The Knife in my Back

John McCain loves to wear his Navy hat whenever he can. He loves to let everyone know that he is a veteran and that, being a veteran, he is one of us and he supports us unequivocally. He stands up on all those stages during his speeches with this pretentious idea that he deserves to be commander in chief because he was a prisoner of war. I feel differently. If he was such a champion for veteran’s issues, then why does his voting record and his rhetoric about the Iraq war scream that he doesn’t care at all?

Like I have said many times before, I am in no way taking away anything that says John McCain is not a strong person for surviving five years as a prisoner of war. But, the decisions he has made since those fateful times, chips away the angelic view of him as a war hero. Let me break it down for you: if someone saved a bus full of children one day, cannot turn around and molest a bus full of kids the next day and expect everyone to still see that person as a hero.

John McCain wants us to stay in Iraq for “as long as it takes” or the classic statement of “100 years”. That same old stubborn Bush injected ignorance of pounding the square peg into the round hole coming out of his mouth on every sound bite. How can anyone say they care about veteran’s issues and care about the actual veteran’s if they want to continue an illegal and unnecessary war? A war that was only waged to fill corporation’s pockets with a ton of money they don’t need. Apparently John McCain is part of a very small percentage of POW survivors who feel that putting other young and innocent people through horrible life altering experiences and injuries is the only way to allow our race, world and country to move forward.Let’s take a closer look at some of the “support” McCain gave to use veterans. He voted against funding in 2003 that would have provided troops, including myself, with the SAPI plates and vests needed to be at least that much further from death in a war zone. McCain felt that I didn’t deserve plates for my vest, so I had to use plates that we had confiscated from the Iraqis. Later tests proved that those plates we were wearing couldn’t even hold up to something as small as a 9mm round. Wow, thank you Senator!

And this man wants to be president.

A fun quote that I hear a lot of people say is: I support the troops, but not the war (I agree). It seems John McCain has his own: I support the war no matter how much evidence is piled against me, and oh yea, I want to kick dirt in the troop’s faces when they are down and out. He has voted against so many health care measures for veterans that you would think he held a grudge against us personally.

Maybe his anger towards being a POW can’t be released in any real way, so he wants everyone else to suffer as he did.

He was one of only 13 senators to vote against a measure that added $430 million to outpatient and inpatient care for veterans, and that is the tip of the iceberg. The veteran senator has opposed more than 20 measures set to increase funding for veterans. What’s his deal? He doesn’t have to sit and wait at the VA like the rest of us so why should he care, right? He doesn’t have to hitchhike to his VA appointments like some of the people I have met. He doesn’t have to stand on a street corner with a sign begging for food, so why should he care?

A lot of people would say: “he only opposed those health care measures cause they were tied to a timetable”. Well, the fact that he wants to continue a ridiculous war for no reason, should be the biggest clue that he really doesn’t care about troops at all.

I think his biggest “show of support” for us veterans, was his unwillingness to support a measure that would increase taxes on the wealthy by 1% to help fund the war. A measly one percent, you have got to be kidding me. So what John McCain wants, is for the poor to to pay for a war with blood and tears, while the rich keep their kids in school and laugh all the way to the bank? This kind of stuff just sickens me. Maybe his multimillionaire wife couldn’t separate herself from all her inheritance that she worked so hard for.

So Senator McCain wants to betray me as a veteran. He wants to sharpen his knife and stab me in the back. He wants me to be stop lossed multiple times and have to live with guilt and burden the rest of my life, but he doesn’t want me to be to be taken care of. He wants me to spend endless days in a mind melting hot desert, so his buddies on the hill can buy their reelections. He wants me to watch people die for no damn reason at all, but when I need someone to talk to when I get back, he doesn’t want to pay for it.

Senator McCain has said that the war in Iraq will be “a great thing to happen to our country”.

Just remember that, the next time you see a homeless and hungry veteran.

Thanks for the knife in our backs Mr. Senator.