Bush is bad. But you knew that...

Sometimes I forget to bash Bush, not because he's not a bashworty subject, but because the sheer volume that's possible is simply overwhelming. Still, it's important to focus in just how awful his administration is on so many things once in awhile.

Let's just take one issue close to my heart - veteran's affairs. You'd think that a President who has a sketchy relationship to the military already, given his own record of dereliction while supposedly wearing the uniform, and who has put hundreds of thousands of Americans in harms way would take care of a group that a lot of people assume is a component of his constituency.

Not hardly. This piece from the Columbus, Ohio Free Press provides a good outline of the Bush betrayal of America's military veterans...

"...he has now frozen $1 billion in financial settlements won by 17 U.S. combat veterans who were whipped, beaten, burned, electrically shocked and starved by Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The vets and their families filed for compensation under a 1996 law, citing the Geneva Convention.

On July 7, U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts ordered Iraq to pay the 17 ex-POWs and their families $653 million in compensatory damages, plus another $306 million in punitive damages. But Bush has cited "weighty foreign policy interests" and has sued to withhold the money.

Meanwhile Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has blatantly violated a 1990s law requiring the military to keep baseline medical data so the health of the US soldiers now serving in Iraq can be properly monitored. The demand derives from Gulf War Syndrome, which may have caused disabling diseases among as many as 220,000 vets. But Rumsfeld has ignored the law.

The Administration is also denying service women access to reproductive care, including abortions. And it has failed to provide body armor to some forty percent of the soldiers serving in Iraq.

Meanwhile Bush has fought to slash long-standing benefits due surviving veterans of the World Wars, Korea and Vietnam. The GOP has opposed repealing the Disabled Veterans Tax, which mandated that money due some 600,000 surviving vets in disability pay be deducted, dollar-for-dollar. At one point Rumsfeld told the White House to veto the Defense Appropriations Bill if it gave the vets that money. "

Well, Mr. Bush, I'm a veteran, and I vote. Millions of us do.

Remember in November...