Monday, November 14, 2005

Bush voters deserve what they got, but the rest of us don't

This afternoon I was in a little cafe, and there was an elderly man in a motorized wheelchair in there. He had a very large American flag on a pole attached the back of his chair, and in front of his basket was a Bush/Cheney '04 sign.

I felt bad that he was in a wheelchair, but all I could think of was his mental disability. One of the first things Bush did when he entered the White House was to issue an executive order that, for all practical purposes, abolished federal standards for just about anything you could name, putting things back the way they were during the repulsive Reagan era. The New Freedom Initiative has never been taken seriously, and the ADA is still not enforced. Bush's Social Security disability cuts and his preference for judges who are hostile to the ADA says it all.

My guess is that the man in the cafe was also a veteran, which would make him doubly dimwitted. The Bush administration's cutting of veterans' benefits has been one of the main outrages of the invasion of Iraq. When the American Legion attacks the right wing, you know they have gone too far.

One man I know for sure is a veteran is a 63-year-old man who called in to a radio show today to say that he was a member of armed forces for 31 years, he had a weak heart, two stints, a bad back, and a busted leg. He lost his home when Katrina hit, and he waited six weeks to get a trailer. When FEMA called him to meet them so they could set the trailer up, he couldn't get through the checkpoints, so they left. They called him again--same thing. They called him a third time--again, they left. Finally, on the fourth try, FEMA left the trailer without trying to contact the man.

The trailer came furnished with nothing. Not a chair. Not a table. It is 17 feet long. The man's feet hang off the end of the bed, he has 22 square feet to move around in, and he has to keep his coffeepot on the floor.

Those Louisiana people. They just can't stop whining, can they?

2 Comments:

Interesting the guy was in a wheelchair. He was likely a recipient of Medicare fraud.

Do you remember hearing about the scam going around with the companies that make and sell those chairs signing people up, many who did not need them, and often not delivering what they were paid for? It was especially prevalent in LA, and I'm pretty sure my stepfather got one of those $8000 scooters via a crooked medicare defrauder. Yet where was the outrage?

I don't even know where to start with that.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4:17 PM  

I'd almost forgotten about the motorized wheelchair scandal; it was kind of on the edge of my mind. Yes, as a taxpayer, I helped pay the cost of that other man's trailer so that Super-Patriot could have a wheelchair delivered to him months after the fact.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4:28 PM  

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