by Molly Ivors
Ah, Thanksgiving is over and the preparation for the holidays has begun. The housing market is in the shitter and wingnut Fred Thompson is complaining that the wingnuts at Fox don't want him in their club. Clearly, we are descending into an anarchic frenzy. Order, people, Order!
Whew! How comforting that Real American™ Michelle Malkin has decided to take a break from masturbating with the turkey neck to take a swipe at people whose position she fundamentally disagrees with by making shit up.
Believe it or not, Michelle (or, you know, Jesse), I was horrified to read this too:
The unpleasant scenes broke out at Leatherhead Leisure Centre in Surrey when the wounded veterans, who are at Headley Court Military Hospital, had to use the 25-metre public pool because the hydro-pool at the defence rehabilitation centre is not big enough for swimming.
The servicemen were about to begin their weekly swimming therapy in closed-off lanes when they were verbally abused by the swimmers.
One woman in her 30s was said to be infuriated by the lane closures saying the soldiers did not deserve to be there when she had paid.
It was also reported that others complained that limbless servicemen were scaring children at the centre.
The atmosphere was said to be so tense that the soldiers' instructors removed them.
Rude, of course. In poor taste? Absolutely. Moonbatty? Not on your turkey-fucking life.
The Malkins interpret this event:
Britain has a potent strain of moonbat virus going around. What would Churchill do?
Now, I know that she thinks the answer to the rhetorical question is run the treasonous bitches over with tanks, but let's examine this, shall we?
Some of the other articles linked from the Telegraph piece include complaints about an underfunded military, people dropping out of the service as their terms come up rather than returning to Iraq and Afghanistan, Lords slamming the Rumsfeld doctrine of war on the cheap, and a promise that returning soldiers will get preferential treatment at the NHS. (I'll return to that last one in a moment.)
So Michelle looks at these harridans in Little Whinging and notes that they must be liberals (that's "Labour" over there, Michelle), completely without a shred of evidence. (Though the calls to "out" the women must have made the serial invader of other people's privacy weep with pride.)
Why were the soldiers in the public pool? Why because the pool at the rehab center wasn't big enough. Boy, it sure is a good thing *our* veterans have top-notch health-care! (As John Amato pointed out last spring, Michelle used the Walter Reed scandal to rail against national health care, ignoring that many services at Walter Reed had been privatized.) In other words, they're not putting their money into caring for their vets either, and this is the result.
The Malkins love them some trinket veterans, seeing the physically wounded as some sort of authorization that The War is Good. I guess that's good for them (the Malkins, I mean, not the vets) because, as I noted a couple weeks ago, there are 16 wounded vets for every dead soldier, so there's no shortage of trinkets, assuming of course they'd want to live in Michelle's purse with the Mentos and Halcyon and crumpled-up tissues and the Saturday Night Special, to be produced when it's politically expedient and hidden otherwise. The other ones, the ones with traumatic brain injuries and PTSD, well, they're no doubt some of those fakey-fake IVAW vets she loves to out, so they probably deserve it, or they're just pussies to Michelle. (Funny, I know a bunch of IVAW vets, and they're all real soldiers. Go figure. Of course, many of them don't have health insurance and are locked into the never-ending cycle of the underfunded VA, but thank christ they don't have to deal with the NHS! Much better and more patriotic to have no coverage at all, isn't it, Michelle?)
Placing this national shame at the feet of people who argued against this war from the beginning, then argued that we need to rescue our vets from squalor, fund them properly, and live up to our responsibility for the damage this war has caused is not only intellectually dishonest: it's evil. The Malkins and their ilk demanded that our soldiers to do a stupid job to guarantee the wealth of a few dozen cronies of the president, then kept moving the goalposts so that the same soldiers are caught in an endless spiral of violence caused by people who just want to live their own lives in their own country. And maybe, you know, keep their oil revenue to rebuild all the shit we broke, rather than handing it off to one or the other oil conglomerates for pennies.
The Ladies of Little Whinging bear more resemblance to the Malkinesque supporters of the Super Happy Fun War We Are Always Winning, where the damage of war is invisible and life goes on as though there is no war, because mentioning it, noting that it has costs, well, that's just bad taste.
Hey Michelle: more power to you, baby! This one's called "The Hero"!