Democrats Defame Veterans

OffHisMeds has observed that, among the many frauds that the Democrat Party has perpetrated on America is the notion that our military Veterans are "victims"; and surely the most egregious example is the claim of the Social Welfare crowd that Veterans are a huge and disproportionate percentage of the "Homeless" population, which they attribute to the stress of war. Spewing the term Posttraumatic Stress Disorder as if it was an inevitability for all Veterans, so-called Advocates for Veterans Rights cynically use the perception of a wide-spread problem to promote an entirely different agenda.

The true purpose of the exercise, of course, is two fold: 1) to expand yet again the Welfare State by making Veterans "victims", and 2) to delegitimize the use of American military power to defend our country and promote our interests around the world. Those policies are not without unintended - and embarrassing - consequences. In the second instance, just look at the difficulty in getting Obama to even make a decision to allow our Navy to rescue the Captain of the Maersk from Somali Pirates as the most recent example. He was paralyzed for days as he sought to close all the appropriate legal loopholes necessary to conform to the Democrat Party's insanely skewed perception of the term "Rules Of Engagement".

So, what - you might ask - are the proponents of this "Vets Are Homeless" syndrome basing their claims on? There is no empirical evidence to support the notion that Vets are any more likely to be homeless than the general population as a whole, and a ton of evidence to suggest that Veterans actually comprise less a percentage of the homeless than the General Population. For example, ask these "advocates" to come up with even a partial list of names of these homeless Vets, and they will embarrassedly admit that their numbers are based on "models", and the opinions of the decidedly self-interested folks in the Homeless industry.

Ironically, you need only go to a U.S. Census website to find actual statistics that disprove their theory. That's pretty amazing, seeing as how the U.S. government has been the number one abettor of the "Veterans As Homeless" fiction, but hey, not even the Feds can effectively Game the books 100% of the time. Check this one out:

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/010733.html

From this website, I learn that:

- 74% of all Veterans vote. That's 20% greater participation than the General Populace.

- 90% of all Veterans have a High School diploma, far higher than the 70% national average.

- 5.9% of all Veterans live below the poverty line, compared to 12.3% for everybody else.

- 14.5% own their own business, over 50% higher than the general populace.

And all of this, despite the fact that over 6 million of our 26 million Veterans were disabled in War.

This conforms, I suspect, with the views of most Americans who see their parents, children, siblings and friends return from War. Sure, they were traumatized, physically and mentally; how could it be otherwise? But they were also remarkably self-sufficient and responsible, a tribute not only to their military training and discipline, but the character that caused them to volunteer for military service and put themselves in Harm's Way in the first place. This is nowhere so evident as in the generational tradition of soldiers who have experienced combat by refusing to talk about it afterwards. That alone speaks volumes to their character, forged as much by their personal qualities as by the traditions inculcated by the military towards stoicism, self-reliance and self-sacrifice.

In other ways, Veterans themselves refute the entire model upon which the Social Welfare crowd depends. For example, Veterans of the current Gulf War overwhelmingly support it, with election polls last year showing that 75% of all troops strongly supported the war. To the distress of The Media, when they interviewed a soldier and asked his or her opinion, 90% of the time they sounding like Patraeus, offering a sophisticated and nuanced defense of our Iraq and Afghanistan incursions. They also overwhelmingly expressed concern about Obama's plans to withdraw from Iraq "before the job was done".

That's not exactly a natural constiuency for the Democrat Party, much less one that would readily become the Accredited Victims that Democrats so rely upon for electoral success.

There is another explanation for this perception of Veteran Homelessness that is perpetuated by these so-called Advocates, and you've seen it on a street corner in your neighborhood: Panhandlers with signs, representing themselves to be Veterans so as to increase their income. It's a very effective scam, but scam it is. For proof, try this exercise: ask a Panhandler what Branch of the military he was in, where he was stationed, his rank and his unit. Most of the time, you'll get stone silence or nonsense in response.

At the end of the day, what these Democrats do is to defame the very soldiers they purport to represent. By making them Victims in the eyes of the world, they turn Veterans into something they wouldn't recognize: helpless souls dependent on a Nanny State. It ought to piss off our Veterans, and I suspect that it does. After all, who is more entitled to an opinion as to the morality of this war, much less its effect on our soldiers: the people who actually fought it, losing limbs, health and brothers-in-arms, or a bunch of meddling Welfare Pimps, intent on creating yet another Victim Group so as to perpetuate their bureaucracy, their incomes, and their miserably inadequate sense of self-worth?

That question doesn't really require an answer.