Levees Not War

[courtesy of 2millionth web log

Remember the Commander’s surprise Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad in 2003, when the perfectly Norman Rockwell turkey that he held on a platter turned out to be plastic (supplied by a contractor)? In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we offer a new use for that fake bird: As an award for bureaucratic idiocy + callous penny-pinching. (We thought Rumsfeld had left the Pentagon, but the following story makes us think the streamlining, privatizing CEO–SecDef is still in the bunker.)

Pittsburgh’s KDKA reports that the Defense Department is demanding that thousands of disabled U.S. soldiers return parts of their signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments. They had to go and get blown up so bad the army couldn’t patch them up well enough to push ’em back out on the streets of Baghdad as they do with other wounded soldiers. It is well known that the army has had to resort to signing bonuses of up to $30,000 to attract new soldiers to an increasingly unpopular war (though the army continues to fall short of its recruiting goals).

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