Eric Alterman: Liberals and Veterans ... Welcome Back
[Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, “Altercation,” appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation, His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will appear early next year.]
... [George W.] Bush is the first American president ever to combine the fighting of a war with the granting of a massive tax cut to wealthiest Americans—or indeed any Americans. The president also encouraged Americans to shop and offered further tax-breaks for gas-guzzling SUVs. To top it all off, the administration refused to allow the coffins of returning soldiers to be photographed, and thereby did not invite Americans to honor their war dead. (The flights carrying wounded soldiers to U.S. military hospitals also arrived at night to preclude much photography.) Also ignoring previous precedent, George W. Bush attended no military funerals. He furthermore refused numerous requests that he personally deliver a recruitment speech, despite the crying need for new enlistees his own policies have created.
A new G.I. Bill would be smart place to for progressives to begin. As Dionne has argued, such an approach would not only be fair and decent; it would demonstrate that progressives “honor two things at least. We honor service to country and community and say that that’s important. And then by rewarding service to country and community, we assert that government has the capacity to help lift people up.”
Indeed, Sens. Jim Webb (D-VA) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) are calling for just such a measure—a post-Iraq G.I. Bill. They noted in a joint op-ed in The New York Times last Friday that the current Montgomery G.I. Bill provides hardly enough for one to attend a community college, and that “first-class service to country deserves first-class appreciation.” Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has joined with veteran and former Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA) in calling for active measures to prevent veterans from losing their jobs when they return from service, since nearly 11,000 National Guard and Reserve troops alone have been denied reemployment since 9/11.
FDR’s G.I. bill was liberalism at its best; it offered opportunity in gratitude for assuming responsibility and helping remake America in its own self-image. As a symbol of just how different progressives are from conservatives today—as well as from the caricature that conservatives and their allies in the mainstream media so frequently pose—a new G.I. would paint the kind of picture that is worth not merely a thousand, but many millions of George W. Bush’s worthless words.
Read entire article at http://www.americanprogress.org
... [George W.] Bush is the first American president ever to combine the fighting of a war with the granting of a massive tax cut to wealthiest Americans—or indeed any Americans. The president also encouraged Americans to shop and offered further tax-breaks for gas-guzzling SUVs. To top it all off, the administration refused to allow the coffins of returning soldiers to be photographed, and thereby did not invite Americans to honor their war dead. (The flights carrying wounded soldiers to U.S. military hospitals also arrived at night to preclude much photography.) Also ignoring previous precedent, George W. Bush attended no military funerals. He furthermore refused numerous requests that he personally deliver a recruitment speech, despite the crying need for new enlistees his own policies have created.
A new G.I. Bill would be smart place to for progressives to begin. As Dionne has argued, such an approach would not only be fair and decent; it would demonstrate that progressives “honor two things at least. We honor service to country and community and say that that’s important. And then by rewarding service to country and community, we assert that government has the capacity to help lift people up.”
Indeed, Sens. Jim Webb (D-VA) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) are calling for just such a measure—a post-Iraq G.I. Bill. They noted in a joint op-ed in The New York Times last Friday that the current Montgomery G.I. Bill provides hardly enough for one to attend a community college, and that “first-class service to country deserves first-class appreciation.” Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has joined with veteran and former Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA) in calling for active measures to prevent veterans from losing their jobs when they return from service, since nearly 11,000 National Guard and Reserve troops alone have been denied reemployment since 9/11.
FDR’s G.I. bill was liberalism at its best; it offered opportunity in gratitude for assuming responsibility and helping remake America in its own self-image. As a symbol of just how different progressives are from conservatives today—as well as from the caricature that conservatives and their allies in the mainstream media so frequently pose—a new G.I. would paint the kind of picture that is worth not merely a thousand, but many millions of George W. Bush’s worthless words.