I

t
is disturbing that President Bush not only has refused to attend
the funeral of any service- person killed in Iraq, but also refuses
to send condolences to fallen servicepeople’s relatives. Bush’s
denial of acknowledging U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq—the same
as his government’s media ban on showing body bags and coffins—is
even worse when compared to his sending wreaths to Confederate graves
on Memorial Day. However, looking at his record, this should not
be surprising: 

• 
  While soldiers
  are fighting in Iraq, Bush cut soldiers’ danger pay and family
  separation allowances, cancelled a Congress-proposed doubling
  of servicepeople’s life insurance benefits, and slashed GI
  Bill benefits. Most servicepeople now are too low-paid to receive
  Bush’s per-child tax credit and many live on food stamps. 

• 
  Bush cut $600
  million from the Veterans Administration budget, although the
  VA is already under-funded by around $2 billion a year and now
  has over 200,000 new veterans to service—many of whom are
  already sick with Gulf War Syndrome, which has left over 270,000
  Gulf War vets disabled and over 10,000 dead. There are also plans
  to cut $1.5 billion per year from the VA’s budget for each
  of the next ten years. 

• 
  Wounded National
  Guard and Army Reserves have returned home only to be placed in
  “medical hold” while the Army decides what medical treatment
  and benefits—if any—they should receive. Some soldiers
  have stated the Army has tried to claim their Iraq injuries/illnesses
  were “pre-existing conditions.” Soldiers are having
  to wait four to six months to receive medical care while their
  treatable ailments turn to permanent disability. At Fort Knox,
  more than 400 wounded soldiers lasted the Kentucky summer in a
  non-air conditioned, animal-infested barracks. At Fort Stewart
  (Georgia), over 600 wounded soldiers languish with no indoor plumbing
  and have to pay for food and lodging. On a re-election stop last
  fall, President Bush visited Fort Stewart, but refused to see
  the wounded soldiers. 

• 
  All evidence
  indicates the war was started on fictitious grounds. It has left
  more than 700 soldiers killed, over 9,000 wounded, and over 1,000
  evacuated for psychiatric evaluation. 

In
contrast: 

• 
  As governor
  of Texas, Bush wrote official state letters honoring white-separatist
  organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy,
  whom Bush praised for their “high standards” and “dedication
  to others,” and to the unreconstructed Sons of Confederate
  Veterans, to whom Bush has had a membership. 

• 
  Bush also wrote
  a fundraising letter for the revisionist Museum of the Confederacy
  in support of their annual ball. The ball, held in a slave hall
  turned gun foundry which produced Confederate munitions that killed
  union soldiers, entertains hundreds of all-white guests in antebellum
  costumes surrounded by Confederate flags. The museum sells books
  that support the Confederate Constitution. 

• 
  Bush, who previously
  attacked the NAACP’s boycott of South Carolina over the Confederate
  flag, campaigned at South Carolina’s white-supremacist Bob
  Jones University and, in the words of southern journalist Jackson
  Thoreau, “genuflected before the Confederate flag.” 

• 
  Close ties between
  Bush’s Southeast Regional 2000 campaign chairperson, Warren
  Tompkins, and neo-Confederate vanguard, Richard Hines, resulted
  in Hines’s (then-unregistered) political action committee
  mailing over 250,000 letters condemning John McCain for seeing
  the Confederate flag as a racist symbol and lauding Bush for appreciating
  it. Hines, long connected to the nation’s leading white-supremacist
  apologia magazine
  
  Southern Partisan
  
  (which celebrates the
  assassination of Abraham Lincoln) claimed on one of his websites
  to have “an active voice in the current Bush administration,”
  which Bush has never denied. 

It
will be interesting to see what President Bush does this year. Will
he again pay tribute to fallen Confederate soldiers? Will he finally
acknowledge U.S. casualties from the Iraq War? Being an election
year, probably neither—nor will he memorialize fallen servicepeople
from the Vietnam War, the war President Bush was so unwilling to
fight that he deliberately lost his flight status.

 

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Kyle Tucker is
a freelance writer living in the Joplin, Missouri area.