Okay, I know the Dems are getting a lot of mileage out of the problems at the Walter Reed Army Medical center, but I have to call them the way I see them, and this is just not all the preznit's fault. The VA has been a complete mess for decades and everybody knows it. I've been hearing about veterans getting fucked over and around and every which way by the VA since I was in high school in the '70s. The VA is chronically undermanned and underfunded. This is not a new story. What is new is that it appears there's a chance something will finally be done about it.

Though there's no doubt that dubya made the existing situation worse (that is, after all, what he does best) by cutting funding and installing unqualified political cronies in positions of authority while at the same time overloading the existing system with casualties from his never-ending War on Terra, he seems to actually be taking steps to try to remedy the situation. He's commissioned a panel headed by Bob Dole and Donna Shalala to review veterans health care. Shalala was Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Clenis administration. She had this to say of her meeting with dubya:

He made it very clear that if one soldier doesn't get high-quality treatment and isn't transitioned back into civilian life or back into the military, that's unacceptable.
"And you could sense his anger and his anxiousness that we move as quickly as possible while the Defense Department is moving to make corrections at Walter Reed," Shalala said.
"I don't want to overstate or understate [the mission] other than it's going to be comprehensive. It's going to be vigorous," she said.

It sounds like a good start and I hope dubya follows through. With veterans coming out of the woodwork to voice their dissatisfaction with the quality of service, and with Iraq in flames as a background this story is not going away anytime soon. The panel's report is due in 45 days. It will, of course, call for more spending and for me that is the real issue here. The American public needs to know about the hidden costs of war. Taking care of grievously wounded veterans after they leave military service is very expensive and the funding for this care is not part of the Department of Defense budget.

Moving on, there's this story.

The Bush administration is ... asking Congress for permission to use up to a quarter of the Food for Peace budget to buy food from foreign farmers.
But to legislators like Colin Peterson (D-MN), who is chairman of the Agriculture committee in the House of Representatives, the aid programs exist to send American food abroad — not American money. And he intends to keep it that way.

I don't fully understand this, but dubya appears to want to do something for purely humanitarian reasons. And of course there's a Democrat right out there in front fighting him on it. You can bet the Democrat in question is deeply in the pocket of the American farm lobby. We spend more than a billion dollars annually to help feed starving populations world-wide, but virtually all that money is spent buying American grain from American farmers at the artificially inflated American price. It's really just agri-business welfare under the guise of humanitarian aid. By buying grain from farmers closer to the area of need, we could simultaneously boost foreign economies and save a great deal on shipping costs. Not to mention the fact that the foreign grain would be cheaper, allowing us to feed more people for less money. I'm with dubya on this one. It's the right thing to do.

So, I agree with two decisions the preznit has made in one week after disagreeing with everything he's said and done for the past 6 years. WTF? I'm thinking somebody slipped me some of that strong Republican kool-aid. Hopefully it'll wear off soon.