Those of us who actually have shed their blood and sweat in the sandbox have a hard time with chickenhawk Republicans. Tom Tancredo on WikiPedia:

I briefly met Markos Moulitsas at Netroots Nation, so I had not formed much of an opinion of him. After watching this, I can report that he’s an impressive debater who does not sufferor the hypocritical. Via GottaLaff at Political Carnival

“Poltroon” and “movement conservative” are two terms that come to mind while reading that bio. His career has been all about the deconstruction of the Department of Education and the system of American public education; now, thanks to my fellow Army vet, his smaller-government agenda for the Department of Veterans Affairs has been laid bare.

Tancredo’s idea of replacing veterans health services with vouchers does not appeal to a majority of veterans. Indeed, the other night I sat in on a telephone town hall with Representative Parker Griffith (D-AL), bluest of Blue Dogs. Here are the problems identified by random veterans in a very red state: we can’t find jobs, have trouble starting small businesses, and can’t afford insurance for our families. Several callers were having trouble getting their claims through the VA system — which is no surprise.

Dr. Griffith is a military veteran as well as a physician who has treated countless veterans. During the call, he said “the VA has always been underfunded.” That’s certainly true, but this decade has been a disaster for veterans. Aside from the Walter Reed debacle (the wages of privatization), Bush cut personnel in the claims processing department when there was already a massive backlog of claims and a huge, new wave of combat injuries coming down the pipeline. The GOP Congress didn’t even address this until 2005.

Even today, the best answer Republicans can come up with is to automate claims processing — which sounds good until you realize that the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration don’t talk to each other. As Congressman Griffith observed in the call, this problem won’t go away until the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs do something about it. The problem, then, is in the executive branch — not Congress.

“As veterans get further and further from the conflict in which they served, they get less and less attention,” Griffith said. Millions of American veterans have a forest’s worth of paper documentation from their years in the military and in the VA system. Indeed, disappearing paperwork is a perennial problem for vets, and the backlog of claims got so large that in 2008 desperate VA employees were caught shredding paperwork instead of processing it.

That is the Republican formula for government and the chickenhawk’s way of thanking veterans for their service. As the wingnutosphere erupts over Markos’ impolitic deconstruction of a party hack, bear in mind what smaller government actually means for America’s heroes.