From Empire Burlesque
Supporting the Troops: “Shut Up and Suffer”
Written by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
Because some soldiers were ballsy enough to tell the press about the callous way the Bush gang treats the cannon fodder it sends off to die, kill, maim and be maimed in a useless, pointless, illegal, corrupt, immoral, murderous, mismanaged war, now all the soldiers in Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit are being subjected to a punishment regimen – and banished to an area where they will be inaccessible to the press. So reports that well-known bastion of defeatist pink-lib Islamo-wimpism, the Army Times:
Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.
“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.
Soldiers say their sergeant major gathered troops at 6 p.m. Monday to tell them they must follow their chain of command when asking for help with their medical evaluation paperwork, or when they spot mold, mice or other problems in their quarters.
They were also told they would be moving out of Building 18 to Building 14 within the next couple of weeks. Building 14 is a barracks that houses the administrative offices for the Medical Hold Unit and was renovated in 2006. It’s also located on the Walter Reed Campus, where reporters must be escorted by public affairs personnel. Building 18 is located just off campus and is easy to access.
The soldiers said they were also told their first sergeant has been relieved of duty, and that all of their platoon sergeants have been moved to other positions at Walter Reed.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to find terms that would sufficiently plumb the depth and extent of the moral putrefaction that oozes out of the White House on a daily basis. Metaphors drawn from waste management, the barnyard or the most unsavoury of bodily processes fail to do justice to the moral nullity and active malice that animates every policy of this rancid, wretched crew.
While no one could possibly expect the foul, perverted, fourth-rate minds of the Bush Administration to pay even the briefest quark of concern or attention to the hundreds of thousands of innocent people they have murdered in Iraq or the millions of American citizens they have driven into deep poverty, one might think that they would at least make a show of caring what happens to the men and women they have so cynically and criminally abused in the service of their apparently limitless greed and infinite stupidity. Especially as the Bushists (and their innumerable little bootlickers out there instapunditing and powerlining and pajama paryting and blowing hot air) have made such a fetish of “supporting the troops.” But as any sentient being now recognizes, they are not interested in the concept as a physical reality, but only in the mere phrase – and only so far as it can be used as a cudgel to beat their political enemies.
They literally, demonstrably, do not care what happens to the actual human beings in the U.S. armed forces. In fact, they are demonically adamant that more and more soldiers be sacrificed to their war of aggression and crony conquest, dying – or living lives blighted by pain and suffering – for the sake of the Iraqi “oil law.” (Or, in the case of most of the bootlickers, for the sake of their own warped and stunted psyches, their apparent need to experience vicarious murder and domination – seeing the state as an extension of themselves – in order to assuage or cover up the various inadequacies, anxieties and craven fears that bedevil them.)
Read the rest here.