A tremendously important story has gone virtually untold by the media, ignored by our political leaders, and unknown to the American public. Despite the extraordinarily high price they have paid, America’s severely wounded veterans are enduring humiliating financial hardships of epic proportions. Home evictions, utility shutoffs, car repossessions, and foreclosures are commonplace.

“The Armed Forces Family Aid Concert” seeks to benefit those families suffering severe financial hardship.

The concert is scheduled to take place April 29th through May 1st on a 40 acre farm outside of Dayton, Ohio. Bands from across America and of all music backgrounds (rock, country, rap, blues, etc) will be performing, including Congressman Thad McCotter (R-MI) and his band, The Flying Squirrels!

Yours Truly will act as one of the Emcee’s.

Rep. McCotter

A Congress that thinks nothing of spending trillions on bailouts and stimulus packages has mostly turned a deaf ear on our severely disabled vets. Often times spouses of returning veterans have to give up their jobs to become caregivers, cutting family incomes in half. Most disabled vets receive much less in compensation and benefits than they did while on active duty, reducing family incomes even further. Many are too dysfunctional to hold a meaningful job, if any, because of the devastating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Some time ago I interviewed one such vet and his spouse, Mr. and Mrs. Kim Tanner. Mr. Tanner worked as a truck driver while serving with the Army, often driving 12 to 14 hours a day delivering weapons and supplies throughout Iraq. The effects of numerous blasts from exploding roadside bombs has left him suffering from severe PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. Today he lives with memory loss, speech impairment, and hearing loss. He is unable to work long periods of time at his part-time post office job. (more…)

Like everybody else, when I first heard about the shootings at Fort Hood I immediately rushed to judgment, assuming that anybody opening fire on soldiers on an army base in Texas expected to die. Thus the shooter was either 1) a soldier who had cracked or 2) a priapic jihadist aroused by the thought of all those virgins in paradise. Reasoning that an armed Islamist would struggle to penetrate Fort Hood’s security, I concluded that the shooter was probably an unfortunate soldier gone berserk. A few hours later however I discovered secret option 3) that the “alleged” shooter Nidal Hasan was both a soldier and a jihadi nutbag- an entirely new hybrid, in other words.

Of course, this just goes to show the wisdom of suspending judgment until all the facts are in.  Alas, this lesson was lost on the media, who from the minute news of the shooting broke managed to get almost every detail of the story wrong. At first they told us that the killer was dead; then that there might have been more than one shooter. Soon we knew the suspect’s name, and learned that he was a Muslim convert. Then we learned that he had been Muslim since birth. Then we were told that he might have cracked as a result of exposure to combat, only he had never seen combat. Or maybe it was a response to racism he had experienced, or because as a devout Muslim he was unhappy about being deployed to Afghanistan. (And yet curiously, such a degree of sympathetic understanding was never extended to the likes of Timothy McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho who also vented their rage by killing strangers.)

Indeed, even Mr. Obama lost his cool, by rushing to the judgment that we were all rushing to judgment, and asking us not to do it. After all Americans do love their pitchforks, don’t they? And when it got out that the suspect was not dead, and that he had shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire, well- it became all the more important not to rush to judgment, and especially not to assume that the massacre had anything to do with terrorism or Islamic extremism.

Tired of listening to all the non-judgmental judgments, on Saturday I visited Fort Hood for myself.

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