For students of post-war US history, the GI Bill stands as one of the towering achievements of the New Deal coaltion. In the wake of WWII, the so-called Servicemen’s Readjustment Act offered veterans returning home tuition to go to college or vocational school, up to a year of unemployment insurance, and loans to purchase homes or businesses.
Now, VoteVets is hitting John McCain hard for not supporting the latter-day GI Bill, the Webb-Hagel Bill. The above ad highlights one of the most sickening disjunctures between the rhetoric and reality of today’s Republican Party: braying about supporting the troops while treating them like expendable labor. From the horrible conditions at Walter Reed, to the abuse that is stop-loss, to the appalling rates of suicide among soldiers, and now to McCain’s and Bush’s partisan intransigence, the mainstream of the Republican Party uses the women and men who fight this country’s wars to score cheap political points while refusing to treat their service with the respect it deserves.
Via Yglesias.
6 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 20, 2008 at 5:40 pm
urbino
I always like to point out the GI Bill in conversations with conservatives who are bloviating about how much better this country was before the rise of the welfare state (which they tend to pin to the 1960s), when people (men) did things for themselves, dammit.
May 20, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Levi Stahl
When I’m feeling particularly grumpy about the state of our country, I tend to say that we’re still living off the capital we built up with the New Deal and the GI Bill. I remember being astonished in High School when I learned that the GI Bill no longer came close to covering college–this change is a no-brainer.
The ad is good, and it’s a point they need to hit McCain on again and again and again.
May 21, 2008 at 12:53 pm
albiondia
The seeming cynicism of Republicans on this issue is astonishing. The political capital gain you make from strident support of American troops overseas should surely be used for something other than legitimising the failure to support American troops as a matter of domestic policy. Paul Foos in his volume on the Mexican War links the emergence of different wage-earning demographics and ideologies of labour in the early-1840s with the disjuncture between the ideal of the republican citizen-soldier and the reality of the emergent waged-soldiery, whose civic engagement with the polis was neglected and/or doubted. Perhaps the Polk Admin.-Bush Admin. parallels are less superficial than they sometimes seem.
On an unrelated note, has anyone done any work explicitly linking the gradual demise of the GI Bill generation with growing social/economic inequality?
May 21, 2008 at 2:33 pm
charlieford
I think it was Taylor Branch who had a fantastic article on the GI Bill in the NYRB last (?) year? Can’t seem to find it, but it was really good.
May 22, 2008 at 11:01 am
Matt
No matter what your political vews are I am all for this new GI Bill!!! My nephew is only 20 years old and currently oversees protecting our country I would like to think when he comes back home he has the support he needs from this country to continue on with a successful and honorable life…Sen. Cornyn needs to take a look as this video and maybe find a little bit more inspiration in his heart to support our troops! God Bless America!!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTzATHLOGWY&hl=en]
May 22, 2008 at 5:59 pm
rja
Cornyn is a twit. Thanks to him, my box turtle and I had to call it quits.