Yeah, bite me, Dave.

I am for this bill, but I do recognize the rationale behind McCain voting against it and proposing the benefits based upon years of service. Awarding huge benefits to someone with 12 years or more in makes it much less likely they will accept it. If you are only eight years from a full military retirement you are probably not going to jump out of the service and go to school full time. By that time you have probably married and had children to keep you focused. If you offer these accelerated incentives to a 22 year old that just finished four years in the Infantry, undoubtedly he is going to take the money and run. Before there is a rabid backlash, I reiterate that I “recognize the rationale”, not that I “agree with the rationale”. Since we have switched gears from standing in the Fulda Gap to hold off Ivan and moved toward Counterinsurgency Warfare a number of truisms have emerged. Airland Battle with mass on mass is a thing of the past. The worst threats are not superpowers. Nuclear weapons are not scary anymore. Services, and components within a service need to be plug and play, because you may have to be able to get somewhere quickly to set up operations. Above all of that, we see that the E-5 through the E-8 are the most vital ranks for command and control, therefore you want to retain your best and brightest. E-4 and below are the worker bees that take the brunt of the sweat and blood spillage. If you can’t keep the E-4 and below ranks up, with good E-5 thru E-8 leadership it won’t matter if you bring McArthur, Audie Murphy, Chesty Puller, Abrams, Patton, and Leonidas back from the dead. High top end leaders can’t do it all. The squad, platoon, and in small cases the company level are where the rubber meets the road as well as where the metal hits the meat.

See! It’s a plan by some people here to act like morons till you snap at them so they can laugh at you.

Fortunately, that will never work on me.

… Okay, you can stop laughing.

Seriously, stop it. I’ve never snapped while posting here. This is just how I am; I can calmly call someone a retard and ’shout’ fuck several times in one sentence without ever having my blood-pressure rise. If someone says something that is worth of insult, I will insult them.

Why does Obama want to encourage people to get out of the military? Doesn’t he have any respect for the work they are doing?”

“Obama voted against the troops, effectively bribing them to leave military service.”

Dear Republicans,

Please, please, please run ads stating this. I want Obama to win 300 or more EC votes, and a ad like this would be the quickest way to get there.

Love,

C.S.Strowbridge

Think how much less that pork barrel spending would have been if we hadn’t invaded Iraq and given hundreds of billions to Haliburton et al. How much would our energy costs have been if we has spent that invasion money on renewable energy?

That is why “conservatives” are morons.

You do, however, remain wrong. I suppose I’ll just have to live with that.

SENDING US TO DIE FOR NOTHING WHILE THE WAR PIGS GET RICHER!

Give us our damn benefits.

Stay classy, Duros.

Then you have a significant incentive for people to join in the first place and a large group of people able to continue to benefit society once their service ends.

Option 2:
Provide crappy benefits for for soldiers while in the service and minimal, if any, support for once they are out. Indeed, Force them to stay longer than they originally agreed to, and then make sure to not diagnose them as having any problems once they finally get out.

Then you end up with a far larger portion of those serving who are lacking in motivation, can’t wait to get out, and are a larger burden on society once they do.

Yeah, let’s stick with Option 2.

He says that he doesn’t believe Obama’s “present” votes imply cowardice on Obama’s part.

He really went out of his way to qualify those statements.

He says that he doesn’t believe Obama’s “present” votes imply cowardice on Obama’s part. You believe that they do. But Rich Miller, your venerated insider, reads minds, and you do not.

There are many issues that lend themselves to partisan posturing, but giving our veterans the chance to go to college should not be one of them.”

You know what? Fuck you and the bandwidth you rode in on. And take Dave with you.

The only ones consistently against our troops are you asshats who want to keep them in harm’s way forever with as little reinforcement as possible.

Not sure, Scratch. Maybe you should ask him. Also, has McCain stated explicitly that he’s against the current bill because it doesn’t include increased funding?

All told, your argument is just an offshoot of the idea that Obama doesn’t support a strong military. And you make it sound like people who join the army can be so easily swayed by the GI Bill that they’ll run, en masse, from the military.

If they do, it has nothing to do with the GI Bill, it has to do with the clusterfuck they’re being asked to keep on the simmer.