Obama backs down, & a new rating (36%)

The Washington Post reports that Obama has agreed to drop the issue of Veteran's paying for their own combat related injuries with private insurance. This is a story that has caused a tremendous amount of anger among the people I know, yet has made almost no ripple in the mass media that I can find.

I'm glad that our Commander in Chief has decided that forcing veterans to pay for injuries sustained in combat would be bad. What I'm not glad about is that it took this much effort to make him see that. Here's a few facts that I would have thought would've been obvious from the get go.

1) It would destroy retention. As it stands now, if you walk into MEPs and raise your right hand you are essentially agreeing to be sent into combat. That is the reality as it stands now. Thanks to the mistreatment of the armed forces that has been going on for years, recruitment and retention is very low. How many people will be lining up to join if they know that when they get sent to combat they could come back with healthcare costs that will haunt them for the rest of their lives?

2) Morale and order in the forces would be destroyed. If this measure had passed it would have caused chaos, both here and abroad. You'd have troops refusing to serve when called to deploy. You would have deployed soldiers refusing to leave the wire, not confident they will be taken care of if they were hurt. My mind cannot even begin to grasp the damage this would do to our fighting capabilities.

3) It's a political NIGHTMARE. Even if you don't care one bit about troop welfare or our ability to win a war. Even if you think the money we'd save would be totally worth it, how could you as a politician not see that this would've been political suicide? It's a complete no brainer. There are tons of people willing to decry the war(s), but very few Americans, much less politicians, are willing to come out against the military itself. Thankfully we learned a little bit from Vietnam here.

Obama did eventually come to his senses. For that, he'll get a +3% rating boost. That still leaves him net -7% for the whole affair, but I'm leaving that in place because this position should never have made it past an inner-office conference call, much less the newspapers. That it didn't shows either a tremendous lack of respect and concern for the American fighting man, or an even more ginormous lack of foresight and judgement. That puts his rating at 36% for now.