Bend over and grab your ankles

The Veterans Administration is considering whether to close the Manhattan VA Hospital and sending everyone to the Brooklyn facility. Trying to cut costs and all. You know what it's like to get from Upper Manhattan to Downtown Brooklyn if you're handicapped? It might be only a few miles away, but the hassle factor is incredible. I guess Bush only cares about the troops who are healthy enough to go to Iraq. Fuck everyone else.

Update: 10:35:

Finally found a link to this.

Every Thursday afternoon for the past year, Peter Bronson has gathered with his small group of veterans in front of the VA hospital on E. 23rd St. in Manhattan.
The country is at war, after all, and the number of American casualties in Iraq keeps climbing at an alarming rate. And not just the dead, which passed 1,000 this week; it's also the wounded, now at almost 7,000.

To Bronson, a veteran of the Korean War, it makes no sense for our government to be talking about closing down veterans hospitals when the number of wounded from this war was more than 1,100 in August alone.

[. . .]

The Bush administration has been developing grand plans for several years to make our nation's huge and unwieldy system of military hospitals more efficient.

This plan involves closing some hospitals, reducing in-patient stays for veterans and creating more out-patient facilities.

As with most Bush programs, the plan has a friendly-sounding name: CARES. That's short for Capital Asset Realignment for Enhanced Services.

When word leaked out that the CARES Commission, appointed by Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi, was about to recommend closing the Manhattan VA hospital, a furor erupted among veterans groups and local politicians, especially our two local senators, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. [my emphasis]

[. . .]

Full story.

Now who's looking out for our vets? Ain't the Bush Administration, is it?