Replies

"Veterans – and there are millions of them from sea to shining sea – have vowed to hold our politicians' feet to the fire this time around to make sure they honor our nation's sacred obligation to the men and women whose sacrifices have made our country the freest in the world. "

Clark just went up a notch. He may be the most America first conservative in the race.

This might clear up some of these allegations. It is from the Dec 31 edition of National Review, and deals with the veterans as well as the combat pay allegation:

VETERANS' BENEFITS
The allegation: that Bush, at the height of the Iraq engagement, cut both the combat pay of active-duty servicemen and the medical benefits of veterans. "I've made it very clear that we need to support our troops, unlike President Bush," said Dean in late October, "who tried to cut their combat pay after they had been over there and he doubled their tour of duty; unlike President Bush, who tried to cut - successfully cut 164,000 veterans off their health-care benefits." Added Lieberman: "The Bush administration's decision to cut the pay of our troops in Iraq is unconscionable." And Kerry: "Walking away from our veterans is wrong and in a Kerry administration it will be a thing of the past."
The answer: The combat-pay allegation apparently stems from a single newspaper article, an August 14 report in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined, "Troops in Iraq face pay cut; Pentagon says tough duty bonuses are budget buster." Congressional Democrats and presidential candidates seized on the report, but the administration immediately announced that the Chronicle was simply wrong. "We are not going to reduce their compensation," said Pentagon personnel chief David Chu the day the report appeared. Chu explained that when Congress voted to increase the troops' pay, the Defense Department asked that the measure be taken out because it would extend bonus pay to troops who were not in Iraq or Afghanistan. "We have plenty of authority" to keep up combat pay, Chu said. After Chu's announcement, a spokesman for the Association of the U.S. Army, a military advocacy group, told Congressional Quarterly that he believed Chu's explanation and that the entire affair was "a tempest in a teapot." In any event, Congress decided to go ahead with the pay increase, and in late November, President Bush signed it into law.
As far as VA medical benefits are concerned, the charge stems from the administration's efforts to deal with soaring costs. After Congress loosened VA eligibility rules in the 1990s, extending coverage to those without service-related medical problems, VA enrollment went from 2.9 million in 1996 to 6.8 million today. Given those costs, the VA decided to impose a means test for the best-off veterans. A few years ago, Congress directed the VA to create priority categories for veterans, with Priority Group 1 being those most in need, and Priority Group 8 being those least in need; veterans in Priority Group 8 are those who are not being compensated for a military-related disability and have higher incomes than those in other groups. Facing a budget crunch, the VA decided to freeze Priority Group 8 benefits and exclude those veterans - about 164,000 of them - from the VA system this year (although it made other health benefits available). But the VA also "grandfathered" any Priority Group 8 veterans who were already in the system. The 164,000 veterans cited by Dean and others were never in the system, had no service-related medical problems, and were not cut off from benefits.

Any military member knows: when a politician says "nothing is to good for the troops" he means "nothing is too good for the troops."

The ironic thing is that Clark's $2 billion budget proposal won't come near the amount VA needs. The organizations of the Independent Budget are probably going to recommend around a $3 billion increase.

Further, Bush's budget proposal probably will not be significantly less than what Clark is proposing