Quotes of the Morning: A Strong Moral Stance

“Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
-Washington Post, February 18, 2007

“Remember this little scandal? US troops placed in cockroach infested rooms and forgotten? Remember how the Administration was so surprised to find out about it? Well it turns out that they had been aware of it for a few years and nothing had been done.”
-Skippy

“Senior Republicans who knew about problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center while their party controlled Congress insist they did all they could to prod the Pentagon to fix them.
But C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., former chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said he stopped short of going public with the hospital’s problems to avoid embarrassing the Army while it was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
-Congressional Quarterly (CQ), March 7, 2007

“Yes, we wouldn’t want to embarrass the Army. You just have to look at what is more important: supporting the troops or LOOKING like you are supporting the troops. Remember, no amount of inconvenience or danger is too extreme for our troops if fixing the problem would make the Administration look bad. Still, they tried to do what they could.”
-Skippy

“Beverly Young [Rep. Bill Young’s wife] said she complained to Kiley several times. She once visited a soldier who was lying in urine on his mattress pad in the hospital. When a nurse ignored her, Young said, ‘I went flying down to Kevin Kiley’s office again, and got nowhere. He has skirted this stuff for five years and blamed everyone else.’”
-Washington Post, March 1, 2007

“So Rep. Young’s wife was all over the situation. Bill Young was not, himself, able to do much due to his morals.”
-Skippy

“’What else do you want me to do? I am not going to go into a hospital and push my way into a medical situation,’ Young said after the hearing.
Young said he ‘separates my life as a member of Congress and the work I do on a volunteer basis,’ visiting military hospitals with his wife almost every week.
Young said he used his role as an appropriator to push to fund a new lab at Walter Reed and a new phone system at Fort Carson so patients could more easily make appointments.
But he said he purposely opted to bring concerns about individual patients’ care privately to the attention of Walter Reed commanders, rather than wield his clout as an Appropriations subcommittee chairman.
‘We did not go public with these concerns, because we did not want to undermine the confidence of the patients and their families and give the Army a black eye while fighting a war,’ Young said.”
-Congressional Quarterly (CQ), March 7, 2007

“See? He rigorously keeps his Congressional and volunteer work separate. To mention the squalor that our troops were trapped in would violate his strict moral code. Better to let them stay there and suffer than mention it. Heck, Rep. Young so vigorously separates his two lives that when speaking as a Representative he ignores the things he learned in his ‘other life’ entirely.”
-Skippy

“Well, Mr. Chairman, I want to join you in welcoming our guests and our witnesses today, having known especially Don Arthur and General Kiley very, very well over the years. I thought they’d get tired of seeing us in their hospitals. And we haven’t had as much opportunity to visit with the Air Force, General. But I know that these gentlemen are committed to providing our war heroes with the very, very best medical care that is possible.”
-Rep C.W. Bill Young (R-FL), January 19, 2007

“If he had done less than praise General Kiley it would have been mixing what he knew as a volunteer with what he knew as a Congressman. Well done Rep. Young. Lesser men would have allowed empathy for the troops or human compassion make them speak out, but you were of stronger stuff than that. Bravo.”
-Skippy