If there ever was a glaring public display
of just how much has gone so very wrong
at the House Veterans Affairs Committee
under the new Democrat majority, then
look no further than Committee Chairman's
recent KookBall TV appearance at the
home housewives circuit on the Dr. Phil
TV show, the whole time touting a misdirected
Veterans issue to an audience where no
veterans were sitting.

It doesn't get any better than this to
show to all of you and to demonstrate
what a flaming Nut Farm we have going on
in our government at a time when VA Rome
is burning with chaos and corruption ensuing
everywhere inside the agency while the
2 top nation's Chairmen for Veterans stands
around in a toga suit playing their
Nero fiddles.

Or maybe you like the Don Quixote metaphore
a little better as they Piddle and Diddle
our lives away into early graves while
tilting at windmills.

I predict in this new up and coming legislative
session, and as I continue to do more
tracking of these Goof-Balls to Nowhere
in the Congress, that the shock, horror,
and realizations of just how much of a
mental illness factory the 2 congressional
Veterans Committees really are, will show
itself in a large way to our readers over
time.

It is apparent to us, for sure, and we
only get to post Forums on a fraction of
what we know.

So for this latest GEM! of KookBall
coming from Chairman Filners camp, let me
begin the description by saying here he
is in his own words, blowing his own
misfired horn on what he perceives as a
Legend In His Own Mind effort to "represent"
Veterans issues in his newest Dr. Phil
TV appearance, the whole time not really
cluing you in that this is a daytime TV
show in the afternoon prime time where
only bored housewives are the lead audience
in the Nielsen Ratings, and it's not even
clear what it is exactly, that he expects
Dr. Phil to either know about or want
him to do in the face of an exclusively
all-military issue, that being mental
illness from combat, which of course, is
only a minority in our Vet population and
does NOT effect the millions who are also legitimate disability cases in our population
and who never saw a day in combat.

Bob Filner is determined to use this
one issue to avoid and refuse to
talk about all other broken features of
the VA agency and claims system. He has
done this Monkey-Circus road show for the
last 5 years or so, and he continues
to do it now, and he apparently plans
on doing it all of the next session so
that none of the other VA mess ever gets
straightened out.

While I suppose it can be said perhaps
military wives, (in HIS mind), may be
in the viewing audience for this, more
often than not is the case since military
wives are too, too busy being soccer Moms
these days and running the kids back and
forth to day care, school, and after
school activities. So to what end this
Bone-Headed TV waste of an appearance really
was in outcome does remain to be seen.

So I will start with this little display
of disconnect and Kook-Ball by listing out
Filners own horn blowing from his official
committee statement below:


_____________________________________________

Filner Discusses Veterans Issues on Dr. Phil Show

Episode explores the needs of America’s returning service members

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


December 17, 2008

Washington D.C. – Congressman Bob Filner, Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, will appear on Dr. Phil in an episode focused on honoring America’s contract with our military veterans. Dr. Phil talks with veterans and their families about the challenges of returning home after deployment.

Congressman Filner shares his views about the medical and mental health care needs of returning service members. He also discusses the need for a good faith reform effort at the Department of Veterans Affairs to improve the care and services offered to America’s veterans. The show, entitled “Beyond the Front Lines,” is scheduled to air on Friday, December 19. Check your local listings for air time.

What
Dr. Phil episode “Beyond the Front Lines”

When
Friday, December 19 - Check local listings for air time

Who
Veterans and their family members
Congressman Bob Filner, Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
Colonel David Hunt, FOX News Military Analyst
Tammy Duckworth, Director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs
Paul Reickhoff, Director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America


Beyond the Front Lines

Military men and women are true American heroes who fight for our freedoms. But are we doing all we can as a nation to honor our contract with these warriors? When a soldier survives war, oftentimes he or she comes home to face a different battle. Dr. Phil's guests are veterans who say they have returned from the front lines only to fight a medical system bureaucracy that is failing them. Randy was severely injured during an ambush while deployed in Iraq. His mother, Tammy, says the military lied to him, and used him, and that Randy was eventually lost in the system. She says getting any help from the Department of Veterans Affairs is a struggle with minimal results. Dr. Phil introduces this wounded warrior to two special people who want to make his life better. Next, Jerry says he got a "raw deal" when he returned from Iraq, and he's struggling with what he believes to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). His wife says Jerry is angry and violent, and she's afraid of him. You won't believe what they say the Department of Veterans Affairs advised Jerry to do to cope with his suicidal thoughts.

Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Congressman Bob Filner, and FOX News military analyst Colonel David Hunt passionately share their opinions about health care for veterans. Then, Kevin and Joyce say their son came home from Iraq a changed man. They say they tried to get him help for what they believed was severe PTSD, but it didn't come in time. And, Tammy Duckworth, director of the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs and Paul Rieckhoff, director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, weigh in on the cases. If you are an American, this is your call to arms to step up and help turn things around for the men and women in uniform.

###

__________________________________________
END of Filner's Mental Delusion


Now, (ha ha) excuse me if I am wrong,
but does the freaking VA watch Dr. Phil
TV ??? I would love to know this.
Because if the answer to that question
is NO!, then what the f____ are they
all doing on this program?????

If the VA is the problem here, then what
does Dr. Phil's TV Show have anything to
do with what is going wrong for Veterans?
It's just a question.

This gets even more laughable.

At the very same moment and time that
poor little Lost Pants Chairman Filner
does this publicity stint to Nowhere,
the Associated Press was carrying a much
different version of what is happening
in the mental illness circuit to todays
returning Veterans, and it is this
OTHER article which goes unattended
to, and unaddressed while Nero Chairman
Filner, the Nut Case Extraordinairre, is
rubbing elbows with Dr. Phil.

I bring to you now, in complete comparison
to the truth and reality of at least one
of the situations in our troops arena,
that is nowhere pursued in fixes and remedies
at the very same time that this other
Blowhard Central from Congress, does the
Dr. Phil circuit:

_____________________________________________

Dec 22, 3:27 PM EST


4 recruiter suicides lead to Army probe

By MICHELLE ROBERTS
Associated Press Writer


HENDERSON, Texas (AP) -- Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Henderson, a strapping Iraq combat veteran, spent the last, miserable months of his life as an Army recruiter, cold-calling dozens of people a day from his strip-mall office and sitting in strangers' living rooms, trying to sign up their sons and daughters for an unpopular war.

He put in 13-hour days, six days a week, often encountering abuse from young people or their parents. When he and other recruiters would gripe about the pressure to meet their quotas, their superiors would snarl that they ought to be grateful they were not in Iraq, according to his widow.

Less than a year into the job, Henderson - afflicted by flashbacks and sleeplessness after his tour of battle in Iraq - went into his backyard shed, slid the chain lock in place, and hanged himself with a dog chain.

He became, at age 35, the fourth member of the Army's Houston Recruiting Battalion to commit suicide in the past three years - something Henderson's widow and others blame on the psychological scars of combat, combined with the pressure-cooker job of trying to sell the war.

"Over there in Iraq, you're doing this high-intensive job you are recognized for. Then, you come back here, and one month you're a hero, one month you're a loser because you didn't put anyone in," said Staff Sgt. Amanda Henderson, herself an Iraq veteran and a former recruiter in the battalion.

The Army has 38 recruiting battalions in the United States. Patrick Henderson's is the only one to report more than one suicide in the past six years.

The Army began an investigation after being prodded by Amanda Henderson and Texas Sen. John Cornyn. Cornyn, a Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said he will press for Senate hearings.

"We need to get to the bottom of this as soon as we can," he said.

The all-volunteer military is under heavy pressure to sign up recruits and retain soldiers while it wages two wars.

Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command, acknowledged that recruiting is a demanding job but said counseling and other support are available.

"I don't have an answer to why these suicides in Houston Recruiting Battalion occurred, but perhaps the investigation that is under way may shed some light on that question," he said.

In all, 15 of the Army's 8,400 recruiters have committed suicide since 2003. During that period, more than 540 of the Army's half-million active-duty soldiers killed themselves.

The 266-member Houston battalion covers a huge swath of East Texas, from Houston to the Arkansas line. Henderson committed suicide Sept. 20. Another battalion member, Staff Sgt. Larry Flores Jr., hanged himself in August at age 26; Sgt. Nils "Aron" Andersson, 25, shot himself to death in March 2007; and in 2005, a captain at battalion headquarters took his life, though the military has not disclosed any details. All served combat tours before their recruiting assignments.

Charlotte Porter, Andersson's mother, said her son - who served two tours in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne and earned a Bronze Star - couldn't lie to recruits about the war and felt an enormous burden to ensure they could become the kind of soldiers he would want watching his back.

"He wasn't a complainer. He just said it really sucked," said his 51-year-old mother, who is from Eugene, Ore. "He felt like a failure."

Paul Rieckhoff, founder of the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said recruiting these days "is arguably the toughest job in the military."

"They're under incredible stress. You can see it on their faces," he said.

In Iraq, Henderson helped lead other infantrymen on risky "snatch-and-grab" missions and saw several buddies die.

He had been stationed in Germany before going to Iraq. After his tour was up, he was assigned to recruiting. He didn't particularly want to leave the infantry, but going to recruiting allowed him to move back to the U.S., his widow said.

Like most recruiters, he began his day with paperwork, followed by cold calls to high school graduates and college students. He spent lunches trying to chat up high schoolers outside the cafeteria, and then, more phone calls - often 150 a day, according to his widow.

He spent evenings on the living room sofas or at the dining room tables of the few interested young people, trying to sell them and their families on the Army's opportunities while easing their fears. Some recruits' parents were hostile.

"They are completely outright nasty to you. That's stressful to you right then and there because you have some mother or father just ripping you apart," Amanda Henderson said.

She said her husband also found himself under crushing pressure from above. He and other recruiters in the battalion were required to account for every minute of every day in planners and logs, his widow said.

When Henderson took some time to recover from knee surgery, his bosses acted as if he was lazy and threatened to have him thrown out of recruiting and reassigned far from his wife, Amanda Henderson said.

He lived in constant fear of failing to sign up enough people, something that can result in an all-day audit by a recruiter's superiors and thwart a soldier's chances of a promotion, Amanda Henderson said.

As much as Henderson hated recruiting, he did the job well, his widow said. But Flores, who killed himself a few weeks before Henderson, "was getting chewed up one side and down the other" at work in the days before he died, Amanda Henderson said. Flores was her boss.

Smith, the Army spokesman, would not comment on Henderson's job performance. Asked about the demands put on recruiters by their superiors, he said recruiting duty "often does entail long hours during the week and on weekends." But he added: "There are other duty assignments in the Army that entail long hours, such as being deployed."

Some recruiters volunteer for the job, but most are assigned. They must have a recent evaluation showing no record of mental instability. But Amanda Henderson said her husband, like other combat veterans, rushed through his assessment, insisting he was fine.

Patrick Henderson had been out of Iraq a little less than a year when he began recruiting, and after several months on the job, his sleeplessness and flashbacks became evident, according to his wife. She said she stayed up one night watching him apparently flash between nightmares of combat and of illegally signing up a recruit.

He suffered a breakdown in the weeks before his suicide, his wife said. Because he was hundreds of miles from the nearest Army post, he went to a local counselor recommended by the military after an initial visit with an Army doctor. But the counselor had never worked with a combat veteran and couldn't decipher the military jargon in his medical records, Amanda Henderson said.

One morning in September, she woke up alone, panicked and went out to look for her husband. The chain was on the door to the shed, but she could see him inside. She pried the window open, and screamed. "He was gone," she said, her voice breaking.

"I don't want anybody to feel this pain that I have," she said, her eyes welling with tears. "It's too much for one person. They need help."

---
____________________________________________
END of Associated Press Release


Now some of you out here are completely
mentally obsessed with the word "PTSD"
and you immediately rush to judgement
with the false notion that the mere
mentioning of that word is somehow
legitimate and justly applied. But
in this display and comparison of 2
different article stories, this is NOT
the case at all. Both of these stories
are misfires, and PTSD is used as the
mask and the deception to make you
think that the problem is over There,
when the truth is, the problem really
is over Here. It's a Trojan Horse to
put it in Vet terms.

In the Dr. Phil misfire, get a clue that
military wives already DO know about
PTSD so who exactly, are they talking
to as a TV audience?

In the Recruiter misfire, get a clue
that the article is really about very
bad and incompetent business management
of an agency, mainly because the Army
is run by virtually nobody who has
an M.B.A. from Harvard in how to run
a business.

The Recruiter misfire could all be stopped
tomorrow, because the real MEAT of that
AP article is NOT really about PTSD:
instead it is really about the troops
being FORCED against their own
desires to serve in a Recruiter capacity,
and in some cases, almost immediately
after they return home from deployment.

The Army could fix this issue TOMORRW
because the details of the article
is giving off signs that it is Army
incompetency which is putting these troops
over the edge and NOT their dam PTSD.

Think about it everybody.

How is this Recruiter situation being
served by Chairman La-La Land appearing
on the Dr. Phil TV show?? It's isn't.

Who is put in charge to immediately
fix, amend, revise, intervene, and halt
the bungled troop assignment practice
that is forcing high risk returnees
to serve in a Recruiter capacity in
the first place?

Read this Recruiter article over several
times and the truth will unfold to you
before your very eyes.

This Army Recruiter comes home a war
hero and his sense of pride is running
high from how well he is received at
home. Then the Army turns around and
sticks him in a Recruiter job from hell,
one that he himself did NOT ask for,
and now by virtue of that stinking
low down job, his sense of self worth
evaporates right before the very eyes
of his wife and family. He is ridiculed
at every turn by Recruitment targets
and their families, openly held up to
scorn, and embarassed at length in front
of his own wife and kids. He can't
get out of it, and he realizes he is
putting his own cherished wife through
something that he himself never intended
to happen.

This Army is a murder factory of incompetent
types and it's time for many of you in
our Vets population to grasp the simple
idea that business management college
degrees are nowhere in the mix, and it
is this very element of BUNGLE who
eventually transfers into the VA agency
to spread the pain and chaos around
there too.

These 2 very different, and yet very same
articles of troop issues just don't lie.
One is the Fame-Monkey Misfire, and the
other is the truth and reality in small
details that nobody in Congress is dealing
with.

You all have to stop with your fixations
on PTSD and only that alone. Both of these
articles have other hidden meanings and
you all have to learn how to begin sorting
out those hidden meanings and analyzing
them very accurately when they show themselves
in the news.

There is nothing at all being served
by Chairman La-La Land going on the
Dr. Phil show. And by the very small details
of his own death, vet Henderson in the
story above, perhaps left the very best
information trail of all for the Congress
to shut up and sit down and mobilize
upon to fix, which is NOT PTSD but instead,
incompetent business management practices
in forced Recruiter slots inside the Army
against an already high-risk population of
new returnees. Get it right, get it straight.
We have to.

This full comparison of these 2 article
stories holds the key to what is wrong
inside the totallity of our VA and DOD
systems. Nobody at the top who is
QUALIFIED to be doing what they
are doing. I rest my case.

Perhaps Rep. Bob Filner will keep his
dumb face back in his office now and
get off the housewives circuit on
TV which only serves him and him alone
while the whole faker time, he is
touting the names of already dead veterans.

This all sits at the crux of our
protests here at VFJ. At Congress,
and at the VA, it's all about THEM!!