Rove’s Fun and Games in the Name of Wounded Warriors

Props to Media Matters for taking apart the distortions about the VA’s “end-of-life” educational pamphlet propagated by Karl Rove, Sean Hannity and Fox News.

Most relevant, in light of Karl’s playful prop on Hannity’s Monday show, however, was Rove’s claim that the booklet, on page 99, directed vets to the Hemlock Society as the single referral for “end of life” directives. In fact, according to MM, the Hemlock Society is not even mentioned in the 51 page booklet.

Something progressives sometimes fail to bring up, however, in countering the “death panel” meme — at least, when it comes to the V.A. and veterans counseling — is the larger hypocrisy at play. In other words, what Rove and the wingnuts are doing is playing politics on the backs of the thousands of often severely mentally and physically disabled veterans they — especially Rove, as the architect behind the selling of the Iraq War — unnecessarily put in harms way in the first place.

It wasn’t until late 07, by the way, that Bush even appeared with the more severely war wounded — and only then after these veterans, having been sought out by photojournalists, became the subject of numerous media stories. Sadly, Bush’s photo-ops mostly exploited these soldiers as props in the attempt to mitigate the PR damage and salvage his legacy in his last year in office two years after Katrina exposed Bush/Rove’s “compassionate conservatism” for the slogan it was.

So Karl, if you’re that intent on exploiting the kind of suffering and cost that would lead a veteran and/or his family to question the worth of existence, maybe you should tell it to the people paying for your handiwork, not Sean Hannity.

(screen grab: FOX News)