Wake Up, Bill O’Reilly:A New Generation of Homeless Vets Emerges

When the Faux News Wingnut Bill O’Reilly infamously opined last week, in a challenge to a comment from former Senator John Edwards that there are  over 200,000 homeless veterans” in the US today, that were no “homeless vets”,  he really really pissed me off.

O’Reilly was discussing Edwards with radio host Ed Schultz when he said, “[W]e’re still looking for all the veterans sleeping under the bridges, Ed. So if you find anybody, let us know. Because that’s all the guy said for the last … ” When Schultz told O’Reilly, “Well, they’re out there, Bill, don’t kid yourself,” O’Reilly replied, “They may be out there, but there are not many of them out there, OK? So if you know where one is, Ed … if you know where there’s a veteran sleeping under a bridge, you call me immediately, and we will make sure that man does not do it, is not there.” Schultz then gave O’Reilly “his word” that he would “do that.”

As part of Bush & Co’s Disinformation Team, O’Reilly was trying to cover up one of the real tragedies of the current conflict in the Middle East, that ex-Gi’s are coming back to a Veteran’s Administration that is both underfunded and ill-equipped to deal with them. As the AP article below documents, this is a crisis of national proportions, and rest assured, one that exists right here in the Miami Valley.

By ERIN McCLAM, AP
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LEEDS, Mass. — Peter Mohan traces the path from the Iraqi battlefield to this lifeless conference room, where he sits in a kilt and a Camp Kill Yourself T-shirt and calmly describes how he became a sad cliche: a homeless veteran.

There was a happy homecoming, but then an accident — car crash, broken collarbone. And then a move east, close to his wife’s new job but away from his best friends.

And then self-destruction: He would gun his motorcycle to 100 mph and try to stand on the seat. He would wait for his wife to leave in the morning, draw the blinds and open up whatever bottle of booze was closest.

He would pull out his gun, a .45-caliber, semiautomatic pistol. He would lovingly clean it, or just look at it and put it away. Sometimes place it in his mouth.”I don’t know what to do anymore,” his wife, Anna, told him one day. “You can’t be here anymore.”Peter Mohan never did find a steady job after he left Iraq. He lost his wife — a judge granted their divorce this fall — and he lost his friends and he lost his home, and now he is here, in a shelter. (more…)