If The Military Actually Cared About ‘Readiness,’ It Wouldn’t Have Fired Members For Refusing An Experimental Shot
Democrats and weak Republicans have launched a series of attacks against Sen. Tommy Tuberville in recent weeks for forcing individual votes on President Biden’s military appointees in protest of the Pentagon’s abortion policy.
Tuberville — who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee — has been slowing down military personnel moves that require Senate confirmation to protest the Pentagon’s use of taxpayer money to cover service members’ travel expenses to get abortions. To be clear, Tuberville is not blocking votes, but is forcing the Armed Services Committee to vote on each nomination individually rather than voting “en masse on large numbers of nominations.”
The senator’s protest has been ongoing since March, according to the New York Post.
Central to Democrats’ dishonest attacks is the assertion by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Biden appointee, that Tuberville’s hold could impact military readiness and “America’s national security.” Without missing a beat, congressional Democrats and their allies in regime-approved media jumped into action, relentlessly bashing the Alabama senator for fighting to reverse a policy a majority of Americans oppose.
“The Senator from Alabama has achieved something that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin could have only dreamed of. Our military and our nation are weakened by his actions,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said during a recent Senate floor speech.
“Tommy Tuberville’s reckless blockade is the real threat to military readiness,” a July MSNBC headline blared. Even Senate Republican leadership and 2024 GOP presidential primary contender Nikki Haley have joined Democrats’ pile-on, with Haley calling Tuberville’s protest “shameful.”
But all this feigned outrage raises the obvious question: If “military readiness” is such a major concern, where were these same people when the Pentagon was kicking out service members for refusing the experimental (and risky) Covid shot?
For well over a year, the Austin-led Department of Defense (DOD) purged over 8,400 healthy service members from its ranks for choosing not to comply with the Biden regime’s compulsory Covid vaccination requirement. On top of that, the vast majority of service members who sought a medical or religious exemption from the mandate had their accommodations denied.
Even more infuriating about the Pentagon’s mistreatment of our nation’s finest is that the agency can’t even claim its Covid policies made a difference in stopping the spread of the virus or keeping service members healthy. Last month, the DOD inspector general’s office released a report revealing the Pentagon’s Covid patient data collected throughout the pandemic is “not complete, accurate, or representative of the universe of DoD patients who had a COVID-19 event.”
“Among other issues, we identified errors in 24 of the 25 registry records we reviewed; therefore, we are at least 90 percent confident that the accuracy rate of the data in the registry is less than the contractually required minimum of 90 percent,” the report reads. “As a result, any data from the COVID-19 Registry … provided to the DoD and other stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic were inaccurate and potentially misleading.”
Notably, information on the number of service members hospitalized due to Covid is redacted from the report.
The findings mean the DOD can’t measure how effective their masking, social distancing, or vaccination policies were because the data collected is unreliable. In other words, all the claims the Pentagon issued about how these policies were designed to protect service members’ health were based on a load of nonsense.
The Washington, D.C. political class’s phony outrage about military readiness and national security is really about advancing a politically convenient narrative and expanding taxpayer-funded abortion. When our service members needed their support the most and military readiness was actually at risk, they were nowhere to be found.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Comments are closed.