A FOLLOW-UP TO A PHONY STORY

Remember this tempest in a teapot from last week?




On the radio this morning, in a reference to the president's schedule today, I heard something relevant to this:

The stage for today's visit is the Disabled American Veterans' annual national convention at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. It's the first time a President has accepted the group's yearly invitation since Bill Clinton in 1996....

Oh.

So it's horrifying that President Obama didn't make a personal appearance at the Boy Scout Jamboree -- but were you even aware of the fact that George W. Bush snubbed the Disabled American Veterans for eight straight years? A president whose actions disabled more veterans than those of any president since Nixon?

There may have been serious scheduling conflicts in some of those years, but I do see, for instance, that in 2005 the DAV convention took place August 12 through August 17. On Saturday, August 13, according to his archived WhiteHouse.gov site, Bush was at his vacation home in Crawford, Texas; that evening he found time to attend the Little League Baseball Southwest Regional Championship in Waco.

By the way, Dick Cheney did speak at the DAV convention in 2004, but his invitation was withdrawn in 2008 -- for good reason:

Vice President Cheney's invitation to address wounded combat veterans next month has been yanked because the group felt his security demands were Draconian and unreasonable....

His staff insisted the sick vets be sequestered for two hours before Cheney's arrival and couldn't leave until he'd finished talking, officials confirmed....

When Cheney spoke to the group in 2004, his handlers imposed the same stringent security lockdown, upsetting members, officials said.

Many of the vets are elderly and left pieces of themselves on foreign battlefields since World War II, and others were crippled by recent service in Iraq and Afghanistan. For health reasons, many can't be stuck in a room for hours.

"It was a huge imposition on our delegates," added David Autry, another Disabled American Veterans official.

Autry said vets would've had to get up "at Oh-dark-30 and try to get breakfast and showered and get their prosthetics on."

Once inside, they "could not leave the meeting room, and the bathrooms are outside," he said....

But Bush ... eight years of snubs.

And shockingly, not one screaming headline from Fox.