Where is the outrage?

Both candidates have been invited to participate in a town hall near Fort Hood, Texas, to engage in a dialogue with veterans and military families about the future of our Armed Forces, our veterans’ support system, and our country. To date, Senator Obama has declined to attend.

There are many ironies and tragedies in this story.

If Senator Obama does not deign to attend, the event will not occur, and thus the organizers’ vision of helping the American public realize the breadth and depth of the issues facing veterans, wounded warriors, and military families will go unrealized.

This is the man who is asking to be elected the next Commander-in-Chief (during a time of war, no less) and at whose direction many people in this audience will sacrifice their time, their family, their health, their happiness, and, possibly, their lives. Yet some other engagement is more pressing than explaining his positions on how he plans to lead them while they serve and care for them when they finish.

To Obama’s advisors, this is just invitation to another event. But it isn’t. It is a nationally broadcast, live town hall with McCain that Americans would actually watch, thus raising awareness about veterans and military families in crisis and the consequences that their unmet needs have for all of us—as taxpayers, as citizens, and as beneficiaries of an all volunteer military force.

Where is the media? Where is the outrage? For eight years, the media has failed to hold the President accountable for his obstinance, arrogance, and insensitivity. Despite two wars, trillions of dollars of debt, hundreds of thousands of wounded, and thousands more dead, it appears that this trend is going to continue: different chapter, same book.

Yes, McCain was a POW, but Fort Hood is a widow maker. I don’t think the audience is going to be as pro-McCain as his handlers think it will be. I know, I live here.

I urge you to contact Obama’s campaign and tell him he has to accept this invitation to the Fort Hood Presidential Town Hall. If there is one more debate or town hall before November, shouldn’t it be before an audience composed of the men and women whose service and sacrifice allow these events to occur?

(The press release is on the Veterans for Common Sense website and the Military Spouses for Change website.)