Tammy Duckworth vrs Tea Party Fav Joe Walsh

And Tammy, many of us Veterans, older and your brothers and sisters now, across the Country, have your back!

Especially against this so called 'tea party' fully funded by special interests and mostly made up of those that had no qualms as to the rubber stamping of these present wars you and those sisters and brothers served in, off the books till the present administration, and same no qualms as to zip being done out of congress, their reps told them to go shopping, a decade plus now added to the previous decades, for the veterans of until the 110th and 111th and now right back into the continued obstruction as they lay blame on the VA, as those they represent cheer on same, and not themselves!!

USN All Shore '67-'71 GMG3 Vietnam '70-'71

Tammy Duckworth Takes on the Tea Party

May 14, 2012 - After Tammy Duckworth lost her 2006 run for Congress by 2 percentage points in one of the country’s most expensive House races, she swore she’d never run again. One of the few women to pilot Black Hawk helicopters in combat, Duckworth lost both legs and shattered her right arm after being downed by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq in 2004. She later emerged as an important voice against that war. Powerful Illinois politicians like Dick Durbin and Rahm Emanuel recruited her to run for Congress in suburban Chicago while she was still recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, learning to navigate the world on prosthetics.

The race against Republican Peter Roskam was hard. “It was so nasty, and so full of lies,” she says. Duckworth, whose mother is Thai-Chinese, recalls seeing an image of herself, her eyes Photoshopped into slits, “standing on the border handing out money to illegal immigrants.” After the election, she says, “I just thought, I’m done. I will find other ways to serve.”

Now, though, she’s back, campaigning against Republican Congressman Joe Walsh in what will likely prove one of 2012’s highest-profile races. For Democrats, the contest has an epic quality, pitting a galvanic war heroine against a man who symbolizes everything liberals abhor about the Tea Party. Walsh is famous for screaming at constituents for their criticism of big banks. He also preached personal responsibility while being sued by his ex-wife for more than $100,000 in unpaid child support. (They recently settled out of court.)

Duckworth says it was the excesses of the Tea Party that lured her back into politics. Following her defeat, she went to work on behalf of veterans for the state of Illinois and then, after Obama’s election, as an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She was there last summer during the standoff over the debt ceiling. “I was sitting in my office at the VA at midnight,” she says. “I’m in charge of trying to communicate to veterans that we’re going to shut down the government and your access to your benefits may not happen on a timely basis. I’m getting ready to send out messages to the VA staff that, oh, by the way, you might not get to come into work tomorrow and you might not get paid, and it just pissed me off.” read more>>>