The veterans advocacy organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America is ramping up its criticism against Bill O'Reilly's recent comments on homeless vets. Users of IAVA's website can sign an online letter protesting O'Reilly's statement that:
“They may be out there, but there’s not many of them out there.
Okay? … 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.”
O'Reilly pulled presidential politics into the mix as well accusing John Edwards of using the homeless veterans issue for his own political gain. Today a transcript from one of O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memos" was published on the Fox News Website. It referenced an exchange between Edwards and David Letterman:
DAVID LETTERMAN: Tell me a
little bit about your feud with Bill O'Reilly. Now there's a tough guy.
He's been on the show a couple of times. And he's a tough guy. What's
going on there? What's at the core of the feud?
JOHN EDWARDS:
Well, the core of the feud is I've been talking about homeless veterans
and the fact that we have a couple hundred thousand homeless veterans
who have no place to sleep at night. They're either in shelters...
LETTERMAN: It's embarrassing, isn't it?
EDWARDS:
It's incredibly embarrassing for America. Huge moral issue facing the
country. And he kind of went on his show and said that I was
exaggerating, making it up. And I think he got a lot of correspondence,
a lot of homeless veterans have been calling in.
LETTERMAN:
Well, you know what I've noticed about Bill O'Reilly — and he's a
marvelous communicator. But he's not — he doesn't really care much
about telling the truth.
O'Reilly then countered:
As Laura Ingraham might say, tedious. Edwards and
Letterman could not care less about the truth unless it fits into their
far-left vision of the world. Using homeless veterans to make a
dishonest political point is wrong. That's one of the reasons Edwards
is going nowhere in his campaign. The man simply cannot be trusted.
Recently the Associated Press reported on an interesting program giving wounded Marines and Navy Corpsmen job placement in the film industry. Working with the Wounded Marine Careers Foundation
gives these vets hands on training in the various aspects of filmmaking--even the camera equipment can be modified to suite any injuries the
vets may have. As the center's co-founder Kev Lombard tells the AP,
the idea for the program came out of his own project:
Lombard came up with the idea for the foundation's Wounded Marine
Training Center for Careers in Media program after being asked by a
friend in the military nearly two years ago to document the stories of
wounded veterans at military hospitals.
"It wasn't our story to tell. It was theirs," he said. "So I said how about we teach them to tell their own story."
Throughout the story we follow one young wounded Marine who's
filming a mock scene of helmets atop inverted rifles set
as battlefield memorials to those killed. If movies about Iraq
will continue to be made in the future, his lens offers an idea of just
how valuable these aspiring filmmakers may be:
Frey focuses on the helmets, which sit near a box of blank ammunition.
For a moment he considers taking pictures. But then he decides against
it, saying later that the scene didn't look real.
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