Liberals are using the Pentagon bureaucracy's mistake to attack Delta, and other, airlines.  You've probably heard how Delta charged some servicemen returning from Afghanistan huge fees for extra luggage.

Many people including Barbara "don't call me ma'am" Boxer are all upset about how poorly the soldiers were treated.  Apparently Boxer thinks only liberal Senators can be nasty to people who put their lives on the line to protect the country.

Everyone can agree that telling soldiers coming back from Afghanistan that they have to pony up $200 because they brought 4 bags rather than 3 is insane.  But what most people don't know is that the military will reimburse those soldiers.

That, of course, isn't good enough.  We don't pay the troops over in Afghanistan enough that we should ask them to float the money for extra baggage.  There's absolutely no reason why the Pentagon couldn't set things up so that returning soldiers just sign a form acknowledging how much luggage they had and then the airline submits those forms to the Pentagon for reimbursement.

The poor Delta person who asked for the money may be an anti-military wacko who didn't think there was anything wrong trying to squeeze cash out of a bunch of heroes. But it's easy to imagine a low wage clerk at the baggage counter who has absolutely no freedom to change the rules being afraid of losing their job in the Obama "recovery" if they bent the rules, even for soldiers.

My son once paid in advance for 2 extra pieces of luggage on a flight to the East Coast.  When he packed he managed to need only 1.  But when we got to the airport it turned out that one bag was 10 pounds over the limit.  A reasonable person would assume that since he'd paid for 2 extra bags, each of which could weigh 60 pounds, that there would be no problem flying with 1 extra bag that weighed 70. Sadly no.  The clerks, and their supervisor, didn't have the ability to do the obvious so my son had to shuffle items into his carryon to meet the weight limit.  The airline people were all sympathetic but they had no freedom to make a decision -- an example of why minimizing bureaucracies is always good.

To attack airline employees because the Pentagon couldn't figure out that some fraction of troops redeploying to CONUS would have extra baggage and that it wasn't nice to ask privates to float hundreds of dollars is patently unfair.  The problem lies with the bureaucrats in the Pentagon who set up the whole travel scheme.

Boxer obviously has no respect for the soldiers but she'll never miss the opportunity to attack a business.

Interestingly enough this example shows Boxers priorities.  While she generally has no problem attacking the Pentagon it's now clear that given the choice she'd rather attack an American company than a government agency -- even an agency she doesn't like. Clearly Boxer's first loyalty is to the government.   

In this case we need to castigate the people who set up the travel for the soldiers not the airlines who just did what their customer, in this case the government, told them to do.

You can find more of Trinko's ramblings at obvioustalk.blogspot.com