You can get a hard view of reality about what conservative talk has done to "fiscal responsibility" as well as government services here -- in an inside view of the use of private contractors to do government's job. The mess described is a direct result of the Reagan-and-beyond ideologically-driven effort to mimic fiscal responsibility in government by "reducing" the size of government.
The size of government hasn't been reduced. It has been reoriented to serve industry and ideology, not the American people.
One of the results can be seen in this story of a counter intelligence expert wounded in a bombed Humvee.
Helms, 31, a civilian counterintelligence expert with the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group, had been sent to Iraq in 2004 to help fill a critical intelligence gap in the area known as the Sunni Triangle. While in Iraq, he lived with soldiers and ate military rations, took fire from mortar rounds and small arms, and clocked hundreds of miles manning a machine gun on the back of a Humvee.
Nevertheless, his status as an Army civilian would leave him stranded in the aftermath of the June 16, 2004, attack, when the bomb hit his Humvee so hard it blew his M-60 off its turret.
In the months that followed, Helms recalled, he was denied vital care for his wounds -- ranging from shrapnel in his left arm to traumatic brain injury. Forced to rely on federal workers' compensation and turned away from regular care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals, Helms has faced years of frustration grappling with bureaucracies unprepared to help a government civilian wounded in combat.
It's the old story. The Reagan legacy of cost-cutting plays out in cost-cutting for the poor and for the wounded in "wars of choice" while the war industry makes out like bandits. We have been learning lately how badly the military are treating their own. The irony comes this time in the form of a civilian contractor, wounded in service to the Army, who can't get care from his employer.
Did we need further proof that conservativism, once a respectable political belief, now encompasses a tragic conviction that there's nothing wrong with throwing people away in the service of ideology?
