Barack Obama's War On Veterans

by JASmius

Accountability, after a fashion, but certainly no solution:

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki's tenure at the helm of the embattled agency grew more perilous on Wednesday, as several Democrats joined Republicans in calling for his resignation after a new report found widespread problems throughout the vast VA healthcare system.

"The inspector general's preliminary report makes it clear that the systemic problems at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are so entrenched that they require new leadership to be fixed. Secretary Shinseki must step down," Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a statement.

The two-term Democrat, who is facing a tough re-election bid this fall against GOP Rep. Cory Gardner, is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"We need new leadership who will demand accountability to fix these problems and ensure the VA is providing Coloradans the services they've earned," Udall said.

He was the first Democrat senator to call for Shinseki to step down, but was soon joined by others. John Walsh of Montana, said that Shinseki needed to go because "America's veterans deserve an immediate end to the troubles plaguing the VA, and we must take urgent steps to secure the care they deserve.

"With the launch of inspections of VA facilities nationwide, it’s time to put the partisanship aside and focus on what’s right for our veterans."

Then North Carolina's Kay Hagan piled on, saying she was "outraged" by the report. "We can no longer put our faith in the current VA leadership’s ability to fix these problems," she said.

Late Wednesday Minnesota's Al Franken and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire also called for Shinseki to go.

All five of the Democrats face elections in November.

And now you see why "The Gang of Five" is parroting the "Neocon Menage a Toi".  McCain, Grahamnesty, and Ayotte may or may not be trying to "score political points," but they definitely suffer from the lack of imagination that sees the VA scandal as a "failure of leadership" instead of the "It doesn't matter who the captain is, it's always going to hit the iceberg" bureaucratic Titanic it really is.  Udall, Walsh, Hagen, Franken, and Shaheen don't give a rodent's rectum about the VA but are most especially "playing defensive politics" in the interests of career self-preservation.  Which makes it all the more ironic that Udall actually touched on the true issue - systemic problems, which is to say, the same government-run single-payer system his party wants to inflict on everybody else and largely already has via ObamaCare, for which he voted and which has his ass hanging out to electoral wind at the moment.

The IG report that constituted Commissar Shinseki's latest death thro is what you would have expected:

The interim report by Richard Griffin, the VA's acting inspector general, disclosed that as many as 1,700 veterans in need of care were "at risk of being lost or forgotten" after being kept off the wait lists at the Phoenix Veterans' Administration Center. The report found that investigators had "substantiated serious conditions" at the facility.

The 35-page document confirmed allegations of excessive waiting time for care at the Arizona facility, with an average 115-day wait for a first appointment for those on the wait list.

"While our work is not complete, we have substantiated that significant delays in access to care negatively impacted the quality of care at this medical facility," Griffin wrote in the report.

The investigation also found that "inappropriate scheduling practices are systemic throughout" the nationwide VA healthcare system, which serves about 6.5 million veterans each year.

1,700 vets.  So the forty dead ones that ignited this scandal were just the vanguard, the leading edge of the engineered disaster.  And if you project those numbers onto the entire American population, you get an equivalent number of "at risk of being lost or forgotten" in the universal Medicaid system into which the Obama Regime is bent on herding us of over eighty thousand.  Or approximately 27 9/11 attacks.

None need wonder why Democrats are pissing themselves in terror and pining for Eric Shinseki to depart.  It's the only way they can look like they're "doing something" about VA-gate without actually doing anything.

And Montel Williams, for one, is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore:

Former talk show host and retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Montel Williams warns that the United States cannot continue as a democracy if it doesn't fix the current Veterans Health Administration scandal.

"Democracies don't stand when you can't man an army, and you can't man an army if you lie to those who want to protect you," Williams said Wednesday on Fox News Channel's "Your World with Neil Cavuto."

I'm sorry, Commander, but this country (1) was never a "democracy" and nor ever meant to be (It was a constitutional federal republic), and, (2) if it had been, that distinction ended on November 6th, 2012 in any case.

Veterans groups and members of the House and Senate have called for the resignation of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, but Williams told Cavuto it would do little good, since the problem is systemic.

"There have been thirty years of studies, committees," a visibly angry Williams told Fox News.

Williams reasons farther than any senator has, but still doesn't quite hit paydirt:

Citing the troop surge Obama launched in Afghanistan in 2009, Williams called for a "VA surge" in which recently discharged corpsmen from each branch of service could be re-activated for a short period to help clear the backlog in VA hospitals.

He told viewers to help him gather support by tweeting him at @Montel_Williams and using the hashtag #VASurge.

Instead of "#PrivatizeTheVA" we get "VASurge"?  And a hashtag campaign?  It's not as pathetic as the White House's idea of waging war against jihadists in northwest Africa, but if a man in Lieutenant Commander Williams' position was going to go all Howard Beale on the country, I'd have thought he wouldn't have squandered it on such a letdown.

Sorry, gentles, but shuffling around deckchairs on a ship designed to sink isn't going to "fix the problem".  The VA is a disease that only the private sector can remedy.  And that is what Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are most afraid of.

Exit questions: Over/under on how far away Commissar Shinseki is from tasting those bus wheels?  And when his way out of this travail is to throw a single high-level scalp to his obtuse pursuers, why doesn't O just get rid of Shinseki and make the problem go away?  Or is it "Sebelius Syndrome," aka not wanting to be perceived as acknowledging anything short of official omniscience and omnipotence?