General Shinseki was called to the Principal’s office this morning. A last minute meeting added to Barry’s schedule at 6 A.M. Eastern. Ooooh, he’s in TROUBLE!!!! Not really, he’s a fall guy. The White House minions most likely saw some type of polling data that showed Barry’s likeability is so deep in the toilet that even Roto-Rooter™ can’t save him and he is grasping at straws to protect the reputation of his party prior to the mid-term elections.
There is no one person and no amount of money that can correct what has been going on at the VA for decades. If the purpose of this meeting is to ask for the General’s resignation, it is naught more than a dog and pony show and will fix NOTHING. What the VA needs is “cleaners” to be assigned to each and every hospital in the system who can sort through the mess of paperwork, triage the cases awaiting attention and ensure that each facility has enough nurses, physicians, therapists (occupational, physical and psychological) and medical support personnel to care for the influx of new patients into the system. This cannot be corrected from an office in DC, and asking any one person to repair the damage that has built up over the years is unfair and ludicrous.
My step-uncle served in the Korean War – in country. He suffered mental, emotional and physical impairments most of his life as a direct result of his service. In the late 70s, he was admitted to the VA Hospital in Brooklyn. His mother and sister called every day to check on his condition. They visited him twice a week, driving from Rockland County, New York early in the morning and staying until the hospital made them leave at night. One morning his mother phoned him, but a nurse answered and said he had been sent for tests. The VA employee told her to call back in a couple of hours. This went on all day. Finally, his sister phoned at 5 P.M. demanding to know what was going on. Her mother was a wreck because they were getting no answers. The voice on the other end of the phone advised her that John Falletta had passed away at 8 A.M. that morning, but would not say how it happened. Can you imagine the devastating effects this news had on his family? Bureaucracy and lack of communication among departments is, in my opinion, to blame for the pain they went through.
No President since Jimmy Carter (or possibly those in office prior to his term) is to be excused for allowing this to continue and grow into the monster the VA has become. President Bush 43 was working on in-hospital solutions to eliminate the backlog, knowing that putting “boots on the ground” was the only way to straighten up this mess. Barry was advised during the transition in 2008 and vowed to be the President who healed all of the ills of the VA system.
Then crickets…until now.
So, the typical Ego in Chief “madder than hell”, “found out about it on TV [or in the newspaper, etc.]” rhetoric begins. Attempting to solve issues by creating fall guys or gals is another classic Barry move. And how long will he be madder than hell? Probably until he can find another shiny thing to direct the sheeple’s attention away from his latest disgrace.
Meanwhile, stories like mine will continue as they have for decades and our military men and women will suffer – along with their families – for years to come.
Just an aside: How can POTUS claim that he is “madder than hell” and feign surprise at the ineptitude of the VA when he served on the US Senate Committee for Veteran’s Affairs in 2006? This report was developed in 2014, after he had been POTUS for a few years. But, you cannot tell me the 2006 committee members lived in blissful ignorance. Some of the findings took years to research:
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