Shinseki should have resigned a while back and for the right reasons, but he wasn’t the problem with the VA. The military cost-cutting culture that Obama and his Center for American Progress backers brought into politics was. The VA scandal is one of those events where the consequences of an ongoing policy reaches the public and Obama pretends to be as upset as the public expects him to be. Whether or not the White House knew about the waiting list, the impulse to cut the costs of military health care came from the very top. Shinseki was implementing an administration policy. So were the VA people responsible. They may not have been told exactly how to implement it, but what happened was a consequence of a larger policy directive. Like them, Shinseki is a scapegoat. He did a bad job, but he was ‘following orders’. This year, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was pushing for cuts to Tricare benefits and claiming that military health care was dragging the defense budget down. This wasn’t Chuck Hagel’s idea. Hagel was implementing an agenda pushed by the Center for American Progress, the think tank that had the most influence on Obama and whose staffers went on to play key roles in the administration. Two years ago, I wrote about the Center for American Progress’ war on veterans. The VA has been bad for a long time, but no previous administration made cutting health care to vets on its budget priorities. What happened at the VA came from the top down. It was dictated by anti-war special interests who were pursuing a larger agenda. A single resignation won’t change that. We have to stop pretending that this was an accident or a few bad apples. What we should do is have a serious conversation about the agenda of Obama Inc. to slash military budgets with little concern for the lives of veterans.
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 21:47:36 +0000
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