Iiandyii, what I said “specific” I was referring to the comparison between the very general memo Bush received about al Qaeda in Aug. 2001 vs. the very detailed letter the President got highlighting widespread corruption and mismanagement in the VA.
It’s entirely fair to ask what actions were taken in response to that letter over the last year. Now of course I’m sure the President will say he never saw it, so we’ll want to know who made the call to keep it from him and that person will of course need to resign.
I don’t particularly care. It doesn’t make the President anymore competent, and that’s what the thread is about. The fact that people would rather focus on things I say that don’t even affect the central point of this thread says to me they don’t want to grapple with the issue. which is fine, I can do entertainment too.
The media hasn’t asked him to account for it yet. Maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t. There’s no answer to that question though that will be good, though, unless he’s been working on a secret plan to improve the VA that’s achieved amazing results which have not yet been publicized.
More likely, either he didn’t see it because it was deliberately kept from him(which has happened to him before), or he did see it and took no action.
Given that he did not initially take action to press stories a month ago about the VA, it’s probably the latter. He doesn’t do his job unless the media takes a virtual cattle prod to him.
It certainly does affect your central point, because most of the supposed ‘evidence’ you’ve posted to support your argument has been false.
So, yet again, your post is criticized and you immediately back off. Here’s an idea – don’t post stuff unless you actually believe it strongly enough to not immediately back off once you’re challenged.
Or he saw it and took some actions, which included (as Congressman Miller later said) directing VA leadership to send a response to Miller detailing the progress that was made on at least some of the cases that the original letter outlined.
Your central point fails because your arguments are bad and usually false.
I have never understood how someone who can craft a sentence as well as adaher is nevertheless so boringly wrong all the time.
adaher, I don’t have much posting history, so it would be easy enough to check this: I am not a partisan hack. I’ve called out liberal posters here on the SDMB for excessive behavior in the past. I’m not a liberal apologist. Please chew over what I’m about to say carefully:
You are not helping your conservative cause. You are not raising important questions. You are not exposing governmental misdeeds. Across days, and months, and years, you are bafflingly, mystifyingly wrong over facts big and small. You misunderstand cites, post absurdities as fact, and are just wrong.. You’re a perfect reverse barometer, and when posters say they don’t believe what you say without multiple cites to back it up, it’s because you’re always wrong.
You’re opionated, and I’d never imply your opinions are wrong. But your opinions are predicated on such a woeful misunderstanding of fact that I’d caution you to seriously reconsider why you believe what you believe.
He desperately wants to be right, but he doesn’t understand that to get to Right you have to go through Wrong. Lots and lots of Wrong, all the time. And he can’t handle being wrong, so he never grows, and never learns - he just sorta sits there, y’know, knowing it all already.
Given how the VA problems are spread all over the nation, and that information was steadily coming out about the problems, I’m just not sure anymore how Shinseki and the President cannot be held directly responsible. Problems at one or two clinics where the books are cooked are just bad actors. Widespread book cooking and other mismanagement, with widespread reports reaching the administration, is a leadership failure at the top.
Actually some Republicans are using the current situation with the VA as an excuse to scrap the whole thing and privatize it:
Some of the most prominent elected Republicans are also floating that idea around:
This is a good time for conservatives - who would like to privatize everything if they had their way - to see if that flies with all this sudden criticism.
In fact, one might surmise since the VA has had issues with wait times going back to when Bush was in office (“VA’s claims-processing time skyrocketed early in the Bush years. In 2002, it took the VA an average of 224 days to complete claims, as compared with 166 days in 1999.” -National Journal) that the timing of this is a little suspicious:
Now, I realize that the above is opinion only and might even sound a little conspiratorial to conservatives on the defensive. However, as much as Republicans have tried to invent scandals to use them for their political gain, it would be foolish of them to not capitalize on an actual scandal. The fact that they could push for something that conservatives love is just icing on the anti-Obama cake!
But even if you take all of that as mere opinion, the fact is that they are trying to sell it as the private healthcare system would be even better for Veterans, and the fact is that they would be wrong:
So this is the same song and dance we’ve seen time and time again with Republicans since the year 0 BC (Barack Craziness): Try to pin something on Obama which has been a problem for ages but which somehow escaped scrutiny until Obama was in the White House for it. The fact it was a problem before doesn’t matter. The fact that their facts are often lacking doesn’t matter. And certainly it doesn’t matter if what they are doing actually hurts many, many people and the country as a whole.
All that matters is trying to get something to stick to Obama. The fact that in this case they can also attempt to parlay it into an ideological victory is undoubtedly giving some conservatives bigger hard on’s than 16 year old boys in gym class shorts, however my guess is that this won’t pan out for them as well.
First of all, everyone is sick of Republicans crying wolf. But most importantly, the days of vets being overwhelmingly pro-Republican are over. When you have half a dozen veterans groups slamming Republican Senator Richard Burr for his overt politicizing of the whole affair, and everyone - including veterans - knows that the Republicans in the Senate blocked a bill that would have built 27 new medical facilities (think that would help with wait lists?) because they couldn’t tack on unrelated amendments that would sanction Iran - it’s hard to make the case that the Republicans are really on your side.
The VA is not perfect and it’s amazing that it does so well when it’s impossible for them to ask for money to handle huge influxes of patients sent off to Republican wars because Republican ideology says that going to war is fine but taking care of the soldiers later is too much to ask, when like most government jobs the pay pales in comparison to similar positions in the private sector. The fact that they do so well overall is a testament to everyone involved (and a testament that our private healthcare system was what needed the overhaul).
Fix the VA, make it better, fund it properly and quit playing political games with that funding. But dissolve it? Anyone who thinks that is a good idea is putting politics ahead of the well-being of our vets because the facts don’t bear this out.
KMOV-TV can’t get a response from CMS about a contractor implemented in scandals in other countries. By law, they are supposed to respond in 20 days. 30 days later, nothing.
Incompetence all around. And there’s no one trying to actually fix these problems.
It would divert funds away from the organization that needs it, the organization that has done a much better job than the private healthcare system already.
