Just a few hours after meeting with and speaking to a homeless veteran group, V.A. Secretary Ric Shiseki has tendered his resignation, President Obama tells us. He also tells us it’s because Shinseki doesn’t want to be a “distraction”.
Whatever.
Let us go back nearly fourteen years, back to when I first met my beloved Jonn over at This ain’t hell… That was when I first encountered the absolute idiocy that is Ric Shinseki due to his stroke of genius in wanting to give to the entire Army the black beret of the Rangers (made in China, I should add) so they’d feel like special snowflakes. Nah, not a distraction at all.
Now he doesn’t want to be a distraction? Yeah, no. Shinseki is not now, nor has he been in tune with the best interests of the military man and woman, but he does know how to play a mean distraction.
What he doesn’t want is to be held accountable for his inaction in regards to the health and well-being of veterans. Delays at the VA are nothing new. My own father, a Vietnam vet, didn’t receive benefits until three decades after he got back, and it took over two years for him to even see a doctor. Hell, Obama even spoke of the disrepair of the VA when he was a Senator. They both were aware, but neither has the testicular fortitude to do anything about it.
Make no mistake, Shinseki is resigning semantically only. There is no doubt in my mind that Obama asked him to in lieu of actually being presidential and giving him the ax for not doing his job in the first place, a lapse in responsibility that COST VETERANS LIVES. Why, that would mean Herr Barry was responsible as well, wouldn’t it?
They can both go to hell, but PPOTUS should damn well make sure the inexorable behavior towards our veterans is fixed before he books that trip. Not-firing a poor excuse for a VA Secretary that he appointed is barely a nudge in that direction.
Xavier says: SOP: Vacay, transfer, raise.
Secretary Shinseki had to resign, of course, but the problem predates his tenure: he didn’t create this problem, but he didn’t fix it, either.
And he couldn’t, even if he had tried. The stretching out of appointments and treatments is a common practice in single-payer health care systems across the developed world, as a means of saving money. The VA simply had to cover it up better — and did — because we Americans expect better, but better and single-payer are mutually exclusive.
Chris in N.Va. says: Graduated from Bible college with Pastoral Study degree alongside a former Ranger classmate. He and my wife and I (all vets) often chatted about active and veteran topics. He eventually fulfiilled his goal of reentering the Army as a Chaplain.
I finally lost track of him when he was the Jumpmaster-qualified Deputy Division Chaplain of the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan, always enjoying leaping out of the door with his men to enjoy “the breeze between the knees” as he called it (something I’ve also enjoyed a few times in the civilian realm).
I can only imagine what’s going through his mind as he’s no doubt only a handful of years shy of retirement himself.
Honor has been replaced by bureaucratic CYA (well, actually it’s not an entirely new phenomenon).
A resignation or two, a few sacrificial-goat firings, lateral-or-upward (no demotion) reassignments and things will quietly and quickly return to their deadly normal at the VA, I’m only too afraid. As has been noted, the way the system is working is not a bug, but a single-payer, government-controlled, hardwired feature it all its gory glory.
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