Krauthammer: VA Scandal, Economy 'a Crisis of Competence' for Obama

On Thursday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer called the combination of problems including the economy and the Obama administration’s handling of the current Veterans Administration hospital scandal a “crisis of competence,” which goes beyond being a product of President Barack Obama’s liberal ideology.

“You put them all together, and you have a crisis of competence,” Krauthammer said. “This administration had a lot of ideological opponents, including me, many others. But it was mostly on their goals, the radical expanding the government, intruding into people’s lives. Then you get to a point where you get three factors, as you say, the most important underlying all of it is the economy. If the recession lasted 18 months, the so-called recovery has been on for five years. We now have a quarter of contraction. You compare it with the Reagan recovery, the average for the six years after his recession was a growth of over 4 percent. He was between 1 and 2 [percent].”

“So we have high unemployment chronic sort of discontent, and that underlies everything,” he continued. “You add onto that the fiasco of ObamaCare, self-inflicted. They can’t even put a web site together for half-a-billion dollars. Then you add the VA crisis, which isn’t only incompetence, but a kind of banality, a whiff of corruption and there’s a moral component. People can understand abusing the IRS for political and all that, but these are veterans. These are people everybody wants to honor and take care of. So add them all together and Shinseki is a dead man. What you heard today was an invitation for a resignation. And I think he’s gone by the weekend.”

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