In response to The VA is a Vision of the Future Under Obamacare:
The VA and ObamaCare look quite symptomatic of Big Government to me. It’s all about cover-ups, cooking the books, wasting huge piles of taxpayer money – the VA is an under-funded agency that still managed to blow millions on plump administrator bonuses and expensive office renovations – and shifting the blame. You get the same thing from every quarter of Big Government.
Echoes of every Obama-era scandal, plus quite a few that came before him, can be seen in the VA mess, from the White House’s hilariously clumsy attempt to pretend it held someone accountable and fired him, to GSA-style frittering away of taxpayer cash on luxuries, to the attempted crackdowns on whistleblowers. Part of the reason this scandal is catching fire is that even the famed Low Information Voters have the nagging feeling they’ve seen all this before.
Even the media, particularly exasperated reporter Drew Griffin of CNN, is visibly tired of hearing Obama’s worn-out buck-never-got-here routine again:
My only quibble with what Griffin says here is his expression of surprise and incredulity that Obama would try to drag this story out with a contrived delay for a superfluous report. Is anyone really in need of an explanation for why Obama’s doing that? Don’t even the most loyal mainstream-media shills understand that the White House has already written their “old news” and “Republicans playing politics” talking points for the July news cycle? Do they really need to see that junk appear in their in-box, sent by the same political hacks who brewed up the Benghazi smokescreen, or can they all finally admit they already know what their marching orders will say?
It’s not as if blame-shifting and cheesy excuses are exclusive to the public sector. This stuff happens all the time in corporate America too. The difference is that the private sector is ultimately ruled by forces of accountability that are entirely absent from Big Government. Government agencies don’t have to worry about going bankrupt or losing their “customers.” There are no angry stockholders to be confronted at disaster post-mortems. We’re all going to get VA treatment under ObamaCare, and even more pointedly under the single-payer nightmare ObamaCare was designed to usher in, because the only real objective of a massive bureaucracy is to prevent public outrage from becoming universal and bipartisan. As long as there are reliably faithful constituencies to blunt the anger of the betrayed, government faceplants are manageable.
How long have we been hearing that ObamaCare is the “settled law of the land,” a permanent modification to American government more powerful than the Constitution itself, impossible to repeal no matter how badly it fails? It seems foolish to expect accountability or transparency from people who think that way. Until a few days ago, Barack Obama thought the VA scandal was something he didn’t even need to address personally – a teapot tempest his flacks and hacks could spin away. We’ll never stop getting this treatment from socialist government, because it has no real incentive to behave any other way.
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