Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chairman of the Senate Veteran's Affairs Committee, and one of the most persistent and effective advocates for veterans anywhere in government, was on Face The Nation this morning. He was more constrained in his response to the V.A. scandal that Ken was in his report Friday evening after Shinseki had been forced to fall on his sword. Ken speculated that we'll probably never know how responsible Shinseki really was for the mess because, in his words, "the psychotic lying scumbags who have been leading the assault on him not only are incapable of speaking a word of truth but have now effectively substituted their psychotic lying scumbag agenda for any possible consideration of discovery of truth and fixing it… [T]heir historic and amply documented hatred of America's heroes is kind of hard to understand, even remembering that we're dealing with psychotic lying scumbags.
For sheer gall, you have to stand back and admire the right-wing screech assault on the VA. I had a fleeting thought to suggest that all the unaccountably uncaged right-wing beasts who are now having fake-orgasmic follies over the VA scandals be asked to pause in their lying orgy or right-wing scumbaggery to chronicle their history of support for veterans' affairs. Then I realized that it would serve no purpose, since gathering that chronicle would take literally no time at all, since the lying scumbags of the Right have a combined history of absolutely no support of any kind at any time for veterans' affairs.It's as if right-wingers hate veterans worse than the enemies those veterans had been sent into combat to protect us from.For a country that has allowed warmongering to be stitched into the center of its psyche, one of the strangest phenomena is the depth of contempt and loathing our warmongering party has shown toward the Americans who are sent off to fight those wars.Right-wingers love war. They worship war. You get the feeling it's what they do instead of sex, at least when there are no abusable friends or family, or hookers, or dishy callboys readily available and they would otherwise have to satisfy themselves with their vast reserves of porn. (What would right-wingers do without their vast reserves of porn?)BUT RIGHT-WINGERS DON'T LOVE THE PEOPLE THEY SEND SO JOYFULLY TO FIGHT THEIR WARSThere's never any limit to how much money the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags are prepared to spend on war-- on budget, off budget, around budget. And the mantra is always "Support Our Troops." You can be tarred and feathered for Not Supporting Our Troops. We sure heard plenty of that during the Bush regime's orgy or warmaking. But of course the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags never give a damn about Supporting Our Troops, only about Supporting Our Wars. Do we really not remember how ineptly armed, or even unarmed, Our Troops were sent into Iraq? Even though a war in Iraq was clearly at or near the top of the agenda of everyone in the Bush regime who had input into the making of foreign policy.And when those Not Supported Troops, having lacked the good grace to die, are turned from troops into veterans, then they become the warmongers' enemy.Partly, of course, it's about money, and the role of government, which is basically to provide right-wing scumbags with the opportunity to steal as much of it as they can lay their grubby paws on-- and of course to provide the money itself for them to hijack.And when right-wing psychotic lying scumbags get on their Gov't Is the Enemy mechanical horse, intoning that Gov't Spending Is Wasteful Spending, then of course it's the rest of us who have to live with the consequences. Whenever Congress was called on to provide adequate financial support for veterans' care, it was the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags who led the shrieking chorus of "Chuck you, Farley."And when right-wing psychotic lying scumbags inflected mandatory automatic spending cuts, and a government shutdown, pretending in the depths of their devoid-of-realtiy delusions that these idiotic, dangerous actions in fact had no consequences, how were they allowed to sustain those vicious delusions?Yesterday on the radio I heard one of the psychotic lying scumbags intoning-- in that mandatory tone of high dudgeon and high outrage-- about how it's not about politics or lack of public support and I assumed the earth must surely have promptly opened up and swallowed the slimepod, because as anyone with a working brain has known all through the scandals, those are the only things it has been about.It's the right-wing psychotic lying scumbags who caused the crisis, and naturally they lie about it. Well, what would you expect them to do?
Bernie took a slightly different tact this morning. As he told Bob Schieffer, he plans to propose short-term legislation tomorrow or Tuesday and then go for the systemic fixes in a committee meeting this coming Thursday. “There must be a culture of honesty and accountability within the VA," he wrote, "and people who have lied or manipulated data must be punished. But we also have to get to the root causes of the problems that have been exposed. The simple truth is that with 2 million more veterans coming into the system in recent years there are many facilities within the VA that do not have the doctors, nurses and other personnel that they need to provide quality care in a timely way.”His Restoring Veterans’ Trust Act of 2014 aims to give the V.A. authority to immediately remove senior executives based on poor job performance while preventing wholesale political firings. It would provide veterans who can’t get timely appointments with VA doctors the option of going to community health centers, military hospitals or private doctors. It would authorize V.A. to lease 27 new health facilities in 18 states. It would authorize emergency funding to hire new doctors, nurses and other providers in order to address system-wide health care provider shortages and to take other steps necessary to ensure timely access to care. To address primary care doctor shortage for the long-term, the bill would authorize the National Health Service Corps to award scholarships to medical school students and to forgive college loans for doctors and nurses who go to work at the V.A.
Other provisions in Sanders’ legislative package would:• Upgrade VA’s antiquated scheduling systems.• Require President Obama to establish a commission on VA health care access and recommend, within 90 days, actions to bolster capacity.• Extend comprehensive services and benefits to the most severely injured pre-9/11 veterans; standardize the process for sending patients to community health centers, military hospitals or other health care providers; and extend from five to 10 years access to VA health care for all recently-separated veterans.• Provide help for veterans who suffered significant spinal cord, reproductive and urinary tract injuries and who now want to have children.• Bolster the VA’s ongoing effort to eliminate shrinking but still unacceptable backlogs in processing claims for disability benefits.• Make certain that all veterans get in-state tuition rates for college costs covered by the Post-9/11 GI Bill.• Improve the delivery of care and benefits to veterans who experienced sexual trauma while in the military.• Remove the VA from annual budget battles by adopting so-called “advance appropriations” to protect veterans in case of a government shutdown.• Restore a 1 percent cut in retirement cost-of-living adjustments that Congress enacted for current military service members.
The Republicans, always eager to sabotage the V.A. and push it towards privatization on behalf of their avaricious, wealthy donors, filibustered S. 1982, the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014 and managed to kill it even though 56 senators voted for it. How obvious is it that the 41 GOP scumbags-- to quote Ken-- should have all resigned along with Shinseki… or maybe instead of Shinseki, since he seems to have at least been trying to ameliorate a bad situation, while they were busy making it worse and making it untenable. None have resigned and no will resign. It's up to the voters. These are the 41 senators who murdered our veterans:
