Eric Shinseki Falls On Sword After V.A. Scandal, Will Have To Wait 3 Months For Treatment

Eric Shinseki resigned this morning as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, so all the problems at the V.A. are probably fixed; expect his replacement to be unacceptable to Senate Republicans, or for wingnuts to call for Barack Hussein Obama himself to step down, or at the very least to tell the truth about Benghazi and repeal Obamacare.

Shinseki's resignation is almost certainly not going to actually make anything change, but it was also pretty much inevitable because of the depth of long-term problems in the V.A. medical system. So, sacrifice accepted, and now we're still stuck with the dysfunctional hospital administrations that played paper-shuffling games instead of actually providing services to veterans. Eventually, the people who really screwed up will be replaced, and the V.A. will be repaired to at least the usual patchwork of under-funded bureaucratic sloppiness that it has historically been. And whoever replaces Shinseki will also have a huge target on their back, so they'll probably give the job to someone like Tammy Duckworth, unless of course the R's can privatize the V.A. altogether, so that fraud and inefficiency can be rewarded by the free market instead of taxpayers.

And so let's pour out a 40 for Eric Shinseki, and acknowledge that he actually did get a lot of things fixed at the V.A. at a time when it was overwhelmed with new waves of veterans injured in our two off-budget wars. To Yr. Wonkette, Shinseki will always be a hero for speaking the truth about the number of troops that would be needed to keep postwar Iraq under control, for which realistic estimate he was mocked and quickly removed by the Bush-Cheney crowd. He was a straight shooter then, and he's been a straight shooter at the V.A., where he faced a far larger mess, and was actually starting to make progress when the latest dysfunction erupted.

Someone give this man a nice university to run, OK?

[ WaPo / Stars and Stripes ]

 Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He's never fallen on his sword, but he tripped over his tricorder once.