Obama, objective of governing is never to govern well. Simply not to be blamed when governing proves the inevitable failure you get with inept leadership
Veterans fiasco: Disappointing underlings make super-president 'mad as hell' yet again
It doesn't matter whether it's the IRS targeting the Tea Party or the Department of Justice spying on reporters. The claim from Barack Obama is always the same. Why, he heard about it on the news same as you! And he's mad as hell, same as you! See? He's just a regular guy. And so it is again, we're told, with the emerging scandal at the Veterans Administration.
Two problems, however: 1. He is not just a regular guy. He's the president, and these people work for him. If this sort of thing keeps happening on his watch and he just hears about it on the news like the rest of us, then someone needs to get a little basic instruction in executive management. 2. Why would anyone believe him when he says he didn't know about it? It's an all-too-self-serving story, made all the more so by the fact that his chief of staff tells harrying tales of incurring "scars" while briefing the president, and oh by the way, you know Obama is pouring lots of money into the VA, right?
For Obama, the objective of governing is never to govern well. It's simply not to be blamed when governing proves the inevitable failure you get with inept leadership:
President Obama is “madder than hell” about reports that some medical facilities run by the Department of Veterans Affairs have falsified data to hide substantial delays for veterans to see doctors, and he has demanded that the department’s leaders “fix these things,” the White House chief of staff said in an interview aired Sunday.
“The president is madder than hell, and I’ve got the scars to prove it, given the briefings that I’ve given the president” on the subject, the chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.”
He said that the White House had “deployed additional staff over to the Veterans administration to dig into this, to find out if this is a series of isolated cases or whether this is a systemic issue that we need to address with wholesale reform.” He also called attention to what he said had been substantial increases in resources devoted to veterans care under Mr. Obama.
Veterans groups have expressed mounting anger over reports that workers at some medical centers kept secret waiting lists to disguise what could be waits of months by veterans to see doctors. The department’s inspector general is working with federal prosecutors to ascertain whether criminal violations have occurred.
Do you know what you call a leader who is constantly getting outraged when he discovers what his underlings are doing? You call him incompetent. Not because you expect him to know every detail of everything happening every day. The federal government is obviously way too big for that (which means it needs to be much, much smaller, but that's another column or two or 500,000). No, you call him incompetent because as the top executive, his job is to put a management structure in place that makes sure responsible people are in place who will be aware of what's happening, and will put a stop to it when nonsense like this goes on.
Sometimes you miss something, and you have to own up and then clean it up. But with Obama, it's a constant pattern of abuses no one catches, and then Obama's people telling us how "mad as hell" he got when he heard about it.
By the way, government-run health care puts delays like these in place as a matter of course to save money. If you don't like the sounds of how the VA runs, all you happy new ObamaCare enrolles, just you wait. Actually, some folks don't have to wait. It's happening to them already. Obama must be mad as . . . eh, you've heard this one before.
