It’s a Good Thing That Obama Reads the Paper Because Otherwise He’d Have No Idea What His Administration is Doing

So it turns out that President
Obama—that whip-smart guy who is so super-curious about everything
(unlike that quitter-snowbilly former Gov. Sarah Palin
amirite?)—apparently had no idea that his administration was
letting veterans croak while on waiting lists for care at Veterans
Affairs (V.A.) facilities. At the very least,
his people knew about the waiting-list problems, including
inaccurate reporting on treatment times, back in 2008.

You remember the Fast and Furious gun-walking snafu? He read
about that in the papers. Same thing with NSA surveillance. And it
took him a few days to realize that the Obamacare website was
tripping balls but he finally started to get news reports about it
after a few days. And needless to say, he didn’t have any idea that
the IRS—his IRS—was targeting Tea Party groups until he
read about in the papers.

I’m guessing that he still doesn’t really know that his Justice
Department keeps deporting immigrants and raiding medical marijuana
dispensaries in California either. At record rates. Because, you
know, he said he wasn’t going to pull that shit. Can somebody slip
him a newspaper story about those things so he can finally get
cracking?

If Barack Obama wants to play Chauncey
Gardiner and basically act as if he has frickin’ idea of
what’s going around in his White House, that’s fine by me.

But will his erstwhile defenders at least admit that either he
is a know-it-all who is full of B.S. when he pleads ignorance or
that he just has no clue about what’s taking place in this City on
a Hill already? It’s not flattering to him whichever way you want
to go. But at least it’ll be consistent.

Last fall, Reason TV’s Amanda Winkler looked at how the V.A.
took care of soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. In a
word: shamefully. “Right now,” said former V.A. program
analyst Paul Sullivan, “it takes V.A. about a year to process a new
claim. That is simply no way to treat a wounded soldier coming back
from a war.”

The root cause, according to Sullivan? The V.A. has received
over 800,000 claims from Iraq and Afghanistan vets. Congress and
V.A. planned for “zero.” Zero. So if there’s one
thing the government stinks at more than actually planning and
winning wars, it’s taking care of the people it sends to fight
them.