May 25, 2014
Big Stein
The Sun Sentinel

RE: The VA and what’s to be done – Some comments on the du jour outrage in today’s unlinkable Sun Sentinel

Big guy,

Everybody, and I even include modern American Liberals whose spectrum ranges from untersublime to uberridiculous, begins with a major premise.

Mine is simple.

It is based on a consensus of scientists, a consensus that is so strong that’s its underlying science is now “settled” and, as such, is undebatable.

In my lifetime, up until 1980, the United States government did 2 things superbly well.

#1 – Fighting World War 2
#2 – Being the GC on the Moon shot

The 3rd great thing happened in 1980.

The Great Reagan was elected. [I must add that the only good thing that Carter, the worst President in the 20th century, did was to make it easy for Reagan to win.] He restored and burnished American exceptionalism and then he beat the Russkies, the Czars of the Evil Empire, without firing a shot.

It is time, it is indeed past time, for Ron to be on Rushmore.

Having said that, it becomes easier to put the boot to the major premise of your column on the less than sterling characteristics of the VA.

Does the VA have dedicated professionals on its staff? Of course.

Do they care deeply about their patients? Of course.






Are there bureaucratic slugs perpetuating a pestilential paralysis there? Of course.

Here’s why “yelling”, as the title of your column recommends, ain’t gonna work.

Are you ready? Hold on tight. It is something that leads to an epidemic of apoplexy in modern American Liberals. [Since my pal Professor Stevie Goldstein has been exiled to the adult sleepaway camp at the secret isle of Utopia for sensitivity retraining you are now my favorite mAL. Wear your well-earned laurel proudly. You got it the old fashioned way. You earned it. No Affirmative Action here.]

Punish failure
Reward success

Life never ends in a scoreless tie. Self-esteem never made the dog hunt.

It may be too late for public executions or even floggings at the VA facility of your choice. How about a first floor defenestration? If you have to come back again move to the 3rd floor. The next time is from the roof. It will “encourage the others”.

We have been fighting poverty, I daresay unsuccessfully, for 50 years. That’s have a century. It’s time to look at the scoreboard. The measurable criteria from 50 years ago have, if anything, gone down. Unless you believe that the only way to make the poor rich is to make the rich poorer it is as absolute as failure of public policy as has ever been seen. Prohibition, that “noble experiment”, only lasted 15 years.

Coach Duffy Daugherty said it’s always good luck to be ahead at the end of the game. You would think it would be a universal truism. It’s not.

The same mindset that sends troops over the top into the machine guns of the unforgiving marketplace while “fighting” poverty is the same one that says since our intention – helping veterans – is good the results are irrelevant.

If a physician in Broward county makes a mistake there are consequences. In the real world, the world where “stones are hard and water is wet”, debits and credits are always equal. The head of Target is now unemployed, not because of something he did, but because of something that happened when he was in charge. Fair or unfair, it don’t make no never mind. It’s the way the world works. You can’t fire the team; you can and do fire the coach.

The exception is the VA.



Veterans are dying, not necessarily because of medical errors, but because Form A was transposed with Form B and there was no incentive to untranspose them.

Writ large the problem with the VA is what reasonable men can expect from ObamaCare. If the first 2,380 votes to repeal it haven’t work there’s always time for 2,381 or 2,382 or 2,383. In between votes to rid the body politic of this metastasizing cancer maybe the House should look into Benghazi. God gave Mrs. Clinton the big shoulders and the humongous ass to bear the burdens, the slings and arrows if you will, of being in the public arena. She wants the 3:00AM phone call, doesn’t she? That which does not destroy her makes her stronger. She and the country will be better for it.

We are told that the President learned of the SNAFU approaching a PR FUBAR at the VA from the media. Am I the only one to remember that he was in high dudgeon as a candidate in 2008 in re the VA? I think an excess of “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome” compels him to “piss on the country’s back and then tell them it’s rain”.

Meanwhile, the consensus of scientific opinion is that the next time a veteran goes into any VA facility, he should be armed.





Kevin Smith
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET