The (Latest) VA Scandal: "The Dog Didn't Bark" - AGAIN!

The latest media feeding frenzy, of course, is the latest Veteran’s Administration exposé (believe it or not, a federal agency isn’t being run very well), and it goes on. The posturing and pontificating by politicians and media camp followers is tumultuous. Anna Nicole is in the ground and in the interim between the now customary pornography spectaculars, we have the customary political equivalent, which is the latest orgy in the sybarite saloon maintained on the Potomac River by public largesse. The Congress of the United States, I mean.

The usually preening generals (what did Colonel David Hackworth once call them – “perfumed princes?” - have suddenly gone sickeningly sycophant, falling all over themselves, feigning ignorance or fawning, anxious to mollify the public and protect by heroically declaring mea culpa everything their perfumed status requires .

What, for instance, if somebody would relate this mess to, say, the mess in Iraq? Afghanistan? How about the CIA who thought Saddam had missiles and chemical weapons factories under his bed? ET cetera, et cetera.

And they’re not the stars of the show, either. Consider the people who tell us every day that they control the military in the Land of the Free – the sleaze of patricians we call “senator” and “congressman.” If anyone has ever seen posturing and pontificating like this, it must have been during the last time Congress got caught with its pompous purity down. I guess another “Oversight Committee” has overlooked something. Like the way the Congressional Oversight Committee charged with overseeing IRS overlooked for years – and goes on in the same fashion even after that particular exposé - just about every felony crime you can think of off the top of your head.

Where, in other words, were all the watchdogs? You remember the Adventure of the Silver Blaze, don’t you? Sherlock Holmes?

Watson: "Is there any point to which you wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night time."

Watson: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That is the curious incident."

Where was the Oversight Committee journalism likes to call the Fourth Estate while Walter Reed Building Eighteen was falling into disrepair? What of that staunch defender of our liberty? Nobody knew about decades of this sort of thing, and with the same going on everywhere in the system and nation? That’s funny – especially for a guy who tried to expose it decades ago, and wrote literally scores of letters to those same “oversight committees.” Including the Fourth Estate.

Oh, sure – you say it was the media, reporters named Anne Hull and Dana Priest, who “broke the story.” Sure. And as soon as the story appeared giants of journalism like those whose names appear at the bottom of the page here - guys who, while never having been soldiers, swarmed immediately to join those already swimming swimmingly - and, of course, likewise indignantly - in the new feeding frenzy. Sure.

Okay, then “splain dis to me, Lucy.” Remember “limited hangout?” When a fed admits something, you’d better look deeper. If he admits taking your wife to lunch, well . . . Ask yourself why it is that the media hasn’t mentioned so far what happened to all the money that should have made the repairs to Building Eighteen at Walter Reed? You don’t actually believe that the responsible parties didn’t include all kinds of building and equipment maintenance and repair in their yearly requisitions and appropriations, do you? And, year after year, when the VA made no such funding applications, nobody noticed?

Sure. That happens all the time in government. The federal budget goes down every year, due the fact that nobody wants anything.

Funny, l like I said. Funny, what with all the media “posturing and pontificating,” feeding frenzy, and brouhaha, this essay will be the first mention you’ve heard of what I just said. How come all the “watchdogs” haven’t barked about that? Doing some fast digital terpsichory on the old calculator here, extrapolating Walter Read into all the VA hospitals and establishments around the country, together with a little FEMA-New Orleans ratio-ing, I estimate that we’re talking about something around thirty billion dollars. You can damned betcha that it was appropriated, so where did it go?

Is this story another of those twenty-one billion-in-cash-that-went-to-Iraq-in-order-to-vanish capers? Yeah, ‘fraid so. You can kiss your money good-bye, taxpayer – it not only won’t be missed, there’ll likely be no mention of it. Too bad, sucker.

But how is it that the “dog didn’t bark?” Yeah, how IS that - “Splain dat to me, Lucy!”

Okay, “Lucy,” let me see it I can help. . . . Every one of those heroes of liberty on that list down there, for instance, is also “rich people,” patricians - every one a contemporary Horatio Alger and trumpeting apologist for capitalism. Free market economy, and all that. While I hasten to point out that I haven’t seen any of these hot-air heroes’ stock portfolios, I know perfectly well that each makes big bucks with his interests in the military industrial complex corporations. “Where the carcass is,” after all, “there are the eagles” (the Bible, you know, says “eagles” meaning vultures). That means, by extension and common sense, making not only a chunk of their nifty incomes off the nation’s Halliburtons, but fattening their TV ratings – the real reason for the media feeding frenzy I’ve been talking about.

Posture and Pontificate, incorporated may not actually be legally incorporated anywhere, but it is as sure as daily observance can make it a de facto one. Congressional cesspool diving, media scum-suck frenzies, and general pusillanimous prostitution of anything saleable to pandering lobbyists, after all, is synonymous with government here in the Land of the Fee. Not exactly remarkable. Not even noticeable – that being a factor in the “scandal” – matter of fact.

Last time here, I wrote concerning the matter, to point out that soldiers are poor people, and some time ago, September, 2005, to be more precise, I remarked how in the movie, “The Mask of Zorro,” Anthony Hopkins, in the role of Diego de la Vega the old Zorro, instructed the new Zorro, Antonio Banderas, that a member of the Spanish nobility “would never look directly at a servant.” In the United States, I said, the capitalist rich never look at the poor.

Soldiers are servants. The word samurai, matter of fact, means exactly that. The samurai were soldiers.

“Members of the nobility . . . never look directly at a servant.”

That servants recuperate in “sub-standard” – note the studied euphemism – conditions from wounds taken in order for the nation’s patricians to be patricians is somebody else’s responsibility. Capitalist patrician’s business is to make money, preferably using somebody else’s money, but somebody else’s brains, skill, or muscle will do. Check your definition of capitalism. Any responsibility besides that is to be “overseen” by somebody else. Overlooked, is okay, too.

Or, of course – this is the effeminate United States – it will all be talked away. Listen to SecDef Robert Gates. “They should not have to recuperate in sub-standard housing, nor should they be expected to tackle mountains of paperwork and bureaucratic processes in this difficult period for themselves and their families. They battled a foreign enemy. They should not have to battle an American bureaucracy."

My goodness - that's more like it! That's what we want to hear. "The system works," again. When has it ever been otherwise? New Orleans after Katrina? When there proved to be no WMDs in Iraq? 9-11? When the outcry against IRS reached dangerous levels (in that case it took the threat of having widespread rape exposed to even get discussion and the little that happened)?

How long ago did the media watchdog go to sleep? That’s another story, the story of Central Intelligence Operation Mockingbird. Maybe you should have a look.

You won’t, of course – too much trouble. Have to get to the soap operas, some phony macho minimalist video game or the like. Nothing you can do about it anyway. It’s always been this way.

Which proves you’re wrong, again. That was the sentiment in 1775, when these words were written by a man like Samuel Adams: "If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." Just like there was then at Samuel Adams time, there’s a fight coming, and it’s a revolutionary one.

The antagonists are the same, too – capitalist and patrician ruler against the plebian and worker. And you’ll fight, too. You won’t be given a choice. Greed, the love of money, is relentless, eternal. The only question that remains is whether you’ll fight now when the fight can be won relatively easily or when the patricians' oppression stifles you in one form or another, and you find it hard to breathe. And, since I’m paraphrasing Winston Churchill, I’ll finish with his warning that there is even a worse case. You may fight, Sir Winston said, because you would rather die than live as a slave.

But even the famed Englishman’s “worse case” is not the worst. As CNN owner Ted Turner said a few years ago, and Glen Beck echoed more recently, the patricians need to get rid of a whole lot of you. When you fight because you’d rather die than live with a patrician’s boot on your neck or watch him sell into prostitution your wife and daughter, it will be nevertheless what he wanted all along.

He won’t even have to do the job, or deal with it. The servants – soldiers - will do it. And, “Members of the nobility . . . never look directly at a servant.”

Did not serve”
Sean ("The Great American") Hannity
George Will
Chris Matthews
Bill O'Reilly (hid in England, from what I gather)
Paul Gigot
Bill Bennett
Pat Buchanan
Rush Limbaugh (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst' on his ass!)
Michael Savage (aka Michael Alan Weiner)
Pat Robertson
Michael Medved