Some of Republicans' outrage is, no doubt, real. I won't deny that vestiges of basic humanity are incapable of a total scrubbing, even in the wildest days of political opportunism. But would Republicans trade that outrage for a rewinding of the clock--for a replay of the last 10 fiscal years--for the retro-opportunity to fund the Veterans Administration at adequate levels?
Would they, in short, exchange the present abominations for a re-creation of their beginnings, given the chance?
There's a fat one of that. For the supreme Republican ethic is that of eviscerating government so as to righteously deplore it.
It is this that provides us the nauseating hypocrisy of the sniveling Eric Cantor: "This is a core competency question for the White House.... There are lots of issues of competency that are being raised right now about what’s going on in this government."
What's going on? What's going on? It doesn't take much of a political historian to remind the leader of majority imbeciles just what the hell has been going on: insanely ill-advised wars mixed with the gutting of government revenue culminating in extraordinary deficiencies of veterans' care.
And none of it was unwitting. The Bush administration warned the incoming Obama administration of its inexorable train wreck. And yet what fiscal cooperation has the Obama administration received from the Cantors and Boehners and Bachmanns and Gohmerts?--from those now so outraged by the gross deficiencies?--from the veterans-hugging, flag-waving militarists of supply-sided starvation?
This isn't to say that the VA's exposed malfeasance should be, or can be, excused. Rather than concealing its Hobson's choices, the VA should have been screaming them from every hospital rooftop and at every veterans-affairs congressional committee. It is to say that focusing on the malfeasance only overlooks the fundamentals, overlooks rightful responsibility, and overlooks the emetic hypocrisy and preening political monstrosities of the modern Republican Party--which is the real scandal.