(May 24, 2014 at 12:30 pm)A Theist Wrote: Okay....
There's a scandal involving the VA that could potentially harm the democrats in the upcoming mid-terms. So the left follows the same familiar pattern of...
1). Deny there's a problem.
2). Dismiss and make light of any scandal that could be potentially harmful to the democrats for upcoming elections.
3). Make use of the Whataboutism deflection.
4). Blame the Republicans.
5). Accuse the Republicans of creating a Conspiracy just to discredit Barack and the democrats.
6). Deflect to other issues that have nothing to do with the scandal at hand.
1: There IS a problem.
2: There's nothing light or funny about 1400 veterans having committed suicide this year.
3: I'm not deflecting, I'm addressing the root of the cause, where you're focused on the stem of the weed.
4: They blocked the fucking legislation to provide funding! You can't do shit without resources, and they keep refusing to provide resources to an already cash-strapped agency!
5: That's what politics is! Conspiring against your opponents! Of course they're conspiring! It's not like the democrats don't conspire, they do it just as much, it's called political maneuvering.
6: Or in your case, ignore the root of a problem and instead focus on the task of cutting the weed rather than killing it.
C'mon, man, this is stuff that is unbelievably obvious. Are you denying that the republicans blocked legislation to provide vital resources to the VA? If not that, are you denying that it's extremely hard to do shit when your organization is underfunded, and therefore understaffed, since the first thing to get cut in response to financial losses is the employees?
It's hard to manage things when you're trying to do a job that should be handled by five people by yourself. Anyone who works in retail can tell you that.
The VA IS mismanaged. Why is that? Well, the only thing I can rationally think of is the financial issues, because the VA wasn't struggling nearly so much until the republicans started nixing legislation for funding allocations to them. Less than a year after the republican-controlled congress cut the existing financial flow to the VA down, and not long after the Republican senators (except for two) blocked Sanders' proposed bill to increase coverage and funding, the suicide rate of veterans skyrockets. I'll leave you to wonder why, but to anyone who even gives a cursory amount of attention to the overall political picture, it's pretty obvious.
I'm no mindless fan of Obama. I don't vote along party lines. Yes, I lean to the left, and I do so because I am a progressive; I want the country to catch up with the rest of the developed world, and stop stagnating. We're stagnating because the political climate is still putting too much power behind policies that have been proven over and over to hold us back, to not change with the times, to empower those who already have too much power, to back economic policies that continually hurt those who are already struggling. But all that said, a president who fucks shit up, I will hold them to it. I'm pissed Obama hasn't cut the damn DoD's pork-riddled, unbelievably bloated R&D budgets. I'm pissed he's left Gitmo open. I'm pissed he's kowtowing to political pressure to refuse to change policies that grossly favor people with fucktons of money.
But this? This is not his fault, nor his administration's fault. You don't get to take away someone's money, and then say it's their fault they're poor, you just fucking don't, dammit, and it's a twisted, warped, and flatly stupid brain that thinks you can be justified in doing so.
The fact that the Republicans are jumping at Obama's throat to say it's all his fault shortly after the whole legislation and funding debacles that they caused gives this away; it IS a political move. The GOP is aware that the midterms are coming up and they're highly unpopular thanks to the shutdown and the other issues they've been causing. And the GOP has shown time and time again to utterly disregard collateral damage in the pursuit of their goals. The shutdown is a great example of that. Now they're fighting extremely dirty, because they know the average American is politically illiterate, and all they need to do is just go "the veterans are committing suicide, and there's mismanagement in the VA, ergo it's Obama's fault!" to convince the idiotic masses who vote for them, and the political voyeurist voters who hardly pay any attention and just love to eat sound-bites.
So in conclusion, the Republicans started the fire, and they're blaming the burning house on the lack of fire extinguishers available...when they're the ones who voted to remove the fucking fire extinguishers.
But hey, who needs to look at the cause, when all you need is the dramatic effect, right, AT?
