So General Shinseki finaly got his resignation accepted, and he can put the impossible situation that he was expected to fix behind him. He is a good man who deserved better treatment by the government, but he was treated the way this government treats all vets – badly.

Ken Houghton at Skippy’s place has a post with links that covers the real problems with the VA. Ken is annoyed with Matt Yglesias, but he lays out the facts of what is really going on, not what the MSM and Congress want you to believe.

Here’s the deal – the number of vets needing assistance has been growing by leaps and bounds, while VA funding hasn’t kept up with inflation. That means that the number of people that the VA can see and treat has remained the same while the number of people who want to be seen and treated is increasing geometrically.

The record keeping fraud is a problem, and it can be dealt with by the existing system. Fraudulent reporting is more than enough justification to fire the people involved, and may be violation of law, depending on the definition in Federal statutes of malfeasance. You can fire Civil Service employees if they don’t do their job properly. If the people in the VA don’t understand the process, The School of Industrial Relations at Cornell University has a 40 hour seminar on it. It takes a little time and some record keeping, but there is no doubt as to how it will end, and union attorneys will advise workers to resign rather than waiting for the end of the process. There is no point in having new legislation. I know this works because I’ve done it. People who say that you can’t fire people on Civil Service, don’t understand Civil Service.

The reason people have to wait months to be seen at VA facilities is because Congress won’t adequately fund the VA to handle the number of veterans that Congress created when it approved so many wars.

Rudyard Kipling described the attitude of people towards the military in his 1892 poem, Tommy. The attitude is still the same.