The Crackup At Walter Reed

So the Secretary of the Army resigned, and a new permanent commander at Walter Reed will be named later today (READ: Kiley is out). This is a tremendous black eye for the military, and it comes directly out of the fact that we have an Administration that doesn't care about governing. As such, they don't plan for the consequences of their actions, whether it's breaking the National Guard with these repeated foreign deployments, so that they can't respond to homeland emergency needs, or undercounting the troops needed for the escalation by 7,000, because nobody recognizes (or wants to admit) the need for suport personnel, or destroying the veterans' hospital system because no planning was made for the thousands of wounded coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. It shows a tragic short-sightedness, an inability to look past one's own hellish fantasies for how the world should work, and a lack of caring for what happens to the men and women they send into the meat grinder. This is a bigger story about carelessness and obliviousness, more than anything. It's all about the war; they don't care about the aftermath. And that's how George Bush has lived his entire life; somebody else has always cleaned up his messes.