Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

'Tis the season for the press to be played by Republican spinners. You'd think that after eight years' worth of lies told directly to their face they'd stop believing this stuff. But no.

Carl Cameron, who works for the other team so is little more than a propagandist, dutifully typed up a story about the Obama campaign tossing in the trash 12,000 flags after their convention. It's completely untrue, yet other news outlets ran with it.

The McCain campaign refused to acknowledge the dumbest mistake in the history of political conventions by projecting Walter Reed Middle School behind John McCain's speech instead of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which they clearly preferred. Instead they claimed that it was part of the images of Americana that played behind him, and public education was part of it. Except they stopped the parade of images when one of them was clearly wrong:

But you don't need the inside scoop to know what happened here. Those who watched the convention closely know that through the event, the screen backdrop had rotating video of what Bounds called "images of Americana." Stuff would cycle in and out.

But that's not what happened with McCain. Our crack analysts at TPM HQ pulled the tape. And what happened in McCains case was that the green screen was up for 5 or 6 minutes. Then it got pulled. It was replaced briefly by a cornfield. And then after a few moments of that it was the picture of the flag, which appeared as a blue screen to viewers on tv. That remained through McCain's entire speech. No more changes. It was pretty clear that someone on McCain's staff realized the goof a few minutes into the speech, cancelled the pre-programmed order of images and hurriedly slotted in flag image to save the day.

And yet the NYT bought that. Unbelievable.

Journalists really have the lowest self-image of any profession in America. They are lied to and lied to again and yet they print up the spin every time.

Here's a good piece, actually, about the Walter Reed Middle School mixup, wherein middle school students show themselves to be keener than the New York Times.

"McCain messed up. He was talking about Walter Reed hospital, and he used our picture by mistake," said 11-year-old Joshua.

And Now, A Comedy Video Interlude

Americans United For Change does a fantastic video about the Walter Reed staging screw-up.



Change To Win brings us Real McCain of Genius.



And there's this by a comedy troupe.



"I am royally fucked right now.. he's a speechwriting monster!" Great stuff.

OK, That's the Funniest Thing I've Ever Heard

To a man, everyone on the liberal blogger side of the aisle was stunned that the McCain campaign would allow the TV shot to go out to the world on his big night to be him in front of a lime green background. Cottage cheese and lime Jello, in the vernacular of the blogosphere. Surely they WATCHED the shot through a monitor and knew that it would make him look sickly.

But that's not the only head-scratcher with the RNC staging, which the set designers had months to organize. The giant screen was useless outside of the room, always putting the speaker at the podium behind monochrome, or worse, in the East River (in Rudy Giuliani's speech). Putting the seats for dignitaries along the side of the stage was OK, but the white line across the boxes designating them looked to the TV angle like the seats were empty, in a wide shot. And then there's this, which is absolutely amazing.

A lot of people were asking tonight: what the hell was that mansion up behind John McCain tonight during the first part of the speech? As I noted below, the TV close-ups only showed McCain's head against the grass in the picture, which made it look like he was reprising his famed green screen performance. And when they panned out, it looked like McCain was showing off one of his mansions.

Well, several readers have written in to tell me that the building is actually the main building on the campus of the Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, California. And sure enough, this page on the school's website makes it pretty clear that they're correct.

Could this be? Could the producers have wanted a shot of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and they farmed it off to the intern who picked Walter Reed MIDDLE SCHOOL? I mean, is that possible? None of the consultants and muckety-mucks charged with picking the backgrounds know what Walter Reed looks like? As Josh Marshall says, "is this the RNC or a scene out Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman?"

You know, it wasn't so long ago that these guys were the pros at this. Say what you will about Mission Accomplished Day, putting Bush in that flight suit was brilliant theater. Where did those people go?

The End of Obamamania?

The media honeymoon with Barack Obama is over, and while some of the rationales for nitpicking are absurd (he forgot which magazine he read when he was nine! Obama is making rookie mistakes!), others are pretty cogent, and I'm glad they're getting out of the way early.

While Greg Sargent is correct about the silliness of this AP hit piece on Obama, it's also true that there's a grain of truth here. Obama came to a scheduled forum on health care without anything resembling a coherent health care policy. It's comforting that he didn't try to spin that he actually had a plan, but it was an easy news peg for a media that wants to spin a story about Obama's style over substance. But this isn't entirely true. Here's Sargent:

But wait -- no policy speeches since the campaign started? What about this speech on March 21? What about this one on March 2? Those are both foreign policy speeches -- or doesn't that count?

Would it behoove Obama to go into more detail about his plans and policy prescriptions, and would it behoove him to do better on health care than he did over the weekend? Sure it would -- and his lack of experience is undoubtedly a valid topic. But taking things to the point where you're suggesting that the guy may have "little substance" on the strength of this stuff alone seems pretty damn thin. It's deeply superficial and stinks of the worst sort of slavishness to predetermined narratives -- today's being that Obama is a closet lightweight. Your Hack Pack at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Indeed, Obama took to the floor of the Senate yesterday to pass an amendment to the Iraq appropriation removing the red tape for returning veterans that has hampered their ability to receive quality health care. In fact, he's been in the lead on this issue ever since Walter Reed. So I don't buy the lightweight stuff. The media doesn't like to carry policy speeches, anyway, so they're essentially creating a sin of omission by refusing to cover the substance and then claiming there's no substance there.

But I do think that there are some traps here for the Obama campaign. His campaign theme is about creating a new kind of politics, and he's specifically eschewed policy prescriptions in favor of changing the system in Washington. There is a definite peril here, elucidated by Ron Brownstein in an excellent op-ed.

Obama's early support is following a pattern familiar from the campaigns of other brainy liberals with cool, detached personas and messages of political reform, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. Like those predecessors, Obama is running strong with well-educated voters but demonstrating much less support among those without college degrees [...]

Since the 1960s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.

It's not much of an oversimplification to say that the blue-collar Democrats tend to see elections as an arena for defending their interests, and the upscale voters see them as an opportunity to affirm their values. Each group finds candidates who reflect those priorities

Brownstein terms this dichotomy "the warrior and the priest," and he plants Obama in the latter camp:

Obama's aides resist the collar, but in the early stages, he looks more like a priest. He's written two bestselling books. Like McCarthy, Hart and Howard Dean, he's ignited a brush fire on college campuses. His initial message revolves heavily around eloquent but somewhat amorphous promises of reform and civic renewal. He laments "the smallness of our politics … where power is always trumping principle."

Not only have priests — including Hart, Tsongas and Bradley — run better among voters with college degrees, they've tended to run well in the Northeast, the West Coast and portions of the upper Midwest where wine track voters congregate; the warriors usually thrive in interior states such as Ohio, Missouri or Tennessee, where college graduates constitute 40% or less of the Democratic electorate.

I agree that this is an oversimplification of Obama; he began as a community organizer, and so he can speak to the concerns of everyday people with a great degree of sincerity. But, as the president of the Wisconsin branch of the firefighter's union said in the article, "In my view, that's really not a message for our guys... They're really not afraid of politics."

You know, politics can be rough-and-tumble, but running against politics can be a familiar trope for failed campaigns. Ultimately the candidates who use politics as a way to affirm their values end up winning the game. Style vs. substance is something Obama can overcome. Warrior vs. priest? Maybe not.

Walter Reed and the Continuing Contempt for the Men and Women of the Military

Kevin Kiley resigned as Surgeon General of the Army today, the latest to be forced out of office in the continuing scandal over outpatient treatment at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Maybe Kiley will get a lavish farewell ceremony like Francis Harvey, the Secretary of the Army who resigned earlier. Or maybe he'll get a demotion in rank in retirement, as MSNBC is reporting.

But whatever the case, he will not feel the sting of the conditions at Walter Reed the way that the troops already have, and not just in the medical care department. At every step along the way of this Administration and the wars they have fought, these soldiers and Marines and airmen and midshipman have been abused, subjeced to substandard training and equipment, given no clear sense of mission, put in danger by a lack of body armor and uparmored Humvees, given cuts to their hazard pay and medical benefits, sent back into the field over and over with extended deployments and extra tours of duty, and in the latest outrage, are sent back even when injured in combat.

"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Jenkins and 74 other soldiers with medical conditions from the 3rd Division's 3rd Brigade were summoned to a meeting with the division surgeon and brigade surgeon. These are the men responsible for handling each soldier's "physical profile," an Army document that lists for commanders an injured soldier's physical limitations because of medical problems -- from being unable to fire a weapon to the inability to move and dive in three-to-five-second increments to avoid enemy fire. Jenkins and other soldiers claim that the division and brigade surgeons summarily downgraded soldiers' profiles, without even a medical exam, in order to deploy them to Iraq. It is a claim division officials deny.

About the only advances for soldiers is the medical technology that is now able to keep them alive instead of dead on the battlefield. But as Lindsay Beyerstein notes, even those advances end up screwing the soldier, as multiple surgeries and long outpatient stays are needed to sustain them and the military only pays for families to come out for the first week. And we know how the outpatient facilities are kept. There's a psychological strain on these men and women and their families that is repugnant. And the bureaucratic red tape they must negotiate, all of which could have been removed for a pittance, is even more repugnant.

A proposal to keep seriously wounded vets from falling through the cracks of the bureaucracy was shelved in 2005 when Jim Nicholson took over as the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, according to the former VA employee who was responsible for tracking war casualties.

As a result, seriously wounded veterans continued to face long delays for health care and benefit payments after being discharged from the military, says former VA project manager Paul Sullivan.

The program, called the Contingency Tracking System, had been approved by Nicholson's predecessor but died once Nicholson took over the VA, Sullivan told ABC News.

Sullivan said he was told the cost of the system -- less than $1 million to build and requiring a handful of staff to maintain -- was prohibitive.

The soldier is pretty much disrespected at every level of his involvement, as Jon Soltz of VoteVets explains to Holy Joe Lieberman:

Senator Lieberman, I have a challenge for you. Let's call it the American Troops Challenge. Here's how it goes.

First, your office needs to give up the basic tools that it uses everyday to make it function and allows people to do their jobs. Let's say you'll only have one pen in your office, for starters.

Of course, you'll have computers, but only two of them. Then let's look at your staff. Your legislative assistants will be replaced by highly qualified gym teachers. Even though they're not trained properly to work the legislative process, they are excellent at what they do. They'll adapt the best they can, and work incredibly hard, but be patient. Remember, they were never trained for the job. Be sure to wear your sweatpants, though, because you won't be allowed to wear a nice suit. Hmm.. sweats might be too comfortable, but nevermind. Oh, pack your deodorant too, because we're going to place portable heaters in the office, and also bring a few dumptrucks of sand for the floor.

Your office staff, and you, will have to stay in the Capitol for eight months, without the chance to rest or go home. At the eight-month mark, we'll have a little surprise. You and your staff will be involuntarily extended for another few months. You know, just until you pass a couple of more pieces of legislation and complete your job.

I know that the White House is scrambling to put together blue-ribbon panels and show that they belatedly care about the troops they so blithely put in harm's way. But it's clear that they knew about how bad things were at Walter Reed for years, as surely as they know how poorly they treat the troops on every other level. The real truth here is that they don't care. They care about rewarding rich defense contractors through privatization, even to the extent of getting kickbacks from the contractors in exchange for making sure they get the work at Walter Reed, for example. And after all of that, after the contractors suck the American taxpayer dry by taking every last piece of work from the government they can get, they up and move to Dubai. There's patriotism in the 21st century corporatocracy for you. Pat Leahy is right, but then again everything this Administration has ever done has been an insult to the soldiers:

Senator Patrick Leahy called the company’s move corporate greed at its worst. “This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers. At the same time they’ll be avoiding U.S. taxes, I’m sure they won’t stop insisting on taking their profits in cold, hard, U.S. cash.”

This is all about profit and the soldiers are nothing more than instruments. The White House does not see them as human beings but as pieces on a chess board they can use to reach their goals. And as long as that's the mindset, we'll have a hundred Walter Reeds.

Errata

From the reporting I've read, I was unclear that Walter Reed is a military hospital and not a VA hospital, and that there is a crucial difference between the two.

The VA system has made remarkable strides in the past decade, and is now the best hospital system in the nation, beating out such gold standard institutions as the Mayo and Cleveland Clinics. As Phil Longman writes, "A RAND Corporation study published in the The Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that the VA outperforms all other sectors of American health care in 294 measures of quality. In awarding the VA a top prize in 2006 for innovation in government, Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government gushed that "While the costs of healthcare continue to soar for most Americans, the VA is reducing costs, reducing errors, and becoming the model for what modern health care management and delivery should look like." The military hospitals, sadly, have not enjoyed the same rennaisance.

Note, also, that the VA hospitals are run by the federal government, while the situation at Walter Reed was exacerbated by privatization. Which, of course, is the exact opposite the the takeaway Michelle Malkin got. Not that this is surprising.

Walter Reed and the Larger Implications

Today is Walter Reed day in the Congress, with two field hearings taking place. And the weekend was pretty much all about this disaster as well. This morning Anne Hull and Dana Priest have a story suggesting that more VA hospitals than Walter Reed have been suffering from disrepair, which only makes sense, as Walter Reed is supposed to be the crown jewel of the system. Priest and Hull document the scores of letters and emails they received from around the country detailing the substandard care at various medical facilities for veterans. It's the lack of concern for these returning vets but also the lack of preparedness which induces the most anger. Our prowess in field hospitals in Baghdad is saving more lives than ever before, and yet the medical centers stateside are not being properly funded to handle these returning wounded. As Rep. Tierney mentioned this morning at the hearing, "Cockroaches and mold don't happen overnight." This has been an unfolding disaster in slow motion that could have been stopped at any time over the past four years. For some reason it wasn't.

And one major explanation for that is that the feds don't even control these hospitals anymore, preferring to contract out and privatize the service like they do everything else.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by the unstoppable Henry Waxman, uncovered the background to the scandalous living conditions of some vets housed at Walter Reed. It turns out that last September Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi wrote a memorandum (PDF) to the then head of Walter Reed, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, and sent on to the Army Medical Command (italicized words added for clarification), describing how the imposition of a privatization plan upon Walter Reed was rapidly undermining the Center's ability to serve its patients. The Army Times has the story:

The memorandum “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel,’” the committee’s letter [to Weightman] states. “According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”...

During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, “skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves,” the letter states. “The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them.”

The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission had grown “significantly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.

“Without favorable consideration of these requests,” Garibaldi wrote, “[Walter Reed Army Medical Center] Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”

There was a $120 million dollar contract with a private contractor run by a former Halliburton official. All of the employees managing the facility at Walter Reed are now private workers answering to their corporate bosses instead of the government. So cost-cutting became the priority instead of caring for veterans. The support personnel dropped dramatically, budgets were slashed, and money was put toward studying how to privatize VA jobs rather than patient care. The whole sordid story is here.

And the lesson is that private, for-profit involvement in the health care of any citizen, veteran or civilian, man, woman or child, will inevitably produce a value placed higher on money than the well-being of the individual. This is maybe the most shocking example of that you'll ever hear.

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.

Children are really cheap and easy to cover with full medical care, including dental, but in our society they are neglected because for-profit insurance companies feel no compunction to cover the poor, who can't really afford insurance and who have a greater percentage of maladies. The pay-to-play system is practically immoral, and for those who say that the emergency room is a de-facto universal care system, they're wrong:

According to a new report, among hospitalized children, the uninsured are twice as likely to die from their injuries as children with insurance. And this isn't some unrelated effect: The data in the report was adjusted to account for age, health, severity of injury, etc. The difference is that the uninsured get worse care, for less time, and wait longer to be treated.

None of this, of course, is a surprise. But sometimes it's worth remembering that the uninsured aren't simply a fascinating policy problem. They are people, many of them are children, and because they are unlucky enough to lack parents with health coverage, they die from conditions that insured kids survive.

We hear a lot from those who have a vested interest in sustaining the for-profit insurance system that single-payer universal coverage means long lines and substandard care. That's exactly what we have today in America. And the situation in all other Western industrialized nations gets slandered a lot, but in fact it's quite civilized compared to vermin crawling up the walls at Walter Reed. We know that we pay more than any country on Earth for health care and receive care that is less effective than that in other nations. It is rank demonization to describe this situation in the inverted way conservatives normally do, and the American people aren't buying it anymore. They live with this system every day of their lives, they want it to change and they're willing to pay for it.

Buried in the big New York Times poll released late yesterday is a number showing that a solid majority would be willing to pay higher taxes in exchange for government-guaranteed health care for all.

Respondents were asked the following question: "Would you be willing or not willing to pay higher taxes so that all Americans have health insurance that they can't lose no matter what?" Sixty percent said they were willing, while only 34% said the were not.

People are demanding a totally different health care system, one that is not employer-based, one that does not preserve the for-profit insurance industry, one that recognizes that health care is a right and not a privilege. That's why the California debate is so important. The choice is between fig leaf changes on the margins and a real revolution in how health care is distributed:

Senate Bill 840 by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, would scrap the status quo and replace it with a government-run, single-payer system providing comprehensive health care benefits for all, financed by taxes and free to patients at the point of service.

"California needs a system of truly universal health care now more than ever," Kuehl said this week as she reintroduced her bill, which Schwarzenegger vetoed last year. "This is not the time to wait patiently for universal health care. It's time to move forward." [...]

What would all this cost? One detailed economic study, by the Lewin Group, concluded that the plan could be financed simply by redirecting all of the money Californians and the federal government already spend on health care in the state. Care for those not covered now would be paid for with savings in administrative costs and the elimination of insurance company advertising and profits.

We have everything we need to institute real change on health care except political will. As revelations like those at Walter Reed continue to emerge, perhaps that will get stronger.

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.

Meet The New Boss

Worse than the old boss.

Yesterday’s management shake-up at Walter Reed looks increasingly suspect. The Washington Post reports today that the hospital chief who was relieved of duty, Army Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, is “well respected in the military medical community and well liked among the staff at Walter Reed.” He had been at the hospital for just half a year, and “instituted some changes to improve outpatient care.”

Weightman is being replaced for now by Army surgeon general Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley. As ThinkProgress documented yesterday, Kiley has known for years about the neglect and deplorable conditions at Walter Reed. Kiley was personally told about injured veterans who were “languishing and lost on the grounds,” sharing drugs and “drinking themselves to death,” and reportedly did nothing to address the problems. In one stunning case, Kiley took no action when personally informed that a soldier was sleeping in his own urine.

This had the feel of a whitewash, with Weightman being the fall guy. The staff at the medical center, meanwhile, can't stand Kiley, who let the outpatient facilities slip into this disrepair.

Waxman's going to haul both these guys into his committee for field hearings on this at Walter Reed. Those should be revealing. In the meantime, there's no way that Kevin Kiley should be running this facility.

UPDATE: Rules Committee Chair Rep. Louise Slaughter wants Kiley out today:

“The Department of Defense needs to make a choice: does it care about our wounded veterans, or does it care about public relations?” Rep. Slaughter said today. “While I was glad to see that initial steps had been taken to change the leadership at Walter Reed, yesterday’s news of Mr. Kiley’s appointment was simply baffling. How can a man who stood by for years while American soldiers suffered needlessly be expected to enact real reforms?”

“The outrage of the American public over the conditions at Walter Reed will not be pacified by simply shuffling the deck,” Rep. Slaughter said. “Secretary Gates must immediately remove from command anyone who allowed its facilities to fall into such a state of disrepair.”

“Our wounded soldiers deserve nothing less than the best health care this country can provide and the best leadership to ensure they receive that care.”

The Fall Guy

Maj. Gen. George Weightman, the top general overseeing operations at Walter Reed Medical Center, has lost his command, and I couldn't think of someone more deserving of a sacking, just based on his statements in the aftermath of the continuing relevations. But it shouldn't stop there.

It turns out that the horrifying conditions at Walter Reed's outpatient facilities have been well known for years to top officials, including the Army's surgeon general. And Weightman was only in command of the hospital for 6 months. So he may be the fall guy, but he's not the sole person responsible. For instance, how about Kevin Kiley?

A procession of Pentagon and Walter Reed officials expressed surprise last week about the living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares faced by wounded soldiers staying at the D.C. medical facility. But as far back as 2003, the commander of Walter Reed, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, who is now the Army's top medical officer, was told that soldiers who were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were languishing and lost on the grounds, according to interviews.

Steve Robinson, director of veterans affairs at Veterans for America, said he ran into Kiley in the foyer of the command headquarters at Walter Reed shortly after the Iraq war began and told him that "there are people in the barracks who are drinking themselves to death and people who are sharing drugs and people not getting the care they need."

"I met guys who weren't going to appointments because the hospital didn't even know they were there," Robinson said. Kiley told him to speak to a sergeant major, a top enlisted officer.

A recent Washington Post series detailed conditions at Walter Reed, including those at Building 18, a dingy former hotel on Georgia Avenue where the wounded were housed among mice, mold, rot and cockroaches.

Kiley lives across the street from Building 18. From his quarters, he can see the scrappy building and busy traffic the soldiers must cross to get to the 113-acre post. At a news conference last week, Kiley, who declined several requests for interviews for this article, said that the problems of Building 18 "weren't serious and there weren't a lot of them." He also said they were not "emblematic of a process of Walter Reed that has abandoned soldiers and their families."

How about stripping Maj. Gen. Kenneth Farmer of his rank?

Retired Maj. Gen. Kenneth L. Farmer Jr., who commanded Walter Reed for two years until last August, said that he was aware of outpatient problems and that there were "ongoing reviews and discussions" about how to fix them when he left. He said he shared many of those issues with Kiley, his immediate commander. Last summer when he turned over command to Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, Farmer said, "there were a variety of things we identified as opportunities for continued improvement."

In 2004, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and his wife stopped visiting the wounded at Walter Reed out of frustration. Young said he voiced concerns to commanders over troubling incidents he witnessed but was rebuffed or ignored. "When Bev or I would bring problems to the attention of authorities of Walter Reed, we were made to feel very uncomfortable," said Young, who began visiting the wounded recuperating at other facilities.

And how about firing whoever decided to blame the soldiers for the harsh conditions they face (h/t Nitpicker):

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.

So we're not at the end of the investigation into Walter Reed. We're at the beginning. And nobody should be satisfied with Gen. Weightman being relieved of command. This is a shocking indictment of an Administration who doesn't support the troops, and the VA Secretary as well as every branch of the military should be made accountable for it.

You Messed With The Wrong Marine

All hell is breaking loose over the incredible and harrowing story of how we treat disabled Iraq War veterans at Walter Reed medical hospital, which appeared not just in The Washington Post, but was corroborated by The Army Times.

Yet when it was time for the Army to take care of him, one of its wounded warriors, Van Antwerp gave up before he even began. Rather than fight for a higher disability rating, he quietly signed for 20 percent — and no medical benefits — saying he knew he couldn’t do better. He inherited his father’s stubbornness, he said, and refused to ask anyone to pull strings based on his dad’s rank. Then his first medical board counselor, the person who would help him make his way through the medical evaluation board system, left. The second, he said, “wasn’t on the ball.”

“The Army is trying to give you the lowest amount of money possible,” he said. “A lot of people are appealing, but I’ll be going to [the Department of Veterans Affairs]. I want to go home.”

Van Antwerp is one of thousands of wounded troops rushed from the war zone for health care and then stranded in administrative limbo. They are at the mercy of a medical evaluation system that’s agonizingly slow, grossly understaffed and saddled with a growing backlog of cases. The wounded soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are stuck in holding companies awaiting hearings and decisions on whether they will continue their military service or be discharged, and if so, at what level of benefits — if any.

The least we could do is to take care of those who fight this war. But Republican ideology of drowning government in the bathtub ensures that we don't even do that. It's disgraceful.

And Democrats are rightfully angry.

Following two votes last week in which Democrats rejected President Bush's surge plan and faced questioning from Republicans regarding their commitment to the troops, Democrats quickly seized on a story published by the Washington Post describing the conditions some soldiers encounter at Walter Reed.

"Caring for our returning heroes is one of the things we can still get right about this war, and that's why the deterioration of the conditions at Walter Reed is both appalling and unacceptable," presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said.

Obama and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said they would introduce legislation to improve the ratio of caseworkers to recovering soldiers, ensure caseworkers are better trained, cut back on the red tape recovering soldiers confront and set a timeline for repairs to "substandard facilities."

"I felt sick when I read these articles about how our injured American military men and women are being treated at Walter Reed," McCaskill said. "They sacrificed and fought bravely in Iraq and Afghanistan. They shouldn't have to fight a whole new war at home to receive the service and compensation they deserve."

In the House, Louise Slaughter (D-NY), chairwoman of the Rules Committee, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

I urge you to explain why the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, once the crown-jewel of military medicine, has become a bleak and frustrating place for our wounded soldiers to recover, and what the Army intends to do to restore the integrity of its medical system.

This weekend's Washington Post series revealing the "other Walter Reed" was stunning. It painted a picture of abhorrent living conditions and a bureaucratic nightmare for our wounded soldiers in outpatient care. In striking detail, the series described how one of the outpatient facilities, Building 18, is marked by rodent infestation, mold problems, and crumbling ceilings. As if the facilities were not bad enough, wounded soldiers and their families must wrestle daily with an Army bureaucracy ill-equipped to provide them with the attention and care they need. Wounded soldiers are often left on their own to make and keep appointments, and fill out the 22 documents needed to enter and exit the Army's medical system.

The commander at Walter Reed moved quickly into damage control mode, saying that repairs on the infamous Building 18, infested with cockroaches and bad plumbing and a broken elevator, have begun. But Slaughter was correct to point out that, without the WaPo expose in the first place, nothing would have been done. It takes 9-1-1, crisis, emergency mode to get this Administration off of their ass to do anything.

In a tense White House press briefing, Tony Snow claimed Bush never knew about the appalling conditions at Walter Reed (although I think he got suckered into saying that, and Snow corrected the record as an addendum to a later transcript), and then actually said that everyone should go ask the Pentagon about it:

Q Were you aware?

MR. SNOW: We are aware now, yes. And I would refer you to the Department of Defense, which I know is taking a very close look at it, too.

Look, the men and women who have gone and fought for our country over there, they deserve the best care.

Q So why has that not been guaranteed, then?

MR. SNOW: I'm not sure that -- you know, when you find a problem, you deal with it.

Q So you're saying the President learned about this from The Washington Post?

MR. SNOW: I don't know exactly where he learned it, but I can tell you that we believe that they deserve better. And, again, Ed, this is something where I'd suggest you give DoD a call, because I know they've taken a good, hard look at it.

Right, because the President apparently has no say over the rogue, out-of-control Department of Defense under his executive command.

This story's going to have legs, and it dovetails with Rep. Murtha's call for readiness in the Armed Forces. Readiness on the battlefield extends to the hospitals and the outpatient facilities as well. You cannot keep a war going when you can't even decently house the wounded.