Thread: How to Tell Barack Obama Will Be Angry: 5…4…3…2… Hey, There’s Another Scandal…1…

How to Tell Barack Obama Will Be Angry: 5…4…3…2… Hey, There’s Another Scandal…1…

By Mike Miller 2 hours ago



As our friend Zip says, two things happen after every Obama scandal breaks out: 1) He claims he only found out about it by watching TV. 2) He gets “mad.” The VA secret-waiting-list scandal is just the latest.

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/05/1396...candal-erupts/

Conservative Daily

"Mad as hell" that his ignorance has been exposed, perhaps?



Supposedly 'Mad As Hell' Obama Was Warned About VA Wait Problems Way Back in 2008

Was Obama angry for the 6 years that he's ignored the problem?
ijreview.com

Supposedly ‘Mad As Hell’ Obama Was Warned About VA Wait Problems Way Back in 2008

By Soopermexican 12 hours ago
Video at the Page Link:

Over the weekend, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough suggested that Obama was “mad as hell” over the Veteran’s Affairs scandal, but the Washington Times has obtained information that completely undermines any notion that the administration took it seriously at all:

Veterans Affairs officials warned the Obama-Biden transition team in the weeks after the 2008 presidential election that the department shouldn’t trust the wait times that its facilities were reporting.

“This is not only a data integrity issue in which [Veterans Health Administration] reports unreliable performance data; it affects quality of care by delaying — and potentially denying — deserving veterans timely care,” the officials wrote.

The briefing materials, obtained by The Washington Times through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the problems existed well before Mr. Obama took office, dating back at least to the Bush administration. But the materials raise questions about what actions the department took since 2009 to remedy the problems.

It makes you wonder if Obama was “mad as hell” about Veterans dying while waiting for proper healthcare, or if he’s angry that anyone dares to pin this on his administration after providing him cover on every other scandal.

After all, Democrats have been trying to say that the VA did a “pretty good job.” Somehow, the VA spent millions under Obama on improving their own offices while Veterans waited for care.

Despite all of that, he’s “mad as hell” and will get to the bottom of the scandal. Just like he was angry about Benghazi and promised to bring the terrorists to justice, until eventually “dude, that was two years ago” became the White House’s last word on that scandal.


http://www.ijreview.com/2014/05/1394...-back-in-2008/

Obama ‘madder than hell’ about VA scandal, according to someone he allegedly yelled at behind closed doors



By: John Hayward
5/19/2014 10:02 AM

Never mind the utterly bloodless, who-gives-a-damn attitude Barack Obama has projected about the VA scandal thus far, citizens! Rest assured that in private, behind closed doors, he’s “madder than hell” – maybe madder than anyone has ever been about anything. As usual for an Obama scandal, none of his top people will actually be held accountable for anything, but there’s been a resignation, and some more faceless mid-level bureaucrats might just get put on paid “administrative leave” before those whole mess boils over.
Feel the President’s incandescent rage, which he’s been keeping entirely bottled up in public, but he’s a volcano in private, according to what his chief of staff told CBS News:

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough defended the White House reaction to the scandals emerging from Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals around the country, saying on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that President Obama “is madder than hell – I’ve got the scars to prove it.”
In an interview with CBS News Chief White House Correspondent, McDonough said that VA Secretary Eric Shinseki is the right person to lead the investigation into reports that veterans have been put on secret waiting lists to hide the number of people who were not being treated within the VA’s goal of 14 days. Several Republican lawmakers and The American Legion, the nation’s largest veterans group, have called on Shinseki to resign.
“General Shinseki continues to work this every single day…and he will continue to work these issues until they’re fixed,” McDonough said. “The president will continue to demand that he and all of us who work for him continue to fix these things until they are functioning the way that our veterans believe they should and…so that they get the services and the benefits that they have earned.”

Obama’s Hulk-like rage over this outrageous treatment of our military veterans is being kept in a bottle because he’s still running political calculations on scandal damage control. He’s survived all his other scandals by refusing to hold anyone accountable – it usually takes a few days, and maybe an internal poll or two, before someone says the magic words “I take responsibility,” and the Administration begins tapping its foot while it waits for its faithful media servants to declare the story over.
In this case, Shinseki said the magic words “I take responsibility,” which in the Obama era mean exactly the opposite of the literal English translation of the words, so he’s supposed to be untouchable now. (Shinseki also used almost exactly the same language as Obama’s spokespeople about how he’s “mad as hell,” which I think officially qualifies it as an Administration talking point, if not a grotesque joke.)
Robert Petzel, the undersecretary for health care at the Department of Veterans Affairs, handed in his resignation on Friday, prompting Obama’s talking-point dispensers to rush out and declare that he really got “terminated” good and hard… even though Petzel announced his plans to retire long ago, and President Madder Than Hell announced his replacement a month ago.
Students of the IRS scandal will recall that Obama used exactly the same dodge to slip through a tough news cycle after the story broke, pretending that the scheduled conclusion of Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller’s temporary tenure was a head sent rolling in the name of “accountability” for an “inexcusable” abuse of power Obama claimed he was “outraged” about.
This is comical, and sickening. Obama’s trying to run his standard obfuscate-delay-yawn strategy for scandal control, but the media seems less eager to buy it this time, perhaps because they’re still smarting from bombshell scoops on Benghazi and the IRS delivered by watchdog groups.
As the scope of the VA scandal expands, and it becomes clear the deliberate falsification of records was a systemic problem Washington was aware of before the scandal blew up on CNN, Democrats grow more nervous about the political fallout. This isn’t going to be a story that can be stuffed in the freezer until the midterm elections are over, not with groups like the American Legion still calling for Shinseki’s termination… and the Administration’s attempts to spin the story aware are only making these critics angrier. Back to CBS’ Face the Nation from this weekend:

In a separate interview on “Face the Nation,” American Legion National Commander Daniel Dellinger stood by the organization’s insistence that Shinseki should step down.
“He should be coming forward with the same leadership he showed in the military as a four-star general into the VA and it just hasn’t happened. The accountability just hasn’t been there and I think it is systematic of the entire system,” Dellinger said. He said that under similar circumstances the CEO of a major corporation would have stepped down or a member of the military would have been relieved of duty.
In his interview with Garrett, McDonough highlighted the administration’s other efforts to help veterans like funding for the GI Bill and an increase in spending on the VA. But Dellinger said those efforts should be considered separately from the other problems being seen at VA hospitals nationwide now.
“We realize that the administration has done a lot for the veterans, but that isn’t the issue. The issue is we’re having veterans die waiting for the care that they’ve earned,” he said. “This has been an ongoing problem.”

Dellinger joined the chorus of voices insisting that President Obama must directly address the issue, but he’s not going to do that, not until his political spin operation is running at acceptable speeds. He won’t expose himself to reporter questions that would jeopardize his scandal delay tactics, or issue the sort of statement that could make Shinseki’s position untenable. As long as Shinseki stays put, Obama will believe this scandal has a half-life, and he won’t have to worry about disgruntled former employees giving inconvenient interviews.
The other great danger for President Obama in the VA scandal is the growing sense that it’s typical of his brand of Big Government. There are the obvious (and well-founded) fears that ObamaCare will transform all of American health care into a secretive, scandalous system like the VA. But this isn’t just about health care – the same sort of thing is happening everywhere you look. One agency after the next has been rocked with charges of secretive communications, the evasion of public transparency laws, deliberate rule-breaking by highly compensated officials, and spectacular wastes of taxpayer money.
What we have now is government of, by, and for the government. An aristocratic bureaucracy enriches itself at our expense, while their nominal missions are almost completely forgotten. There are no standards of performance to meet any more, because Big Government enthusiasts believe the American electorate has been permanently subdued. As long as the federal government’s failures aren’t bad enough to prompt bipartisan pitchfork-and-torch marches on Washington, every scandal can be spun away… even though we keep hearing the same story over and over again, from one agency after the next. The Leviathan State can’t even launch a website, but it still says it has first claim on every dollar we earn, and knows how to run every business in America better than its owners. Its actual performance record includes one catastrophe after the next, followed by spin tornadoes and media sideshows instead of anything even vaguely resembling accountability.
It’s remarkable, and sad, how many times this Administration has been able to run the same playbook against the American people. This might be the end of the line. If the usual pattern is followed, the next barrage of public statements from White House flacks will be outrage directed at anyone who would dare to insinuate that the President doesn’t care about veterans more than any other President – probably more than any other American – who ever lived. There’s a new story today from the Washington Times about how Obama was warned that “VA medical facilities were reporting inaccurate waiting times and experiencing scheduling failures that threatened to deny veterans timely helath care” five years ago, before this President was even inaugurated… which Team Obama will predictably use to claim the whole mess is really George Bush’s fault, another crisis unfairly dumped in the overcrowded lap of his helpless successor. It will be interesting to see if there are any wiling consumers for that nonsense beyond the dwindling ranks of the hard-core Obama faithful.

http://www.humanevents.com/2014/05/1...-closed-doors/

Obama tries to blow off the VA scandal



By: John Hayward
5/16/2014 09:21 AM

It’s shocking to learn that the President who booted World War II vets out of their own memorial during Shutdown Theater would have a blase attitude about the outrage at VA clinics. Confronted with reports of veterans left to languish on secret lists until they died, Barack Obama yawned and assigned a White House aide to look into it. The obviously overwhelmed Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki, staggered in front of a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee to read some talking points and claim he was “mad as hell,” while cries for his resignation fell upon the President’s numb ears. That’s not how it works in ObamaLand, my friends. Nobody gets fired. Ever. (As is typical of Obama scandals, a few faceless bureaucrats have been placed on temporary “administrative leave” by Shinseki.)
Obama’s not even putting much effort into looking “outraged” by the story, the way he pretended to be outraged for a couple of days when the IRS scandal exploded. He seems, if anything, mildly annoyed by yet another unpleasant story to be papered over. The President, who found time to personally weigh in on L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s wiretapped phone conversations, dispatched his flack Jay Carney to inform the media he currently “concerned and angry about the allegations,” and if the secret waiting list story proves true, Obama’s emotional state might deteriorate to outrage. (Newsflash: there’s not much doubt that the secret waiting list stuff is true.)
Likewise, Democrats are performing political calculations to decide whether they have to break with the President and get harsh with his Administration over this. The Party’s anger has been rather muted, because they don’t want to make Obama look bad. They’re all running the numbers, checking out polls, watching the media coverage, and trying to decide if Shinseki blew it so badly before the Senate that they can’t cover for him any more. At this point, it doesn’t look like the Democrat caucus in Congress is willing to make fools of themselves to derail this particular investigation, the way they’ve acted to disrupt hearings into Benghazi and the IRS.
The story, which began at the VA hospital in Phoenix, has expanded to include similar secret death lists at a half-dozen additional facilities. At the Phoenix hospital, veterans seeking treatment were actually deleted out of the official computer system, and their documentation was shredded, when they were shoved onto the secret “ignore” list. It was a systemic effort to break the rules and cover up malfeasance, and it claimed at least 40 lives just at that one hospital… while highly-paid administrators claimed fat “performance” bonuses. A similar story of falsified records emerged from a clinic in Ft. Collins, Colorado. A new story has surfaced from Southeast Texas about thousands of veterans denied access to simple colonoscopies until, as one doctor with VA experience put it, they were bleeding out of the rectums – a delay long enough for colorectal cancer to progress from easily treatable, to inoperable and fatal.
Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs was blowing $500 million – enough to cover colonoscopies for every veteran with a stomach ache – on office furniture and curtains, with nearly $7 million spent on building a single conference room. This is bureaucratic incompetence, malfeasance, and deception on a scale we haven’t seen since… well, ObamaCare, which is dragging us toward a hellish single-payer future in which everyone enjoys the death-panel treatment given to vets. The VA scandal is a disturbingly exact mirror of ObamaCare, demonstrating precisely the same management characteristics as Barack Obama’s boondoggle: gigantic sums of money wasted, endless lies foisted upon the public, and nobody held accountable by Obama. Unless the President is dragged kicking and screaming into cleaning house by his frightened Party, Eric Shinseki will hang on until he gets the same fond farewell the monstrously incompetent and deceitful HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius enjoyed.
The strongest indication Shinseki might be in real trouble is that Democrats clearly weren’t buying what he was selling at Thursday’s Senate hearing, as related by CNN, which has been doing very good work on the VA scandal:

At his first congressional hearing since the CNN reports drew national attention to the issue, Shinseki told the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee that he was reviewing all VA operations and also cooperating fully with the independent inspector general’s investigation.
“Any allegation, any adverse incident like this makes me mad as hell,” he said, urging the legislators to wait for the investigation’s finding before trying to resolve a complex set of problems.
His assurance that “we will act” on any substantiated allegation angered senators from both parties who insisted the problems are real and need immediate action.
Some pointed to a policy implemented by Shinseki that set a 14-day limit to provide care for veterans applying for the first time, saying a deadline they labeled as unworkable resulted in VA administrators devising ways to cover up months-long delays.
Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina questioned why Shinseki, who has been Obama’s only veterans affairs secretary, failed to act sooner on problems long cited by veterans, the U.S. Government Accountability Office and others.
“With the numerous GAO, IG and Office of Medical Inspector reports that have been released, VA senior leadership, including the secretary, should have been aware that VA was facing a national scheduling crisis,” Burr said. “VA’s leadership has either failed to connect the dots or failed to address this ongoing crisis, which has resulted in patient harm and patient death.”

When Shinseki kept referring to the whole story as a series of unproven “allegations,” it was Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut who reminded him the secret waiting lists and falsified records in Phoenix are a matter of documented fact, not an allegation. Following the Senate hearing, it was announced that the VA inspector general would be working with criminal investigators, federal prosecutors from Arizona, and the Public Integrity section of the Justice Department to determine if criminal prosecutions are warranted.
Here’s the part of the CNN report that shows us just how personally outraged Barack Obama is:

Asked at one point if he should resign, Shinseki said caring for fellow American veterans was a mission, not a job, and he intended to continue working until he achieves his goal of improved care “or I am told by my commander in chief that my time has been served.”
In appointing White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors to assist Shinseki in reviewing what happened, Obama said he asked Shinseki to review “practices to ensure better access to care.”
“While we get to the bottom of what happened in Phoenix, it’s clear the VA needs to do more to ensure quality care for our veterans,” Obama said.

Yes, you can tell the President is boiling mad about all this. He’s acting like the problem is a lack of decent reading material in the waiting rooms. He’s rattling off talking points about “quality care” instead of demanding resignations.
Pete Hegseth, CEO of Concerned Veterans of America, wrote an op-ed at Fox News comparing Shinseki’s claim that the VA is a “good system” to the biggest lie in modern history, Barack Obama’s claim that people would be able to keep their insurance plans under ObamaCare:

The totality of the Secretary’s remarks before the committee Thursday were not only deceptive, they were detached, defensive, and unbefitting a leader who, by now, should be fighting mad about the scandals engulfing VA, firing those responsible, and fundamentally challenging every assumption he has about the manner in which care is provided to our veterans.
Instead, Shinseki played the role of aloof bureaucrat, reading dispassionately from his prepared remarks in a monotone voice, as if this was a run-of-the-mill budget hearing. Shinseki’s comments were spot on in that respect—a perfect personification of VA’s indifferent and unaccountable bureaucracy.
As my organization Concerned Veterans for America has been saying for years—and Fox News has been reporting aggressively—the VA is an infected bureaucracy, incapable of delivering timely care to veterans; instead, the VA has been cooking the books to preserve the jobs and bonuses of senior officials.

Hegseth called for Shinseki’s ouster, as merely the first step in a process of fundamental reform… a process that pointedly would not include blindly pouring more money into a defective top-heavy bureaucracy:

Shinseki should be fired immediately—as my group, the American Legion, and many Senators have called for—but that is only the beginning.
Fundamental reform is needed, from top to bottom, to shake up a calcified and unaccountable bureaucracy. These reforms start with accountability at the very top, and throughout VA.
VA must also be made more transparent, and the benefits veterans have earned should be more portable—meaning if you can’t get timely or convenient care at a local VA, you can go elsewhere.
It also must be made clear that the problems at VA are not funding problems. Some individuals testified Thursday that more money might solve the problem. This is bogus.
Sure, there are certain aspects of VA that could use additional funding, but reallocation of existing funds would be more than sufficient.
In Phoenix alone, 59% of salaries are spent on administration and operations, notmedical care.
The VA bureaucracy is very adept at gobbling up additional funding; so before we spend more money on VA, we need to reform it. Let’s stop throwing more money at a bureaucracy incapable of using it wisely or efficiently.

Hegseth’s recommendations illuminate the fundamental conflict of philosophy at play here. What he’s calling for is the exact opposite of Barack Obama’s philosophy, in which the amount of taxpayer money handed over to bureaucrats is the sole metric of “success.” What happens to the money is utterly irrelevant. Obama is not even slightly interested in improving government or making it more transparent, in any respect – he is the greatest enemy of transparency this country has ever seen. He doesn’t think the public needs to know anything except what his regime wants it to know, and nobody has any business second-guessing his imperial decisions about how government should be structured. He views the flow of information from government to the public as a means for the former to influence and control the latter. Find me a single example, during Obama’s entire presidency, where any part of his Administration has humbly taken a knee before the American people and presented them with the full truth on any subject in a timely manner. You can’t even get Freedom of Information Act compliance from Obama’s royal government on any sensitive topic without suing them, as groups like Judicial Watch have been doing.
Another consistent thread of the Obama management style is that he judges top officials by their ability to handle the political fallout from catastrophes, not prevent them. It seems entirely foreign to his thinking that a high government official is supposed to carefully monitor and manage his department to ensure problems don’t occur. Obama views the highest levels of government as a royal aristocracy, whose days are to be spent on junkets, meetings, press conferences, and fancy dinners, not rolling up their sleeves and making sure their areas of responsibility are well-controlled. That’s why Obama himself didn’t bother to check up on how ObamaCare was coming along for over three years, or even check to see if Sebelius was minding the store. The notion of an exalted official getting held strictly to account, and even fired, because disaster occurred on his or her watch is utterly foreign to Obama’s view of regal government.
Barack Obama will take no action, or even make any statement, that would support criticism of his government’s pure and noble intentions. That’s another reason nobody ever gets fired during his scandals – he regards such action as a display of weakness, an admission of guilt, an invitation for further political damage from his opponents. You’re not supposed to question that any of Obama’s appointees, or their top lieutenants, are less than 100 percent invested in the tireless pursuit of noble goals such as “access to quality health care.” You’re not supposed to question Obama’s judgment in who he appoints, how he chooses to supervise them, or how he spends his time. And you’re not supposed to get angry at him for claiming he only learns about these massive scandals by reading the newspaper.
Obama’s official position on his own performance is that he’s never done anything wrong, and all of his problems are the fault of either his enemies or his predecessors. If he sacks Eric Shinseki, it will be slightly harder for him to maintain that pretense until he leaves office, so it’s going to take a lot of arm-twisting from Democrats before the President would consider such drastic action… and if it happens, I would bet heavily that it will be made to look like it was Shinseki’s idea to resign. At this point, I’d say the smart money is on nobody getting hit with anything worse than “administrative leave,” i.e. a paid vacation.
Update: And yet another secret waiting list is discovered at a VA clinic in Gainesville, Florida. This is a systemic crisis, not a little hiccup that can be fixed with “reforms” implemented by the same management that allowed it to happen.

http://www.humanevents.com/2014/05/1...he-va-outrage/

PAPER: President warned about VA problems in '08...

White House says Obama unaware -- until reading news reports...

Doctor claims patients on waiting list committed suicide...

Vets Angry, Sick and Scared...

Limbaugh: Death panel at work...

FLASHBACK: Obama Assailed Bush VA For 'Deplorable Conditions'...

http://drudgereport.com/

[Watch] Every Scandal Makes Obama Mad as Hell – That America Found Out

Posted on 19 May, 2014 by Rick Wells



If every scandal makes Obama as mad as he claims it does, he must spend a lot of his time kicking walls.

Of course getting mad doesn’t do much to correct a situation in and of itself but it does often generate a response, which can result in positive results.

Or it can cause one to spend a lot of time on the golf course, away from all of the bothersome peasants.



To illustrate how phony this outrage is, in the first speech video in the video, regarding the IRS scandal, he knew what was going on before it broke. Yet he claims surprise and outrage.

How any of the citizens of our nation can continue to believe a word this guy says is a sad commentary on the lack of intellectual honesty and discernment of the American people.

“Like” Rick Wells on Facebook and “Follow” him on Twitter.


http://gopthedailydose.com/2014/05/1...ica-found-out/

Obama Learned About V.A. Health Care Scandal While Watching Fox News…Or Something

By Norvell Rose
1 3:39 pm May 19, 2014

Okay, maybe it wasn’t Fox News that informed President Obama about the exploding health care scandal engulfing the Veterans Administration. Maybe it was some other news source, like MSNBC or Russia Today. Or HuffPo. Drudge? Whatever.
The point is, according to White House spokes-kid Jay “Jaybird” Carney, as reported on mediaite.com:

President Barack Obama first learned of the scandal involving Department of Veterans Affairs hospital administrators concealing the true wait times vets faced in the press.

Gee, once again the President of the United States finds out about really important stuff happening in his administration by watching/reading news accounts? Well, as you might suspect, the facts tell a far different story than Obama’s official flak man, Carney.

While the president may have not been aware of the falsified wait lists, however, reports indicate that his administration was informed of excessive wait times at the VA as early as 2008. Obama even campaigned on the issue of VA waiting lists in 2007.
While it is possible that the White House first learned about the apparent systemic effort by VA administrators across multiple institutions to hide the wait times that veterans endured, Obama was aware that excessive wait times were a problem even before he took the oath of office.

Let’s hope and pray that, should Iran finally announce they have a deliverable nuke, Obama doesn’t find out about it from The Daily Show.


http://www.libertynews.com/2014/05/obama-learned-about-va-health-care-scandal-while-watching-fox-newsor-something/

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