There Politico goes, putting words in our mouth again:
GOP leaders and officials have spent the last week talking about the backlogs and misconduct, but what they’re hoping voters hear is: Obama is still an unprepared executive who needs to be stripped of power in the midterms. Once again, they say, he’s presenting himself as an angry bystander, confronted with high-profile management failures on his watch that he says he learned about from news reports.
Unlike in October, when Republicans focused their message on calling for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to be fired, they’ve gone broader now, saying this is about more than VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, whom most have avoided calling on to resign or be fired.
This, they say, is much, much bigger — the phrase that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his colleagues have been emphasizing is “systemic failure.”
[pause]
[thoughtful chewing]
You know, actually, this stuff isn’t half bad. I mean, yes, the actual reason that we’re upset about the VA thing is because veterans died – this administration’s scandals often seem to default to ending in ‘and then somebody died’ – but ‘unprepared executive who needs to be stripped of power in the midterms’? Yeah, I like that. It’s kind of catchy. And true! And apparently Politico agrees with me: they’re just a little scared to say so themselves, so we get the entire Oh those horrible Republicans with their cruel arguments that we somehow unaccountably forgot to get any Democrats to really rebut! Seriously, the closest that they came to that were comments from Fast Eddie Rendell, and the former governor of Pennsylvania was far more interested in hanging Obamacare around the President’s neck (and not, say, Hillary Clinton’s).
I wouldn’t start any long trilogies, if I were Eric Shinseki.
Via @cayankee.
Moe Lane
PS: If you’re wondering why simply canning Gen. Shinseki for cause is such a political football, it’s probably because progressives consider him to be somewhat of a martyr of the Global War on Terror. Making him VA Secretary was probably seen by some on the antiwar Left as being a chance for Shinseki to rehabilitate his reputation.
[pause]
Well.
Why is it that Politico has problems with the idea of holding this admin responsible for anything that happens.
Because the entire admin is a bunch of precious snowflakes whose participation trophies still litter their walls and anything/anyone that says/proves otherwise is fingers-in-the-ears-la-la-la time?
Confirmation bias.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
.
They have a very hard time being objective
.
Mew
Perhaps because of the loose thread analogy. Once you start pulling, ya gotta keep pulling.
Or the potato chip analogy, once you eat one…
Better to ignore it all and hope it goes away.
It’s been noted that Obama can never admit he’s wrong. Maybe he thinks once one crack starts, the whole structure may come down.
That seems to me a very insecure, even paranoid way of thinking.