This is one of those stories that you actually hope to God never happened, because of course you’d prefer that somebody lied to you about a veteran getting beaten by cops than for it to actually have happened. But it’s being reported in local news, too: the short version is that the widow and family of Jonathan Montano claim that Veterans Affairs Police essentially beat Mr. Montano into having a eventually-fatal stroke as part of their restraining of the man during an argument over treatment. The VA did its own investigation, which concluded that the man fell and hit his head; the problem for the VA here is that the percentage of the populace that are ready to trust anything that the VA says these days has significantly dropped.
I mean, under normal circumstances I might not have even written about this – but this was before I had it ground into my face that the federal government has spent the last five years covering up fatal service delays in VA hospitals. Exactly how am I supposed to give them the benefit of the doubt, here? Not just why: how? For all I know, VA cops get extra overbearing whenever they think that they can get away with it. …And that is one major, often under-emphasized, problem with things like the VA scandals; to wit, those scandals erode basic trust in the institutions that are caught up in them.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: I don’t think that there’s an answer besides firing people* – starting with the Cabinet Secretary – for cause en masse. Which includes killing their pensions. And destroying the travel budgets of the survivors.
PPS: Turns out that Megan McArdle also thinks that mass firings at the VA would be salubrious, although she (I think) finds the idea more painful than I would.
*Putting some of them in jail would be great… if you can do that. It’s not as easy as it looks.
The kiiling of the pensions is the part that needs to be emphasised here. Most of the recent government ‘firings’ I heard about tend to be early retirements with full pensions. You can blame me for whatever you want if I get to retire early with a full pension.
Wait, the VA has its own police force? *facepalm* Why?
“It’s too late for apologies when trust has been betrayed.” – Steven Taylor
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I ran across a comment on another board recently that applies here – name any federal government executive-branch agency that hasn’t broken trust under this administration.
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I mean, there are the obvious ones, the IRS and the VA, but .. the BLM vs. Bundy issue taints BLM, then there’s any agency that went after the founders of True The Vote.. all tainted.
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In that discussion, we decided that the only ones that had maintained trust were the ones shut down by previous administrations .. but I’m willing to accept that we overlooked one or more. Can you name them?
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On a more cogent note, trust has been betrayed and must be rebuilt, and we *used to*, before we became convinced that things like “honor” were meaningless, have ritualistic ways to assign blame to one or more scapegoats who would carry it away. Now? It just kind of lingers around, swirling like a putrefying fog…
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Mew
Bingo, this is why I was so on the fence concerning the Edward Snowden situation (which some fellow Conservatives can’t seem to get through their head). I wasn’t simply looking at whether or not Snowden was credible, I was looking at the fact that the Obama administration has repeatedly taken actions that violated the trust between our government and the American people.
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The choice as to which one to believe was telling the truth boiled down to choosing whether to believe a man that may be a traitor to this country or a President that one could say has turned his back on his oath of office and seems to be trying to shred the Constitution of the United States. A President whose administration is well known for targetting whistleblowers because they make his administration look bad.
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Despite what some people (not on this blog site), accused me of being, I’m not a Libertarian, nor am I tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist. I am a Conservative, I am someone on the Autistic Spectrum aware of the fact that I have a hard time reading body language and telling when someone is lieing to me. My defense for that is to be very cynical about people, to be very careful to look at facts and logic.
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I didn’t have enough evidence to say Snowden was a traitor at the time (and it’s still debatable if he’s willingly betraying this country now or is being manipulated by Putin (which is why I wanted for him to be in Germany, so that he was out of KGB goon’s hands)), however his accuser was an administration that has repeatedly lied to the American People, an administration that used the IRS to target their political critics.
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I know people don’t like to here this, and tbh I wish I could wake up tomorrow and discover that these past 6 years were nothing but a bad dream, but I won’t go around pretending that the facts don’t exist. The fact of the matter is that when the government betrays the trust of the people, then it is reasonable to assume they’ll continue to betray that trust until officials are held to account for their bad behavior.
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What really makes it scary is the fact we have terrorists trying to get into the country to kill us, and this administration seems to view fellow Americans that disagree with them as more of an enemy than the terrorists.
While I agree with those on this site who recognize Snowden is a national security problem, I also see no way short of a whistle-blower to right these secretive agencies.
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Hell, even today there are NSA (and CIA and FBI etc. etc.) folks who deny that they’ve broken trust!
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Put another way, I do not equate my value judgement that Snowden did something useful with a value judgement of Snowden as some kind of saint. (most spies aren’t)
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Mew
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p.s. As I *am* one of those libertarian types, I’m quite sure we will disagree over plenty of other things.
“And all the King’s horses
and all the Kings men
couldn’t put Humpty
together again.”
Once trust is lost it is a very difficult thing to try and regain and it corrodes everything it touches upon.