Meet Corrine Brown, FL-05 representative and… vehement Florida Veterans Affairs booster.

I would like to assure my readers that the following is neither a Saturday Night Live skit, nor a Onion News Network video special.  The woman shown in it is Corrine Brown, who is indeed a sitting Congresswoman from Florida.  Florida’s Fifth district, in point of fact.  And that is very likely even her own hair.

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I mention all of this because it is legitimately difficult to believe – even for me, and I know darn well that it’s real – that what you just saw was anything except a bizarre kind of performance art where the Distinguished Representative ‘unconsciously’ placed all the blame on the current Veterans Affairs disaster on feckless Democratic oversight and pointless spending*.  And as for Rep. Brown’s fascinating declaration that she had done ‘reconnaissance,’ and thus knows that the VA has no problems in Florida?  …Well, let us check in with the well known rabid mouthpiece of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy known as NPR:

NPR’s Greg Allen reports that Florida Gov. Rick Scott says he plans to file a lawsuit against Veterans Affairs to be able to inspect and regulate VA facilities in his state.

“Several times over the past month, inspectors with Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration have been denied access to six VA facilities in the state. The state says it wants to ensure the facilities meet the health care needs of Florida Veterans,” Greg reports.

The VA hospital in Gainesville has reportedly placed three employees on leave after an audit found the names of more than 200 veterans on a handwritten list. The veterans were waiting for appointments and hadn’t yet been entered into the electronic scheduling system, Greg says.

Rep. Brown should probably at least get points for basic party loyalty, though: lots of Democrats aren’t even trying on this one.  I’d say that it’s hard to blame them, except of course they’re utterly to blame for the whole sorry mess in the first place.  The cardinal rule of medicine, as I understand it, is: First, do no harm.  That precept – which is a great rule of thumb for life in general, by the way – has been trampled into the mud by an administration so desperate to establish its place in history that it’s forgotten that History will remember the more extravagant fools and knaves, too.  Right now we’re trying to figure out which label of the two best fits Barack Obama and his inadvertent wrecking crew; not that either epithet will be what you’d call pleasant wearing…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Basically, the only real option for Democrats right now is to somehow foist off any of their party’s involvement in current VA conditions.  It is not difficult to do that when your party’s Presidential candidate campaigned on fixing those conditions, and your party increased funding that apparently did nothing to fix the problem; it is in fact impossible.