Republicans have got one solution to the backlog at the Veterans Administration and it's one McCain has been pushing for years now, and that's to privatize the VA. McCain has been getting plenty of help in the media on this, and was out there himself on Neil Cavuto's show on Faux "news" this Thursday, attacking President Obama for not cleaning up the decades-old mess and complaining that his push to privatize the organization back in 2008 wasn't taken seriously.
CAVUTO: The argument for these delays, and the president touched on it yesterday senator, is that they're going on for a long time, we've actually improved things, but it takes time. It's a decades long problem that takes time. What do you think he meant by that and was he just trying to spread the blame around for this?
MCCAIN: Well I love modern technology where you can replay individuals and particularly office holders' words. When the president was running in 2008 he made these commitments about we're going to eliminate the delay and we would have a new VA, and I said that we had to give flexibility to the veterans to get the care at the places they felt that they could get it best.'
That was of course downplayed. Then the president talked in 2009, 10, 11 about all the great things that they were doing. In 2012 said that they were... everything was fine with the VA, and remarkably, it was well over a month before he had anything to say about this latest scandal.
And finally Neil, he sent his deputy chief of staff to Phoenix Arizona to look at the situation at the VA hospital. He didn't send an expert on healthcare. He didn't send a veteran that really knows about healthcare. He sent one of his chief political operatives, showing what he views this crisis as, and what it really is.
Yes, because we all know Republicans would never dare to play politics with such a serious issue. Of course he had nothing to say about the branch of government he is a member of and what they've done when it comes to oversight or funding the VA and their responsibility for the recent problems that have come to light.
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