Rounding Out Miss Hillary Rodham....

Hillary Fired for Lies, Unethical Behavior from Congressional Job: Former Boss
   

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By: Ed Morrissey (HotAir)
(from the 2008 primary era)

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     Dan Calabrese’s new column on Hillary Clinton’s past may bring the curtain down on her political future. Calabrese interviewed Jerry Zeifman, the man who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, has tried to tell the story of his former staffer’s behavior during those proceedings for years. Zeifman claims he fired Hillary for unethical behavior and that she conspired to deny Richard Nixon counsel during the hearings:

     As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

     Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

 Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”
This isn’t exactly news. When her lachrymose performance arguably won her New Hampshire, Zeifman tried to tell people about Hillary’s duplicity. Patterico noticed the effort, but few others picked it up. Zeifman wrote at his website:

     After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader “Tip” O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series.”

     Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the fact that in the committee’s then most recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

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And then there is this:

Published by: Dan Calabrese on Wednesday January 23rd, 2013

By DAN CALABRESE - Bet you didn't know this.

I've decided to reprint a piece of work I did nearly five years ago, because it seems very relevant today given Hillary Clinton's performance in the Benghazi hearings. Back in 2008 when she was running for president, I interviewed two erstwhile staff members of the House Judiciary Committee who were involved with the Watergate investigation when Hillary was a low-level staffer there. I interviewed one Democrat staffer and one Republican staffer, and wrote two pieces based on what they told me about Hillary's conduct at the time.

I published these pieces back in 2008 for North Star Writers Group, the syndicate I ran at the time. This was the most widely read piece we ever had at NSWG, but because NSWG never gained the high-profile status of the major syndicates, this piece still didn't reach as many people as I thought it deserved to. Today, given the much broader reach of CainTV and yet another incidence of Hillary's arrogance in dealing with a congressional committee, I think it deserves another airing. For the purposes of simplicity, I've combined the two pieces into one very long one. If you're interested in understanding the true character of Hillary Clinton, it's worth your time to read it.

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Shades of Frida

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

(Emphasis is in red by hand of El Gringo Viejo, although each word should be ingested into the 'little grey cells'.)

How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.
The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.

“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.

The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files. So what did Hillary do?

“Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.

The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.

Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.

Of course, Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending Hillary’s career on the Judiciary Committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary if anyone wants to check the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.

But they show that the pattern of lies, deceit, fabrications and unethical behavior was established long ago – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before cattle futures, Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make her president of the United States.

Franklin Polk, who served at the time as chief Republican counsel on the committee, confirmed many of these details in two interviews he granted me this past Friday, although his analysis of events is not always identical to Zeifman’s. Polk specifically confirmed that Hillary wrote the memo in question, and confirmed that Hillary ignored the Douglas case. (He said he couldn’t confirm or dispel the part about Hillary taking the Douglas files.)

To Polk, Hillary’s memo was dishonest in the sense that she tried to pretend the Douglas precedent didn’t exist. But unlike Zeifman, Polk considered the memo dishonest in a way that was more stupid than sinister.

“Hillary should have mentioned that (the Douglas case), and then tried to argue whether that was a change of policy or not instead of just ignoring it and taking the precedent out of the opinion,” Polk said.

Polk recalled that the attempt to deny counsel to Nixon upset a great many members of the committee, including just about all the Republicans, but many Democrats as well.

“The argument sort of broke like a firestorm on the committee, and I remember Congressman Don Edwards was very upset,” Polk said. “He was the chairman of the subcommittee on constitutional rights. But in truth, the impeachment precedents are not clear. Let’s put it this way. In the old days, from the beginning of the country through the 1800s and early 1900s, there were precedents that the target or accused did not have the right to counsel.”

That’s why Polk believes Hillary’s approach in writing the memorandum was foolish. He says she could have argued that the Douglas case was an isolated example, and that other historical precedents could apply.

But Zeifman says the memo and removal of the Douglas files was only part the effort by Hillary, Doar, Nussbaum and Marshall to pursue their own agenda during the investigation.

After my first column, some readers wrote in claiming Zeifman was motivated by jealousy because he was not appointed as the chief counsel in the investigation, with that title going to Doar instead.

Zeifman’s account is that he supported the appointment of Doar because he, Zeifman, a) did not want the public notoriety that would come with such a high-profile role; and b) didn’t have much prosecutorial experience. When he started to have a problem with Doar and his allies was when Zeifman and others, including House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill and Democratic committee member Jack Brooks of Texas, began to perceive Doar’s group as acting outside the directives and knowledge of the committee and its chairman, Peter Rodino.

(O’Neill died in 1994. Brooks is still living and I tried unsuccessfully to reach him. I’d still like to.)

This culminated in a project to research past presidential abuses of power, which committee members felt was crucial in aiding the decisions they would make in deciding how to handle Nixon’s alleged offenses.

According to Zeifman and other documents, Doar directed Hillary to work with a group of Yale law professors on this project. But the report they generated was never given to the committee. Zeifman believes the reason was that the report was little more than a whitewash of the Kennedy years – a part of the Burke Marshall-led agenda of avoiding revelations during the Watergate investigation that would have embarrassed the Kennedys.

The fact that the report was kept under wraps upset Republican committee member Charles Wiggins of California, who wrote a memo to his colleagues on the committee that read in part:

Within the past few days, some disturbing information has come to my attention. It is requested that the facts concerning the matter be investigated and a report be made to the full committee as it concerns us all.

Early last spring when it became obvious that the committee was considering presidential "abuse of power" as a possible ground of impeachment, I raised the question before the full committee that research should be undertaken so as to furnish a standard against which to test the alleged abusive conduct of Richard Nixon.

As I recall, several other members joined with me in this request. I recall as well repeating this request from time to time during the course of our investigation. The staff, as I recall, was noncommittal, but it is certain that no such staff study was made available to the members at any time for their use.

Wiggins believed the report was purposely hidden from committee members. Chairman Rodino denied this, and said the reason Hillary’s report was not given to committee members was that it contained no value. It’s worth noting, of course, that the staff member who made this judgment was John Doar.

In a four-page reply to Wiggins, Rodino wrote in part:

Hillary Rodham of the impeachment inquiry staff coordinated the work. . . . After the staff received the report it was reviewed by Ms. Rodham, briefly by Mr. Labovitz and Mr. Sack, and by Doar. The staff did not think the manuscript was useful in its present form. . . .

In your letter you suggest that members of the staff may have intentionally suppressed the report during the course of its investigation. That was not the case.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Doar was more concerned that any highlight of the project might prejudice the case against President Nixon. The fact is that the staff did not think the material was usable by the committee in its existing form and had not had time to modify it so it would have practical utility for the members of the committee. I was informed and agreed with the judgment.

Mr. Labovitz, by the way, was John Labovitz, another member of the Democratic staff. I spoke with Labovitz this past Friday as well, and he is no fan of Jerry Zeifman.

“If it’s according to Zeifman, it’s inaccurate from my perspective,” Labovitz said. He bases that statement on a recollection that Zeifman did not actually work on the impeachment inquiry staff, although that is contradicted not only by Zeifman but Polk as well.

Labovitz said he has no knowledge of Hillary having taken any files, and defended her no-right-to-counsel memo on the grounds that, if she was assigned to write a memo arguing a point of view, she was merely following orders.

But as both Zeifman and Polk point out, that doesn’t mean ignoring background of which you are aware, or worse, as Zeifman alleges, confiscating documents that disprove your argument.

All told, Polk recalls the actions of Hillary, Doar and Nussbaum as more amateurish than anything else.

“Of course the Republicans went nuts,” Polk said. “But so did some of the Democrats – some of the most liberal Democrats. It was more like these guys – Doar and company – were trying to manage the members of Congress, and it was like, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ If you want to convict a president, you want to give him all the rights possible. If you’re going to give him a trial, for him to say, ‘My rights were denied,’ – it was a stupid effort by people who were just politically tone deaf. So this was a big deal to people in the proceedings on the committee, no question about it. And Jerry Zeifman went nuts, and rightfully so. But my reaction wasn’t so much that it was underhanded as it was just stupid.”

Polk recalls Zeifman sharing with him at the time that he believed Hillary’s primary role was to report back to Burke Marshall any time the investigation was taking a turn that was not to the liking of the Kennedys.

“Jerry used to give the chapter and verse as to how Hillary was the mole into the committee works as to how things were going,” Polk said. “And she’d be feeding information back to Burke Marshall, who, at least according to Jerry, was talking to the Kennedys. And when something was off track in the view of the Kennedys, Burke Marshall would call John Doar or something, and there would be a reconsideration of what they were talking about. Jerry used to tell me that this was Hillary’s primary function.”

Zeifman says he had another staff member get him Hillary’s phone records, which showed that she was calling Burke Marshall at least once a day, and often several times a day.

A final note about all this: I wrote my first column on this subject because, in the aftermath of Hillary being caught in her Bosnia fib, I came in contact with Jerry Zeifman and found his story compelling. Zeifman has been trying to tell his story for many years, and the mainstream media have ignored him. I thought it deserved an airing as a demonstration of how early in her career Hillary began engaging in self-serving, disingenuous conduct.

Disingenuously arguing a position? Vanishing documents? Selling out members of her own party to advance a personal agenda? Classic Hillary. Neither my first column on the subject nor this one were designed to show that Hillary is dishonest. I don’t really think that’s in dispute. Rather, they were designed to show that she has been this way for a very long time – a fact worth considering for anyone contemplating voting for her for president of the United States.

By the way, there’s something else that started a long time ago.

“She would go around saying, ‘I’m dating a person who will some day be president,’” Polk said. “It was like a Babe Ruth call. And because of that comment she made, I watched Bill Clinton’s political efforts as governor of Arkansas, and I never counted him out because she had made that forecast.”

Bill knew what he wanted a long time ago. Clearly, so did Hillary, and her tactics for trying to achieve it were established even in those early days.

Vote wisely. (writer was referring to the Democrat Primaries, 2008;  Seems like a million, miserable years ago.)

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     This seems a bit Ho-hum, to be sure, but it speaks to the broader point very effectively.   Hillary Rodham is a chronic, pathological liar.  Every step she takes and every move she makes is designed to avoid self-contamination and to do serious injury to other "little people" who do not count for so much as she.

    It should be of interest to note that one of the not-so-little-people who helped clear out Vince Foster's White House Office...quite close to Hillary's own throne room in the same edifice...was none other than the peculiar Bernie Nussbaum who helped carry out the entirety of Vince Foster's office's contents before the arrival of any constabulary or forensic analysts.  The one uniformed capitol policeman who did make a presence was threatened by the very formidable Maggie Thompson who pushed the officer aside, literally with the cardboard box of "stuff" as she exited Foster's office door...even as she threatened and admonished the officer with the possibility of informing (Sir Edmund) Hillary of the officer's interference in Royal Matters.

     It should be of interest that of (Sir Edmund)Hillary's first court was the stunning sum of 30 employees in the "Office of the First Lady".  In keeping with quotas and affirmative action as practiced by leftists, one of the 30 new hires was a male.  So to speak.  That male was Bernie.

     The escape by (Sir Edmund)Hillary from the long arm of the law was amazing.    It was as if she were in the cattle stampede....(not the cattle futures stampede, just a literary cattle stampede) ....where people would be having their guts squashed out, bones splintered, and heads cracked open  by thousands of deranged, thunder and lightning driven moo-cows ( I'm sorry, bovine-persons) and their little dogies.   Then, when the deafening music ends in the theatre and all is quiet, all the cowboys, camp cook, and helper Mexican named Hey Soos, of the set on Rawhide,  "They daid or in th' calaboose, Mr. Faver.  Them bovine-persons was plum spooked, like by the ghosts or somethin'."

     The only one what weren't daid or in the calaboose?   (Sir Edmund) Hillary, the meanest, orneriest, most low-down gila-monster on the whole Chisholm Trail.  Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Chief White House Counsel, Number 3 man at the Department of Justice, USA, and a score other middle and high ranking people are out there in the Whitewater - Rose Law Firm complex of slime and felonious activity having served lengthy prison terms.   Several are dead before, during, and after the episode.

     Why bother running up to the present?   Why bother with the two control tower officials at the airport tower where Ron Brown's plane went down, 40-plus dead.   Not counting the two airport / control tower people...who both committed suicide very shortly after the incident.    This linkage must be read in its entirety:     https://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/BROWN/kelly.html.

     Why bother with any of the true nature of Billy Jeff Blythe and Hillary Diane Rodham?  Perhaps the only astute thing done by Valerie Jarrett during her term as ''the real president", is to have appointed (Sir Edmund) Hillary as a useless Secretary of State in lieu of Vice-President.   She knew the mistake John Kennedy had made, in reality, is what killed him.  Remember what El Gringo Viejo said, some time back, that when his mother and god-mother were learning of Kennedy's choice of Vice-Presidential candidate during the Democrat convention of 1960....that it was Lyndon Baines Johnson....each said to the other, "He'll never survive his term."

     Valerie was wise to keep Hillary out of the first line of succession to the Presidency.

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We'll mosey on along, and look for fresh pasture.  You boys keep an eye on the herd for a bit.

El Gringo Viejo

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Mandatory Reading for ages 9 to 109 - More Examples of No Shame, No Pride on the Left

The author of a much-quoted 1975 Newsweek article predicting catastrophic global cooling now says it was a big mistake and the earth was warming all along. (H/T Climate Depot)

THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF THE FIRST PINKO CLIMATE-CHANGE ALARMIST!

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''I Recant,'' Says Author of Infamous Seventies
 Newsweek 'Global Cooling' Article



PETER GWYNNE

CEERTIFIED MARXIST DUFUS

Declares that he wants to go to all the parties from Occupy Wall

Street, and see the new breed of hippy girls and the better dope

to smoke, "It seems like I'm missing out on so much in life now

when I see how much fun Al Gore is having with his cute little

masseuses.  Younger people are so stupid and dumbed down

at this point, I can change sides completely and look like a

brilliant scientific pioneer, and score some weed, and who

knows what else?  Maybe I can meet Miss Flukie."



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The first lie:
Peter Gwynne, began his piece in 1975 by declaring portentously:

"There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth."

The second lie:
And this wasn't just a minority opinion, he went on to stress:

"Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in their view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic."

Update quickly to 2014 and we are now graced with -


The third lie:
But now Gwynne has decided that this certainty was misplaced:

"While the hypotheses described in that original story seemed right at the time, climate scientists now know that they were seriously incomplete. Our climate is warming -- not cooling, as the original story suggested."

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James Dellingpole, who researched and wrote this article, writes:



     Gwynne is apparently sick and tired of having the article rubbed in his face by "websites and individuals that dispute, disparage and deny the science that shows that humans are causing the Earth to warm." Especially painful for him - it seems - was the occasion when his piece was triumphantly brandished by comedian (and notorious skeptic) Dennis Miller on the Tonight Show in 2006.

     Luckily, Gwynne is in no danger of being made to look a fool twice. He has now chosen to place his faith in the expertise of perhaps the most widely respected, uncontroversial figures in the entire field of climate science - a man he quotes approvingly throughout his recantation.

"There's no serious dispute any more about whether the globe is warming, whether humans are responsible, and whether we will see large and dangerous changes in the future – in the words of the National Academy of Sciences – which we didn't know in the 1970s," said Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He added that nearly every U.S. scientific society has assessed the evidence and come to the same conclusion.

    Gwynne concludes by sounding a warning note on the dangers of science writers failing to ask the right questions and reporting over-enthusiastically on the latest scare story.

     "If I had applied those lessons back in 1975, I might not now be in the embarrassing position of being a cat's paw for denial of climate change," he says ruefully.

     Indeed. But at least Gwynne has learned his lesson. Now that he believes in global warming - as all the experts do - no one is ever going to take him again for a gullible idiot who has failed to perform his due diligence on one of the most important scientific issues of the day.

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Article by James Dellingpole

Brietbart - London

23 May 2014

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We could not resist this piece, since we forgot to twine our Maypole and sing "Le Internationale" and "Look for the Union Label" last May the First.

Everything in red was added by your grumpy old curmudgeon.  Dellingpole's work on this article is succinct and excellent.

El Gringo Viejo

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AMAC - The Conservative Alternative to AARP

Where is Honor at the VA?

Posted 05/23/2014 | Opinion

3

By Robert B. Charles

 

     Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA) Eric Shinseki is a man of honor, who ought to be politically bullet proof.  A four-star general, two combat tours in Vietnam, a former wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs and land mine survivor, his military career is the definition of high-integrity leadership.  But he is not bullet proof.  Here is why.

General Shinseki has been head of the VA since 2008, more than five years.  Between April 2009 and today, there have been ten semi-annual Inspector General’s (IG) reports done on the VA.  Another is now pending.  Each is a damning six- month compilation.  In the very first report, Shinseki learned of 102 individual IG reports on major VA problems.  In his second, he learned of 133 new problems.  In his third 120, fourth 143, fifth 140, sixth 161, seventh 140, eighth 159, ninth 164, tenth 185.  So, the number of problems and investigations on his watch has been rising, not falling.

What did five years of mounting investigations reveal?  A lot.  The first consolidated semi-annual IG report – five years ago – reported to the general that “An OIG audit determined the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) lacks an effective method to track and report unused appointments, particularly those canceled in advance and those never scheduled.”  So, within his first six months, the general knew VHA had major scheduling, appointment allocation, and wait time problems.  What is the current investigation about?  VHA wait times alleged to have been the proximate cause of veteran deaths.  Ironically, the cover of that first IG report?  An Arlington headstone.

What did the second report find? Among other system failures, “noncompliance” across the VA with critical “directives.” “VHA’s failure to comply on such a large scale suggested fundamental defects in organizational structure.”  Again, the process by which the VA managed all appointments and information technology was found deeply flawed.  Wrote the IG, of the system for veterans’ medical appointments:  “Oversight … was ineffective,” thus “VA expended over $70 million” but “does not have a deployable [appointments system].”  Worse, there was “a fundamental inability on the part of [the VA] to properly manage [important] IT projects internally.”

Nor could the VA leadership, including the general, have missed this point.   In March of 2009, there was a media bombshell: The multi-million dollar project “to develop a core computer application to schedule patient appointments at hospitals run by the VA has all but collapsed, and senior executives are worried about the repercussions it could cause on the Hill … according to an internal memo.” So, there it was:  Leadership knew the system was failing veterans.

The third IG report? “Many veterans do not receive timely medical examinations because VA medical facilities do not commit sufficient medical resources to them” and “program weaknesses persist.”  The fourth and fifth amplified.  In the sixth, mishandling of medical systems in “16 regional offices,” and a return to the failed appointments system:  Specifically, the VA “made little interim progress in one key area—ensuring contact with patients during the time interval between acceptance into a mental health residential rehabilitation program and the start of the program.”  In other words, appointments for mental health were a continuing problem.  Suicides were rising.

Seven?  The general’s VA “lacked financial and budgetary controls,” had “ineffective oversight and stewardship of VA funds.” More Arlington headstones.  Eight? “At 5 years after separation, 3.7 percent of [veterans were] experiencing … homelessness,” and “were more likely to be diagnosed with mental disorders …” Nine? Hundreds more arrests, more systemic problems.  Ten?  More non-compliance, negligence and criminal issues.

So, here comes the five-year head of VA to testify before Congress.  And what does he say?  He says that learning of mismanagement now “makes him mad as hell.”  He fires a senior administrator.  President Obama’s staff says he has “complete confidence,” but is “outraged” by failures at his VA.   Really?

After five years of systemic disconnect and program failure, after breaking trust with nearly 65 million patriotic and ailing American veterans, the head of the VA is “mad as hell?”  The president is “outraged?”  Really?  I am sorry.  My father died in a VA hospital.  Too many of my relatives are at Arlington to accept this.

Responsibility for systemic failure goes to the top.  The president has too much pride or too little shame to accept responsibility for another systemic failure, let alone to resign.  But General Shinseki, you are a man of honor – still.  Is it not a little late to get “mad as hell,” in view of the last five years and all those IG reports?  Why must so many good men and women suffer so much, after defending us with their lives, limbs, hearts and minds?  Where is honor at the VA?  Surely we can do better.  We must.

This article first appeared in The Hill.

Charles ran a House oversight subcommittee for five years, served as assistant secretary of State under Colin Powell, and was a Naval Intelligence Officer, USNR, for ten years.  He currently runs a consulting firm in Washington D.C. 

A word to the Obsolete Press and their lackeys in the GOP - Beware the Gloat

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    Some months back, El Gringo Viejo was watching some programme about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and taking note that the adage, "In politics the truth and the facts have no value.  Only the impression and the perception count."   That was on the other tablets that Moses dropped when he came down from Mount Horeb.

     What brought my metabolism to my normal acerbic state of boiling ire was the moderator's matter-of-fact pronouncement that JFK was struck down, and the Nation was flung into the depths of grief.   The certainty of a landslide victory being rendered by an adoring electorate was dashed by the hand or hands of a vile and capricious Fate.

      It made great Styrofoam peanuts for packing, but the peanuts were not worth eating for instance.  The fact is, the polls, one year out from the 1964 elections were showing that Barry Goldwater had a 2 to 4 point lead on the popular President.   That was one of the problems.  People generally had to like Kennedy, even if grudgingly.   But four more years of hot and cold diplomacy, especially becoming more, and more deeply wrapped into becoming both Japan's and all of Europe's defender while playing chicken with Khrushchev had people a bit wary.   The general left drift (by the standards of yore) and Barry Goldwater's no-nonsense, homey, and solid approach to governance resonated at the time.

     The last opinion polls, just before the assassination, underscored the need for the Massachusetts native to come to Texas and have, "Jackie show those Texas women how to dress".   Texas, even with a "native son" as Vice-President was showing a 55 - 45 split for Goldwater.  Nationwide, Goldwater had a 2% to a 5% lead, depending upon the agency.   To be sure, Texas had been digesting a revival of the bloody mess associated with the Box 13, Jim Wells County voter fraud that gave Lyndon the Democrat nomination for US Senate in 1948 primary run-off against Coke Stevenson.  In those years, of course, the Democrat nomination for a Statewide office was essentially the election, because the Republican presence was strictly token during the general elections.  Lyndon had other issues as well, with the Bobby Baker mess, along with the Billie Sol Estes mess, and several other "messes", many of them concerning an excess of dead bodies.


     The point behind all of this perambulation is that Kennedy was overwhelmingly popular throughout all fifty-seven States and his re-election was a foregone conclusion.  Perhaps that is true to-day, but it was not true at the time of the events.  Lincoln just loved the Negro race, and saw "them" as equals and brothers in all affairs, and he freed the slaves.   Sounds good for Father Abraham's legacy and resume' now, but, true to-day does not equivilate to the truth for yesterday.




    This is aimed at those hopeful people who have pronounce that the real Republicans are the RINOs  and that the tea-party radicals with all their crazy ideas like spending discipline and debt as well as deficit reduction along with securing the border are no longer a force in the Real Republican Party.  The pundits, even the conservative ones, bought into this interpretation.  The facts are different.
     Few of the experts are prepared to view the tsunami to come in November.  In Texas, where far more Republicans will vote and be elected than in any other State in the American Union will have almost entirely Tea Party Lt. Governor all the way down-ballot.   Nebraska was of interest, because there was no incumbent in that Senate race in the Republican Primary.   Tea Party Victory there.  Where the country-club Republican incumbents have run and won are in situations such as  Kentucky where the rural, stereotypically Tea Party type Republican voters turned out in good numbers, they split their vote between one of their own and a slightly recalcitrant Senate Minority Leader, McConnell.  They figured that he would try to be a bit less reasonable and more dedicated to the concepts of doing right and fighting wrong.
     It is my impression that his victory speech was one of the potentially sincerest invitations to the loser and to his supporters, and his words, in spite of previous bad taste in the ears problems, should and must be taken at face value.  There is no other choice, frankly, after the results of the vote.


     My point remains, that the rustics and rubes, the natural law thinkers and snake handlers are alive and well and having a profound effect upon the Republican brand.  Our...their....victories are numerous and solid.  We must buck up and remember "Repeal Obamacare, every letter, word, paragraph, and page and all the regulations that were inserted after its passage...40,000 pages and counting. Repeal, repeal, repeal, rescind!!  No repairs!!!!"


El Gringo Viejo
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Pour Money on Top of the Issue, Prices Go Up

     The looming disaster of the Obama Socialised Medicine Initiative (OSMI) is now poised to thrust the rapier into the body of the American economic system again.  It is obvious even to  a left-handed door knob that the bulk of the participants in the OSMI will be a combination of Medicaid slugs and people expecting my children to pay for their "free health care" via Obamasubsidies, known in the business as "ObieSubies".

     The term "crony capitalist" that applies to private businesses that lobby to pick up preferential selection and contractual considerations, moves  six steps down to the level of "Compliant National Socialist Pseudo-private Business That is Essentially Owned and Operated by the Central Government".   Now, the previously private insurance companies can join the likes of the Ethanol Triangle Conspiracy, and the expropriation of General Motors and Chrysler and their delivery by Barry Soetoro to the United Auto Workers labour union.


     Two things will happen in fairly short order if the Republicans do not immediately move to repeal en toto the OSMI.  The flood of money being printed to subsidise the insurance companies for the lack of full-pay OSMI captives will be massive.   The old saw about how this programme will save the government, therefore the taxpayers, billions and billions will suddenly turn into a nightmare that will make the financing of the Iraq and Afghan wars look like the financing of Michelle's last State Dinner honouring Kanye West for his contributions to humanity.   And with those payments and subsidies, any and all pretence about competition and cost controls will be totally disregarded.
     Whenever there is a subsidy, the money of everybody becomes the money of nobody.  It will be exactly like the Medicaid Programme's open ended shovelling of money into the bottomless pit of social disorder, third world illness, and maladies of sloth and anchor-baby madness.


     We are humoured as well by the effects of Obama's nationalisation of the "Student Loan Programme".   It does, however, help prove the previous point.  Something had to be done about the rising cost of a college education.  Democrat Socialist solution?   More money and let the government run the whole show, so the dirty old banks could not gain a usurious profit from the futures of the poor innocent students.   Result?   More free money into the hopper resulted in the inevitable, and the tuitions and other charges went up even faster.  Now the average college graduate has a crummy marxist brainwashing instead of an education and a debt of 30,000 USD, on average, to liquidate over the next 200 years.


     We must repeat to ourselves in the morning, shortly after awakening, "The quickest way to control a population is to tax the income of that population and to control its access to medical attention and records".


     We are receiving  fair warning from the Cosmos, with this hideous Alptraum that has befallen the nation due to this Veteran's Administration situation.    Government workers, at times and far too frequently, learn that since they are immune from dismissal, they can practice inventive administration to their own benefit while the petitioners are abused or dis-attended.  We are noticing now that one after another of the Veteran's Administration's facilities have been cooking service statistics in such a way as to be something that can only be criminal.   In scores of cases, as they build up, we are looking a charges that in Texas would be 1st degree Manslaughter by depraved indifference....5 years to life....depending on how the Jury decided that particular day in that particular court.


     The phony scandals seem to outdo each other at every turn.  If there is nothing to hide, then why do they try so hard to hide it?


More Later.  Thanks for your attention.
El Gringo Viejo

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A Sad side note about a recent previous post

      Folks, this is critical.  It is sad.  It is bad.

      We were sent a quote, a very salient quote, which we posted above the speaker of said quote, James Abram Garfield on a previous page of this blog.   It was sent by some of our favourite people who sometimes send us contributions, clips, notions, and observations.  We posted the reasonable and correct impressions of President Garfield.   As good Confederates, we render honours to Generals and dignitaries and Presidents of certain countries, especially when they are our own. Mr. (General, President, Congressman, etc.) Garfield needed a bit of dressing for the entry on our blog....but we could not find anything appropriate for a Yankee hero, a President killed in office, a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, a man whose soul had few scars.

    El Gringo Viejo had thought that the lack of reasonable Confederate memorabilia and commentary...along with the flourishes and ruffles. was simply a desire to cause the  disparagement of the South and its cause in the War, the bad reasons and the good reasons.  The South, and its losses and sacrifices, was hated simply because of the hatred by liberals and the politically correct robotrons.   But no....They hate the damnedyankee heroes just as much.   Those who also fought for confused abstracts and fought against lesser numbers but who were easily the equal or greater than even the Japanese defender of his island.  And we cannot find in three or four cliques a "grand display of American Flags" to celebrate America....the Grand Army of the Republic.....or any of those great things that the Union forces and their sacrifices accomplished.

     I am truly distraught that our nation and its sections are so little considered.  To ask "The Cloud" to give me a nice 4th of July scene with hundreds of American standards flapping in the breeze seems to be a simple enough thing.  A Memorial Day something, even if not pertaining to the War Between the States.  But all forms of reasonable nationalism are being buried into the Cloud.   We are being forced to become citizens of the Planet Earth. The only reason there are such displays within five or six clics for Confederate issues is to ridicule that for which 450,000 Southerners died and to confuse the issues, and to discount the good intention as best they could be represented of the Southern position.   Both of these sides....either of these sides....would have been a better path than what the United States has now, with 25,000,000 in the slavery of dependency.  Neither of our two sides would have had the peculiar institution functioning after 1910....mechanisation would have destroyed all justification for such an archaic and disgusting  institution.

     -30-