Why Liberals Other Than Rachel Maddow Should Care About The V.A. Scandal

For several weeks, the scandal over fraudulent waiting lists at Veterans Administration facilities has been gaining steam, but for some reason, the story has failed to resonate with many liberals. While Fox News and CNN have devoted significant chunks of their primetime programming to the story, MSNBC has been conspicuously absent from the story, with the notable exception of Rachel Maddow. This is not a political scandal, but it will become one if liberals sit it out, and veterans will suffer for it.

Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC have all devoted roughly the same amount of attention, overall, to the Veterans Administration scandal, but when it comes to primetime programming, the story has been all over Fox News, covered proportionately by CNN, and nearly absent from MSNBC. Aside from The Rachel Maddow Show, which ran a segment on Thursday pegged to V.A. Secretary Eric Shinseki’s testimony before a Senate committee, not a single MSNBC primetime show even mentioned the story this week. that includes Friday night, when the Obama administration announced the first resignation of the scandal, of V.A. Under Secretary for Health Dr. Robert Petzel, whose retirement was announced last year.

As anyone who follows Rachel Maddow’s program even casually knows, she has a long history of covering veterans’ issues, so it’s no surprise that she’d be the exception. If there’s an objective-media counterpart to Maddow’s passion for this issue, it would be that of CNN’s Jake Tapper. While Maddow delivered one of her patented televised essays on the subject, catching viewers up on the story and calmly explaining the longstanding nature of the problem, Tapper was unleashing his palpable disgust on White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.

Is Tapper right to be pissed at Secretary Shinseki? Without a doubt, yes. Notwithstanding the considerable challenges that the V.A. faces from all directions, this problem, as Maddow pointed out, has persisted for years, but the specific practice that is the subject of this story, the creation of fraudulent appointment records, was the subject of a GAO report in December of 2012, and a Congressional hearing over a year ago. At that hearing, Congress was given the same assurances of reviews and accountability that they’re hearing now. This is simply inexcusable.

Tapper’s question to McDonough, “How many dead veterans,” is a heavy made-for-political-ads cudgel, but it’s also a necessary one, because…READ MORE

By: Tommy Christopher

Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.