Paging Dr. Friedman

Fire of Liberty

I commend the Washington Post for revealing the conditions at the highly antiquated outpatient buildings at Walter Reed and the subsequent actions of the Pentagon, that resulted with the resignation of the secretary of the Army as well as the firings of several generals, majors, and various others. Now everyone has the right to be horrified at the conditions of these facilities but I'd caution the Democrats on the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, Veterans Affairs Committee and the other respected committees from flying off the hook on the building because these buildings (some of which are 80 to 90 years old) and the current Walter Reed campus has been commissioned for destruction for some years now. Just see here, here, here, and here. Even worse is the fact that some of the same individuals who will be the most vocal on their shock of the conditions at Walter Reed are some of the same people who fighting like mad to keep the old and decaying campus open.

If you think about the the whole events at Walter Reed, it just further demonstrates how slow and inefficient that the federal government and its bureaucracy is when it comes to the handling of problems and the formation of solutions for such problems. With recovering veterans facing such headaches one can understand why some true patriots in the American hinterland(What Bill O'Reilly refers to as "the folks) decided to bypass the federal government and create the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund which has already raising some $50 million for the construction of a state-of-the-art Center for the Intrepid rehab facility at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. You also have private/public entities like Fisher House who build housing facilities for recovering soldiers and their families as they get back on their feet. I know that these soldiers have served their country and deserve the best from the federal government but if they have to choose then I'm betting they will take the private sector facilities anytime. I'll go one further and say that they get even greater care with less waste of money and time at these facilities.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for laying the hammer down on the individuals who let such horrors develop at the Walter Reed outpatient facilities but as with most things related to the federal government I'm not surprised that things went wrong.