Hillary Clinton's indefensible defense of the scandal-stained VA

The media gave Hillary Clinton high marks for her handling of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last week. Democrats immediately followed up on that narrative by dismissing the committee as nothing but a sham, leading a nonplussed Chuck Todd to remind ranking member Elijah Cummings of the ongoing FBI investigation into Clinton's email scandal, and challenging him on Sunday's Meet the Press for "shielding" Clinton.

Nevertheless, the main thrust of coverage for the hearing painted it, prematurely or not, as a triumph for the Democratic Party's frontrunner for the presidential nomination. Clinton expertly used the panel as a foil to make the entire exercise look political, and the media happily lapped it up. With voter interest in Benghazi not exactly catching fire — although that has not been true of the email scandal — Clinton deftly evaded a much-needed look into the Clinton/Obama policies that turned Libya into a failed state and haven for terrorists, and seemed to brush the whole thing off as just more silly-season nonsense.

And then Clinton managed to step all over her momentum... again. On Friday, Clinton told Rachel Maddow that the scandal at the VA in 2014 was nothing more than another political football for Republicans. While admitting that the denial of access to health care for veterans through phony wait lists was real, Clinton denied that it was "widespread," and said Republicans exaggerated the scandal for political effect. Clinton also blamed the media in part for creating a false impression of this single-payer health-care system.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"Now nobody would believe that from the coverage you see," Clinton told Maddow. "The constant berating of the VA that comes from the Republicans, in — in part in pursuit of this ideological agenda that they have... They want it to fail, so we can argue for privatization." As for the veterans, Clinton claimed that they are satisfied with VA care. "There have been a number of surveys of veterans," Clinton argued, "and overall, veterans who do get treated are satisfied with their treatments."

That is a highly significant qualifier, however. An inspector general's report on just the Phoenix VA alone showed that the average wait time to access care was 115 days, almost five times as long as the official reported time of 24 days. The report calculated that 40 veterans died while waiting to access the Phoenix VA's facilities. Cheering the quality of care in a system that let 40 veterans die in one metropolitan area is tone deaf, to say the least.

Clinton's claims that the fraud wasn't "widespread" depends on the definition of the word. Would 64 percent of all VA facilities be considered "widespread"? That was the finding from the VA itself. More than six in 10 facilities kept unofficial wait lists to prevent oversight of their lack of responsiveness to the veterans trapped within the VA system. The Los Angeles VA destroyed records to cover up their own fraud. The same VA audit blamed a demand for a 14-day average wait for access (which it called "simply not attainable" with the resources provided) "an organizational leadership failure" — which certainly sounds "widespread."

Even President Obama, whose administration failed to deal with this fraud for more than five years despite having been warned specifically about it during the 2008 transition to the White House, didn't try to defend the indefensible. "What they've found is that the misconduct has not been limited to a few VA facilities, but many across the country," Obama said in May 2014. The exposure of this scandal led to a singular moment of executive accountability in this administration as Obama demanded and received Eric Shinseki's resignation as secretary of Veterans Affairs. Shinseki remains the only Obama Cabinet official forced to resign for poor performance.

This was all over the systemic fraud that Clinton argues now was mostly a figment of Republican imaginations.

Why is Clinton defending the VA and dismissing the real and admitted plight of veterans? Maybe to distinguish herself from Bernie Sanders, who seemed open to allowing for private care based on lack of access at VA facilities in the spring of 2014. More likely, though, is that Clinton decided to ride the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy for one too many victory laps around the track after the Benghazi hearings.

In doing so, Clinton may have deflated the political boost she gained the previous week. Clinton had already come under fire for her cavalier attitude in the initial Benghazi Senate hearings, with her infamous "what difference at this point does it make" rejoinder to Sen. Ron Johnson over the deaths of four Americans in a poorly secured State Department facility operating in an area known to be rife with radical Islamic terror groups. After having established the argument that Republican probes into what led to those deaths are nothing more than election-year politics, Clinton now suggests that the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of veterans in a badly managed government monopoly matters less than defending the big-government approach to health care.

That doesn't sound presidential. It sounds paranoid and ignorant, and it should cause the media to take a second look at the so-called triumph last week. At the very least, perhaps news outlets might wonder just what qualifies for accountability in Clinton's world.