Eric Shinseki resigned today as a result of the unfolding scandal within the Department of Veterans Affairs. This event became inevitable the moment that Shinseki sat down before the Veterans Affairs Committee of the United States Senate. It became clear almost immediately that Shinseki didn't have two votes in that room; Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal who, despite Shinseki's departure, shows no sign of getting this teeth out of this story any time soon, made it quite plain that he wasn't buying anything Shinseki was selling. And thus ends the honorable career of a soldier who was correct about the lies behind the greatest policy disaster of our times, about the essential criminality of the people who launched the invasion of Iraq, but whose primary failures as an administrator were his inability to oversee the people in his department who were directly trying to cope with the flood of casualties that resulted from all of those soldiers that most of official Washington told Eric Shinseki they would never need to create a democratic paradise in Iraq. Irony is the rail on which Shinseki now has been ridden out of town.

One of my first beats in this business was covering the Vietnam veterans movement as they tried to get the various veterans organizations, including the VA, to pay attention to things like PTSD and the longterm effects of Agent Orange. They spoke with contempt of the World War II veterans who staffed those organizations, scoffing at what they called "the Class of '45" for the way those veterans looked down on them because they had "lost" their war. The people most willing to help were the scattered remnants of the antiwar movement -- like the people who ran the GI coffeehouses and, I guess, people like us in the alternative press. I recall vividly the general anger at the Reagan Administration when it proposed to close down the psychiatric outreach centers that they had fought so hard to include under the VA system. Those centers served some 52,000 veterans of the war Reagan called "a noble cause." That was my rude introduction to the vast gap between the political rhetoric about America's veterans and how they actually are treated. "I got a hundred stories," my best source within the Vietnam vet community told me when we first met. "Which one do you want?" Two years later, he took his M-1 into a closet and only the rifle came out.

It is no surprise at all that Shinseki's resignation is not enough for the people who perceive a political advantage to be derived from what's been going on in the VA hospital system. The inexcusable John Boehner made sure we knew that his departure was essentially meaningless. Republican members of the United States Senate who, back in February, refused to allow a vote on a comprehensive veterans health package that took more than a year to craft, swifly went into high dudgeon, where they met John McCain, who lives there permanently now, like Goofy at Disney World. Marco Rubio, the rake-stepping lightweight from Florida, chimed right in:

"Secretary Shinseki's resignation is just the first step in addressing the institutional neglect of veterans at the VA, but that alone won't solve the problem," he said. "The systemic mismanagement will continue unless we bring reform to the VA and hold all those who are responsible accountable."

Rubio is pumping himself up for introducing a Senate bill to make it easier to fire people in the VA, as though that means he's committed to improving the health-care system for veterans, instead of being the same ambitious opportunist who's been making a dunce of himself on every issue from climate change to this one since his attempt to be reasonable on immigration got lit on fire by his own party. Rubio, of course, joined with all the other Republicans in blocking the bill last February, which got him quite a recent hiding from Bernie Sanders.

The problem with the VA system right now is that, for an entire decade, we sent people into the meat grinder of a war the architects of which conducted completely off the books. They kept it off the books used to keep the federal budget, and they did all they could to keep it off the books of the nation's moral conscience as well. They lied and they cooked their estimates on everything far worse than did the likely criminals who fudged the documentation at the hospital in Phoenix. The whole country was awash in the moral equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, all glistening and shiny and bedecked in bunting. Meanwhile, the physical, financial, and moral cost of it all built up and built up until the scheme got bigger and more complicated and, ultimately, it became untenable. And now, the people who launched it in the first place are tut-tutting about what happened when the whole thing finally collapsed. The one thing to remember about a Ponzi scheme is that the people who get in first get paid off. They got their war. They profited from the double-entry bookkeeping they kept on the national conscience and, now, there's a Democratic president, and a whole lot of injured veterans, who end up holding the bag.

There was no question that Shinseki had to go. That was clear from the moment he sat down before the committee. Now, there will be a lot of stuff and nonsense about reforming the whole system -- privatizing it, so that it more closely resembles the wonderful health-care system we had before the Kenyan Usurper cast his socialist spells upon the republic -- and there will be a great deal of posturing from both sides about the "debt" we owe to our "wounded warriors." But, as we all know, you can't solve any problem by "just throwing money at it." The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which has been completely mad since before Reagan closed all those counseling centers, pointed that out to us just today. But, ultimately, Bernie Sanders is completely correct about it all. If you don't want to pay all the real costs of taking the nation to war, then don't take it to war at all. It is, after all, criminal naivete to be shocked by the inevitable.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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