Have You Noticed? Everything bad ‘Sky-Rockets’ Under Obama

The VA scandal continues to get horrifically worse every day and the president’s inappropriate response to it, thus far, is causing  people to wonder  how he can be so clueless and incompetent. Some are blaming it on the government leviathan:

The VA and ObamaCare look quite symptomatic of Big Government to me.  It’s all about cover-ups, cooking the books, wasting huge piles of taxpayer money – the VA is an under-funded agency that still managed to blow millions on plump administrator bonuses and expensive office renovations – and shifting the blame.  You get the same thing from every quarter of Big Government.

Echoes of every Obama-era scandal, plus quite a few that came before him, can be seen in the VA mess, from the White House’s hilariously clumsy attempt to pretend it held someone accountable and fired him, to GSA-style frittering away of taxpayer cash on luxuries, to the attempted crackdowns on whistleblowers.  Part of the reason this scandal is catching fire is that even the famed Low Information Voters have the nagging feeling they’ve seen all this before.

Indeed, Obama is following the same pattern of crisis management he’s used for all of his scandals. Ignore all the warnings until they can no longer be ignored because the scandal/controversy/clusterfark has hit the MSM. Then express stunned outrage. Promise accountability after a full investigation – but make clear, no action can be taken until the investigation is complete. (this can take years.) In the meantime, crack down on whistleblowers,  and ignore inquiries from Congress, saying there is an ongoing investigation. Six months later, when most Americans have moved on to other things, call it a “phony scandal.” Stand back and watch as your minions use the internet to mock fellow Americans who refuse to let it go.

Ace says Obama’s incompetence is due to the “the priorities of a bureaucracy” —  which “left to its own devices, will do what any self-interested guild will do, which is focus entirely on its own interests and focus little or not at all on the public interest.”

…not that bullshit you see in its mission statement, which is for public consumption, bait for the rubes — are very similar to the biological imperatives of living organism.

In order of priority, the biological imperatives of the Bureaucratic Collective Life Form are as follows:

1. Protect our phony-baloney jobs.

All organisms’ highest priority is survival. And fold into this other self-interested survival-like goals: raises, comforts.

There’s an important sub-priority here:

1. a. Protect the Phony-Baloney Jobs of Our Fellow Government Workers.

2. Do as little work as possible.

3. Expand turf, power, and responsibilities.

But every president deals with the bureaucracy. Why is everything so much worse under Obama?

Peter Wehner of Commentary argues that this all boils down to Obama’s gross  incompetence.

The emerging narrative of Barack Obama, the one that actually comports to reality, is that he is a rare political talent but a disaster when it comes to actually governing. The list of his failures is nothing short of staggering, from shovel-ready jobs that weren’t so shovel ready to the failures of healthcare.gov to the VA debacle.

***

The White House response to everything from the VA and IRS scandals to the seizure of AP phone records by the Department of Justice is that it learned about them from press reports. More and more Mr. Obama speaks as if he’s a passive actor, a bystander in his own administration, an MSNBC commentator speaking about events he has no real control over. We saw that earlier today, when the president, in trying to address the public’s growing outrage at what’s happening at the VA, insisted he “will not stand for it” and “will not tolerate” what he has stood for and tolerated for almost six years. His anger at what’s happening to our veterans seems to have coincided with the political damage it is now causing him.

We’ve learned the hard way that Mr. Obama’s skill sets are far more oriented toward community organizing than they are to governing. On every front, he is overmatched by events. It’s painful to watch a man who is so obviously in over his head. And more and more Americans are suffering because of it.

Wehner has put his finger on it. Obama not only has no clue about governing. He’s not even interested in it. He’s an Alinsky-trained community organizer and he came to Washington to community organize  – to agitate for more government power  – but not actually govern.. .

I found a news story from March of 2013, that concluded that the VA’s ability to quickly provide service-related benefits had virtually collapsed under Barack Obama and the VA was actively concealing the truth about that from congress and the public.

Internal VA documents, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting and authenticated by the agency, reveal that delays newly returning veterans face before receiving disability compensation and other benefits are far longer than the agency has publicly acknowledged. The documents also offer insight into some of the reasons for those delays.

The agency tracks and widely reports the average wait time: 273 days. But the internal data indicates that veterans filing their first claim, including those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, wait nearly two months longer, between 316 and 327 days. Those filing for the first time in America’s major population centers wait up to twice as long – 642 days in New York, 619 days in Los Angeles and 542 days in Chicago.

The ranks of veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits grew from 11,000 in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, to 245,000 in December – an increase of more than 2,000 percent.

As a candidate, Obama had promised to revamp a “broken VA bureaucracy,” but the documents reveal that many of the administration’s attempts – including efforts to boost staffing and computerize claims processing – have fallen apart in the implementation. Calls to the White House press office were not returned.

 ***

In Washington, U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he was not surprised that the VA’s internal documents painted a much gloomier picture than the agency’s public pronouncements.

“One of the biggest oversight challenges we’ve encountered is just getting VA to engage in an honest conversation,” Miller said.

Rep Miller went on to write Obama a letter in May of 2013, alerting him to these problems at the VA, telling the president that the problems were dire and  required his immediate attention. Obama ignored the letter. 

Of course – what was Obama doing last May? He was embroiled in 3 new scandals – the IRS, AP/James Rosen and NSA – with Benghazi simmering below the surface, and he was employing the same crisis management techniques he’d used before, and is using now. It’s all so gut-wrenchingly familiar.

In his speech, Wednesday, Obama claimed that the VA was a long festering mess when he came in, but he had been working hard to fix the problems.

But the VA’s internal documents tell a different story.

They show that the average wait time for veterans filing disability claims fell by more than a third under President George W. Bush, even as more than 320,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans filed disability claims.

The documents show delays escalated only after Obama took office and have more than doubled since, as 455,000 more returning veterans filed their claims.

Have you noticed that everything seems to “sky-rocket” under Obama?  Everything that hurts people, weakens the economy, and undermines the culture has sky-rocketed. Not good things. Only bad things.

Unless you consider government dependency to be a good thing: Government programs are sky-rocketing: Tracfone (Obama-phone) usage, foodstamp usage, medicaid expansion, welfare expansion, and the number of people on disability — all have sky-rocketed.

Insurance rates,  unemployment, racial division, non enforcement of  immigration laws, government workers, government corruption, “public sector millionaires”,  homelessness,  tuition costs, inflation, taxes, debt, and intolerance for people who dare to voice non-liberal views – all have sky-rocketed.

As a result of all this, distrust in government has (you guessed it) sky-rocketed.

Name one good thing that has sky-rocketed under Obama.

Everything this president does when he’s not golfing, fund-raising or on vacation,  is geared toward his endless campaign of  political agitation and division.  Traditional enemies of America – like Communist and Islamic tyrants are not his enemies. If the enemies of his enemies are his friends – they are in fact Obama’s allies.

His enemies are those who threatens his great passion – big government. That’s why we’ve seen him sic the bureaucracy on them. No, I don’t think he’s clueless about what is going on in the Leviathan. He either enables it through neglect because he really doesn’t care: the VA scandal.

Or he is knowingly enables it: the IRS scandal.

Incompetence and bureaucracy can only explain so much failure. In Obama’s case – there is also malice.

Megyn Kelly had on Rep. Duncan Hunter, (CA-R) and Pete  Hegseth of Concerned Veterans of Americans to talk about the national disgrace.

SEE ALSO:

JP Attitude: Obama milestones

The Washington Examiner:‘Impeach Obama’ movement gains speed with new book on ‘lawlessness’

I really don’t know if the country can take another two and a half years of this guy.

Linked by Doug Ross, thanks!

*Editors Note: I’ve added a few more “sky-rockets” since this post was first published. If you can think of more, please add them in the comment section.

UPDATE:

Only one “good” thing I could think of that is sky-rocketing – gun sales.

But not for a good reason. People are afraid their freedoms are going to be curtailed and watching Obama’s mismanagement of the economy. People are also becoming preppers in record numbers – another sign of the Obama times. People are waiting for the STHTF.