Paul Krugman gets it

In his editorial, "Valor and Squalor," Paul Krugman states the obvious: that the scandal at Walter Reed Hospital is just a small part of a much greater scandal--the Bush administration's destruction of veterans' health care in general. Krugman compares the privatizing (at a greater cost to taxpayers) and destruction of the veterans' system with the similar destruction of FEMA.

Says Krugman:

Yet even now it’s not clear whether the public will be told the full story, which is that the horrors of Walter Reed’s outpatient unit are no aberration. For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

But the public has been told the full story, over and over--just not by the mainstream media. But the facts have been clear and available for several years now, and Americans who cannot be bothered to see them have no right to get all shocked over what has happened not only to veterans' health care programs, but all veterans' programs.