Bush Apologizes For Hospital Conditions

Posted on March 31, 2007
Filed Under America |

At least he’s taking responsibility:

WASHINGTON - President Bush apologized to troops face to face on Friday for shoddy conditions they have endured at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He shook the artificial hand of a lieutenant and cradled a newborn whose daddy is nursing his remaining, severely injured leg back to health.

“The problems at Walter Reed were caused by bureaucratic and administrative failures,” Bush said during a nearly three-hour visit to the medical center — his first since reports surfaced of shabby conditions for veterans in outpatient housing. “The system failed you and it failed our troops, and we’re going to fix it.”

News that war veterans were not getting adequate care stunned the public, outraged Capitol Hill and forced three high-level Pentagon officials to step down. Bush met with soldiers once housed in Building 18, who endured moldy walls, rodents and other problems that went unchecked until reported by the media.

So can we officially declare that the cartoon below is pure nonsensical garbage or is it still too early for that?

Comments

6 Responses to “Bush Apologizes For Hospital Conditions”

  1. cee on March 31st, 2007 3:55 pm

    6 or so weeks after the revelations… i read this a few weeks ago, it was on the money then it still is now. check it out:

    http://joeleonardi.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/where-is-the-outrage/

    cee

  2. Finnpundit on April 1st, 2007 4:24 pm

    Even with the failure of the government-run veteran’s system, there are still people who insist the government should provide a national health care system.

  3. Roman Kalik on April 1st, 2007 6:25 pm

    The US government failed its veterans. That is something few men who ever wore army green are likely to forget. Forgive a particular case, maybe, but forget? Hardly.

    And national health care is slow murder, and nothing short of it. It gets the job done if you can survive for over half a year before your *tests* are up. Treatment? That’s for next year.

  4. Maureen on April 3rd, 2007 7:09 pm

    I’m an American who has been very familiar with the state of veteran’s hospitals and I can tell you that it is way beyond Walter Reed, and Way beyond Bush. Vet hospitals have been in deplorable shape for decades, under both democrat and republican administrations.

    Don’t be fooled by the sophistry in our US media–Dems are just as guilty as anyone else. The best thing about the USA is it’s ordinary, not-rich, not-powerful people. Our politicians generally suck on both sides of the isle(democrats and repubs).

  5. Roman Kalik on April 3rd, 2007 11:53 pm

    Maureen, no surprise there. But Bush had a chance to fix it, or to even bother knowing about it. And as a president who decided upon sending the troops to war, he had a duty to take care of them when they came back. That he is but the recentmost failure is no excuse for him.

    It *is* a reason for the Dems to shut up, mind. Their idiots were no better. And possibly even worse.

  6. Finnpundit on April 5th, 2007 4:27 am

    But Bush had a chance to fix it, or to even bother knowing about it. And as a president who decided upon sending the troops to war, he had a duty to take care of them when they came back.

    I agree that it is the president’s job, as the head of the administration, to know about it, but I think that most people are unaware of the same pattern in two-term American presidencies: by (roughly) the sixth year, the public (Dem and Rep) grows tired of the one sitting in the White House, even if they won election to a second term. It happened under Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and now Bush.

    The key here is to discern what is really amiss with an administration’s policy, as opposed to what is really simply a cause of a democracy’s natural fickleness. I’m not entirely convinced that these problems that are now surfacing are not just a product of the public’s ennui.

    Of course, good leaders should respond to those kinds of changes. The prime example, I think, is Winston Churchill, who lost a democratic election as soon as a war was over, but got re-elected later, when people realized he did have something in terms of enduring, outstanding leadership.

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