Shineski shut out of "loop"???

And there it is.

Both sides of Congress screamed and hollered in feigned self-righteous indignation and got Shinseki to resign. Yah! Wohoo! Hooray!

And now they can claim they actually did something, you know, without actually doing a goddamned thing. No actual investigation - we've investigated Benghazi how many times now? All outraged over the deaths of 4 Americans in a war zone, but countless American Vets have died waiting for care in their own hospitals and not even a committee level review from Congress. Nothing. No review of procedure. No revision of process. No change in regulation. No expansion of services. No increase in funding. No attempt to address the real problem identified in the Inspector Generals report. Nope. They got rid of Shinseki, that'll fix it!

Leading veterans groups are lashing out against Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) for an open letter he wrote scolding the organizations for not doing more to condemn Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki.

Calling Burr’s letter a “monumental cheap shot” and a “disgusting ambush style of politics,” Veterans of Foreign Wars’ commander in chief William A. Thien and John E. Hamilton, the adjutant general, said on Monday that Burr should be ashamed of his conduct.

Paralyzed Veterans of America National President Bill Lawson and Executive Director Homer Townsend Jr. wrote that Burr represents “the worst of politics in this country.” And the Disabled American Veterans wrote that it is clear Burr would rather have heard them call for Shinseki to resign than to hear how to actually fix the VA.

It's not just social media, it's 24/7 connectivity, it's the 24-hour news cycle, it's all the information of the world ported directly into our brains in full real-time streaming broadband. We're like crack addicts, we need a larger and larger jolt to get high.

The noise floor is set so high nowadays that you often have to shout pretty damned loud and pretty damned hysterically indeed to get noticed - at least by the lazy and dullwitted lowest common denominator who naturally gravitate towards sensationalism and hyperbole. If the dog ISN'T driving a giant robot tank full of killer bees and stomping school children into pudding, if the story isn't the MOST AMAZING THING, no one is likely to notice - at least not in enough volume to turn a profit. Which is why, I suspect, that the pundits and the media resort to comparing everything under the sun to Nazis and TV preachers spend an extraordinary amount time proclaiming the imminent arrival of the anti-christ and why a significant fraction of our population fully expects to be herded into FEMA Death Camps of Death run by giant killer robots, because if it's NOT the end of the world as we know it, well, you know, whatever, man, what-ever.