Senator Obama missed 51% of Senate Veterans Affairs Committee meetings

Hell of job, Barky! Yesterday Obama reminded the the no longer docile press that as a senator he served on the Veterans Affairs Committee as if that gave him some special insight into the ongoing scandal that has seen veterans quite literally dying for want of proper care. It may have if he had bother to show up. What he neglected to tell the press was that he missed 19 of the 37 meetings the committee held during the 109th Congress which ran from 2005 to 2007 long before he officially began his campaign for the presidency. By my calculation he missed 51% of the meetings. A more partisan blog might suggest that the President has been a major part of the problem for 9 years. Senators who do not care enough about veterans to even learn about their problems when they are paid handsomely to do so are no better than the hospital administrators who mismanage the VA.
Even though he served on the committee of jurisdiction the first black senator form Illinois first learned of the abysmal condition of Walter Reid Army hospital from, where else, the newspaper. I quote from a 2007 post by Susan Hu at the Daily Koz;

Sen. Obama admitted he didn’t know anything about problems at Walter Reed before the WaPo‘s shattering series. And Sen. Obama has missed KEY votes for disabled veterans — including a measure that would create “common disability ratings.”

Seven years later he still only knows what he reads in the newspaper? What a zero!
But Hu was just warming up!

But Sen. Obama has continually skipped hearings on the veterans budget. Chairman Craig opened a hearing Obama missed and said, “we will consider today … legislation touching on veterans insurance, housing, burial, compensation, and employee benefits.” Obama also missed all four committee hearings in a series that focused on the President’s proposed 2007 budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Ranking Senator Akaka noted during the hearings that “we must learn a lesson from last year’s budget crisis and do everything we can to ensure that veterans and their family members have access to health care and benefits they have earned.”

Now the administration stumbles and stalls, seemingly breathlessly awaiting the Inspector General’s latest report as if reading one more time of the inadequacies, mistakes and malfeasance endemic in the VA will at last yield the final piece to the puzzle. Obama was a lazy senator and is now a lazy to the point of malfeasance President. He is the problem.