Today, I'd like to single out two Congresscritters (and their staffs) for special recognition - Representative Henry Waxman (D-Ca), Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Representative John Tierney (D-Ma), who chairs that committee's national security subcommittee.
Today, the national security subcommittee is holding hearings on the Walter Reed fiasco. This is a good thing. The military health care situation right now is insane, and hearings are an excellent first step in figuring out what needs to be done to fix it. Unfortunately, one or another of these two schmucks (or one of their staffers) decided that it would look better for the news cameras if the hearings about Walter Reed were held at the hospital.
The preparations for Congressional hearings are hardly a low-stress, low-workload process, and it's not like the folks at Walter Reed were loaded up with free time in the first place. Way to go, genius boys. Look, hearings are good, but next time it might make everyone's life easier if you have them in your own nice, comfortable hearing room instead of trying to make the point that you are so concerned that you've taken the effort to drive the two miles to the scene of the problems.
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Nope. This was a good use of Walter Reed staff time, as a way to keep this story visible in the MSM and to attract more reports of the problems. The goal is to get people to fix it, which takes some PR.
I really don't think the amount of attention paid to the hearings was caused by the location. I think it came from the nature of the hearings. Had the subcommittee met in a hearing room on Capitol Hill, the effect would almost certainly have been the same - but the Walter Reed staffers could have been focusing their attention on fixing the problems, not on prettying up the post and making sure that the hearing room was ready.
But, hey, look at the precedent it sets: What if we could get Bush to hold public hearings on Iraq in Baghdad? Now, there's a jolly thought
- JS