CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: You put them all together, and you have a crisis of competence. This administration had a lot of ideological opponents, including me, many others, but it was mostly on their goals, radical, expanding the government, intruding into people's lives. Then you get to a point where you get three factors, as you say, the most important underlying all of it is the economy.
The recession lasted 18 months. The so-called recovery has been on for five years. We now have a quarter of contraction. You compare it with the Reagan recovery, the average for the six years after his recession was a growth of over 4%. Here, it is between 1% and 2%. So we have high unemployment, chronic sort of discontent, and that underlies everything.
You add onto that the fiasco of Obamacare, self-inflicted. They can't even put a web site together for half-a-billion-dollars and then you add the VA crisis, which isn't only incompetence, but a kind of banality, a whiff of corruption and there's a moral component.
People can understand abusing the IRS for political [reasons] and all of that, but these are veterans. These are people everybody wants to honor and take care of. So add them all together and Shinseki is a dead man. What you heard today was an invitation for a resignation. And I think he's gone by the weekend.
