VA official

VA official

Here’s the latest bull$#%! dropped on the Aurora hospital construction by those paragons of bureaucratic excellence, the VA.

It’s a shutdown, cause that’s what government does best when they’re throwing a hissy fit and no one is paying attention — sort of like a child holding his breath to get his way.

The head honcho, VA Secretary Robert McDonald, is pulling the strings himself on this puppet show, telling Congress that unless more money is authorized by Memorial Day, it’s bye-bye construction workers.

So the game plan is: Give the GOP-led Congress one week over a freaking holiday to pass a law, OR, shut the whole thing down and blame Republicans.

Adding insult to injury, the VA now says they wanted to build a nursing home and PTSD center at the unfunded hospital, neither of which had even been authorized by Congress.

Congress never even heard about this bright new idea until a couple of months ago.

See? We told you it was bull$#%!.

We can see the headline now: “GOP Congress Shuts Down VA Hospital and Old Folks Home.”

Here’s how the clustercluck occurred:

The VA told Congress in March they needed more than $800,000 to build the hospital, and planned to take the money from funding set aside by Congress to correct last year’s patient backlog scandals that resulted in the deaths of numerous veterans.

Congress said no freaking way, you idiots, then sent them to bed without dinner.

The VA didn’t bother with a counter-offer, then out-of-the-blue announced yesterday they found $150 million just lying around somewhere, Oh, and they have to spend that money next week in order to avoid a shutdown of their own making.

The pièce de résistance — that money can’t be spent without congressional approval. And, as we all know, Congress works so darn well under threat of a shutdown.