Next Time a Levee Breaks, Be a Veteran

Can't help but notice the alacrity with which the President and the Secretary of Defense have responded to the scandal at building 18 of Walter Reed Hospital. Within days of the publication of the Washington Post's series on the appalling conditions in the outpatient facility, the Secretary of the Army had been forced to resign, two heads of the facility had been fired in two days, and an indpendent bipartisan commission was about to be appointed to look into the matter, alongside investigations by committees in both houses of Congress. By contrast, of course, when Army Corps-designed and -built levees and floodwalls breached in dozens of places and resulted in the flooding of an American city, resulting in thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands rendered homeless, we saw: stonewalling by the Corps and silence from the President and Congress. There have been several independent forensic engineering studies of the disaster, and their own 600-page mea cupla, but no in-depth hearings on the disaster (as opposed to the response) in Congress, and no independent commission. It's hard to know the exact number of wounded vets affected by the deplorable state of Building 18, but it appears to be in the high hundreds or, at most, the low thousands. The difference in the two sets of responses speaks volumes about the difference in the political clout of veterans and New Orleanians.