You want to shake up an entrenched bureaucracy in the Veterans Administration, folks?  Start sending your congressional representatives and senators letters, and tell them to demand the right leader from the Obama administration to investigate this corrupt agency.  Not a liberal sock puppet like Eric Shinseki, but a genuine, hard-nosed, ass-kicking, take-no-prisoners general like the retired four-star Marine, James “Mad Dog” Mattis.

General Mattis has in the past demonstrated his confidence in his abilities to accomplish the mission most notably with this quote:

I don’t lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.

Here’s another quote.  The general was referencing Islamic terrorists, but his words could be just as well applied to the bureaucrats in the Veterans Administration:

The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some a******s in the world that just need to be shot.

When you consider that secret VA waiting lists resulted in the possibly preventable if treated deaths of American veterans, just so VA higher-ups could collect quota bonuses, you just may agree with the general that there are some such people in the world who just need to be shot.

But the Mattis quote that I believe would warm the hearts of neglected veterans and their families is this:

Demonstrate to the world there is ‘No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy’ than a U.S. Marine.

And folks, if that Marine needs to be kicking ass of the enemy of our veterans – a sorry bureaucracy that has been allowed to become the antithesis of its original mission of caring for America’s veterans – then so be it.

When it comes to clearing out the treacherous self-serving bureaucrat rats who have exploited their offices to deny our veterans their entitled services while enriching themselves, we need a “Mad Dog” who will go into that system and clean it out from top to bottom, ruthlessly and with no remorse.

I’m an old combat infantryman from the Vietnam War whose ears have been ringing since 1966, when I was exposed to all kinds of explosions going off around my ears.  When I sought help at the VA facility in San Antonio twenty-some years ago, I was summarily dismissed by a rather hostile minority female VA employee, who made it quite clear that I was not welcome there regardless of my actual ground combat service.  I’ve never been back.

I told my wife that this should be the epitaph carved into my headstone at the national cemetery for veterans: “Well his ears finally quit ringing.”

Shame, shame, shame, on a totally corrupt Veterans Administration that callously left this old veteran, and who knows how many others, to suffer the consequences of their combat experiences.

General Mattis, your old soldiers and Marines need you to get back in the trenches and really kick some bureaucratic ass in this agency that has failed its mission.  We veterans know that if these bureaucrats were uniformed, we’d court-martial the lot of them and stand the worst of them against the wall.