Twisting Begich’s Response to VA Scandal
• Posted on June 4, 2014
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Crossroads GPS misuses a quote from Sen. Mark Begich and conflates two separate management problems at the Veterans Administration to insinuate in a TV ad that Begich doesn’t take the current VA scandal seriously.
The conservative group attempts to link Begich – who sits on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee – to news reports that some veterans died while waiting for VA medical appointments. The ad quotes Begich as saying, “If there’s a problem, they need to fix it,” and then asks incredulously, “if there is a problem?” to suggest that Begich doesn’t believe there is one. But three weeks before he made that remark, Begich condemned reports of mismanagement at the VA as a “disgrace” and called for an immediate investigation and a national policy to allow veterans to get care at non-VA health facilities.
The ad also suggests that Begich should have known about the current problems at the VA because “four years ago the VA inspector general failed the Anchorage VA office in 13 of 14 areas.” But that report concerned the processing of disability claims and was unrelated to the scandal. And Begich did press former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to fix the claims backlog at the time.
http://www.factcheck.org/2014/06/twisting-begichs-response-to-va-scandal/
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