A lot of politicians are suddenly upset now that it seems some veterans have been waiting up to 115 days to get an appointment with a doctor at the VA. Of course, it took me only 86 days to secure an appointment with my dermatologist at a public clinic, so I can understand that no one is worried about my healthcare.

And that’s probably a good thing.

I’m not convinced that having politicians worry about you is akin to having them do anything for you. For instance, in the VA brouhaha — which is truly disgraceful, by the way, in a nonpartisan sort of way — we have Republicans and now some Democrats joining in the shouts of outrage to have VA chief Gen. Eric Shinseki resign. After all, somebody

has to be blamed for that mess. And how did we get into that mess anyway? It’s not hard to figure out that if we hadn’t gone into two undeclared wars (Iraq and Afghanistan, in case you forgot), we wouldn’t have millions of veterans coming home from battlefields and crowding VA offices all over the country. And by the way, earn extra points for historical memory if you can recall that it was a Republican president who got us into those messes under somewhat false pretenses (at least in Iraq). And yes, Democrats did join Republicans in supporting the undeclared wars, but few lawmakers in either party had access to the reams of misinformation the Bush administration used to win support for the overseas misadventures.

And there’s another small historical tidbit worth remembering, too. In the last 12 months, Democrats in Congress have proposed a bill funding significant upgrades for VA facilities. And what happened to those bills? Well, a lot of those Republicans who have been criticizing the VA loudest are the same ones who voted down the VA proposal earlier. In other words, it’s hard not to to see them as sharing some measure of responsibility for that VA mess now, a mess they see most easily disposed of by demanding that Mr. Shinseki resign.

I don’t know if he ought to resign or not. But I do strongly believe that fixing the problems in the VA go a whole lot deeper than firing its chief administrator. Getting rid of Mr. Shinseki might make some people feel better, but I wonder if it would make any of our wounded warriors better? I would hope Congress might dig a little deeper into all of this.