The reason that Obama did not immediately fire the hapless General Eric Shinseki was not just that the latter had earned iconic liberal status for taking on the Iraq War from the inside. More likely, Obama simply did not find the horrendous bureaucratic mess all that alarming. It was a military problem; let the military sorts handle it. If the virtual destruction of the VA system is a scandal that has come and gone in less than a week, was it a scandal at all? Or a transformation in the way we envision the VA?