One can only marvel at the myriad ways in which the patrician media misdirect public attention and otherwise mislead civic awareness.

A recent article ("Veterans Scandal Risks Engulfing Obama") in The Financial Times seems a prime example.

Amid contrived outrage over Benghazi and the improving fortunes of its healthcare reform," the article's very first sentence proclaims, "the Obama administration could be facing a genuine scandal about its treatment of military veterans that has the potential to attract broad political condemnation of its competence.

What?

A "genuine" scandal in which Obama almost certainly isn't personally culpable could "engulf" him, but two "nongenuine" scandals in which Obama was certainly culpable personally are inconsequential because one of the latter (Benghazi) is "contrived outrage" and the other (ObamaCare) has such "improving fortunes" as to make it now nihil ad rem?

Not only does this opening editorial gambit sweep aside two very genuine Obama scandals, but it also transforms Obama into a blameless martyr relative to the vast federal undertakings over which the Office of the President nominally presides (call it the Torment of Obama or The Political Christ Crucifixus).  Moreover, it further minimizes, by association, another genuine Obama scandal: the Internal Revenue Service's "social welfare organization" vendetta against Obama's conservative opposition.  You know, the IRS scandal was just some obscure 501(c)(4) bureaucrats in the Cincinnati and El Monte offices acting on their own impaired initiative (or, in the case of the Veterans Administration scandal, some equally obscure bureaucrats at some hospital somewhere in Arizona).

By The Financial Times' light, there apparently isn't really much more here than some Veterans Administration hospital that "has long suffered from delays and a dysfunctional bureaucracy."

But the truly disingenuous thing about this article is that it pillories the incompetence of meretricious government medical care in an Arizona veterans' hospital while at the same time sweeping aside ObamaCare's almost certain potential to ultimately become for the nation's health care in general what a veterans' hospital has already apparently become for the health care of Arizona veterans in particular.  That is, instead of "as many as 40 [veteran] patients ... [dying] after being placed on a hidden waiting list that could last for up to a year, while officials at the [Arizona veterans'] hospital shredded documents and faked evidence to make it seem as if waiting times were under control," it may well one day be hundreds or even thousands of times that many in the population at large undergoing a similar fate at the hands of a nationalized health care system converting vast sums of what should be free-market health care enterprise into the incompetence of government medicine.

The entire prospect is reminiscent of last century's Soviet society, in which bureaucrats pretended to centrally plan the economy and the economy pretended to produce what the bureaucrats centrally planned.  The result was, of course, a society unable to produce almost anything its practitioners wanted or needed.  The whole historically discredited notion amounts to nothing more than state theft of society and the dissipation of its productive resources as the means of enriching and empowering an oligarchy.

One can only wonder whether Vladimir Lenin has risen from his Eastern tomb and ascended into the Western academy, or perhaps if the West's J-school graduates have become so Sovietized that their commercial viability hinges on toeing the state's party line.