Chris Matthews: No One I Know Ever Said ObamaCare Could Be Overturned

Paging Pauline Kael.

Karl at the Green Room has a good primer on the number of prominent liberals living wholly in The Cocoon.

If liberals not in the media choose to live in The Cocoon, that's their right. But shouldn't media-types who are supposed to inform the public have a passing acquaintance with the arguments of the right?

How can you keep your audience informed if you yourself are deliberately misinformed, by voluntary personal choice?

John Podhoretz writes about the psychic shock when The Cocoon falls apart.

They’re so convinced of their own correctness — and so determined to believe conservatives are either a) corrupt, b) stupid or c) deluded — that they find themselves repeatedly astonished to discover conservatives are in fact capable of a) advancing and defending their own powerful arguments, b) effectively countering weak liberal arguments and c) exposing the soft underbelly of liberal self-satisfaction as they do so.

That’s what happened this week. There appears to be no question in the mind of anyone who read the transcripts or listened to the oral arguments that the conservative lawyers and justices made mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s advocates and the liberal members of the court.

This came as a startling shock to the liberals who write about the court.

Jeffrey Toobin's job is not, supposedly, to offer his own opinions. It's to offer analysis of the court's actual jurisprudence (not just the Jurisprudence of the Left-- that is, Constitutional law in which only liberal opinions are recognized or considered law) and grounded speculation/prediction about the behavior of the court.

For the former, you need to read conservative legal opinions, and not just ignore them as Uncouth. For the latter, you also need to read these opinions, plus briefs in an upcoming case, and make unbiased judgments about what the court will do.

Not what you, as a Man of the Left, wish it to do. But what it probably will do.

But that was too much for Jeffrey Toobin, and Linda Greenhouse, and Dahlia Lithwick, and the rest of the People of Cocoon, so they just spun a cozy home of silk and dreams.

They were surprised by these arguments. Podhoretz says They should not have been surprised.

No one was hiding these arguments. They have been readily-available in court records for two years.

Nor was anyone hiding the two courts' decisions agreeing with these arguments.

Liberals just chose to ignore relevant information about the world they live in, and then call themselves sophisticated for having chosen to be stupider than God made them.

Their arguments were featured in briefs already submitted to the court and available for general inspection. And they’d already been given weight by the two judicial opinions against the constitutionality of ObamaCare issued by federal district court judges — one by Henry Hudson in Virginia in December 2010, the other by Roger Vinson in Florida in January 2011.

The briefs exist. The decisions exist. You can Google them. They are strong, fluent, well-reasoned and legitimate. They take ObamaCare seriously, and they argue against it at the highest possible level.

Thus, the strength of the conservative arguments only came as a surprise to Toobin, Greenhouse and others because they evidently spent two years putting their fingers in their ears and singing, “La la la, I’m not listening” whenever the conservative argument was being advanced.

And they're "experts," of course.

Experts who refuse to do their actual job, choosing instead to be merely cheerleaders for the leftist ideology.

You can ask me two different questions. Who do I want to win in 2012, and who do I expect to win in 2012.

These are entirely different questions. The first one is easy. The second is hard and I change my mind on it every week.

If I, a non-"expert" like these Sages of the Press, can readily recognize that these are two different questions, and that only a Tiny Little Baby imagines "what do I want" and "what I think will happen" are the exact same question, why cannot they manage to do the same?

You know what this week was for liberals?

Yeah you do.

ADVISORY: CHANGE IN SHIT JUST GOT REAL STATUS

NEW STATUS: R E A L

posted by Ace at 06:39 PM

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