Meet the New Holiday Hijacking, Same as the Old Holiday Hijacking

Oh, dude. People will be talking about health insurance. Trust me on that.

Rich Lowry turns to my favorite topic in Politico Magazine: "The Left's Reality Problem."

The left continues to believe that Magic Words will change solid reality. All you need is to get people to Believe -- remember, the Right sabotaged Obamacare by not Believing hard enough -- and that Wish-Magic will change the world.

The “reality-based community” isn’t what it used to be. Progressives spent much of the George W. Bush years deriding the right for disdaining reality itself and waging an associated “war on science,” such was its purported hostility to evidence....

The left happily adopted the appellation “reality-based community.” (You can still find T-shirts and bumper stickers online.) It congratulated itself on its factual rigor and nominated for president a man whose initial appeal was based, in part, on his exquisite sense of nuance. Message: We’re more empirically grounded and intellectually supple than you.

The erstwhile reality-based community is having a tough time of it lately, though. Most infamously, Obamacare is foundering on the flagrant deceptions used to sell it, exposed every day by the workings of the law in reality.

Many liberals still don’t want to acknowledge the rather straightforward fact that if you mandate more insurance benefits in the so-called Affordable Care Act, insurance will cost more. QED. You might be able to cushion the cost increase for some people with subsidies, but not for everyone, and the underlying insurance is still more—not less—expensive.

...

The deceptions around Obamacare are central—both to the law and to the left’s advocacy generally. So much of liberal policy is based on Affordable Care Act-style thinking, which involves hiding and never acknowledging the costs of a given policy; giving legislation a warm and fuzzy name on the assumption that its results will live up to that appellation; and moralistic attacks on people who resist as fools and ogres.

You don't need a god to be religious hysteric; you only need dogma and a devil. And the left is proving that more and more each day.

thanks to @tmi3rd and @charlescwcooke.

posted by Ace at 01:55 PM

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