Digging Out From Under the Rubble of Obama's Catastrophic "Success"

Peggy Noonan's column is worth reading in full.

Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess. It is also utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and government administration.

Its biggest proponent in Congress, the Democratic speaker of the House, literally said—blithely, mindlessly, but in a way forthcomingly—that we have to pass the bill to find out what's in it. It is a cliché to note this. But really, Nancy Pelosi's statement was a historic admission that she was fighting hard for something she herself didn't understand, but she had every confidence regulators and bureaucratic interpreters would tell her in time what she'd done. This is how we make laws now.

Her comments alarmed congressional Republicans but inspired Democrats, who for the next three years would carry on like blithering idiots making believe they'd read the bill and understood its implications. They were later taken aback by complaints from their constituents.

The White House, on the other hand, seems to have understood what the bill would do, and lied in a way so specific it showed they knew exactly what to spin and how. "If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan, period." "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period." That of course was the president, misrepresenting the facts of his signature legislative effort. That was historic, too. If you liked your doctor, your plan, your network, your coverage, your deductible you could not keep it. Your existing policy had to pass muster with the administration, which would fight to the death to ensure that 60-year-old women have pediatric dental coverage.

The leaders of our government have not felt, throughout the process, that they had any responsibility to be honest and forthcoming about the major aspects of the program, from its exact nature to its exact cost. We are not being told the cost of anything—all those ads, all the consultants and computer work, even the cost of the essential program itself.

Ben Domenech is skeptical that Obamacare's managing to sign up 7 million people (for some definitions of "sign up") when it was originally projected to sign up (as in "really sign up") double that is somehow a major success.

Have you heard? Obamacare survived! It got to that magic number it was looking for to make everything right!

Or rather, it got to half the number the Congressional Budget Office predicted it would get to after the Supreme Court ruling.

Either way, it’s totally okay now and is absolutely going to survive and be the law of the land forever and ever despite anything those nasty opponents of the law tell you.

...

This is why talk of the 7 million figure as salvation from supporters of the law is completely bonkers: all you did was meet your lowered policy expectations.

By failing so catastrophically early, their recent failure is, by comparison, a relative success.

So here is what Obama and his supporters now call a "success:"

Obama asked for a primetime network shot to announce his Big Victory, and the red diaper babies of the networks actually refused him.

I'm not sure if this is just about the bottom line, or if the networks (and especially their news divisions) are feeling a bit used for repeatedly bending over for Obama whenever he sexts them a booty call, but otherwise treating them like the Town Pumps they are.

And maybe they've noticed that Obama's people always claim to only know the numbers they're interested in promoting, while claiming to have no idea about the ones that might not be so attractive.

posted by Ace at 03:42 PM

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