Category: Barack Obama

Totalitarian Means to Totalitarian Ends

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David Harsanyi:

You can’t keep your insurance if you like it under Obamacare because you’re too ignorant to understand what’s good for you.
That’s the argument we’ve been hearing from a lot of folks on the left; an argument that pivots from “common good” to soft authoritarianism.

Doug at Daily Gator:

Obamacare is about coercion not choice . . . It was forced on Americans even though a majority opposed it. . . . Obamacare is about crushing the choice we have in health care.

The failure to understand what’s going on is disturbing. It is as if no one in the media ever read Atlas Shrugged or The Road to Serfdom.

What’s happening is an “end justify the means” argument that is, as usual with such argument, fundamentally flawed. If the end you seek to achieve is genuinely beneficial, you should be able to persuade people to achieve it via honest, peaceful and lawful means.

The very fact that people resort to dishonest, coercive or unlawful means to achieve an end should cause us to question whether the end they seek to achieve is actually beneficial, or whether there is some ulterior motive — a hidden agenda — to their policy.

The minute you say “ulterior motive” or “hidden agenda,” it sounds like you’re proposing a paranoid conspiracy theory, which isn’t what I mean at all. Rather, I believe the basic motive of Democrat support for ObamaCare was not a matter of policy, but politics. The arguments made for it were dishonest because they were motivated by politics, rather than by actual concern about health care.

When people are willing to lie persistently and routinely to achieve their objectives, you can be sure their objectives are not good.

Some people hate freedom. Some people hate America.

We call these people “Democrats.” Don’t vote for them, ever.

 

The Old ‘Ongoing Investigation’ Trick Is Being Used to Hide Benghazi Truth

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The Lonely Conservative:

The cover up continues. The State Department and the DOJ are blocking Congress from having access to survivors of the Benghazi attack. They blame it on the ongoing investigation.

This is a very familiar method of truth-suppression in D.C.: “I can’t comment because of the ongoing investigation.” Understand that when the federal government is investigating the federal government, denying information to Congress is a de facto cover-up.

Meanwhile, Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times reports:

Masked from public view, two of the U.S. military’s elite special operations commandos have been awarded medals for bravery for a mission that further undercuts the Obama administration’s original story about the Benghazi tragedy. . . .
[S]ources directly familiar with the attack tell The Washington Times that a unit of eight special operators — mostly Delta Force and Green Beret members — were in Tripoli the night of the attack, on a counterterrorism mission that involved capturing weapons and wanted terrorists from the streets and helping train Libyan forces.
When word of the Benghazi attack surfaced, two members of that military unit volunteered to be dispatched along with five private security contractors on a hastily arranged flight from Tripoli to rescue Americans in danger, the sources said, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because the special operations forces’ existence inside Libya was secret.
The two special operations forces arrived in time to engage in the final, ferocious firefight between the terrorists and Americans holed up in the CIA annex near the ill-fated diplomatic mission in Benghazi, the sources added.
The two special operators were awarded medals for valor for helping repel a complex attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stephens, another American diplomat and two former Navy SEALs, but spared many more potential casualties.

So here we have Green Berets getting medals for their bravery in a battle that the administration refuses to tell Congress anything about, because “ongoing investigation.” Next we’ll be told that Obama can’t say anything about Benghazi, because “national security.”

Remember the administration repeatedly claimed that Benghazi was a “spontaneous demonstration” inspired by a YouTube video.

They’re Democrats. Their first instinct is always to lie.

Now? “Phony scandal!” And whatever happened to Nakoula?

 

ObamaCare: The Liar-in-Chief Throws Kathleen Sebelius to the Wolves

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today displayed the classic combination of dishonesty and entitled arrogance we have come to expect from the monstrously selfish people who insist that we call them “public servants,” although Sebelius could scarcely conceal her contempt for the public she claims to serve.

Not a single Republican voted for ObamaCare, and the responsibility for its massive failure therefore lies entirely with Democrats. Therefore, the task assigned to Sebelius (and to Democrats on the committee) was to convey the impression that the failure is not actually failure, that contrary to all evidence, ObamaCare is successful, and that it is only the mean-spiritedness of Republicans that is the problem.

Even as Sebelius was compelled to embarrass herself in defense of President Obama’s indefensible failure, however, the president is busy trying to make her his designated scapegoat:

An agitated President Obama has expressed frustration to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the faulty ObamaCare enrollment website.
A visibly annoyed Obama behind closed doors has made clear to Sebelius that it’s her responsibility to fix what has become an unwanted second-term blunder, according to senior administration officials.
White House officials say the strong words from Obama don’t mean Sebelius is necessarily in the doghouse but that she’s responsible for fixing the problem.
In the words of one senior administration official, “She’s in a tough spot. She’s on the hook.”

These petulant children deserve each other.

 

The Liar-in-Chief

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How bad is the failure of ObamaCare? Bad enough that MSNBC’s Morning Joe can’t ignore it, says Pete Da Tech Guy. While they cannot ignore it, however, the liberal media must find some explanation that makes this failure look less predictable than it was, and how to make President Obama’s deliberate lies look like innocent errors:

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.” . . .

So all those promises — that rates would go down and that people could keep their existing plans — were deliberate lies. And all the conservatives who tried to warn that ObamaCare was doomed to failure were correct. But the liars were all Democrats, and the people who told the truth were all Republicans, so there will be no apologies and no repentance. Instead, they’ll just come up with new lies.

 


Obvious Truths of the Obama Age

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Professor Glenn Reynolds, who knows a thing or two about effective Internet sites, discusses the HealthCare.gov debacle:

So the Obamacare website doesn’t work, and nobody knows when it’ll be fixed. Administration officials are pointing toward late November, but they’ve had more than three years to work on it. In about the same amount of time after John F. Kennedy’s “we choose to go to the moon” speech, we’d already put people into orbit and brought them safely to earth. It was obviously the signature effort of the Obama administration, but it was a flop. Forget launching to the moon; we can’t even launch a website now. What does that tell us?

It tells us that Obama was elected because a majority of voters are stupid, but we already knew that. Next question, Professor?

 

Obama Claims Ignorance of Failure Despite IG’s Clear Warnings in August

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Evidently, the administration has chosen Kathleen Sebellius as the designated scapegoat for the ObamaCare fiasco:

President Barack Obama didn’t know of problems with the Affordable Care Act’s website — despite insurance companies’ complaints and the site’s crashing during a test run — until after its now well-documented abysmal launch, the nation’s health chief told CNN on Tuesday.
In an exclusive interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked when the President first learned about the considerable issues with the Obamacare website. Sebelius responded that it was in “the first couple of days” after the site went live October 1.
“But not before that?” Gupta followed up.
To which Sebelius replied, “No, sir.”

Let’s call this what it is: A deliberate lie. Jeff Dunetz points out that concerns with the ObamaCare site made headlines in August:

Back in August the Health and Human Services Inspector General issued a report dealing concerns that the Obamacare website was months behind in testing. . . .
As reported by Reuters on August 6th:
. . . “They’ve removed their margin for error,” said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the non-profit Center for Democracy & Technology. “There is huge pressure to get (the exchanges) up and running on time, but if there is a security incident they are done. It would be a complete disaster from a PR viewpoint.”

Read the whole thing and be sure to hit Jeff’s tip jar. The entire ethos of Obama is about blame-shifting to avoid responsibility.

 

Finally, Obama Creates Jobs — Hiring People to Fix Busted ObamaCare Site!

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They spent $400 million to launch the stupid thing, and now they’re hiring contractors in a desperate attempt to make it work.

And by “work,” of course, I mean, destroy our economy.

 

Hope and Change and Expensive Failure

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
— Barack Obama, June 3, 2008

This was the moment when our ObamaCare began not working:

Major insurers, state health-care officials and Democratic allies repeatedly warned the Obama administration in recent months that the new federal health-insurance exchange had significant problems, according to people familiar with the conversations.

Did somebody say, “not working”?

WE PAID $634 MILLION FOR THE OBAMACARE
SITES AND ALL WE GOT WAS THIS LOUSY 404

As if no one possibly could have foreseen this:

When experts told the Obama Administration it was a fact the website was not ready, did they take seriously this advisement?
Nope! They simply said there was no cause for alarm; the strange gods of the left would just sort everything out.
Oddly enough, they didn’t.

Democrats insisted on shutting down the government in order to implement this expensive failure, while Republicans were willing to become less popular than chlamydia in order to spare Americans from the pain of re-learning that Democrat policies don’t work.

Democrats haven’t turned the whole country into Detroit yet.

We must be patient . . .