Category: Health Care

Slimy Dishonest Scumbag Todd Purdum Compares ObamaCare to Brown v. Board

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Ace of Spades dismantles the preposterous nonsense whereby Todd S. Purdum tries to blame Republicans for the failure of ObamaCare.

It’s kook stuff: “calculated sabotage by Republicans,” a phrase redolent of Stalin-era Soviet propaganda blaming problems on “saboteurs,” and then totally throwing down the rhetorical gauntlet:

The GOP faithful then kept up their crusade past the president’s reelection, in a pattern of “massive resistance” not seen since the Southern states’ defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Whoa! Hold on there, Sparky! The Department of Bad Analogies just issued a recall on that sentence, which is part of an emerging pattern of Wrong History as Political Journalism. First it was James Fallows invoking John C. Calhoun, then it was Colbert King invoking Jefferson Davis, and now Purdum goes all Brown v. Board on us?

Instead of trying to gin up invidious racially charged comparisons like this, maybe liberals could actually enlighten their readers by making the apt comparison to FDR’s National Recovery Administration, an unworkable anti-competitive price-fixing scheme that was eventually struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

But Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States isn’t taught in schools the way Brown v. Board is taught, and our nation’s press corps is full of clever half-educated liberal fools like Todd Purdum who can’t distinguish between their partisan prejudices and objective fact.

By the way, you may be wondering, who is this Todd Purdum guy?

The name rang a bell, and he only joined Politico three months ago, but he had a long, rich history of liberal bias before then. Of course, he’s an Ivy Leaguer (Princeton, ’82) and worked for the New York Times, becoming White House correspondent in the 1990s before marrying Bill Clinton’s first press secretary, Dee Dee Myers. Purdum left the Times in 2005 and joined Vanity Fair as national editor, where he established a reputation for blatant unfairness. His savage attack on Hillary in 2008 inspired Bill Clinton to denounce Purdum:

“He’s a really dishonest reporter,” Clinton said during the tirade that followed, according to Fowler’s report. “And I haven’t read (the article). There’s just five or six blatant lies in there. But he’s a real slimy guy.”
Reminded that Purdum is married to his former press secretary Dee Dee Myers, Clinton responded in part: “That’s all right — he’s still a scumbag.” The former president added: “He’s just a dishonest guy — can’t help it.”
Clinton went on to observe: “It’s all politics. It’s all about the bias of the media for Obama. Don’t think anything about it. But I’m telling ya, all it’s doing is driving her supporters further and further away — because they know exactly what it is — this has been the most rigged coverage in modern history — and the guy ought to be ashamed of himself. But he has no shame. It isn’t the first dishonest piece he’s written about me or her.”

The Slimy Dishonest Scumbag Todd Purdum — hey, just quoting a Democrat because I’m all about bipartisanship, see? — went on to publish one of the most hateful Palin Derangement Syndrome outbursts ever to make print, notorious for this paragraph:

More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy” — and thought it fit her perfectly.

Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, she’s a paragon of humility compared to our thin-skinned self-regarding Narcissist-in-Chief.

As I’ve previously noted, however, in career fields where liberalism enjoys hegemonic dominance — including academia, the entertainment industry and especially journalism — being a liberal is an acceptable substitute for any virtue. In such environments, if a coward wishes to be praised for “courage” or a liar wants to be lauded for his “honesty,” he need merely be a dutiful outspoken liberal, and he will be showered with encomiums. Just as the wretched drunken womanizer Ted Kennedy was awarded laurels as a heroic champion of women’s rights — Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment — so it was that Politico‘s hiring of the utterly despicable Todd Purdum was celebrated in July by editor-in-chief John Harris:

Todd S. Purdum, who over 30 years in journalism has fashioned a deserved reputation as one of the most perceptive reporters and elegant stylists of his generation, is coming to POLITICO in September.  . . .
Todd will maintain a strong affiliation with Vanity Fair. As a contributing editor, he will continue to write longer profiles and historical essays on its pages. POLITICO will be his home for the wealth of more in-the-moment reporting and observations that are in Todd’s head and his notebook at any time. Todd, Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, and I all believe this will be a winning arrangement from every perspective.

It’s magic: Any mendacious scumbag can be transformed into a “perceptive reporter” and an “elegant stylist,” merely by being liberal.

 

 


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.

 

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?

 

Sound The Collision Alarm! Yet Another Lefty Switcheroo Is CBDR!

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by Smitty

For those not ‘in the know’, CBDR means “Constant Bearing, Decreasing Range”. Say that on the bridge of a ship underway, and you have everyone’s attention.

Robert Reich over at the Huffington Compost: “The Democrat’s Version of Health Insurance Would Have Been Cheaper, Simpler, and More Popular (So Why Did We Enact the Republican Version and Why Are They So Upset?)”

In February 1974, Republican President Richard Nixon proposed, in essence, today’s Affordable Care Act. Under Nixon’s plan all but the smallest employers would provide insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, an expanded Medicaid-type program would insure the poor, and subsidies would be provided to low-income individuals and small employers. Sound familiar?

As stabbed in the heart by none other than the Oldsmobile Admiral himself, Ted Kennedy, the Lyin’ of the Senate:

Nixon strongly believed that a national health insurance plan was crucial. In that 1974 State of the Union Address, he declared that “the time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American”. Actually, this statement is not surprising considering Nixon’s personal history of poverty and family illness. (He lost two brothers to tuberculosis, the illnesses dealing a heavy blow to the family finances, and in fact proposed a national health insurance bill when he arrived in Congress in 1947.) Nixon sounds very much like Obama, when he said in 1974 that he did not want to see “other families of modest means…driven …to bankruptcy because of the inability to handle medical care problems of a catastrophic type”.
However, the “liberal” opposition, spearheaded by the lobbying of the then-powerful AFL-CIO and United Autowokers, proved too much for an administration spending significant energy on defending against the rising tide of the Watergate affair.
Kennedy did begin secret negotiations with the Nixon White House, but he fell prey to the pressures of the unions, as labor leaders wished for a single-payor system which they felt would be rather easily achieved once a Democrat was elected to the presidency in the face of the Watergate scandal. Many felt that Kennedy would be that Democrat, and therefore he had no business throwing a lifeline to the sinking Nixon administration.

But that’s old politics, and I only bring this up to show that Nixon was more Progressive than anything else, as well as help Reich make sure he doesn’t forget crucial details.

It’s also funny that, for a party that likes to pat itself on the back about being pragmatic, they totally blew the opportunity to get the capstone of FDR’s foul Second Bill of Rights in place while they could.

But the real, contemporary point here, Mr. Reich, is that ObamaCare IS a Democrat turd. How many Republican votes were for it? Zip, zero, nada, zilch. In either chamber of Congress.

The Democrats, and their little sycophants, own this. They were all prepared to bask in the glory, set up a permanent Democrat majority, and pulverize the Republican party. But ObamaCare is a river of lies, with headwaters in hell. It was falsely conceived, falsely legislated, falsely adjudicated, falsely reported, falsely coded, and, unexpectedly, enjoyed a false rollout. The nicest thing I have to say about ObamaCare is that albatross was an appropriate flavor choice:
But under no circumstances should the pure, 100% Democrat ownership of this debacle be allowed to slip from the public consciousness.

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.