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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend....
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To: Sully- who wrote (31228)8/11/2009 12:27:28 PM
From: Sully-   of 35834
 
'Miss Information'*

By Jonah Goldberg
The Corner

Byron has a good column on Linda Douglass and her new role as White House flack. One point he raises, that has been bugging me since I first saw her "rebuttal" to the YouTube video showing Obama endorsing single payer, is just how non-responsive Douglass's video is. She makes no attempt whatsoever to prove her assertion that Obama's comments were out of context or irrelevant.

And that's what's sort of interesting to me. Her rebuttal technique is truly Obamaesque, in that she does what Obama himself does: Quotes Obama as proof that Obama is always right. As has been noted many times around here, Obama has this tic where he says "As I've said before" or "As I said at the time" or "I've said repeatedly" etc etc. to make a point. Sometimes Obama is being less than truthful when he says he's said X before. And sometimes the fact that he said X before in no way bolsters the case he's actuall trying to make.

Douglass does the same thing. She simply quotes some boilerplate lines from Obama saying you can keep your own health insurance (which is not exactly true) and apparently that's supposed to obliterate any claim that Obama favors single payer, even though there's extensive evidence that he does favor single payer (he said it many times in the past when he wasn't trying to sell this specific health care bill) and there's serious concern that the public plan approach would lead, over time, to single payer. But rather than substantively deal with any of that, Douglass accuses people of "disinformation" and simply invokes the divine authority of Obama to rebut any criticism.

* The title "Miss Information" comes from one of the commenters to Byron's column.

Update: From a reader:

<<< Mr. Goldberg-

I wholeheartedly agree with your comments on Linda Douglass' non-rebuttal rebuttal.

Imagine if the left had some clip of Bush before the invasion of Iraq saying he did not believe that country possessed WMD, and then some White House spokesman tried to defend Bush by countering with other statements he had made to the contrary. The outcry would have been deafening.

Best regards, >>>

corner.nationalreview.com
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