President Dumb*ss discovers what every conservative knows:
“We have a great sense this week again of the [Obama administration] making it up as they go along, as kind of government by teenagers,” George Will said yesterday on the Fox News All-Star Panel, but actually, that’s an insult to teenagers. All of us learn by age 17 that government is a non-functioning Leviathan mess, during our first visit to the local branch of the DMV, as Charles Krauthammer writes in his latest column. All of us, that is, except the president.
Krauthammer notes that at age 52, Mr. Obama has made a breakthrough discovery: “We have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly,” he told Chris Matthewsduring his recent vanity interview with NBC. As Krauthammer responsd, that’s a rather “interesting discovery to makeafterhaving consigned the vast universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to the tender mercies of the agency bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service.”
................
The paradox of this presidency is that this most passive bystander president is at the same time the most ideologically ambitious in decades. The sweep and scope of his health-care legislation alone are unprecedented. He’s spent billions of tax dollars attempting to create, by fiat and ex nihilo, a new green economy. His (failed) cap-and-trade bill would have given him regulatory control of the energy economy.He wants universal preschool and has just announced his unwavering commitment to slaying the dragon of economic inequality, which, like the poor, has always been with us.
Obama’s discovery that government bureaucracies don’t do things very well creates a breathtaking disconnect between his transformative ambitions and his detachment from the job itself. How does his Olympian vision coexist with the lassitude of his actual governance, a passivity that verges on absenteeism?
What bridges that gap is rhetoric. Barack Obama is a master rhetorician. It’s allowed him to move crowds, rise inexorably, and twice win the most glittering prize of all. Rhetoric has changed his reality. For Obama, it can change the country’s. Hope and change, after all, is a rhetorical device. Of the kind Obama has always imagined can move mountains.
That’s why his reaction to the Obamacare website’s crash-on-takeoff is so telling. His remedy? A cross-country campaign-style speaking tour. As if rhetoric could repeal that reality.
And speaking of the R-Word, “The Left’s Reality Problem” is explored by Rich Lowry of National Review, in the otherwise-leftwing and usually unreality-based Politico:
.......
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.
...............
Those who tried to warn the country what ObamaCare would actually do had to endure almost 5 years of ridicule, mocking and name calling for trying to sound the alarm. They were called racists and far worse. And now it’s evident they were right all along.
Progressives have done more to destroy their carefully crafted illusion of competency with this ObamaCare trainwreck than the GOP establishment ever did.
Progressives like Obama can only lobby for more power to be given to them based on promises about what they will competently do with it. In just a short amount of time,Obama & Co. have revealed themselves to not only be abject liars, but also completely incompetent blunderers.
The blowback for this should reach spectacular proportions. The Democratic Party can lie and spin all they want, say whatever they think will get them a momentary advantage. But millions of people over the next year will clearly see their experiences on health insurance are not matching the Democratic leadership’s increasingly desperate rhetoric.
..............
Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, [Unexpectedly! -- Ed]thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.
.....................
New York leftists put the blinders on long ago. Only now are they tentatively opening their eyes:
It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people — liberal, concerned with social justice — who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.
It is an uncomfortable position for many members of the creative classes to be in.
“We are the Obama people,” said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans. What to do has become a hot topic on Facebook and at dinner parties frequented by her fellow writers and artists.
“I’m for it,” she said. “But what is the reality of it?”
...........
pjmedia.com
|
