As of today, one third of all adult Americans have been personally affected by Obamacare, either directly, through extended family, or within three degrees of their circle of friends. This goes way beyond simply reading a story on Drudge or hearing about a local family on Channel 6.
What you must know then, is that there is no media power on earth, no propaganda machine, that can mute or dilute this simple reality. There are no amount of promises or lies (with Obama these are the same) that can quell the anger that these Americans feel. And at least 40% more know they will eventually feel. Some will know real loss of medical treatments, or the doctor of their choice, while many more of the middle class will only lose their annual summer vacation or a whole host of other things they used to spend 16% of their annual income on instead of increased premiums (taxes). But that’s only if things go according to the original plan, which is still only a distant rumor. So anxiety and stress are going up in American families accordingly…the inability to plan even a single year ahead. An already unhappy America who is not on Obama’s “most favored” list is more unhappy.
And this pain affects rank-and-file Democrats as equally as any other victim category. Even public employees, who are largely immune from Obamacare’s pain (though apparently their widows won’t be) they are nonetheless painfully aware of it via friends and family not in government service, and except for the “I got mine, so let ’em eat cake” swagger of the classless lower-end government bureaucrat, most feel a little embarrassment about it. The days of prancing around bragging about your great government benefits package to other naked men in the locker room has taken a nasty turn. These days there is no quicker way to become hated among working men and women than to rub their noses in your good fortune…that everyone knows they’re paying for it.
Which brings us to the questions: Just how stupid are the Obama administration’s healthcare designers, or, how stupid do they think we are?
It was argued from the very beginning, even before the October rollout was such a fiasco, that Obamacare was designed to fail…under the theory that it would lead more quickly to single payer, which even Obama admitted back in 2008, that was their end game all along.
Maybe, maybe not. But even if that were the case, what we have observed in the six months since has proven to be much more than mere a cynical attempt to design a flawed plan, then blame its failure on greedy insurance companies. For what we have seen has been a display of such indescribable incompetence IN EVERY ASPECT AND PHASE of Obamacare’s planning, rollout and execution, that the administration, from a lying Obama to a deer-in-the-headlights Sibelius & Staff, to a craven George Costanza Carney, has proven itself so stupid even the most ardent Obamacare believer can’t afford to allow this government to be in charge of prosecuting a bigger, better, single-payer system to replace it.
Consider the existential corner the administration has painted itself into here. Even if they wanted Obamacare to fail they still had to be able to hold onto their much-advertised “competency cards” with the American people so they could rush in to rescue the program once it was sabotaged by evil insurance companies. That pretext is no longer available to Obama. Now, in order to get back any of those lost competency cards they must now try to fix some parts of Obamacare that they designed to fail in the first place (irony of ironies). Only they can’t. They don’t know how. They are clueless, because, in short, not one of them has a clue as to how to actually go about making any aspect of this plan work. It is totally beyond their skill set, and quite frankly, their conceptual perception of how things can be made to work. If the world had waited on them to invent the bow knot for shoelaces we’d all be wearing loafers.
To the extent this sort of educated stupidity has always defined this sector of our society (1930’s socialists were at least real-world pragmatists), and they have always sort of known this about themselves (insecurity is a major couch-theme for the modern Left) they have no other choice but try to lie their way through this rough patch…often to themselves, as we see daily with the media, who often lie to each other as a form of pep rally. They try to use media propaganda and phonied-up government statistics to make voters believe things are much better than they really are against an overwhelming deck of stacked facts which, as I led with, every American knows personally or will shortly know.
By now they are all considered to be liars, but its an indictment they’d prefer to live with instead of “incompetent.” Besides, it is the only card they have to play, if for no other reason than to delude themselves that Obamacare’s ultimate failure will be someone else’s fault (another deep-seated niche of the Left’s psyche).
You’ve seen this symptom before in individuals, I can even name a couple at RedState. They will move earth and heaven just to not have to stand in front of the mirror and admit that this screw-up was their fault. Obamacare is no longer about Obamacare, to the extent that it ever was. There is nothing about what we are seeing today in the media that has anything to do with Obamacare’s stated noble purposes, i.e. insuring America’s uninsured, or delivering low-cost (and qualitatively cheaper) medical care. They are in total psychological survival mode, and this thinking permeates all their actions. Like Clinton, they cannot see past the end of their, errrr…egos.
Our only fear, as always, is that some high-minded group of craven Republicans will reach down and offer them a hand-up as they are drowning…in exchange for a 9 AM tee time and an attaboy at WAPO.
