Posted on 11/01/2013 7:24:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, "He meant to do that."
And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. "Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He's smart, deft, elegant and subtle," proclaimed then-New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It's an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish -- because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody every likes to admit they were suckered.
But the fiction of Obama as a man three steps ahead has taken a terrible beating if you have eyes to see it. The budget cuts under the so-called sequester are the law of the land because Obama thought he was outthinking his opponents when he gave budget-cutters budget cuts. Now he's stuck railing against his own idea. His allegedly revolutionary decision to turn his presidential campaign into a personal political organization independent from the Democratic Party has turned out to be the most expensive way ever to generate smarmy and ineffectual e-mail spam. And, if you want to believe that Obama's goal in Syria all along was to elevate Vladimir Putin and alienate all of our Middle East allies, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, to make Bashar al-Assad our strategic partner while he finds more politically correct ways to slaughter his own people, well, that's nice.
Or consider Obama's only clear-cut political victory since his re-election. Republican demands were a bit of a moving target, but basically the GOP wanted either an all-out repeal of Obamacare or, as a fallback, a one-year delay of the individual mandate. By the end, they would have taken even less.
But Obama wouldn't consider it. Instead, he played hardball with everything from national park closures to, temporarily at least, denying death benefits to military families. As the debt ceiling loomed, the GOP relented. Conventional wisdom says Obama won, and I basically agree with the conventional wisdom.
Or at least I did. There's something those of us scoring that bout didn't know: The president desperately, urgently and indisputably needed to delay the rollout of Obamacare.
This is not a matter open to fair-minded dispute, never mind partisan disagreement. Even the president and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius agree that the rollout of Obamacare has been a "debacle" (Sebelius' word). Revelations in the press and in congressional hearings show that the administration was warned prior to both the shutdown and the Obamacare debut that Healthcare.gov was as ready to go live as a kid's make-believe refrigerator-box submarine was ready to explore the ocean depths.
If Obama were a chess master -- or even a fairly adept checkers novice -- he would have known that when you're not ready to do something incredibly important, it's best to buy time. He could have traded a delay (Three months? Six months?) for some major budget concessions, maybe even lifting the sequester. Perhaps his base wouldn't have liked it, but he could have easily spun the compromise as a necessity given how irrational and "extreme" the GOP was being.
Publicly he'd say he was paying a ransom to "kidnappers" and "hostage takers." He'd denounce Republicans for delaying precious insurance coverage for sick kids and frail oldsters just to score partisan and ideological points.
But privately, ah privately, the master strategist would be stroking his proverbial white cat -- or, in reality, his hypoallergenic black dog -- while breathing a sigh of relief that he bought himself some time to fix his woefully mangled healthcare reform.
Obviously he wouldn't want to delay Obamacare. But that decision was out of his hands due to his administration's incompetence. The only choice before him was whether he would get the blame for the delay or if the Republicans would.
Why Obama didn't do this and why it didn't occur to him are good questions. Hubris obviously played a role, as it does in nearly everything this White House does. But the best answer is he didn't know how terrible things were over at HHS. In other words, the chess master didn't even know what pieces he had on the board, which is usually not something we associate with chess masters. It's something we associate with people who don't even know how to play the game
Actually up till the October 1st rollout he used Obamacare effectively to his advantage, just giving out popular freebees his election year accusing Republicans of wanting to take them away.
The early rollout of the birth control employer mandate 2012 lured many Republicans into his trap, they just jumped right into it.
This is a different story. This is trying to make something huge and flawed work.
I thought the Republicans were throwing him a lifeline by demanding repeal or especially delay of ObamaCare. Maybe Ted Cruz is the chess master, knowing that Obama would not yield, and that he, and the “Tea Party” would get credit for trying to at least avert the disaster.
"The White House has lived in fear of this moment, and the administration's biggest problem is that it has no quick bandage for this bleed. Healthcare.gov is weeks or months from being fixed—if it is fixable at all. Enrollment numbers will thus remain dismal. The insurance horror stories are only beginning. The congressional hearings, too.
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THIS IS THE PART I LIKE BEST: After vowing not to cave, Democrats who unanimously voted for O/Care are frantically running for cover----caving in every way, shape and form.
The story of O/Cares unrivaled disaster dominates.
FOR EXAMPLE Hundreds of thousands of Americans' health-insurance policies canceled. Companies dumping coverage and cutting employees' hours. Premiums skyrocketing.
Democratic consultants were once advising power-mad Democrats that their best O/Care strategy for 2014 was to "own" the law.
Now, as the O/Care horror story unfolds, advisors are being told what to do w/ that cockamamie strategy.
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Obama's the First One to claim credit.......and never accepts responsibility....... and his infamous Rose Garden speech WRT the failed system was not exactly the Obamacare mea culpa some had predicted......liberal Wash/Po blogger Ezra Klein tweeted, “....seems weirdly similar to a speech Obama would’ve given if the exchanges were working fine."
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Now, you have to ask yourself----why did "His Greatness" heave himself into the Rose Garden to speak to his subjects?
I refer now to "Rush's Theorem": Oboohoo endlessly golfs and vacays b/c he can't appear to be governing. B/c he would have to take responsibility when things go wrong.
Precisely what's happened here----he's hog-tied like a squealing pig to Obamacare---w/ all it's flops and failures. So he's forced to address his subjects to reassure them he's as great as he told them he is.
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Obama promised to reveal the number of enrollees in his
signature healthcare plan which Obama promised would
“fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
"I'm working on it right now."
Interesting.
Still, though, haven’t heard much from the insurance companies.
They should be railing against this - should have been. And they’re not explaining their innocence in a clear way.
They’re at least going to be a major casualty. I don’t see us going back to the old system. And that could be good. But they are not explaining to their customers, as far as I can see, how a basic catastrophic plan is unavailable, and that the penalties for not having any insurance are going to increase by a LOT next year.
Ted Cruz, of course, was right. Anyone who’s worke d for a big system or government knows that you can’t repeal something like this, certainly not if you couldn’t even just say no to it.
Yes it most certainly does prove he is a chess master.
His goal is to collapse the current system via chaos, and that is exactly what he is doing.
Those who are not chess masters are those who do not understand that he is playing chess and they are playing nothing.
The generations that preceded us fought against the people Americans are now voting for.
He WANTS it to fail. By FAILING it will dump more and more people OUT of existing health plans and they, together with the newly minted American citizen-illegals will generate the political pressure for socialized medicine - what he REALLY wants.
Its all about “triangulation”.
You don’t have to be a master of chess when your opponents don’t understand the game.
The chess term is “Potzer”.
“haven’t heard much from the insurance companies”
Seems the Obama Administration has had a talk with them saying ‘Nice little company you have here. It’d be a shame if something would happen to it. You WOULD like to participate in the Final Solution, er ah, the Health Care Market wouldn’t you?’
The quota baby has no intelligence, mediocre education, and the morals of a senator.
There really are not sufficient four letter words to describe the utter worthlessness of this miserable piece of excrement.
Problem is, not only do his opponents not understand the game, or even know what game is being played, he is in fact a chess master, and he is playing out a strategy that some don’t see, won’t see, refuse to believe is occurring or are actually even aiding him.
He is proceeding via strategic plan. That is quite clear.
Obama has threatened them to keep quiet (just imagine the IRS and DOJ hell he could rain down on them).
But, we might have asked, does he hold fast to the principles of liberty stated so "elegant(ly)" by the Author of our Declaration of Independence and President of the U. S., Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 Inaugural Address--wherein Jefferson laid out what might be considered to be "qualifications" for the American presidency:
(Excerpt, "Our Ageless Constitution," p. xiv, reformatted)
"Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation;- entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them;
= enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man;
- acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter
—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?
- Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
- This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
"About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you,
- it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations.
- Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political;
- peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none;
- the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies;
- the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;
- a jealous care of the right of election by the people—a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided;
- absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism;
- a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them;
- the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened;
- the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith;
- encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid;
- the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason;
- freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.
These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety."
Now, does Herbert's standard of "smart, deft, and elegant" qualify one--anyone-- to lead us to "retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety"?
Patzer comes from the German word verpatzen and is translated to mess up, spoil
“If you have eyes to see it.....”. Well, isn't that the main problem? We have so many citizens who do not have eyes to see it, from hardcore leftists, to dyed-in-the wool Democrats and core groups who buy everything they are told despite the evidence to the contrary, to low information voters who don't know and don't care but want to freebies to keep on coming. These people without eyes to see outnumber the ones who do.
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