Posted on 11/20/2013 5:07:55 PM PST by Kaslin
One staple in Barack Obama's excuse-making diet is that when bad things happen, he doesn't know anything. He's employed the ignorance defense repeatedly regarding the raging five-alarm fire that is the Obamacare roll-out. During his press conference last week, Obama stated that he wasn't "directly informed" about the myriad tech headaches, then cited his own intelligence as proof of his ignorance:
I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.
Just yesterday, he kept up the "who, me?" routine, brushing off his smoldering crater of failure as a mere underestimation of difficulties:
Obama: "I think that we probably underestimated the complexities..." — Rick Klein (@rickklein) November 19, 2013
But the evidence tells a starkly different story. Initial concerns about Obamacare's readiness first began to simmer in the program's infancy, back in 2010. Administration experts and allies began publicly raising red flags by early 2013, roughly coinciding with an independent review commissioned by the White House. Its findings, which were kept private, were damning:
The Obama administration brought in a private consulting team to independently assesshow the federal online health insurance enrollment system was developing, according to a newly disclosed document, and in late March received a clear warning that its Oct. 1 launch was fraught with risks. The analysis by McKinsey & Co. foreshadowed many of the problems that have dogged HealthCare.gov since its rollout, including the facts that the call-in centers would not work properly if the online system was malfunctioning and that insufficient testing would make it difficult to fix problems after the launch.
Months later, Obamacare's IT chief warned of the "plane crash" that awaited the implementation process. Internal end-to-end testing -- to the extent that it existed at all -- failed miserably only a few days before the October 1 launch date. And in stunning Congressional testimony just yesterday, Henry Chao admitted that up to 40 percent of Obamacare's web structure still isn't built. At every step of the process, however, high-ranking administration officials routinely asserted that everything was on track and on schedule to meet various deadlines. Indeed, White House spokesman Jay Carney is unfathomably still parroting that line. As this freeway car wreck piled up, with grave warnings and admonitions flying for months, are we seriously to believe that Obama didn't know about any of it? Fox News' Ed Henry offered Carney a chance to revise the president's Sergeant Schultz posture at yesterday's press briefing, resulting in this weasely but telling response:
White House press secretary Jay Carney said President Obama was told in April about a review of HealthCare.gov's problems, but Carney declined to specify the details of the briefing. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Carney said, "The president received regular briefings on various aspects of implementing the [health care law], including the recommendations from this review and the steps that [agencies] had taken to address those recommendations." Carney did not say what details of the assessment the president learned. The report included warnings that the call-in centers would not work properly if the online system was malfunctioning, and that insufficient testing would make it difficult to fix problems after the launch.
He may or may not be stupid, but he is lazy.
What didn’t he know and when didn’t he know it?
Remember how we were lectured by liberals, about how Bush was a bad manager, a bad administrator, did not keep up with details, didn’t connect dots and all that???
Can you imagine the reaction if Bush or a Republican president were rolling out some new program, and this was the result???
Between watching b’ball and playing golf, there’s only so many hours in the day you know....
By the end of the year, he will deny that Obamacare was his idea.
New name: RobertsCare.
and arrogant
Either Sebelius lied to Obama at the Cabinet meeting, or she didn't and Obama is lying now. But he's on the record saying that he was informed of something less than a month before the roll-out.
-PJ
“I don’t think I’m stoopit enough....”
Sure yuh are...
“I don’t think I’m stoopit enough....”
Come on, give yourself some credit...
No reason for modesty.
Or it was described to him without a direct statement that it was all broken; or that he didn’t test it directly himself.
I actually tend to believe it.
He is the face and voice for the committee at the other end of the teleprompter. His job is to sell the agenda. It isn't his job to develop it or bother with the nuts and bolts of it.
They call him when they need him to go face the public.
Kind of reminds me of the Head in C. S. Lewis’ novel “That Hideous Strength.”
Basically....you just described the “empty suit-guy”.
That character from Being There, comes to mind. You just kept thinking he was brilliant, in those empty phrases that were repeated over and over, and in the end...you were amazed at just how empty he really was.
The sad thing at this point, is that you are stuck with here for three more years. How we pass this period away...particularly with a Republican senate in control by January of 2015...will be a curious thing. I can only imagine his speeches wretchening up four notches, and more talk about he can’t do his job....for eight straight years. This starts to sound like some “Ernest” movie from the 1980s.
In fact, the picture you posted looks a little like Al Franken. Al could do it after he loses his current job next year.
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