Posted on 11/01/2013 10:43:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
"Nothing is lost save honor."
So said Jim Fisk after he and Jay Gould survived yet another scrape in their corrupt and storied careers in the Gilded Age.
Fisk's dismissal of honor came to mind while watching Barack Obama in Boston smugly explain how his vow -- "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it!" -- was now inoperative.
All along, it had been a bait-and-switch by the first hustler.
In Boston, Obama could no longer evade the truth. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who had purchased health insurance in the private market were getting notices their plans were being canceled.
That this revelation had blown a hole in his credibility did not seem to trouble Obama. Indeed, the president appeared impatient with the complaints. These were "substandard" plans anyhow, he said, the lousy offerings of "bad-apple insurers."
"So if you're getting one of those letters (canceling your insurance plan), just shop around in the new marketplace. ... You're going to get a better deal."
Behind the arrogance is the realty: Obama has the veto power. No alteration of Obamacare, except for changes he approves, can be made before the winter of 2017. And by then, Obamacare will be so deeply embedded in law and practice it will be beyond repeal.
We won, you lost, was written across Obama's face.
Yet, Obama's victory calls to mind that of King Pyrrhus of Epirus over the Romans at Asculum as described by Plutarch. Counting up his dead friends, dead commanders and dead soldiers, the king remarked, "Once more such victory and we are undone."
The price Obama will be a long time paying for this victory is historic and huge.
First, there is the irreversible damage to his credibility and integrity. He conned the people into believing something he knew to be false -- that all Americans would be allowed to keep the health care plans that they had and liked.
This assurance, repeated again and again, helped disarm the opposition. Americans who liked their doctors and insurance plans and were repeatedly told they could keep both were not only relieved; they became more receptive to the idea of helping the less fortunate.
Obama's assurances of keeping your insurance plan if you like it now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush's "Read my lips! No new taxes," Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss. Lewinsky," and George W. Bush's tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.
As for the idealistic avatar of hope and change from 2008, who led the nation to believe that he was something new and different in politics, he has been revealed as the biggest cynic of them all.
Moreover, where his campaign against Hillary Clinton in the primaries and John McCain in 2008 seemed to hold out promise of a newly competent progressive crowd, those hopes have all but vanished in the legendary incompetence of the Obamacare rollout.
Here was the president's signature program -- what Social Security was to FDR, Medicare to LBJ -- and one month into launch, it is grist for the mills of Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central.
Observing the rollout, one begins to appreciate what George Wallace meant when he talked of Washington being a city of "pointy-headed bureaucrats who can't park a bicycle straight."
And though the Obamacare website will one day be repaired, and people may begin to sign up, the land mines in Obamacare are by no means all exploded. We will be walking right through them.
As Obamacare requires the cancellation of insurance plans and forces Americans to buy more expensive insurance than they want, this will inevitably raise the cost of health care for the nation.
And when the employer mandates cut in, many businesses will halt hiring at 49 employees to keep out of Obamacare, as others cut part-time workers to 29 hours a week to escape the mandates.
This cannot but adversely impact an economy whose growth in job creation under Obama has been anemic at best for five years.
Obama and cohorts are celebrating an historic achievement in passing Obamacare. But as one looks at Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Puerto Rico, Detroit and Illinois, the truth seems obvious.
The welfare state that began with Bismarck is reaching the end of the line, just as the private sector that generates the wealth to sustain that state is now, almost everywhere, buckling under its weight. The deficits stretch to the horizon. The debts rise inexorably.
Across the West, neo-socialism is out, the new austerity in.
And of all the great advances proclaimed by progressives over a century and a half, from free schooling to Social Security, Obamacare looks like it will eventually be ranked among the last -- and the least.
President Obama is not damaged by the revelation that he lied to get socialized medicine enacted. Parents lie to their children all the time to force them to do things that are good for them but that the child won’t like. Obama’s core constituency, communist Americans (that’s every academic I’ve ever met, most college students and anybody under 25 or so.) understand that lying is necessary and, if done in the cause of socialization, is laudable. They will continue to listen to his speeches and contribute to his causes until he finally dies at 106. (Evil people are protected by Satan.)
It will end in fiscal insanity and debasement of the currency.
To be followed by war, revolution and a change of government.
It always ends this way.
Can’t state attorney generals sue HHS for bait and switch?
Democrats and "progressive" Republicans continue to dominate the national conversation, however, making it to focus on "health care," or about "health insurance.
The so-called "Affordable Care Act" (Obamacare) never was about "health care." That national pre-occupation was the "Trojan Horse" of "progressives," which they used to hide the imposition of government control over the economic affairs of a formerly free society.
To continue to engage in debate in the semantic terms of the Left masks the threat to liberty America faces.
The only real antidote to lies is truth.
Lies about the legitimate role of government must be countered with the "self-evident" truth embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the structure of government provided by the Founders' Constitution.
The role of government, as the coercive power allowed to "the People's" representatives, by the Constitution by which they are allowed to "serve," is small and defined. Its limitations are broad and strictly limited.
That's why the current President complains that it is a "restraint," or "a document of negative liberties." He understands well that, as Jefferson said, it is, and remains, a "chain" on the powers of the Executive, the Congress and Senate, and even on the Judiciary.
He has been emboldened, however, by the false adulation of a portion of the society, to believe that he can do by Executive Order things that he is disallowed by the terms of "the People's" Constitution.
Now is the time to stop quibbling about web sites and incompetency. This is about a massive power grab, foisted upon Americans under a false premise, under the guise of "helping" them.
C. S. Lewis wrote, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis
“The Democrats gained a net of two seats, ending with a total of 53 seats. The Republicans lost a net of two seats, ending with a total of 45 seats”
Given that the 16 Democrats coming up for election have turned against Obamacare now would be the time for the Republicans to pass a law against it. With these 16 votes they have the votes to overturn a presidential veto. (But, all of the Republicans would need to vote in favor. Given the RINOS it’s a long shot. But, anybody who makes a veto fail will likely not be reelected. So, it’s worth the shot.)
Thanks for your post. Truth is indeed the only antidote to lies.
I have no sympathy for the ignorant fools duped by this puke as they cry and whine now....that he’s a liar and a fraud was obvious to anyone with a brain that payed the slightest attention....
I learned a great lesson in leaving government employee life insurance for a private plan. The government plan was one size fits all, the same premiums for a man of middle age in perfect health as for one who is a morbidly obese, drug using, chain smoking alcoholic with diabetes. On the free market was a life insurance plan with greater coverage for almost one quarter of the cost.
Lesson learned. Now comes government health insurance. The new same as the old. Stuck, for example, with a plan that includes maternity benefits that I may not need (!).
If they voted for him twice they deserve everything bad they get
Your post is a ray of light in the fog.
Obama cannot ruin his credibility with me.
He never had it in the first place.
I worked with people like Obama for 25 years.
Thanks. Just pass it on—especially as a caution for youth.
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