By Charles Krauthammer, Published: October 31E-mail the writer Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.” The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge. (a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated. So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie. But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head. I’m skeptical. It’s not as if the Obamacare plan-dropping is an obscure regulation. It’s at the heart of Obama’s idea of federally regulated and standardized national health insurance. Still, how could he imagine getting away with a claim sure to be exposed as factually false? The same way he maintained for two weeks that false narrative about Benghazi. He figured he’d get away with it. And he did. Simple formula: Delay, stonewall and wait for a supine and protective press to turn spectacularly incurious. Look at how the New York Times covered his “keep your plan” whopper — buried on page 17 with a headline calling the cancellations a “prime target.” As if this is a partisan issue and not a brazen falsehood clear to any outside observer — say, The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave the president’s claim four Pinocchios. Noses don’t come any longer. (b) Beyond mendacity, there is liberal paternalism, of which these forced cancellations are a classic case. We canceled your plan, explained presidential spokesman Jay Carney, because it was substandard. We have a better idea. Translation: Sure, you freely chose the policy, paid for the policy, renewed the policy, liked the policy. But you’re too primitive to know what you need. We do. Your policy is hereby canceled. Because what you really need is what our experts have determined must be in every plan. So a couple in their 60s must buy maternity care. A teetotaler must buy substance abuse treatment. And a healthy 28-year-old with perfectly appropriate catastrophic insurance must pay for bells and whistles for which he has no use. It’s Halloween. There is a knock at your door. You hear: “We’re the government and we’re here to help.” You hide. (c) As for subterfuge, these required bells and whistles aren’t just there to festoon the health-care Christmas tree with voter-pleasing freebies. The planners knew all along that if you force insurance buyers to overpay for stuff they don’t need, that money can subsidize other people. Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments. So that your president can promise to cover 30 million uninsured without costing the government a dime. Which from the beginning was the biggest falsehood of them all. And yet the free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism. Free mammograms, free preventative care, free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Come and get it. And then when you find your policy canceled, your premium raised and your deductible outrageously increased, you’ve learned the real meaning of “free” in the liberal lexicon: something paid for by your neighbor — best, by subterfuge. ****************************************** Read more about this issue: PRUDEN: Spoiled baby boomers infest self-indulgent White House By Wesley Pruden The Washington Times Thursday, October 31, 2013 The Obama White House suffers from “the ‘60s disease.” The affliction seems to be terminal. The president’s men — and women — are mostly boomers, spoiled, greedy and self-centered, nurtured and indulged in the decade of the 1960s, when the culture first began to rot. The boomers taught each other many things, how to turn up the volume on their “music,” where to find the best pot and where to crash to smoke themselves into mellow stupefaction, how to avoid taking responsibility for their blunders, and above all contempt for the nation’s institutions and in particular for the men and women who wear the uniform. The Clintons made no bones about their contempt for that uniform, even after Bubba took Hillary to the White House, where she treated her bodyguards like servants and the assorted White House military aides no better. Bubba had spent his youth dodging the draft and wore his contempt for the suckers who went to Vietnam as if it were the Medal of Honor, which he didn’t know much about except that it comes with a colorful ribbon. Bubba as the commander in chief finally learned to return a military salute without sticking his thumb in his eye, but it took awhile. Khaki still makes Hillary’s nose wrinkle, as if she smells something on the bottom of her shoe. Barack Obama mostly grew up abroad and never learned much about America, and it shows. As an impressionable young man, he hung out with the likes of Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist bomber, and was mentored by scruffy Marxists who drifted in and out of the house, teaching him that his country — America, not Indonesia — wasn’t worth much, but with a lot of work it might be transformed into something as noble as the People’s Republics of Lower Volta or Upper Slobbovia. But the military must always be kept on a short leash. Considering this past is the only way to understand how a president could have betrayed the trust of his own ambassador and the others whom he left twisting slowly, slowly in the stench of Benghazi. The president and his top aides, including the secretary of state, peddled elaborate lies, evasions, prevarication, hoax, disinformation, fakery, flimflam and assorted honeyfuggle for months. Well they might, desperate as they were to cover up the size, height and depth of the betrayal. Nevertheless, the squalid details, taking a circuitous route to exposure, are beginning to emerge from the muck on Pennsylvania Avenue. The ultimate dispenser of the lies about Benghazi secretly awarded two medals for bravery for sacrifice in Benghazi, perhaps as salve for conscience, and that as this newspaper reported this week, “further undercuts the Obama administration’s original story about the Benghazi tragedy.” Rowan Scarborough, this newspaper’s relentless defense correspondent, disclosed how the president had rescue teams readily available in Tripoli, after all, including eight members of the elite Delta Force and Green Berets, but would not listen to them begging to go for a rescue in Benghazi. Finally, two of the eight were allowed to fly the 400 miles to Benghazi and arrived in time to join the final minutes of the ferocious firefight between the terrorists and Americans barricaded inside a CIA “annex” near the U.S. mission. The six others were told to stay in Tripoli. Every changing version of the night of terror in Benghazi put out by the White House in the days afterward is full of holes, plugged with bigger lies. Only now does the administration admit that parts of their stories are “misleading.” Misleading is not the word for the lies, beginning with the tale told by Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, that an unflattering video about the Prophet Muhammad was what set off the Muslim riots. President Obama and his handlers carefully crafted the fakery and prevarication in the weeks following, leading to the 2012 presidential election. The White House men figured that, with media collusion and indifference, they could keep the hoax afloat until after the election. The hoax, with its vivid implications of the lack of presidential resolve and his hesitation and timidity under fire, will continue to unravel. Hillary Clinton must answer for her sins of cold indifference to the plight of those fighting for their lives in Benghazi. No one in the administration appears to understand the compelling appeal of sacrifice, of a cheerful willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty. Hillary turned aside questions about official fear and funk with a chilling nonchalance: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” Spoken like an faithful child of the ‘60s. Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 02:49:29 +0000
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