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| From Ed Driscoll |
Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post:
Potemkincare
The Obama administration has not created a functioning Web site. Rather, it has erected a Potemkin village online — a façade that temporarily conceals the lack of architecture behind it...
It is somehow appropriate that the administration’s health-care plan, which was sold on the basis of multiple untruths (keep your health-care plan, keep your doctor, bend the cost curve) is now itself a grand deception. The Web site provides the illusion of a working health-care exchange, but while it takes your information, there’s no telling what it will do with it (e.g. lose it, send duplicates, garble it). It’s the embodiment of the administration’s fixation on treating every substantive issue and real screw-up as a ”message” problem. Now White House spokesman Jay Carney can “message” (when a noun is made into a new verb you know something phony is going on) that the Web site is “working.”
The only problem is that it isn’t. Ironically, the president was the one to point it out: Obamacare is more than a Web site. The Web site is a portal. Now that you can enter it, you expect to get the insurance you paid for? Silly you. (Even the Web site part of things is not working as planned. The Post reports: “Federal health officials said they saw an increase in error rates and a slowdown in response times and decided to deploy ‘queueing’ software designed to limit the number of users permitted on the site at one time.”)
The seriousness of the problem should not be underestimated. (“The errors, if not corrected, mean that tens of thousands of consumers are at risk of not having coverage when the insurance goes into effect Jan. 1, because the health plans they picked do not yet have accurate information needed to send them a bill.”) The strategy here is to save the president from further political damage, to buy him a month of slightly less horrible news coverage. It comes at the expense of the people Obamacare ostensibly is supposed to help. (By letting more people in the front door, there will be more people surprised they have no coverage in January, when it may be too late to take corrective action.) Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the way this administration works all the time.
Apparatchiks doing what apparatchiks do.
Of course Obamacare is not quite like the Soviet Potemkin villages-- at least the Russkies would have built a real village, if they could've.
In Obamacare, of course, the Potemkin village is a feature, not a bug. Draws 'em in, so chaos breaks out sooner. Why wait for a crisis, when you can make one yourself.
Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, #10:
"The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
In this case, the "opposition" is Americans' healthcare. A healthcare portal to nowhere is very effective pressure on the healthcare system.
Healthcare needs to be broken, so the masters of chaos can remake it in their image.
The current US health care system is a failed experiment in Social Darwinism. Tens of thousands die needlessly each and every year. But I suppose that's a feature, not a bug, according to 'conservatives'. Poor lazy scum wasn't blessed by The Good Lard Jeesus Halleluyah, so they had it coming.
ReplyDeleteHeadline: Shutdown looms as House GOP seeks one-year ObamaCare delay
ReplyDeleteDemocrats on the House floor mocked Republicans, saying they are simply following the lead of Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
--- The Hill (10/29/2013)
Let's see... so far we have Jeebuscare delays emanating from the White House for:
* the large business sector
* the small business sector
* the individual market
The front-end isn't working, the back-end isn't even built, the Hub is vulnerable to hacking, and the Republicans are up ten points (CNN 11/26).
Progressives are smart, all right. Remember this?
[W]e can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra. Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot.But through the Recovery Act, this company received a loan to expand its operations. This new factory is the result of those loans.
--- Jeebus McLightworker (2010)
But you gotta give Progressives credit... they persevere. The downside is that perseveration, in the sense of "an inability to switch ideas along with the social context", is a symptom of brain damage.
The tinfoil hat brigade is out again.
ReplyDeleteHoo
The conservatives are living in a bizarro world. It is unquestionably they who want Obamacare to fail. But somehow they start from that and accuse the President, who is pushing his signature program, of being their most ardent supporter.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the stupid party in the House have not learned a thing from the government shutdown and is plotting to impeach the President. Or at least to make a half-assed attempt at an impeachment. Anything to get the base excited.
Keep at it, guys. It's gonna be a long 40 years wandering in the election desert.
Hoo
How many lies does a President have to tell to get impeached, Hoo? How many deaths have to be laid at his feet? Either Fast & Furious or Benghazi would have had the hypocritical Left rioting for Bush's impeachment. These stories would have been featured every night on "mainstream," networks and all day on the 24 hr news channels until something was done. The stonewalling of Eric Holder and the administration would not have been tolerated. The chutzpah of this president to ignore laws outright or to make laws then pick and choose which parts of them he and his cronies will follow in unheard of. The exemptions of the Democrats and leftist voting blocks like the unions has created a banana republic where the rule of law has been abandoned. Race relations are at an all time low in the administration that promised to unite us all. Obama has become a law unto himself. One has to be blind to not believe this president is trying hard to destroy what's left of constitutional America.
Deletehttp://youtu.be/kg9m1F8B2_c
BRich, you're exactly right, but appealing to the intellectual capabilities of toadies is rarely fruitful. If they had them, they wouldn't be toadies.
DeleteIt's the librulz in the MSM and academia, whaaa!
DeleteYou, guys, have no interest in doing either journalism or teaching, and that's the result. See, I don't complain that dentists and plumbers tend to be conservatives, so don't whine about professors and journalists.
Hoo
Pull your head out of your arse Big Rich. There where over 10 embassy attacks during the Bush years, including three attacks in three years at the Karachi consulate, the last of which killed an American diplomat. Fast and furious was a continuation of programs started by Bush. Nobody on the Left was calling for Bush’s impeachment over any of it. You are a little pavlovian dog yapping away.
Delete-KW
Popeye: "There where over 10 embassy attacks...
DeleteAnd no one claimed a single one was stimulated by a video.
Popeye: " Fast and furious was a continuation of programs started by Bush..."
The [U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General's] report also clearly shows that Fast and Furious began under the Obama administration, dating its inception to October 2009.
--- Politifact,
Popster, you're just another toady giving a tongue bath.
I saw today that Harry Reid has exempted his staff from Obamacare. If this is not a perfect picture of the old Soviet Union, I don't know what is. Those in the Politburo don't have their toilet paper, bread and electricity rationed like the peasants. At least the low information voters in America are finally finding out that someone has to pay for "free healthcare," and it is them.
ReplyDeleteThe Bizarro Social Darwinist Private Sector gets called in again to save Jeebuscare:
ReplyDeletePresident Barack Obama's administration has found a short-term fix to pay insurance companies for plans selected on HealthCare.gov, the not-yet-complete government website used to shop for insurance required under Obama's healthcare program....
The administration is planning a "workaround" for payments...
--- Reuters (12/4/13)
The "workaround", the FIX, is... get this... telling the insurance companies that they must "estimate" the payments the government is too incompetent to calculate.
Yeah. it's FIXED now.
This government thing really works well, doesn't it?
The use of the IRS and other government agencies with guns is pure evil. Here's the story a cancer patient who lost his insurance due to Obamacare and went on Fox News to complain only to find that immediately afterward, he was audited by the IRS and his attorney who came forth to call attention to it was also audited. Can you imagine any Republican getting away with this blatant attack on America citizens? Richard Nixon is turning over in his grave.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/eric-scheiner/cancer-patient-and-obamacare-critic-says-hes-being-audited-irs
The 'grand design'. Forced synthesis. Hegel's dialectic. Call it what you will.
ReplyDeleteYou are all crazy. I think the government should come up with a program, perhaps a camp of some sort, to re-educate you nutters.
ReplyDelete-KW
I never assumed otherwise, Popeye. I always figured a Troll Ninja like you for an "Arbeit macht frei" kinda guy, along with the other members of Egnor's little Troll Troika.
DeleteOf course you didn’t Admiral. That was a little joke aimed at my fellow trolls. Your predictable reaction is exactly why it’s humorous.
Delete-KW
Ahhhh. The old "secret joke" ploy. So clever. Your brilliance never fails to impress, Popeye.
DeleteKW, Hoo, if Obamacare is so great, why are so many trying so hard to be exempt from Dear Leader's plan? Last count we had both houses of congress, all their staff, the executive branch, AFL/CIO, SEIU, teachers unions and every other commie union trying desperately to escape His Highness' munificence.
ReplyDeleteI never said it was great, but it’s better than what came before. I’m all for single payer, I’m just not stupid enough to believe this is a conspiracy to get us there.
DeleteWhat seems to be escaping notice is that the Medicare expansion is going very well in the states that didn’t opt-out. Think about that for a moment. The portion of the program having problems is the portion that involves the private sector. The entirely government run portion is doing just fine.
-KW
What planet are you living on? It absolutely WAS NOT better than what we had before. That's the whole crux of the problem. Millions are losing perfectly good, affordable insurance and being stuck with high priced coverage that they don't need and that is only there for political reasons -- birth control and abortion. Yes, the free loaders are doing fine but those having to pay for the free loaders are revolting which is why the whole thing will crumble.
DeleteNot giving this spectacular music/marketing video a Grammy and an AME award would be racist.
ReplyDeleteMonica Crowley got it right.
ReplyDelete"We have a president who — and I know it’s tough to believe that this president, who came out of the swamps of Chicago machine politics, who learned at the knee of the communist revolutionary Frank Marshall Davis, who studied under Marxist professors and by his own admission sought out fellow Marxist students as friends, who trained intensively in the revolutionary tactics of Saul Alinsky, who launched his political career in the living room of Marxist revolutionaries and domestic terrorists, who worked hand in glove with the socialists of ACORN and the thugs of the SEIU, who for two decades sat in the pews of the radical anti-American preacher, who tried desperately to bury that past, who spoke about the fundamental transformation of the nation, who demonized and punished his adversaries, who waged war on entire news organizations, Fox News, and who spent his firm term slamming into place radical wealth redistribution and socialized medicine. I know that it’s really tough to believe then that he and his administration would now be caught in a house of cards, and not the fun House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey...but the real house of cards that he has built. This is a house of cards built on lies, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, surveillance of journalists, and a targeting and destroying of political opponents."
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/monica-crowley-defeating-the-leftist-revolutionaries/
Big Rich:
DeleteI agree with all that Monica wrote, with one exception.
This is not a house of cards. This is deliberate, very well thought out, and a long game. What we don't understand is that Obama is a very smart carefully trained Allinskite. He is an ACORN lawyer, by profession. What he and his minions are doing is straight out of the Allinsky-Cloward-Piven playbook.
His strategy is deliberate destruction of systems and institutions. There is nothing "incompetent" about it. When things collapse-- and they will collapse (healthcare, the economy, race relations, etc), he knows that his partisans will be there to rebuild it, their way.