The White House Spin Is Making Me Dizzy

This is why so many people hate politics and/or politicians.

The spin.  The doublespeak.  The lies.

Case in point.  Consider White House chief of staff Jack Lew this morning talking with George Stephanopoulos on the contraceptive issue that has been raging; it's really the same thing that grated during the Obamacare debate.  This morning Jack Lew said (emphasis mine),

You know, George, from the very beginning, the president had two important goals here. One is to guarantee that every woman has a right to all forms of preventive health care, including contraception, secondly, that we do it in a way that respects the legitimate religious differences and the religious liberties that are so important in our country. 

On Meet the Press this morning, Lew said:

We are now in a place where we can say with certainty that women are going to have the right to health care and we can say that religious institutions, including Catholic hospitals and universities, won't have to pay for or do the administrative work to provide benefits that they find objectionable.

First of all, when exactly did health care become a "right," and two, when did contraception become a "right"?  And when did I, as a woman, not have access to health care?  Sure, women at one time were denied the right to vote, but health care?  I don't remember that one.

And on the issue of contraceptives, women have managed their contraception choices for ages without the government guaranteeing their right to it.

It's all about the doublespeak.

Now all of a sudden Republicans are apparently denying women access to contraceptives because they don't want the government dictating every aspect of our daily lives.  Bullspit.

And now, the government is attempting to force insurance companies to provide it whether they want to or not.  As Rick Santorum pointed out on Meet the Press this morning:

No one's denying them access to birth control. This is, this is outrageous. I mean, the, the bottom line is that you have the federal government now saying we're going to give you a right and then saying, by the way, we're going to tell you how to exercise that right. We're going to control you, a religious, a church-affiliated group as to, you know, what you provide to your employee. And if you don't like it, tough, because our rights, our right to tell you what to do trumps your deeply held convictions about what your dollars should be spent for. And the idea that you can have the insurance company, and by the way, many and--of--a large number of Catholic social service providers are self-insured, and so the self-insured is the insurance company, they're going to be forced to still provide.

So all that compromise business about how the Catholics won't be forced to provide contraception is baloney.

It's all smoke and mirrors.

Lew went on with his spin cycle when he said on the subject of a Senate budget:

So it, it is a challenge in the United States Senate to pass legislation when there's not that willingness to work together. Congress didn't do a great job last year. It, it, it drove right to the edge of a cliff on occasion after occasion. I actually think it's unfair to blame the United States Senate for that. A lot of that was because of the extreme, you know, conservative approach taken by House Republicans.

Hunh?  It's the fault of conservatives that Harry Reid hasn't passed a budget in the Senate in over 1000 days?   When David Gregory pointed out that the Democrats control the Senate, Lew then blamed the tea party:

Yeah, but it--the positions that ended up tying the Congress in knots came out of the House. It came out of the tea party wing in the House.

Ridiculous. 

So.  According to Jack Lew (on two different programs) today,  contraceptives are a natural born right and the conservative tea party wing is to blame because Harry Reid can't pass a budget.

I'm getting dizzy. 

No wonder people hate politicians.