There Is No Pleasure in "I Told You So"

I have been dumbfounded at how many people these days are shocked, shocked I tell you!, that they're being dropped from their insurance plans.

We tried to fucking tell you.

When I was political blogging every day this is almost all I talked about for two years.  I looked back into my archives and sure enough, it took about two seconds to find a post where Obama is blathering that utter bullshit about how you could keep your insurance.

It also took about thirty seconds to find comments from straight up liberal nut jobs who declare Obamacare is the best thing since sliced bread except that "it doesn't go far enough."  

It was as plain as the blue in the sky that Obamacare was going to be a nightmare and that people would find themselves dumped by their insurance plans like a litter of unwanted kittens.

Dumbasses.

While I would like to say, "I told you so!", it simply does no good (and gives me no pleasure) because most of those people still believe in unicorns and pixie dust and believe Obamacare will save the planet.

Even worse, these people in the White House are still pushing this big lie; why?  Because there are still plenty of idiotic, uninformed people out there who still want to believe it:

In the meantime, the White House site still makes the claim "If you like your plan you can keep it and you don't have to change a thing due to the health care law." This turned out to be a big lie by the Obama administration. 

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, tweeted, "FACT: Nothing in Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans." This is just another fairy tale.

You liberals thought Obamacare was going to make life better?  Quit trying to help me!

This is why I quit political blogging (for the most part.)  I'd been banging my head against the proverbial wall for nothing.  I ranted, railed, researched, and reported.  I typed, protested, linked, and posted until my fingers bled.  It did no good whatsoever. You can't educate a person who chooses to keep their head in the sand.

Mark Steyn today:

“If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan. Period.” But the entire premise of Obamacare was that, in order to cover (some of) the uninsured and (in many cases) uninsurable, other Americans were going to have to pay significantly more. Obamacare was always intended to be the Great Disruptor: Avik Roy reports that, by 2010, administration officials knew that 93 million Americans would lose their current plans under Obamacare. Small businesses are cutting back on full-time workers; medium businesses are dumping employees’ spouses and children from their plans; and the largest businesses are eating nine-figure bottom-line increases. Delta Airlines claims that it will spend an extra $100 million on health-care expenses next year: Even with cutbacks on complimentary mini-pretzels, a tenth of a billion is a big sum to recover. Meanwhile, the Obamacare plans won’t recognize your preferred doctor, and major hospitals won’t recognize the Obamacare plans.

Oh yeah, that slippery slope that is Obamacare is about to get really interesting.

If you haven't considered just going off the grid yet, this might be a good time to invest in survival gear.

The wealthy are okay with all this; the line I keep hearing is "Oh, but we can afford to help those less fortunate.  We are so lucky and so blessed, we can afford to give more."

Okay.  Go right ahead.  Pay a shitload of money each month for your healthcare and subsidize that of the poverty ridden masses.  There are more and more of them every single day thanks to the Obama regulation nation and welfare expansion state.  Those of us in the middle are getting the proverbial finger up the ass and trying to figure out how to survive.  We aren't eligible for subsidies (even if we wanted them) and can't afford the tripling of our insurance rates.  We were told we could keep what we have, right?  Sure.

Why can't I just keep what I have?

Steyn again:

But the fact remains that nowhere in the Western world has the governmentalization of health care been so incompetently introduced and required protection by such a phalanx of lies. Obamacare is not a left–right issue; it’s a fraud issue.

Hope you are happy, lefties.

I'm going back to blogging about day trips now.


Added:

John Hinderaker at Powerline has an excellent post:  The Lies of Obamacare Documented.

(H/T:  Memeorandum)

The Lemonade Stand Metaphor

I watched some of the talking head Sunday shows today.  What is Stephanie Cutter's strategy here?  If you lie and you stick with that lie no matter the proof to the contrary, people will eventually believe you?



I think it's a losing strategy.  She is going to have a difficult time retaining any credibility.

Not to make too much of a small thing, but I thought this piece by Andrew Malcolm was interesting.  It's just one example of a growing number of signs that the Obama campaign isn't living up to 2008 expectations.  Malcolm writes about Obama's Iowa trip last week:

Obama's experienced advance team had a bunch of flubs. That farm family with all the windmills that President Quixote loves to laud turns out to be Republicans and informed reporters after Obama's visit that he sure wasn't getting their votes this time. 

There was the state fair beer tent where Obama bought a round of Bud Lights for everyone, except the guy with the Mitt Romney sign. Great summertime photo op. Except it turns out the Secret Service closed down the guy's tent long before Obama's arrival and the small business owner lost thousands in sales. 

Then there was the caterer who wore a "Government Didn't Build My Business" T-shirt to work the president's event. 

I don't think that trip went exactly as planned.  But, more telling, according to Malcolm's piece,  was Team Obama lumbering past a little girl's lemonade stand in Marshalltown.  The big, black armored bus drove right past the child who "fell to her knees" as Obama drove by.

As Malcolm notes, "spontaneous" stops are often very coordinated, and an important president does have a schedule to keep, but imagine the photo op that would have been.

The story is more a metaphor, it seems to me, of a campaign and a man that is oblivious to real America.

The Romney/Ryan campaign, by contrast, seems the polar opposite of the Obama campaign.  On one side we have demagoguery and negative attacks and on the other side, Romney/Ryan seem to offer the optimism that we can "turn this thing around" as Ryan likes to say.  To be sure, Romney will get his share of attacks in on Obama, but it seems that the Obama campaign is particularly aggressive awfully early.

Shannen Coffin at NRO pointed out that so far Romney has been accused of:

...complicity in the death of a cancer victim, failure to pay taxes owed the United States, wanting to return the American populace to shackles, poisoning the common man with e coli, and, generally, being a very mean white guy who mistreats animals. With his selection of Paul Ryan as vice president, we are reminded that Ryan relaxes by throwing grandmothers in wheelchairs off of cliffs. 

Arguments on policy are one thing, but character attacks are another.  I've never been a fan of that approach.  Love her or hate her, what the media did to Sarah Palin in 2008 was unconscionable.  Don't remember that?  A refresher course from Professor Jacobson is here.

Mark Steyn points out that the addition of Ryan to the Republican ticket has already raised the level of the Obama campaign in that we're no talking about Joe Soptic's wife now, but about Medicare:

Underneath the poseur narcissism, the half-wit demagoguery, and the 13-figure innumeracy is bleak reality: a flatline economy, underwater property, declining social mobility, half the population getting a check each month from the government and with minimum-wage service jobs as the only alternative to long-term dependency. 

If you seriously think this election is about gay marriage or affordable contraception, you’re about to do to America what Gavrilo Princip did to the Habsburg Empire. 

The truth is, nobody cares about Mitt Romney's tax returns, his dog, or his wife's horse.  It's clear that the Obama campaign can't run on his record and so demagoguery is all they have.

I think the American people will see through that.  I think in a debate on the issues, Obama will lose.

In the Mail: Fed Up!

Rick Perry's Fed Up!  arrived today, finally.  A lot of folks must be reading this book.  Amazon changed my shipping date twice before I finally got it.

The delay was fine because I'm still into Mark Steyn's After America.  Glory be!  I've got a notebook filled with notes on that one and sticky notes on nearly every page!  It is definitely a must read!

I saw yesterday on Memeorandum where Perry is supposedly backing off some of the statements he made in Fed Up!

Neil King, Jr. at The Wall Street Journal writes:

He suggested the program’s creation violated the Constitution. The program was put in place, “at the expense of respect for the Constitution and limited government,” he wrote, comparing the program to a “bad disease” that has continued to spread. Instead of “a retirement system that is no longer set up like an illegal Ponzi scheme,” he wrote, he would prefer a system that “will allow individuals to own and control their own retirement.”

But since jumping into the 2012 GOP nomination race on Saturday, Mr. Perry has tempered his Social Security views. His communications director, Ray Sullivan, said Thursday that he had “never heard” the governor suggest the program was unconstitutional. Not only that, Mr. Sullivan said, but “Fed Up!” is not meant to reflect the governor’s current views on how to fix the program.

That seems lame to me. It doesn't sound like the Perry I've been following.  To back off of a position that seemed so definite a few months ago for the purpose of political expediency will certainly come back to haunt Perry, if in fact, that is the case.

It seems as if it would be the ultimate of flip-flops.

I haven't read the book yet so I'm not sure exactly what he said, but my impression of Perry has been that he sticks to his guns (for better or worse).

At any rate, I have some interesting reading on my shelf right now!  Now, if I only had time to properly devote to it...

Obama's Vacation Reading List

Matthew Continetti, over at The Weekly Standard, is wondering what book Obama might take to Martha's Vineyard this summer.

I'm not sure how fast a reader Obama is; is he a one book a year kind of guy or is he a voracious reader like his predecessor?  

I can make some suggestions.

He might try After America by Mark Steyn.  I'm reading it now and can't get past page 35 because I stop every so often to exclaim loudly:  "Brilliant!  This is brilliant!!!"


Obama might also consider The Coming Collapse of the American Republic by veteran and former state senator Robert A. Hall as a companion to Steyn's book.

I hear Dick Cheney has a new memoir coming out:  In My Time; I bet Obama could get an advance copy.

If he's looking for a bargain, Obama might pick up a copy of Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption.  It's out in paperback now and he might learn something about those folks working for him.

Just my suggestions.

You have any ideas?

See What Happens When I Go Back to Work?

Good grief, I go back to work for one day, ONE day, and this is what the stock market does?

Well, blaming my going back to work on the stock market crash makes about as much sense as blaming the Tea Party for the S&P downgrade.  Like, none at all.

Seriously, I'm trying to listen to inservice and new procedures and stuff but every hour I'm checking the markets on my iPhone.  Free fall all day long.

If I'd been home, I'd have been watching how much it dropped while Obama spoke.  Did anybody keep track of that today?

As I said yesterday, I'm reading The Coming Collapse of the American Republic by Robert A. Hall which predicts this.

And, I've just ordered Mark Steyn's After America through Pundette's shop because she gets a commission like that, you see.  You can order your copy right here and then I'll get a commission!  Hey, it's not warm fuzzy reading but it's required reading.  Both of them.

Meanwhile, Timmy "Turbo Tax" Geithner needs to resign, Rick Perry needs to announce, and Obama needs to go on vacation and get off the television for a while.  Then maybe we can break 11,000 again.

Mark Steyn Opines on the NY-23 Race

Mark Steyn offers some observations of the NY-23 race:

Newt really needs to re-think his support for Dede Scozzafava. This isn't RINO but DIABOLO - Democrat In All But Official Label Only. It's not one of those "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" bi-swinger deals - not when you're pro-"stimulus", pro-cash-for-clunkers. And the reductive argument that her sole redeeming value - a willingness to vote for John Boehner as Speaker - is reason enough to support her is silly in a special election. If he's ever Speaker, Boehner won't be till January 2011, and it's 12 months premature for Newt to be telling voters they need to suck it up and accept that a handful of Jim-Jeffords-in-embryo-form are necessary for the Republican tide.

He makes an interesting point. It does seem that Scozzafava's "sole redeeming value" is her willingness to vote for John Boehner as speaker, but there is so much more at stake than that. And as Steyn points out, that wouldn't even occur until 2011 at best. And what guarantee does anyone have that she would still vote for Boehner when the time came? The rumor mill has offered the possibility that she might change parties. Arlen Specter redux.

Steyn goes on to raise a competence issue with Scozzafava as well:

At this stage in the nation's affairs, Washington doesn't need another incoherent buffoon insulated by a phalanx of thin-skinned twerps already guarding her like a 30-year incumbent for whom routine questions are an outrageous form of lèse-majesté.

After the weird incident with John McCormack this week, Michelle Malkin points out that we can also add "liar" to the list of Scozzafava's credentials.

Hoffman can win this race. But, as Steyn points out, if he doesn't then a large part of the blame falls to the crap weasels at the NRCC who endorsed Scozzafava and decided she was the Republican that could win. In a traditionally conservative and Republican district, why in the world would they think such a thing?

Robert Stacy McCain profiles the NY-23 race here, and quotes Hoffman's media coordinator Rob Ryan's response to the Scozzafava/McCormack incident as saying "The only thing the police need to investigate in this race is if Dede Scozzafava is impersonating a Republican."

Ryan also says that this race will be a real bellwether for the Republican party, something Steyn notes as well. How big a tent does the Republican party want to pitch? According to Steyn, if Hoffman loses and the seat falls to a Democrat, largely due to the NRCC's misguided endorsement, "it will be a cautionary tale for party leaders who, as in NY-23, make choices that confirm everything a disgruntled base thinks of them. "


More on this race can be found at Memeorandum.

(Cross posted at Not One Red Cent!)

Quote of the Day

"What struck me (aside from its unfortunate echoes of his self-absolvement with regard to what William Ayers did when young Barack was eight years old) was the reductive narcissism of the answer. Barack Obama is not a banana-republic coup-leader resetting the calendar to Year Zero. When he travels abroad, he represents two-and-a-third centuries of constitutional continuity. The impression he gives that that's all just some dreary backstory of no real relevance to the Barack Obama biopic he's starring in 24/7 is very unusual in the chief of state of one of the oldest democratic polities on the planet. And not entirely reassuring."


Mark Steyn
on Obama's response
to Ortega's diatribe at the
Summit of the Americas

Related Posts:
Venezuela is Just a Tiny Little Country, Right?
History Begins...When?

I'd Like My DVD Set Now

Victor Davis Hanson said this morning that "the Obamians need to get a life and govern the country, rather than blaming their gaffes on Bush, Rush, life, etc. . . "

How many times have we heard Obama blame our situation on the "failed policies of the past eight years"? He's a tad disingenuous in trying to lay all of our current crisis off on the shoulders of George W. Bush. We've had a Democratic Congress for the past two years; that is to say that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been pretty much calling the shots as of late.

Let's be clear, however. The Republicans are not blameless. And there's no need at this point in rehashing the cause of the housing crisis (been there, done that) or any other "failed policy" by Republicans OR Democrats that has put us in the position in which we now find ourselves. The point is that it's time for Obama to quit laying blame for it and actually do something about it.

That being said, some would contend that Obama IS doing something. Well, I agree he's doing something, but I just don't think it's the RIGHT something. Again, specifics on that have already been hashed out here.

In a response to VDH this morning, Mark Steyn says that he had no real hopes for Obama's competency but he did hope Obama would surround himself with competent folks. Consider the British Gift Gaffe, the multiple failed appointments, and the mutliple stumbles and bumbles that lead one to believe that the entire administration is something akin to children playing at being president.

To be fair, nobody comes into the presidency with experience at the job, but we do hope that you've had experience in running SOMETHING if you're going to try to run the country. The dangerous times in which we live do not afford us the luxury of on the job training for the highest office in the land.

More to the point, consider Obama's phone call to the NYTimes regarding their "Are you a socialist" question. He thought they were kidding and blew them off. But, on second thought, he decides he better call them back. So he makes the call. Andy McCarthy calls the phone conversation "cringe-making stuff" and inded, it is.

McCarthy: "To me, what is most startling about the phenomenon VDH and Mark describe is actually listening to the president stuttering and bumbling his way through that follow-up call to the NYTimes. (The recording can be heard by clicking on an MP3 link in this Times story.) It's cringe-making stuff — the poor delivery, the claim that Bush is the real socialist and Obama the free-marketeer."

McCarthy concludes: "If Obama had haltingly spouted this nonsense off-the-cuff at a press conference, that would have been bad enough. But he (or someone) actually decided this would be a good call to make — and they had 90 minutes to think about what he was going to say. That's not just bad, it's scary bad." [Emphasis mine].

Does this alone make Obama incompetent? No, it doesn't. But in combination with all of the other things we've covered, well, it looks a little scary. Hanson called it "that classically unfortunate combination of hubris and inexperience." I wold add to that a total lack of class.

I believe that it displays a lack of class to bash your predecessor at every opportunity. Does Mr. Obama hope to improve his standing by criticizing Mr. Bush? Besides the "failed policies..." that he utters at every turn, he takes shots in press releases and statements, signing ceremonies, etc. You will never raise your own reputation by bringing down someone else's.

Charles Krauthammer said it best last night when he was explaing his decision to decline an invitation to the signing ceremony of stem cell order. He said "...[Obama] had a memorandum which he signed in which he talks about restoring the scientific integrity in government decisions, which is an outrageous attack on Bush."

Robert Stacy McCain, in commenting on the reversal of our Cuban foreign policy, said "When they start trying to change U.S. foreign policy with the fine print of an appropriations bill, you know the Democrats have developed contempt for the voters."

Contempt indeed. Obama and the Democrats seem to hold the voters with the same contempt they hold for the British. I'll be waiting for my DVD set, Mr. President. And I actually have an American DVD player on which I can watch them!

Update: (3/11/09) Camille Paglia is sort of on the same wavelength. Sort of.

Lazy Sunday

I'm paying for my yard work frenzy of yesterday with a day in allergy hell. I woke up this morning and knew right away that cutting back all that English Ivy while my Allegra prescription was empty was a big mistake. I broke out the Zicam allergy formula and tried that. I finally went around the corner and filled my Allegra ($70!) and felt almost instantly better.

I made spaghetti sauce this morning and it's been simmering all day. I made meatballs, too. Kind of wishing now I'd made some brownies, but am too lazy now to do it. We've had GREAT weather this weekend, almost like spring, and I've got windows and doors open. I hope the weather holds for our first major Mardi Gras parade next weekend!

I watched the Sunday talk shows this morning and all the talk was, of course, the Porkulus bill. How in the world can the Senate be ready to vote on this bill on Monday when their version only came out at 11 p.m. last night and is well over 700 pages? You just KNOW they can't have read the thing. The common feeling seems to be panic - "Well we HAVE to do SOMETHING!" Even if it's wrong, we'll worry about it later! Incredible. I'm proud of John McCain for speaking out against it, and our own David Vitter among a few others.

I love Mark Steyn. I don't know anybody else that could pull off such a comparison:

Appearing on "The Rush Limbaugh Show" last week, I got a little muddled over two adjoining newspaper clippings – one on the stimulus, the other on those octuplets in California – and for a brief moment the two stories converged. Everyone's hammering that mom – she's divorced, unemployed, living in a small house with parents who have a million bucks' worth of debt, and she's already got six kids. So she has in vitro fertilization to have eight more. But isn't that exactly what the Feds have done? Last fall, they gave birth to $850 billion of bailout they couldn't afford and didn't have enough time to keep an eye on, and now, four months later, they're going to do it all over again, but this time they want trillionuplets. Barney and Nancy represent the in vitro fertilization of the federal budget. And it's the taxpayers who'll get stuck with the diapers.

Read the whole article; it'll make you laugh.