President Obama Keeps Coasting along in His Ratbag Style — if a Lie Is Not Enough, He’ll Throw an Innocent or Two under the Bus — Anything To Escape Accountability for His Lapses and often Questionable Intent — and a Necessary Comment in His Defense

29 October 2013

“Slimeball performance" apears to fit

Too harsh a phrase? Maybe not.

Consider the two following tidbits — but then read on to my closing (partial) defense of the President.

Tidbit One — spying in foreign affairs

The Obama Administration is so accustomed to getting away with lies — that it attempted to whopper-pretend that the National Security Agency had spied on foreign leaders, including Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, without the President knowing.

Were it me in charge, I would rather be thought of as a ruthless adventurer than a know and do-nothing loser. But I guess our shortsighted President impulsively does what is attractive in the shortest term:

The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.

Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies.

So, he pitched the entire NSA under the bus, much as he had Susan Rice after his and Hillary’s Benghazi disaster in September 2011.

Tidbit Two — reportedly misleading millions of Americans (and their wallets) about health insurance

Early this morning, NBC News reported that the President had known from close to the start that millions of Americans would lose their existing health insurance, during the required transition to ObamaCare, despite having recently claimed the reverse.

The report alleged that the Affordable Care Act had been written to grandfather then existing non-compliant policies. But the Department of Health and Human Services subsequently wrote narrower regulations that eliminated grandfathered policies that had undergone noticeable changes after the applicable date — which was 23 March 2010, per NBC’s Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s, The Daily Rundown this morning:

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”

That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.

Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”

The White House does not dispute that many in the individual market will lose their current coverage, but argues they will be offered better coverage in its place, and that many will get tax subsidies that would offset any increased costs.

Given that the Administration very probably lied about many of us being able to keep existing insurance policies, why would anyone believe its statements about the comparative cost of their allegedly now required replacements?

Democratic-leaning websites are now reminding everyone that the eliminated plans had more restrictions and were narrower than those the Affordable Care Act requires:

[I]ndividuals receiving cancellation notices will have a choice of enrolling in subsidized insurance in the exchanges and will probably end up paying less for more coverage.

Those who don’t qualify for the tax credits will be paying more for comprehensive insurance that will be there for them when they become sick (and could actually end up spending less for health care since more services will now be covered).

They will also no longer be part of a system in which the young and healthy are offered cheap insurance premiums because their sick neighbors are priced out or denied coverage. That, after all, is the whole point of reform.

However, notice the word, “probably.” How does anyone know whether these replacement plans will be reliably cheaper or equal in cost, when the Administration cannot even get the enrollment process that compares them off the ground?

And why should individual plan subscribers be happy at the prospect that they may be picking up a lot of added costs that employer and government-based plans do not?

This kind of rationale for Big Government lying — namely “it don’t matter, the outcome’s the same” — is BS. It does matter because people do not like being tricked and misled.

If the Obama Camp had really thought the country supported the Affordable Care Act, it would not have had to sneak its many hundreds of unread pages past both Congress and the people.

In this complicated fact mix, we can be certain the Administration will continue either (a) to deny that it knew anything about HHS’s calculations, even if HHS proves to have been correct, or (b) to say “it don’t matter, ‘cause the outcome’s the same.”

For an example of how that latter excuse works in practice, see former Obama Administration economist Jared Bernstein’s Huffington Post column today. He essentially leans on the Igor Volsky column that I quoted above, adds some completely unsupported claims about the Administration’s trustworthiness, and concludes:

Not much to see here folks... move along.

I can guarantee that Bernstein’s insouciant Obama-like arrogance is not going to go over well with any of my conservative friends.

Presumably, if these evasions and excuses fail, President Obama’s under-the-bus victims will be both the HHS and those private insurers that ObamaCare’s plutocratic orientation “afforded” too much power to skirt around the Act’s pretended constraints.

The moral? — Ratbag and slimeball performance fit, but . . .

In the President’s defense, I once wrote that:

[I]f anyone has an excuse for integrity-lacking chameleon-like behavior, the President does.

In a still-bigoted nation, President Obama could never have risen to his rank without fooling lots of people (including himself), most of the time.

Expecting him to change from Necessary Chameleon to a courageous and integrity-displaying leader seems too much to ask. We generally remain who we are, especially if who we are got us somewhere successful.

And that is the core message. It is our culture’s penchant for self-indulgent lies that predominantly creates and attracts self-aggrandizing leaders. Not the reverse.

The President’s integrity-lacking performance in office parallels our own, as a predominantly truth-avoiding culture.

PeteFree.com

President Obama Keeps Coasting along in His Ratbag Style — if a Lie Is Not Enough, He’ll Throw an Innocent or Two under the Bus — Anything To Escape Accountability for His Lapses and often Questionable Intent — and a Necessary Comment in His Defense