In September, White House Spokesmodel Jay Carney was asked about the mounting stories of companies cutting employees and hours to get under the arbitrary magic numbers created for Obamacare’s many mandates. In typical progressive fashion, Carney dismissed reality and substituted his own. “There’s a difference between anecdotes and data,” he said.
He’s right, of course. And he should know … his boss has governed by anecdote, not data, not facts, since he took office.
Putting Obamacare aside for the moment, the most egregious example in the history of the United States of the bluster of anecdotes over reality came in the president’s first year.
After passage of the trillion-dollar taxpayer payoff to Democrat donors knows as the “stimulus,” the economy only worsened. The debt skyrocketed, economic growth flat lined, and unemployment ballooned. After wasting the GDP of many small nations and having nothing to show for it, the president glibly joked, “Shovel ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.”
That’s the kind of “humor” you can only attempt when you spend someone else’s money.
But after taking one-third of the annual US budget and setting it on fire, the White House needed some unit of measure to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Enter “saved or created.”
Until the “saved or created” yardstick was manufactured at the White House’s unicorn dream factory, it had never been used before. Data, to that point, was always factual and quantifiable. No more.
The Obama administration, having nothing to show for the largest single check the government ever wrote, scrapped every unit of measure humans had used to that point and went hypothetical. They created the unprovable “saved or created” measure for jobs. It was genius. Diabolical, a lie and corrupt, but genius.
Not only was it impossible to prove any job had been “saved” by the stimulus, it was impossible to prove they hadn’t. It was a hypothetical abstract about an alternate future that could never be. You can’t argue with that. Well, you could argue with that if we had an honest press that didn’t simply parrot White House talking points, but we don't.
They’d pulled off what may well have been the greatest hoax in the history of statistics – hell, in the history of math. Until Obamacare, that is.
On Tuesday, the White House dusted off the old choir risers, loaded them up with human puppets lined up like trained seals waiting for a fish, and got them to clap on command for Obamacare. Who were these human puppets? Obamacare “success stories” – more accurately known as anecdotes.
In his speech, the president pulled five first names from his heavily filtered mailbag and highlighted them as though they were the norm. They were Monica, Sam, Julia, Justine and Joann (apparently his staff drew heavily from the “J” section of the bag). These five had their sad tales of woe -- true or not because you have only his word on it (the White House won’t release their names or any information about them), and his word has proven to be quite elastic of late – paraded about as though they were proof Obamacare is a success. That’s like the tobacco industry bringing out five 90-year-old life-long smokers and declaring they prove smoking doesn’t cause cancer.
This game of “Victims Of Society Monty” the White House is forcing Americans to play is as transparent a fraud as the street game with cards.
“After just the first month, despite all the problems in the rollout, about half-a-million people across the country are poised to gain health care coverage through marketplaces and Medicaid beginning on January 1st — some for the very first time,” the president said. Good for them. Unfortunately almost 6 million other Americans have lost their health insurance because of the same law – most of them for the “very first time” too. But they don’t count.
The White House wants people to focus on only one side of the scale. Doing that means it’s always in balance. But with the ratio being 500,000 to 6,000,000, the scale clearly is not in balance.
That obvious lie can be explained only by ignorance on behalf of the president – the defense he’s claimed on Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, the NSA scandal, the healthcare.gov website failure – or a lack of concern for the truth or for the people he was elected to serve.
Ignorance has been bliss in this administration, but it doesn’t matter which reason the president uses to justify his lies to himself. “We’re not repealing it as long as I am president,” he said Tuesday. That shows an indifference to the real harm he is doing to millions, and soon to be ten of millions next year in the employer-provided market, on the level of any of history’s most despised tyrants.
Whether the president is dishonest, ignorant or a combination of both, he isn’t interested in reality. He has an agenda, and that agenda will march “forward” no matter how many people it hurts, how much it costs or how high a percentage of Americans oppose it or want it repealed and replaced.
So, it’s no surprise Barack Obama was “too busy” to take a half-hour helicopter flight to mark the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address but was able to fly to California for two days of fundraising and campaigning a week later. Even his handlers didn’t want to face the Herculean task of having to explain how the President could go honor a speech predicated on the concept “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” and come home to ignore the peoples’ clear wishes to save them from this unadulterated disaster.
The juxtaposition of Barack Obama’s actions with Abraham Lincoln’s words expose him not as a great statesman and leader, but as a Rhett Butler who simply doesn’t.