Mendacity and Incompetence

Thomas Edsall, a liberal columnist writing at the New York Times, is dismayed at the mendacity and incompetence of which this administration has shown itself capable. The incompetence is dismaying to Edsall because it discredits Democrats and confirms the central theses of conservative objections to big government:

The chaos surrounding efforts to activate HealthCare.gov reinforces a key conservative meme: that whatever the test is, government will fail it. Insofar as voters experience their interaction with government as frustrating and unreliable, the brunt of political damage will hit Democrats, both as the party of government and as the party of Obamacare.

Cumulatively, recent developments surrounding the rollout of Obamacare strengthen the most damaging conservative portrayals of liberalism and of big government – that on one hand government is too much a part of our lives, too invasive, too big, too scary, too regulatory, too in your face, and on the other hand it is incompetent, bureaucratic and expropriatory.

But the rollout isn't the only aspect of this that's discrediting liberalism. Wait until older Americans realize that their health care costs are going up because the Democrats raided Medicare in order to help fund Obamacare. When this begins to sink in the Democrats, who rammed the legislation through congress without a single Republican vote, will all be running for the tall grass. Here's Edsall:

In addition, the Affordable Care Act can be construed as a transfer of benefits from Medicare, which serves an overwhelmingly white population of the elderly – 77 percent of recipients are white — to Obamacare, which will serve a population that is 54.7 percent minority. Over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act cuts $455 billion from the Medicare budget in order to help pay for Obamacare.

Finally, the mendacity of the President, who emphatically assured the American people on dozens of occasions that if they liked their coverage they could keep their coverage and that if they liked their doctor they could keep their doctor, is outraging average folks all across the nation:

Jennifer Harris, a self-employed lawyer in Fullerton, Calif., was notified that Health Net Inc. has cancelled her $98-a-month policy, and the cheapest plan she can find that meets Obamacare requirements cost $238 a month....Harris told The Los Angeles Times, “It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else.”

Well, it may not seem right, but this is the entire raison d'etre of liberalism. It's the vision that animates liberals in everything they do. It's why candidate Obama said in 2008 that he wanted to redistribute the wealth of the nation. Were people in the middle-class so naive as to think he was talking only about taking the wealth from the very rich?

Edsall adds this:

In the same Los Angeles Times story, Deborah Cavallaro, a real estate agent in Westchester, Calif., who faces a 65 percent increase in health coverage costs, said: “All we’ve been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it."

"I’m infuriated because I was lied to,” Cavallaro added.

So, what is the Obama administration's response to this upwelling anger? It is to essentially call Americans a bunch of suckers. For example, one of the designers of Obamacare, Zeke Emanuel, went on the Sunday talk shows yesterday and tried to persuade viewers that what the President meant when he assured us we could keep our coverage and our doctors was that we could keep them if we were willing to pay more for them.

Of course, that's not what the President said, nor is it what he wanted people to understand him to mean. If he had actually told people what Emanuel said he did, or if he had told people that millions of them would lose the insurance plans they had rather than assuring them that they'd be able to keep their plans if they wished, or if he had told Americans that their premiums were going to double or triple rather than telling them that their premiums would go down by $2500, he never would have been elected.

Mr. Obama deliberately misled the American people in order to win office and continued to mislead us in order to get Obamacare passed. I don't know how else to plausibly interpret his words.

Are there no honest men and women left in the Democrat party who are willing to step forward and just admit that Americans were explicitly, intentionally deceived about Obamacare and that our leaders have abjectly failed the people they were sworn to serve and deserve to be thrown out on their ear?

Your Lying Eyes

Who's up for a good optical illusion? The Blaze put us on to this one:

The two parts of the object in the image are actually the same color and brightness. You can demonstrate this by placing your finger over the seam that joins them.

The whole weirdness of it is explained here, but good luck trying to understand it.

Maybe part of the explanation is that our eyes assess the object's background as they view the object. An object viewed against a bright background appears darker than does the same object viewed against a darker background.