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Peter Wehner calls it a “truly wicked blow” as Jimmy Carter criticizes the president.
… Who is Jimmy Carter to indict anyone on grounds of incompetence. And yet the more I reflect on it, the more I think Mr. Carter may be on to something.
What exactly are the impressive achievements of President Obama? The revival of the American economy? Surging job growth? The success of the stimulus package and the number of “shovel ready jobs”? Moving us toward energy independence? Reducing the debt? Reducing poverty and the number of Americans on food stamps? His oversight of agencies like the IRS? The Fast and Furious program? Ending America’s political divisions and unifying his countrymen? Perhaps his skillful handling before, during, and after the terrorist assault on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi? His successes in Syria? Egypt? Iraq? Iran? Peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis? And don’t forget his signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, which may rank among the worst major government programs in modern American history, a failure in both conception and implementation.
So it may be that Jimmy Carter has a right to sit in judgment of Barack Obama. Which is among the worst things that could be said about America’s 44th president.
Charles Krauthammer writes on the “affordable” care act laid bare.
Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”
The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.
(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.
So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.
But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head. …
Craig Pirrong asks if this is the Sergeant Shultz presidency or the second Hoover administration?
Both, actually.
The administration’s response to every one of the mounting pile of FUBARs is “Obama didn’t know.” The latest: Obama didn’t know about impeding Healtcare.gov fiasco. And he didn’t know that the NSA was collecting electronic intelligence on Merkel and other foreign leaders. Add this to the IRS, Benghazi, etc., etc., etc.
This happens so frequently that it is becoming as regular a bit in the Obama Show as Sergeant Schultz’s “I know nothing! I see nothing!’ bit was in Hogan’s heroes. Obama’s denials are about as plausible as Schultz’s. It’s just not nearly as funny in real life.
As the fiascos mount, scapegoats must be found! It is going to get very, very crowded under the bus. …
… of course scapegoats must be found! And you guessed it: the insurance companies are being rounded up and rounded on, most notably by the loathsome, mendacious and incompetent Valerie Jarrett:
“FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans. No change is required unless insurance companies change existing plans.”
Get ready for the daily five minutes of hate. Where by “five minutes” I mean twenty-four hours.
Wherever you cast your gaze, your eyes light on a debacle. Consider that Russia is exploiting Obama’s inept handling of Egypt, where he managed the clever feat of getting everyone to hate him (no Cairo Speech II, I’m guessing-nor Brandenberg Gate II either):
Russian President Vladimir Putin is considering paying a state visit to Egypt to take advantage of frayed ties between Washington and Cairo and possibly gain access to Mediterranean ports, the Sunday Times of London reported.
Nearly 40 years of US policy up in smoke. The Choom Gang rides again.
The headline says it all: it emphasizes that Putin is exploiting the “US vacuum.” That is the Obama foreign policy in two words: the second coming of the Hoover Administration.
Indeed, the appellation “Hoover Administration” is fitting in so many ways, because you know what vacuum cleaners do, right?
Roger Simon thinks the Fool should be indicted for cluelessness.
When I read Sunday evening in the Wall Street Journal that Barack Obama was “unaware” until last summer that the U. S. spied on thirty-five world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, I was frankly stupefied. (Well, maybe not entirely stupefied, but at least semi-stunned.)
No wonder Obamacare and practically everything else from foreign policy to energy policy is an unmitigated mess. This president and his administration have taken hands-off leadership and leading from behind to unprecedented levels.
What exactly does our president do for a living? What’re we paying him for?
Either the administration officials who leaked this information to the WSJ are lying or Barack Obama should be impeached.
Forget “high crimes and misdemeanors.” For those you have to do something and be conscious. Barack Obama should be impeached for cluelessness. …
It would be funny, except the man lies. He lies like the dems vote in Chicago; early and often. Jonah Goldberg on the president’s really big lie.
… The burning question about Barack Obama is whether he was simply “playing to win” and therefore lying on purpose, or whether his statements about Obamacare were just another example of, as Obama once put it, “I actually believe my own bullshit.”
“No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people,” he told the American Medical Association in 2009. “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
No matter how you slice it, that was a lie. As many as 16 million Americans on the individual health-insurance market may lose their insurance policies. Just in the last month, hundreds of thousands have been notified by their insurers that their policies will be canceled. In fact, it appears that more Americans may have lost coverage than gotten it since Healthcare.gov went “live” (a term one must use advisedly). And when the business mandate finally kicks in, tens of millions more probably will lose their plans. …
Jennifer Rubin turns our attention back to one of the president’s lying minions – Sebelius.
In the semi-disastrous testimony of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius — with such doozies on Healthcare.gov as, “The Web site never crashed. It is functional, but at a very slow speed and very low reliability,” with a split scene of the site down — there was more than a new batch of gotcha moments for the Republicans to gloat about. There is a fundamental assumption critical to not only Obamacare, but also to the liberal welfare state more generally, namely that it requires a sophisticated and competent bureaucracy. In its collapse and in the testimony of Sebelius, we saw that this assumption may simply be wrong. Forget ideology for a moment. If the liberal welfare state can’t run its own creations, it is not sustainable.
Here are some specifics from the hearing:
1. She claims not to know how many people have enrolled because the site is not functioning. This contradicts what insurances companies have said and suggests a systemic problem that, if not addressed, makes it impossible to determine basic information like whether HHS has enough young people enrolled to pay for the sicker, older people. …