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The Gruber story has become a firestorm. Pickerhead doesn’t consider it news that fans of government are liars and cheats. They know they are governing against the will of the people and they lie to hide their intent. Our favorites have comments and we’ll go through them today. Charles Krauthammer is first.
It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” This was no open-mic gaffe. It was a clear, indeed enthusiastic, admission to an academic conference of the mendacity underlying Obamacare. …
Craig Pirrong is next.
… The latest episode in the Gruber Gone Wild video collection is his performance at a conference at U Penn, where he said that key elements of the ACA had been written in a misleading way to conceal deliberately their true intent and effect. Gruber said that the law was written in a “tortured” way to ensure that CBO would not score it as taxes, and to hide the fact that the healthy would be subsidizing the sick. If these things had been transparent, the bill never would have passed. But fortunately, sayeth Gruber, American voters are too stupid to see through this.
How Leninist of him. The ends justify the means. Who-whom (the Smart People giving it to the Great Unwashed, but only for their own good).
Gruber again sends his regrets for his incautious language. No apology needed. His ex post honesty is welcome, if his (and the drafters’) contemporaneous dishonesty is not.
And there’s apparently a third video, in which Gruber again insults American voters.
Quite the franchise he’s got here.
Gruber’s revelations makes it clear that Obamacare was a fraud, passed (by the thinnest of margins) using utterly dishonest means. …
Roger Simon compares and contrasts the lies of obamacare and the recently announced climate “deal” with the Chinese.
… So, as I said, Mitch McConnell should relax. Not that he shouldn’t oppose the deal, but in the end this will be the least of his problems. Obama is only making a fool of himself, at least in the eyes of the Chinese and probably most people who see the reality of the situation.
But not as a big a fool as Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor and putative architect of Obamacare, who has been caught on three videos explaining why it was necessary to overcomplicate and lie about the Affordable Care Act in order to pass it. (At least he read it. I doubt Obama did and I know Pelosi didn’t.) Besides the professor’s sleazy Gramscian elitism that doesn’t do much for the reputation of MIT, Gruber has something unconscious and disconnected about him that suggests a personality disorder. He doesn’t seem to quite get why people might be upset that his deliberate obscurantism completely undermines democracy and the founding documents of our country. After all, he means well. (The ends justify the means meets Asperger Syndrome)
In fact, it’s actually quite fascist, reminiscent of Mussolini in a way. But that makes Gruber the perfect adviser for Barack Obama, whose approach to governing is becoming ever closer to Il Duce’s statism. …
The videos of Jonathan Gruber have been hiding in plain sight for more than a year. American Thinker posts on the man who found them.
The story about Rich Weinstein, an unknown investment advisor who poured through hours and hours of YouTube videos, radio interviews, and other media featuring Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber is both incredible and inspiring.
It is Weinstein who is responsible for ferreting out Gruber’s toxic comments about the “stupidity of the American people” and, more importantly, Gruber’s insistence that Obamacare subsidies were limited to state exchanges and should not be made available at the federal level. …
Another post from American Thinker on private citizens doing the job that investigative reporters won’t do. But then, Glenn Reynolds has said media types are just Democrat operatives with bylines.
As explained here yesterday, Rich Weinstein, an investment banker and private citizen, with just average computer skills and higher than average persistence, uncovered the video of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber admitting that voter stupidity and deliberate lack of government transparency were necessary for the passage of the (Un-)Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, in which he was involved.
This revelation raises the question: why didn’t any investigative reporter with access to the right people, a basic understanding of the problems involved with the ACA, paid for persistence and – most importantly – a chance for a career-making scoop undertake the investigative part of the job and make the discovery? And where were the fabled watchdogs – governmental and non-governmental – when they were so desperately needed? …
National Review catches Dems trying to send Gruber down the memory hole.
Jonathan Gruber? “I don’t know who he is,” Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday.
To jog the former speaker’s memory: Jonathan Gruber is, of course, the MIT economist widely hailed for his work as the “architect” of Obamacare. His sudden demotion comes after video surfaced over the weekend of a 2013 interview with Gruber at the University of Pennsylvania, where he told listeners that a “lack of transparency” was crucial to passing Obamacare through Congress in 2010, given the “stupidity of the American voter.” Three more videos have followed, all showing Gruber making substantially similar remarks.
Nancy Pelosi’s ignorance of Gruber is odd for two reasons. First, she was speaker of the House at the time that the Affordable Care Act was passed. Second, she cited Gruber — by name — at a press conference in 2009: “I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis. . . . ” Around the same time, his work was quoted and linked on her website.
In Pelosi’s defense, she may only have been following the lead of Maine senator Angus King, who told the hosts of Fox & Friends earlier this week, “I don’t know who this guy is.” …
More on the memory loss from Jonathan Tobin.
… Just to put this in perspective, here’s what Pelosi said today about Gruber while refusing to answer a question about his admissions:
I don’t know who he is and he didn’t help write our bill.
Here’s what she said in November 2009:
We’re not finished getting all of our reports back from CBO, but we’ll have a side by side to compare. But our bill brings down rates. I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what will happen in our bill for those who seek insurance within the exchange. And our bill takes down those costs, even some now, and much less preventing the upward spiral.
Judging by Pelosi’s convenient memory loss today, the conviction among those who foisted ObamaCare on the nation that they can always count on “the stupidity of the American voter” wasn’t just something invented by Gruber. …
From Pajamas Media, a fifth Gruber video has surfaced.
… In the 2011 video shot by TrueNorthReports.com and sent to Watchdog.org on Thursday, Gruber appears before the Vermont House Health Care Committee to present recommendations for a universal, publicly financed health care program. The recommendations were part of the 2011 “Hsiao Report” submitted to the Legislature by economist William C. Hsiao and co-written by Gruber.
As Gruber sits listening, the committee chair reads a comment from a Vermonter who expresses concern that the economist’s plan might lead to “ballooning costs, increased taxes and bureaucratic outrages,” among other things.
After hearing the Vermonter’s worries, Gruber responds, “Was this written by my adolescent children by any chance?”
The remark was met with uproarious laughter….
… Contrary to Gruber’s snarky insult, the comment was not written by an adolescent.
“It was actually written by a former senior policy adviser in the White House who knew something about health care systems,” said John McClaughry, a two-term Vermont state senator and adviser to President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. …
Daily Caller finds Gruber in a PBS Frontline interview saying one of the deceptions was crafted in a meeting with the president.
… The Gateway Pundit highlighted a clip from Gruber’s 2012 interview with the PBS program Frontline in which the professor admitted that he worked together with the president in the Oval Office to conceal the political impact of their plan to get more tax revenue out of employer-sponsored health insurance plans by imposing a new “Cadillac tax” on companies. The Gateway Pundit also confirmed that Gruber checked into the West Wing for a meeting with the president on July 20, 2009, according to White House visitor logs.
“And Obama was like, ‘Well, you know’ — I mean, he is really a realistic guy. He is like, ‘Look, I can’t just do this.’ He said: ‘It is just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phases and other things?’ And we talked about it. And he was just very interested in that topic,” Gruber continued.
“Once again, that ultimately became the genesis of what is called the Cadillac tax in the health-care bill, which I think is one of the most important and bravest parts of the health care law and doesn’t get nearly enough credit,” Gruber added. …
Ed Morrissey says it’s true Gruber was paid $400,000 by the feds for his work crafting the Democrat subterfuge. That’s just the feds. States paid him $1.6 million.
Or, if you prefer a more acerbic conclusion, taxpayers paid Jonathan Gruber in the mid-six-figures to lie to them, and then brag about it to all of his friends and fans later. Glenn Kessler fact-checked an assertion made by Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) about Gruber’s paid involvement with ObamaCare while Nancy Pelosi et al kept claiming amnesia about the man called the “architect” of the law. Normally, Kessler jumps in to correct factually lacking claims, but this one gets the rare check mark.
The story begins in February 2009, when HHS signed Gruber to a contract to provide a micro-simulation model for four months at $95,000. They later added an eight-month contract for $297,000, bring the total known value of “almost $400,000,” exactly what Barrasso stated. For his year or so on the job — which would have been just a little more than the ObamaCare legislative effort lasted (June 2009 – March 2010) — Gruber received roughly what the President of the United States makes in a year. That’s not too bad for an MIT professor. …
Last, but not least, we get liberal Ron Fournier’s Gruber take.
… Gruber’s remarks struck a nerve with me.
Appearing on an academic panel a year ago, this key Obamacare adviser argued that the law never would have passed if the administration had been honest about the fact that the so-called penalty for noncompliance with the mandate was actually a tax.
“And, basically, call it ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass,” Gruber said.
He called you stupid. He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and poor; white and brown; men and women.
Liberals should be the angriest. Not only were they personally deceived, but the administration’s dishonest approach to health care reform has helped make Obamacare unpopular while undermining the public’s faith in an activist government. A double blow to progressives.
On top of that, Gruber has helped make the legal case for anti-Obamacare lawyers. In July, a year-old video surfaced in which Gruber said Washington legally withholds money from states that don’t create their own health care exchanges. That could be construed by the Supreme Court to buttress the case against health insurance subsidies.
Last year, The Post helped document how Obama and his advisers knowingly misled the public during his 2012 reelection campaign by repeatedly saying that, under Obamacare, people could keep their doctors and keep their health plans. To knowingly mislead is to lie. …