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Mind-Boggling Attempts at Blame Shifting

Hardened leftists, including Journolister Ezra Klein, really believe that Obamacare has been "sabotaged."

by
Tom Blumer

Bio

October 28, 2013 - 11:38 pm

obamacare_sabotage_10-28-13-1

During the Bush 43 administration, leading lights on the left arrogantly christened themselves “the reality based community.”

Many of the same people who claimed at the time to base their assertions and beliefs “more on observation than on faith, assumption, or ideology” have hysterically concocted reasons why HealthCare.gov, surely in size and scope the most disastrously incompetent website rollout ever, cannot possibly be more than partially the Obama administration’s fault. Other nefarious people and shadowy forces, particularly Republicans and conservatives, who in reality “didn’t cast a single vote in favor of the ACA and had no control over its 42-month rollout,” somehow deserve the lion’s share of the blame.

On Thursday, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein promulgated perhaps the longest list of ways Republicans did “everything possible to sabotage” Obamacare. He considers them hypocrites for criticizing the HealthCare.gov debacle, and believes that “their plan to undermine the law worked too well.”

As he blathers on about this non-existent conspiracy, one thing about which Klein can claim legitimate expertise is in orchestrating one.

In 2008, he founded Journolist, a private and intensely secretive Google Groups forum of 400 left-leaning journalists he coordinated from his blog perches, first at the far-left American Prospect and then, beginning in May 2009, at the Post.

In April 2008, Journolist participants were infuriated with reasonable questions raised by Hillary Clinton herself, as well as ABC’s Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, at a presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mrs. Clinton about the degree of Obama’s philosophical kinship with his longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright. In reaction, making it appear as if they had each spontaneously developed a case of instant outrage, they drafted an open letter calling the debate “a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.”

The letter and subsequent internal Journolist discussions demanding that group members ignore all matters pertaining to Wright succeeded in killing virtually all subsequent establishment press coverage of Obama and Wright. Combined with Republican opponent John McCain’s decision, clearly in reaction to the enforced silence, to avoid the topic in the vain hope that he might end up being liked by people who would despise him no matter what he did, their conspiracy succeeded in removing an objectively important issue from the fall presidential campaign.

How can anyone, given the administration’s blatant attempts at race-based wealth redistribution and its disastrous foreign policy, still believe that the Obama’s 16-year rendezvous with Wright was an irrelevant matter?

Three weeks into October, Klein apparently felt the need to mend fences with long-time Democratic Party operatives, Democrat officeholders, and the left’s vast fever swamp after publishing several items severely critical of HealthCare.gov’s rollout earlier in the month. He has particularly emphasized the website’s back-end failure to integrate properly, or even at all, with insurance companies processing the trickle of applications which have made it through the gauntlet of HealthCare.gov’s system timeouts and crashes. A fiasco which will make the website’s access and front-end processing issues pale in comparison looms if those back-end integration problems aren’t resolved.

Klein claimed that the following items are germane to the HealthCare.gov’s calamity:

  • Republicans “refused to appropriate the money the Department of Health and Human Services said it needed to properly implement Obamacare.” That’s a howler. For all practical purposes, HHS has had an unlimited budget for Obamacare implementation, and has exceeded what even its most critical detractors imagined it could throw away. Peter Gosselin, a senior health care analyst at Bloomberg Government who was former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s speechwriter (i.e., certainly not the left’s definition of a crazed conservative critic), estimates that HHS has thus far managed to spend or commit to spending over $1 billion on Affordable Care Act-related projects to just its top ten outside vendors. Just wait until the “tech surge” costs get added in. Yet clowns like MSNBC’s Ed Schultz blame Republicans for forcing HHS to build HealthCare.gov “on the cheap.”
  • Senate Republicans “tried to intimidate Sebelius out of using existing HHS funds to implement Obamacare.” They tried, Ezra. They failed. They had no impact.
  • Many Republican governors “refused to build (their own state exchanges), leaving the construction of 34 insurance marketplaces up to HHS.” HHS knew that it would have to support at least several states from the get-go. Adding more states to the mix would predominantly add only additional hardware to the cost of building a properly designed website.
  • Republican attorneys general who challenged Obamacare’s constitutionality “stalled implementation as government and industry waited for the uncertainty to resolve.” Sebelius’s people were hard at work creating their disaster long before the Supreme Court’s errant June 2012 ruling, and the 15 months which remained before the October 1, 2013 rollout should have been more than enough time to get it right anyway. The Supreme Court decision also had nothing to do with HHS’s exercises in waiver-granting or its arguably illegal decision to delay the employer mandate for a year.
  • Finally, Republicans “literally shut down the government because they refused to pass a funding bill that contained money for Obamacare.” The truth is that the defunding idea, though constitutionally valid, was rejected by congressional Republicans and replaced with an ultimately failed demand for a one-year delay in the individual mandate even before the 17 percent shutdown began. The timely funding of Obamacare was thus never threatened.

Here is a very short and far from complete list of things with which Republicans, conservatives, tea party members, and the Koch brothers have had absolutely no involvement:

  • About 16 million Americans losing health coverage President Obama promised they could keep.
  • The crony hiring of a lead firm on the project whose senior vice president “just so happens” to have been a classmate of First Lady Michelle Obama at Princeton.
  • A website implementation which, according to Media Temple’s Russ Reeder in a Saturday evening Fox News interview with Judge Jeanine Pirro, was stacked with newbies just out of college.
  • “Glitches” which have affected Obamacare paper and phone applications — which unfortunately makes sense, because they all have to be processed through HealthCare.gov’s faulty, clogged architecture.
  • Obamacare navigators who are breathtakingly ignorant or have criminal records.
  • An imminent electronic medical records implementation disaster which will turn routine medical services into bureaucratic, intrusive and error-prone nightmares.

The reality-avoidance community simply refuses to recognize that Obamacare’s failed implementation is a direct result of presidential detachment, Sebelius’s proven track record of government website management incompetence, and an atmosphere of paranoia and intimidation the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime.

Sorry, lefties. This one’s all on you, and only your desperate ilk will buy what you’re trying to sell.

Along with having a decades-long career in accounting, finance, training and development, Tom Blumer has written for several national online publications primarily on business, economics, politics and media bias. He has had his own blog, BizzyBlog.com, since 2005, and has been a PJM contributor since 2008.

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Top Rated Comments   
I have heard this same type of argument before. The Democrats and their media enablers (but I repeat myself) are using the cool, considered reasoning of wife-beaters: "It was YOUR fault that I hit you! You made me act like this."

Perhaps they can now move on to the Marion Barry defense: "B***h set me up."
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
- Republicans wiggled their noses at K-Sebs, causing her to hear M's as B's.
- Republicans xeroxed their butts and substituted the pages for the Obamacare Master Budget.
- Republicans misspelled potato and threw the exchanges into some sort of space-time loop.
- Republicans human-trafficked the programmers in Tijuana and claimed diplomatic immunity.
- Republicans faked their own deaths on the day they were supposed to approve more funds for K-Sebs.
- Republicans ate muffins while the Democrats were trying to explain something about the actuarial adverse selection death spiral.
- Republicans gave the Democrats the healthcare.gov Master Password (1-2-3-4-5), leaving Democrats catatonic in front of their monitors, having faced the gibbering Lovecraftian horror of the raw Obamacare code and lost their souls to the abyss (credit to "db" at the reason.com forum).

Christ, and I was about to call Ezra Klein a journalist when he (momentarily) delivered a few facts about Obamacare.
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
There's no surprise in any of this. Left-liberals' whole world view is founded on a premise of moral and intellectual superiority to us "benighted ones." (http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2012/06/back-by-political-necessity-stupid-or.html) They cannot admit to error; they cannot admit to covert motives; and they cannot admit to a hidden agenda -- even when the sin in question pertains to an isolatable individual or group thereof. To do any of those things would pull them down from their pedestals and compel them to defend their policies on the same moral and utilitarian grounds the rest of us occupy.

Nothing irritates a left-liberal more than having to rub elbows with us groundlings, even to the extent of a conversation about policy. If you've wondered at their inveterate hostility toward talk radio and Fox News, now you know.
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
All Comments   (51)
All Comments   (51)
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my classmate's step-mother makes $63 an hour on the internet. She has been fired for ten months but last month her payment was $16174 just working on the internet for a few hours....>>>>>>>> http://xurl.es/3mzv7
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
Right, the GOP, who can't even agree on what to get for lunch, nonetheless was so organized and united that they sabotaged 0bamacare (rolls eyes).
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
Sure. And all the failures of the Bush administration were Democrats' fault, because they opposed him so assiduously.
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
Google is paying 80$ per hour! Just work for few hours & spend more time with friends and family. Yesterday I bought a top of the range Lancia after having made $9458 this month . Its the most-financialy rewarding I've had. It sounds unbelievable but you wont forgive yourself if you don’t check it out www.buzz95.com
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
"It's the Republicans' fault!"

You mean those Republicans who were literally locked out of drafting Obamacare in both houses of Congress by Harry Reid and Nancy "We have to pass it to see what's in it" Pelosi?

Those Republicans ruined this abortion of a program?
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
The Socialist doctrine IS incompatible with with the Principles GUARANTEED by the Constitution;

" ... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- ..."

VERSUS...........

" ... From each according to their ability; To each according to their need. ..."

The Socialist doctrine IS incompatible with with the Principles GUARANTEED by the Constitution;The Socialist doctrine IS incompatible with with the Principles GUARANTEED by the Constitution;The Socialist doctrine IS incompatible with with the Principles GUARANTEED by the Constitution;The Socialist doctrine IS incompatible with with the Principles GUARANTEED by the Constitution;The Socialist doctrine IS incompatible with with the Principles GUARANTEED by the Constitution;
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
I would like to believe the left is that screwed up. But notice how they never wait until O has f**ked up again—they think well ahead of Obama’s wave of destruction. They instinctively understand his commitment to America’s deconstruction—an old pipedream of the Bamster’s—and there will always be damage control to be done while he’s still in office.

People like Klein come from the same seed pod: he’s as motivated as any dem control freak in Congress to helping Obama because O helps dems get that much closer to Control Central. All in all, anticipating and cleaning up after the Bamster is a labor of fulfillment we should never take away from these people.
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
It is all in the Democratic machine playbook. See http://clarespark.com/2011/12/10/before-saul-alinsky-rules-for-democratic-politicians/. Alinsky learned from Democratic politicians as much as he got from whatever Left faction he favored.
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
This particular blog was retitled "Claude Bowers: racist Democratic pol." And is very eye-opening. You won't look at US political history the same way again.
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
and it was so interesting to hear Jay Carney, the liar in chief's mouth piece try to explain away if you like your policy you can keep it.

He spoke of the pages of fine print in health care that people are, according to him, too stupid to read and understand, but we are supposed to blindly accept a 2700 page bill that we were told had to be passed so we can find out what is in it, and more than 70,000 pages of regulations based on this law.

1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
Isn't it amazing, how for the left, its always someone elses fault when their ideas crash and burn. And, whatever slimy, dishonest, deceitful, illegal incident happens, in our federal government, the President didn't know about it.
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
I think we have to understand that the Left is a religion. As such they well understand that words and beliefs are far more important to their goals than anything in the real world.

It is just a confidence game: I show enough confidence and people will believe me.
1 year ago
1 year ago Link To Comment
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