Shot:
— David Frum at CNN.com, October 14, 2013.
Chaser:
At the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s successor to Newsweek, which the Washington Post sold for a buck in 2010 in part to offload its terminally bloated union-mandated benefit plans, David Frum wrote yesterday that if you like your healthcare plan, you can’t keep your healthcare plan – even if you’re the ultimate RINO who moved leftward in 2008 because you wanted to keep the invites to DC cocktail parties coming:
It’s always exciting to be part of a chapter in American history. I happen to be one of the hundreds of thousands of people whose insurance coverage was canceled for not complying with the terms of the Affordable Care Act. As a result, not only will I pay more, but I have had to divert many otherwise useful hours to futzing around with websites and paperwork.
President Obama promised, “If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.” It was a more ambiguous promise than it sounded. Who likes his or her health insurance? But it was there, and it did its job.
I probably need to be clear straight off that I am not presenting myself as any kind of hard-luck case. Maybe from some social justice perspective it’s perfectly fair and reasonable to load all the costs of health reform onto people like me. The trouble is, this administration has been less than candid about what those costs would be.
During that dank period in early 2009, in-between Newsweek declaring “We Are All Socialists Now” on its cover and before the Tea Party gathered steam to push back against the notion of one-party rule, if only there had been someone warning that such calamities were coming. That the inevitable disasters that befall a society that goes hardcore socialist would occur in America as well, and who was brave enough to openly hope those with such plans would fail before they ruined the country. Naturally, such a person would be demonized by those who had hoped to ride the Obama gravy train over the next four to eight years.
QED:
And if only there was someone willing to organize the Tea Party and speak at many of their events. That person would of course be called a racist, merely for opposing the politics of a president he disagreed with — even in his obituary.
As G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions,” which could well sum up the childish beliefs that were on full display among America’s elites in 2009, before the inevitable hangover began to kick in, one that the entire nation, and not just those drank the Obama Kool-Aid will be suffering for years to come.
Update: James Taranto’s latest “Best of the Web” column is devoted to this latest ObamaCare victim, and how the nation as a whole arrived at this sorry moment:
This column recognizes that politics often necessitates compromise, and we thought the recent effort to defund ObamaCare via a partial government shutdown was both futile and foolish. But we are more convinced than ever of the view we held in 2010, that Republican members of Congress–every single one of them, even relative liberals like Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Rep. Michael Castle–were right to vote “no.” Even David Frum can’t blame them for jacking up his insurance rates.
Read the whole thing.™
Join the conversation as a VIP Member