Once again, what a difference two weeks make:
On CBS Thursday morning, a day after Congress passed a bill reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling, longtime “Face the Nation” anchor Bob Schieffer said President Obama emerged as the clear winner.
“The President won this thing,” Schieffer said. “There’s no question about that. But he has to be very careful not to rub [Republicans’] noses in it.”
The above was from The Blaze, on October 17th. Flash-forward to today; ‘Schieffer Roasts Obamacare Rollout,’ as spotted by the Washington Free Beacon:
Maybe I was thinking about that movie “Dumb and Dumber” but as I watched the disastrous rollout of Obamacare coming as it did on the heels of the Republican shutdown of the government, the phrase that kept running through my mind was “worse and worser.” Is worser a word? Well, actually, it is. We looked it up. The shutdown was the worst but this thing is worser. If we thought the partisan blather couldn’t get thicker or sillier than it got during the shutdown well, we now know. [That includes your own partisan blather, right Bob? — Ed] By now, we have heard from all the people whose fault it wasn’t. We’ve heard all the talking points and some of the critics were all but foaming at the mouth. It was the Washington we have come to know. All talk, all the time, but at the end of the day just another example of how government seems incapable of making things better and it never seems to learn. Does anyone believe that successful start-ups like Amazon or Google would risk launching their programs before they were properly tested? There may be a lesson there if those involved could spend less time refining the talking points and more time actually trying to make things work. The way this thing is going it is a good thing we have a word like worser.
“Government seems incapable of making things better and it never seems to learn.”
Why yes, Bob. But at least half the country learned this lesson long before they reached the age of 76.
To respond to Schieffer’s reference to successful start-ups, “Microsoft, Amazon: Obama Turned Down Our Help on Obamacare Site,” Newsmax reported this past week:
The Obama administration appears to have passed up offers from Amazon and Microsoft to help fix the federal government’s troubled healthcare enrollment website, according to documents released on Tuesday by a Republican-led congressional investigating committee.
An Oct. 7 inquiry from Amazon’s subsidiary Amazon Web Services Inc. was turned down by two senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseeing implementation of President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law, according to copies of emails provided by the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Microsoft also contacted HHS and the White House with offers of “technical expertise and assistance,” but the company has not provided any such services, a Microsoft representative said in an Oct. 25 letter to the committee. The letter did not say whether the administration had responded to Microsoft’s offers.
But why wouldn’t the administration turn down their offers, considering that their boss has never wanted to work in private enterprise, because a job in the free market is “not a dynamic life,” and is simply “going through the motions,” as one of Obama mentor’s said of Mr. Obama’s leftist worldview. And if, as Mr. Obama himself boasts, he knows more than his staff when it comes to politics, policy, and speechwriting, surely he knows more about Website design than anyone who’s “merely” a Website developer. Perhaps he did ponder for a moment about supervising the rewriting of its code himself, as fellow leftist Jennifer Granholm embarrassingly joked last week.
To bring this post full circle, what a difference a couple of weeks makes. In addition to a Website that’s a Kafkaesque nightmare, and with more and more Americans discovering that the president lied to them, and they’re losing their health insurance, including cancer patients reporting their coverage being dropped as a result of Obamacare, if only there was someone who knew such a calamity was about to ensue, and urged the president and his party not to roll Obamacare out in October.
Ted Cruz [made] a fight that the establishment shied away from. He took on a position for principle not popular with the media and public. He made that fight with lots of risks and little upside and pushed the media to the point where that media made absolutely sure that the entire country knew which party wanted to stop Obamacare and which party with one voice was dedicated to protecting Obamacare from repeal and or delay at all costs….
…right up until they weren’t.
Let me close with this: If Ted Cruz had not made this fight, when the Obamacare launch came and the problems arose, the media would have talked about how natural such problems were and when Democrats asked to delay implementation it would be sold by the media as not a big deal, the most reasonable thing in the world…
…instead of trying to explain why it’s necessary to delay a law passed by congress, signed by the president and upheld by the supreme court that they were united in defending as inviolate just two weeks ago while comedians across the country laugh at it.
GOP Ted Cruz did this for you, even while you were trying to destroy him.
My exit question for Karl Rove & Company: How many millions of dollars from Big money donors would you have paid to put Democrats up for election in 2014 in such a spot?
Indeed.™
Update: Ahh, this was the quote I was looking for when I wrote the above post, as spotted by Tim Blair, who writes:
Harvard professor and former Democrat adviser David Cutler explains why Barack Obama’s new healthcare program is such a brilliant, screaming, unfixable superdisaster:
They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business.
Huh. I can remember back in 2009, when it was just us crazy rightwing neocon deathbeast rethuglican libertarian types who were pointing out the shocking lack of real world business experience amongst Mr. Obama’s administration:
Back then, Smitty, Stacy McCain’s co-blogger, quipped that it really didn’t matter who’s working for Obama; his policies ensured that a car-crash of rock star proportions was inevitable:
I think Obama’s Parade of Rookies a red herring. If you’re driving toward a brick wall, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re coasting in, or all ahead full-tilt boogie. You smack the wall, the Corvette’s modern art, and your name is not Rick Allen.
Like the accident involving the aforementioned drummer for Def Leppard, the wall has been thoroughly crashed (just like the Obamacare Website itself). After being driven on through the night, the Corvette went up in a pyromania of flames, and the high and dry left is now beset with a raging case of hysteria. And I’m not fa-fa-fa-foolin’.
(Sorry for that last paragraph. I realize it’s no rock of ages, but I couldn’t resist.)
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