JAMES TARANTO: How Low Can They Go? The White House Attacks A Cancer Patient.

It’s been just over a month since ObamaCare’s disastrous launch, and it’s just over three years until the scheduled election of Barack Obama’s successor. It’s going to be a long three years. The exposure of Obama’s signature “achievement” as both incompetent and fraudulent (with its economic inviability yet to be realized) is also showing the administration’s true face. It is an ugly one, and we can expect to see a lot more of it while Obama remains in office.

This morning the White House went on the attack against a cancer patient who is also a victim of ObamaCare. Edie Littlefield Sundby of San Diego explains in today’s Wall Street Journal that she’s been managing a case of stage 4 gallbladder cancer, an affliction whose five-year survival rate is just 2%. Having survived the diagnosis by seven years so far, she beat very long odds–and she did so with the help of an excellent insurance plan that covered care at three hospitals, two in California and one in Texas.

In touting ObamaCare, Obama asserted at least two dozen times (in slightly varying language) that if you like your health plan, you can keep it. As Sundby explains, she is a victim of Obama’s fraudulent sales pitch. . . .

This morning Dan Pfeiffer the fast-talking flack tweeted out a piece from ThinkProgress.org, a leftist propaganda outfit. Titled “The Real Reason That the Cancer Patient Writing in Today’s Wall Street Journal Lost Her Insurance,” the piece, by one Igor Volsky, claims that “Sundby shouldn’t blame reform.” Volsky instead blames United Healthcare. . . .

All this may be true, but it begs the question. The addition of a phrase to that last sentence shows why: Sundby is losing her coverage and her doctors because of a business decision her insurer made within the competitive dynamics of California’s health care market under the regulatory structure established by Obama’s comprehensive “reform.”

Obama did not qualify his pitch by stating that if you like your health plan, you can keep it unless your insurer makes a business decision to the contrary within the competitive dynamics of your state’s health care market.

To the contrary, he represented ObamaCare as protecting consumers from precisely that sort of cruel business decision, and he has not backed away from that fraudulent promise.

They lied because people wouldn’t have passed it if they told the truth. Now they’re lashing out as people point out that they lied. Back during the campaign they lied and said that Mitt Romney cut off a woman with cancer. Now they’re lying about the woman with cancer that they cut off. Fraudulent, indeed. But lashing out at critics won’t stop the rot.

UPDATE: ObamaCare and the Wages Of Spin.