Pizza and Fairytales

See, President Obama? This is how a website is supposed to work. Unlike http://t.co/4YkqSEnifF. pic.twitter.com/KXO7je22hy

— RB (@RBPundit) October 25, 2013

An insider tells British newspaper Daily Express, “Paul has spoken about John having a real go at him over the telephone, telling him his music lacked depth and meaning.

“John famously told Paul his music was all ‘pizza and fairytales’, and the insult stuck.

“He has always joked it could make a good song or album title and now he has finally put it to use.”

— “Lennon Feud Inspires McCartney’s New Song,” Contactmusic.com, April 13, 2007

If you’re looking for an epitaph for the republic (and these days who isn’t?) try this — from August 2010 and TechCrunch’s delirious preview of Healthcare.gov:

“We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way,” explained Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all-nighters . . . and, you know, idealism. That kind of led to the magic that was produced.”

Wow. Think of the magic that Madison, Hamilton, and the rest of those schlubs could have produced if they’d only had pizza and Mountain Dew and been willing to pull a few all-nighters at Philadelphia in 1787. Somewhere between the idealism and the curling slice of last night’s pepperoni, Macon Phillips, the administration’s director of new media, happened to come across a tweet by Edward Mullen of Jersey City in which he twitpiced his design for what a health-insurance exchange could look like. So Phillips printed it out to show his fellow administration officials: “Look, this is the sort of creativity that is out there,” he said. “One thing led to another and he left Jersey City to come to D.C. and helped push us through an information architectural process.”

Don’t you just love it! This is way cooler than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: The only “architectural process” they had was crumbling viaducts. I think we can all agree that Barack Obama is hipper than all other government leaders anywhere, ever, combined. Unfortunately, the dogs bark and the pizza-delivery bike moves on, and, in the cold grey morning after of the grease-stained cardboard box with the rubberized cheese stuck to it, Obamacare wound up somewhat less hipper and, in fact, not even HIPAA — the unpersuasively groovy acronym for federally mandated medical privacy in America. Appearing before Congress on Thursday, the magicians of Obamacare eventually conceded that, on their supposedly HIPAA-compliant database, deep in the “information architectural process” is a teensy-weensy little bit of “source code” that reads, “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication of any data transmitted or stored on this information system.”

— “Obamacare’s Magical Thinkers: Not even the coolest president ever can conjure up a national medical regime for 300 million people.”

Besides the potential collapse of their century-old, Otto von Bismarck-inspired dream of socialized medicine in the US, part of what makes the crash of the ObamaCare Website so painful for the left to observer were their early comparisons in 2008, when Barack Obama was routinely described by his groupies in the MSM as the second coming of FDR and JFK. Roosevelt’s WPA at least built roads and bridges; NASA under JFK led to the Saturn V. In contrast, the Obama administration can’t even get a Website off the ground.

The gap between the reality of what government can do successfully (not much, other than destroying people, including both enemy combatants on the battlefield, and American citizens trapped in subsidized housing), and what the left believes it is capable of doing — everything — is of course, enormous. It was perhaps never more apparent than when Obama’s aides were crafting the “Stimulus” program in 2009 and Obama barked, “We need more moon shot!”, leading Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind to write in his book Confidence Men: