All Hail Hanna-Barbera Care!

Rahm’s brother Ezekiel Emanuel has his Emmanuel Goldstein, telling Megyn Kelly, “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids at Fox News!”, in the fashion of 45 years worth of Scooby-Doo villains.

OK, that’s a paraphrase…but only slightly:

Emanuel: Remember, this was not an environment which was hospitable to setting up the exchanges. You and your colleagues were constantly criticizing, trying to under fund it and trying to make sure it didn’t work.

Kelly: A lot of that criticism proved true unfortunately.

Emanuel: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “We’re going to try to do everything we can to make it fail, and then when it fails we’re going to say ‘oh, why did it fail?’”

Kelly: What? I don’t, well, I don’t think Fox News had anything to do with the rollout of HealthCare.gov. As far as I know we didn’t touch that website. But, listen…

Emanuel: You were constantly attacking the law, and you were trying to make it under funded.

Kelly (sarcastically): Ok, I’ll give you that too. It was all our fault.

I remember back in 2009 or 2010 when I interviewed the late Andrew Breitbart* for the PJM XM radio show, he said something along the lines of, “If you think that all of the nation’s political problems can be traced back to the news network that’s at channel #360 on your DirecTV guide, you’ve got some serious issues.”

And naturally, now that Obamacare has some serious — possibly fatal — issues, an Emmanuel Goldstein-escque scapegoat must be found. Ezekiel Emanuel isn’t the only one blaming America’s national nightmare on the penumbras and emanations emerging from channel #360, “Daily Beast’s Tomasky: ObamaCare Woes a Mere ‘Soap Opera’ Scripted by Fox News,” Newsbusters’ Ken Shepherd spots, linking to an article published at the Daily Beast mere hours before Mr. Obama spoke today.

On the other hand one Democrat senator for Connecticut is willing to share the blame a bit, as spotted by Ace:

A liberal Democratic Senator, Chris Murphy, attempted to claim on MSNBC that all the problems with Obamacare were fake problems, stoked up by a media out to get them.

Here’s what the archliberal hostess said in return:

Uh oh. Chris Murphy slams media’s ACA coverage on MSNBC. Tamron Hall snaps. “I, the media, didn’t create these problems.”

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) November 14, 2013

How ridiculous is the spectacle of the left claiming The Media is too hard on Democrats, progressivism, and Obama?

This is a real meme on the left — Ed Schultz comically attempted it last night.

What else do they have, really? They own this disaster, every inch of it. There is no way out. So they’ll just scream “It’s the Media!” and “It’s the Republicans!” and “It’s the Insurance Companies!”

As Jonah Goldberg wrote last week, in his article that was moved from out of the National Review on Dead Tree paywall this morning:

The argument against gloating holds that conservatives should want Obamacare to succeed even though we said all along it couldn’t. It’s such an odd argument, particularly since the Democrats’ lies were of the first order, in that Obama’s aides actually debated and discussed them, no doubt presenting them to focus groups like a jar of “new Shimmer, now an erectile-dysfunction treatment and paint thinner all in one!”

When a product is brought to market and the market discovers — as it eventually has to — that the advertising wasn’t merely a tissue of lies but a geological stratum of lies, the utterly fair and justified response from the critics is “I told you so!” — not “Let’s make this thing bipartisan now.” That’s particularly true when the president continues to lie. On September 26 he said, “If you already have health care, you don’t have to do anything” to keep your plan. On November 3 he said, “What we said was you could keep [your plan] if it hasn’t been changed.” Who knew that dozens of flat declarative statements — “You can keep your plan. Period” — were trailed by a cloud of asterisks like so many invisible fireflies?

If Obamacare had been a shining success from Day One, do you think the Democrats would be in the mood to share the credit? Then why should Republicans be in more of a mood to share the blame?

Feel free to cross your fingers that reality will bend to the gravitational pull of Obama’s stellar ego, his invincible hubris. As for me, I’ll be sitting on the sidelines cheering on Nemesis, with joy in my heart.

It’s time for the president to make a Scooby Snack out of this dog of a law and bite down hard.

Update: And when blaming the media fails, it’s time for the next Emmanuel Goldstein — the insurance companies. And like CNNCBSABCNBC, they were deeply in bed with the Obama administration to pass Obamacare, and transform themselves from more or less private businesses into the equivalent of corporatist utility companies. As Allahpundit writes, “Don’t cry for these people, needless to say. They helped make ObamaCare happen:”

They were only too happy to see healthy young adults forced into buying their product by a constitutionally dubious mandate and to gouge healthy middle-class people with the new, more expensive plans required by the exchanges. They wouldn’t have partnered with the White House if this wasn’t a payday for them. But now they’re screwed twice over: Not only are Democrats trying to make them the fall guy for the cancellations, they’re looking at their payday melting down into red ink if they take Obama’s “advice” and re-create the old risk pool. Oh well. No honor among thieves.

They’re not going to take it lying down.

Read on for Allahpundit’s link to Rich Lowry, who writes at Real Clear Politics that, “The great engine of the welfare state is the hidden cost:”

Usually, the costs of a new program or regulation are too diffuse or distant to matter much politically in comparison to the promise of a direct benefit. This time, the costs aren’t hidden. They are immediate and concrete in the canceled policies and the higher premiums, and they are making the politics of Obamacare toxic.

And right now, it’s so toxic, it’s radioactive, both for Obama and the left in general. As Allah writes, “When otherwise loyal Democrats are on TV seething over being lied to about what’s obviously a subsidization scheme, you know things have gone badly wrong with the usual M.O”

And then there’s the legality of Mr. Obama’s proposed fix — not that the administration has ever lost too much sleep wrestling with the L-word:

“Under the White House’s approach, the Department of Health and Human Services will notify the nation’s state insurance commissioners that they have federal permission to allow consumers who already have such insurance policies to keep them through 2014,” reports the Washington Post.

He’ll also be forcing insurance companies to help advertise for Obamacare by letting customers know that there’s an Obamacare marketplace where they can purchase (or get subsidized) health care coverage.

Obama’s proposal is an extra-legal solution to a big problem for millions of Americans around the country.

“I don’t see within the law how they can do this administratively,” said Speaker John Boehner in a press conference on Capitol Hill. “No one can identify anything the president could do administratively to keep his pledge that would be both legal and effective.”

The proposed White House fix so that Obama can honor his commitment is also likely to create more problems and to further distrust the American people have for this administration, which makes law based on what it chooses to enforce while sidestepping the constitutional process that is in place.

Indeed, there’s another problem. As Texas senator Ted Cruz says, the president cannot fix an unfixable law. “We cannot ‘fix’ Obamacare. The damage has been done, as millions of Americans have already been made to pay higher premiums and lose their jobs, wages, and health care plans,” Cruz said today.

President Clinton famously dismissed Obama’s candidacy for president of the United States by saying, “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I have ever seen.”