California has been waging a war against independent contractors for the past 20 years, and President Obama’s administration has made it clear through their actions how much they hate small business in general. But in forcing so many people out of individual health insurance policies, they apparently never bothered to consider how many of those individual policy owners would be journalists.
Now is the time that Newsbusters juxtaposes, Small Dead Animals-style, “The Curious Case of Kirsten Powers,” featuring back to back clips assembled by their in-house video producer Bob Parks, featuring a liberal who was just mugged by her president. As the video’s title implies, the result was Powers going from “ObamaCare Cheerleader to Victim”:
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Last week, the New York Times ran a piece titled “Daring to Complain About Obamacare,” in which leftwing journalist Lori Gottlieb, who lost her policy, feigned surprise at how quickly she was ostracized by her former friends, both online and in person, when she dared criticize The Won:
“Obamacare or Kafkacare?” I posted on Facebook as soon as I hung up with Anthem. I vented about the call and wrote that the president should be protecting the middle class, not making our lives substantially harder. For extra sympathy, I may have thrown in the fact that I’m a single mom. (O.K., I did.)
Then I sat back and waited for the love to pour in. Or at least the “like.” Lots of likes. After all, I have 1,037 Facebook friends. Surely, they’d commiserate.
Except that they didn’t.
Instead, aside from my friend David, who attempted to cheer me up with, “My dad, who never turns down a bargain, would take the sex change just because it’s free,” my respondents implied — in posts that, to my annoyance, kept getting more “likes” — that it was beyond uncool to be whining about myself when the less fortunate would finally have insurance.
“The nation has been better off,” wrote one friend. “Over 33 million people who did not have insurance are now going to get it.” That’s all fine and good for “the nation,” but what about my $5,400 rate hike (after-tax dollars, I wanted to add, but dared not in this group of previously closeted Mother Teresas)? Another friend wrote, “Yes, I’m paying an extra 200 a month, but I’m okay with doing that so that others who need it can have health care.”
I was shocked. Who knew my friends were such humanitarians? Has Obamacare made it un-P.C. to be concerned by a serious burden on my family’s well-being?
The heated reactions even moved offline. Frustrated, I observed to one friend who was covered through her work that when an issue didn’t affect people directly, they became “theoretically generous.” Ask them to donate several thousand dollars so that the less fortunate can have medical insurance — which is exactly what President Obama is asking me to do — and I’ll bet they’d change their tune about “ending inequality” and “creating fairness” and “doing what’s good for the country.”
As Rich Lowry noted yesterday at the otherwise left-leaning Politico, “the great engine of the welfare state,” which Gottlieb and Powers cheerfully supported for most of their adult lives, “is its hidden cost,” which recently crashed upon them, a la Mencken, good and hard:
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.
But the response from Gottlieb’s equally politicized “friends” sounds very much like the “You Are Not OF THE BODY!!!!” reaction that veteran author Harry Stein received when he pointed out how inexperienced then-Sen. Obama was as a presidential candidate in 2008, at an upstate New York party chockablock with effete leftists, including the response from one, which led to the classic title of his 2009 book, I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican!
And since I’ve been meaning to link to this for a couple of days now, another distaff Obamacare cheerleader now experiencing similar feelings of anger, regret and confusion is the person who Viacom’s Stephen Colbert described as that “vaguely ethnic smiling woman,” whom the makers of Healthcare.gov chose for the Website’s splash page:
Behold, Obama’s Julia (another failed Website designer, ironically enough) made flesh!
Once the Obamacare Website crashed and burned so spectacularly it made the Hindenburg look like a marshmallow roast, the above model became the omnipresent radioactive face of flaming health insurance failure, alongside President Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. QED:
Speaking of juxtapositions, Kate of Small Dead Animals had this one on Wednesday, titled “Obamacare Imitates the Onion”:
October 22, 2013: “People In Healthcare.gov Stock Photos Now Visibly Panicking”
November 13, 2013; “Hated and ridiculed, the ‘Obamacare Girl’ defends herself”
Heh. So who is she? Exactly who’d you’d expect: “Obamacare girl not a citizen, hasn’t signed up and….wasn’t paid,” Catherine Wilkinson of the Victory Girls blog notes, not unsympathetically:
She thought she was merely getting some benefit from a deal with the devil and it didn’t happen. And she’s feeling the hurt.
Much like a lot of Americans feel right now….especially two-time Obama voters. This, from the above ABC/Obamacare link:
“Speculation swirled that Adriana might not be a legal resident of the United States, and therefore not even eligible for the health care exchanges. Adriana said she is a wife and mother who lives in Maryland with her 21-month-old son and husband of six and a half years. her husband is a U.S. citizen, as is her son. Adriana, who is Colombian, said she has lived legally in the U.S. for more than six years, is currently a permanent resident and is applying for citizenship.
Though she is eligible for healthcare through the ACA, Adriana says she hasn’t signed up for it, and is neither in favor nor against it.”
And on top of not being a citizen AND not signed up for it, she was never paid for her services.
The irony….it burns.
Is it fair for ABC to track her down and solicit her reaction? Well, about as fair as the media gleefully tracking down one of the actresses in Hillary’s “3:oo AM” video in 2008 to report that in reality, she was an Obama supporter.
And didn’t anybody in the Obama administration see Wag the Dog, where one of the running Clinton-era jokes was making sure each person hired for the project didn’t have any illegal immigrant non-American citizen nannies or gardeners in their closet for the GOP Congress to exploit?
Oh and speaking of the Wag the Dog, that film depicted a president ginning up hostilities with longtime US ally Albania to deflect attentions away from his floundering domestic policies…
…So I’m sure this is probably nothing, right?
Update: Nancy Pelosi stuck a shiv into her fellow distaff Democrats last night:
Did I ever tell my constituents that if they liked their plan they could keep it?” Pelosi asked. “I would have if I’d ever met anybody who liked his or her plan. But that was not my experience.”
In fact, Pelosi said in 2009: “If you like what you have, you can keep it.” Pelosi’s website still states: “Keep your doctor, and your current plan, if you like them.”
“As far as the Affordable Care Act is concerned, what the president said was completely accurate,” Pelosi said.
Nancy, meet Kirsten. Kirsten, meet Nancy. You two have lots to talk about, along with one million of Pelosi’s fellow Californians.
Update (11/16/13): Welcome readers clicking in from:
- Director Blue
- Hot Air
- Instapundit
- Maverick Philosopher
- Lucianne.com
- Right Wing News
- And the PJ Media.com homepage.
Sometime yesterday, the video originally linked to in the above post was pulled; I’m not sure if it was by Newsbusters or YouTube. However, Bob Parks, its producer, also uploaded a copy to his Black and Right Website’s YouTube account, and I’ve swapped it out with that video.
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