JAMES TARANTO: President Haze: Obama and his supporters emit a fog of equivocation and euphemism.

“If you like your plan, you can keep it.” That assertion, repeated with small variations, was Barack Obama’s central pledge when he was campaigning for president and then for the enactment of health-care “reform.” The pro-Obama New York magazine has assembled a 95-second video montage of the future and current president making the assertion two dozen times between 2008 and 2010.

Surely this is the clearest example of a broken presidential promise since George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips: no new taxes.” . . .

What do you call a political promise delivered repeatedly and emphatically only to be broken deliberately? David Firestone, an editorialist at the New York Times, calls it an “unfortunate blanket statement.” We suppose another example of an unfortunate blanket statement was “I am not a crook.”

Indeed.