“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
– President Bill Clinton, January 26, 1998
“And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.”
– President Barack Obama, Portland, April 1, 2010, after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law
So who is the bigger liar, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama?
Is it remotely possible that a bumbling Obama did not know that the Affordable Care Act would deny hundreds of thousands of Americans of their insurance policies? Playing devil's advocate, Charles Krauthammer writes in a Washington Post opinion piece entitled "Obamacare laid bare" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-obamacare-laid-bare/2013/10/31/d229515a-4254-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html?hpid=z2):
"But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare Web site, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head."
But let's not play games. Obama is anything but stupid. He knew that many Americans would not be able to keep their existing insurance plans and would be forced to subscribe to higher priced plans in order to subsidize plans for the uninsurable.
And when only six enrollments occurred on the first day after the Obamacare website went live on October 1 (see: http://freebeacon.com/cbs-obamacare-enrollment-off-to-an-incredibly-slow-start/), the president decided to keep this "incredibly slow start" a secret from the American people.
So, when the President of the United States is caught lying to the electorate about his signature legislation and even Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post assigns him four Pinocchios, how do you go about defending him? Quite a conundrum; however, Paul Krugman seems to have hit upon a solution: You label the president's health care opponents "racists," thereby inflaming your readership and pointing them in a different direction.
In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "A War on the Poor" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/opinion/krugman-a-war-on-the-poor.html?src=twr&_r=0), Krugman argues that "the Medicaid expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor blacks." Krugman writes:
"Republicans in leadership positions try to modulate their language a bit, but it’s a matter more of tone than substance. They’re still clearly passionate about making sure that the poor and unlucky get as little help as possible, that — as Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, put it — the safety net is becoming 'a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.' And Mr. Ryan’s budget proposals involve savage cuts in safety-net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid.
. . . .
So what’s this all about? One reason, the sociologist Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in their minds, acting out adolescent libertarian fantasies. 'It’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,' declared Paul Ryan in 2009.
But there’s also, as Mr. Little says, the stain that won’t go away: race."
I don't like Republicans any more than Democrats (I don't like politicians), and I support universal health care, but how can Krugman today write a column ignoring the chaos and lies surrounding the rollout of Obamacare? Perhaps this is a favor from one Nobelist to another.
In fact, it's time for Obama to resign. He has discredited the presidency.
