A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Utopia

We had hoped to take a day off from the Obamacare death watch, but the convulsions and rattling are simply too riveting and amusing a spectacle.

Wednesday brought not just one but two knee-slapping comedies as both Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the eponymous President Barack Obama both made hilarious attempts at defending Obamacare. Sebelius can probably said to have gotten the worst of it, as her appearance before a House of Representatives committee entailed questioning by anarchist terrorist Republicans with their crazed notions of holding government officials responsible for their actions, whereas Obama faced only another hand-picked audience of adorers during a speech in Boston, but both provided plenty of knee-slapping moments of comedy.

Poor Sebelius had to endure the inevitable “Wizard of Oz” references that are the bane of every Kansan’s existence, even though she grew up in Ohio and is a Democrat, and her day on the job only got worse from there. She was forced to concede that the computer program she had paid $634 million of taxpayer money for wasn’t working very well, and the best boast she could up with was that it hadn’t crashed. Shortly before she made this dubious claim the program crashed, and even CNN couldn’t resist the temptation to split its screen between the apologetic web site message and Sebelius’ earnest if understated claims of success. She was asked about the president’s oft-repeated promise that people will be able to keep their insurance policies “if they like them” and insists that it’s true, even as the president is in Boston admitting the undeniable and evenly widely-reported fact that for many it is not true. A Michigan Republican — apparently they do exist — asked some technical questions about “hot-swapping” and “end-to-security testing” and other computer lingo that forced to Sebelius to admit she had not idea what the hell he was asking about, even after spending $634 million of taxpayer money on it. She was also forced to admit she had no idea how many of the healthy, young suckers needed to subsidize the scheme had been enrolled, or that CNN had reported her website had been broken into by unknown but undoubtedly nefarious hackers. At one point, while being grilled about her own participation in the Obamacare insurance program, and offering a questionable, she was overheard mutter “Don’t do this to me.”

The softball questions sympathetically lobbed in Sebelius’ direction by the Democratic members offered little help, nor did an audience stacked with die-hard supporters offer Obama much help as he touted Obamacare in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall. Despite a pep-rally atmosphere more suitable to a winning basketball team’s impending homecoming victory, Obama at last acknowledged that his oft-repeated promise to people who like their health insurance plan that they can keep it is only going to be kept for the “vast majority” of Americans. Given that Obama’s 52 percent of the 2012 vote was hailed as a vast majority this means that as much as 48 percent of the country could wind up losing its policies, but whatever the number the president was quick to insist they were lucky to have him watching out for them. All those cancelled policies Obama was forced to acknowledge were the fault of “bad apple” insurance companies, he said, and all those forced onto the non-working web site to find a new policy had “substandard” insurance that the government has helpfully nudged them to upgrade. The millions of people who were well satisfied with their coverage and will wind up paying more for less will be hard to convince that the government knows better than they do about such things, but one has to admire Obama’s audacity of hope in making the pitch. He also seemed to blame the whole mess on former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, as he repeatedly likened Obamacare to the state health care reform that Romney had inaugurated as governor of Massachusetts, but the Obamacare moniker will be hard to shake.

The hardship and pain and premature death that will result from Obamacare are to take, but watching the geniuses who dreamed it up trying put a good spin on it is great fun.

— Bud Norman

Dealing With Defeat

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in Republican circles on Wednesday, as the party went down to a widely acknowledged defeat in the great government shutdown battle of ’13.

As a result of a last-minute-before-the-phony-baloney-default-deadline deal the government will be fully back in business on Thursday, which is disappointing enough to any true Republican, and it’s hard to see what the GOP won in exchange in for the bad press and battered poll numbers that it suffered during the much-ballyhooed brinksmanship that proceeded it. The deal does not withhold funding from the much hated Obamacare law, which was the quixotic goal that started all the fuss, nor does it end Congress’ hugely unpopular exemption from the law or delayed its widely hated individual mandate, which we were the backup bargaining conditions of the rebellious Republicans, and it doesn’t seem to offer anything in the way of budget cuts or entitlement reforms or any sort of face-saving fig-leaf at all. The Democratic partisans who predominate in the press are predictably triumphalist, while the conservative outposts of the media are engaged in the usual internecine finger-pointing.

Most of the “RINO” or “establishment” portions of the party, as they’re known to their more rock-ribbed critics, are plausibly claiming vindication for their warnings against the shutdown strategy. Meanwhile the “extremist” or “loony-bird” segments of the party, as they’re known to their more cautious colleagues, are angrily and plausibly arguing that it might have worked if only the party had not been undermined by the weak-kneed defections of those darned “RINOs” and “establishment” types. Both might well be right, at least to some extent, but intra-party sniping is only further proof that the battle did not go well.

About the best that can be said of the deal is that it could have been worse, as it’s all very short-term in extending the government’s ravenous appetite for debilitating debt and record spending, and thus provides future opportunities to attempt to restrain these disastrous tendencies, but that’s not saying much. Partisan rooting aside, and the enthusiastic response of Wall Street to any sort of default-delaying deal notwithstanding, the deal does nothing to address the nation’s most pressing problems but merely puts off the day of reckoning by a few months. A few months hence the same realities of the current political and media landscape that caused Wednesday’s debacle will still prevail, and necessary reforms will likely once again be thwarted no matter how deft or unified the Republicans might be.

Which is why the Republicans should be primarily concerned with changing the political landscape after next year’s mid-term election, and stop in the finger-pointing and aspersion-casting that threatens to turn it into another debacle for the party. The government shutdown affected few people other than some unlucky visitors to the national parks and monuments, most of whom understand that the heavy-handed tactics they encountered there were the fault of officious Democrats, and it will be long forgotten in the eternal span of 13 moths from now. Obamcare’s myriad disasters will still be with us, as will the sputtering economy and overwhelming debt that Obamacare and other administration policies are causing, and the Republican party’s stubborn and poll-defying resistance to such nonsense could prove a winning argument if the GOP doesn’t cannibalize itself in the coming months.

— Bud Norman