Question for my Lefty friends:
Is Barack Obama a liberal politician who wants bi-partisanship and semi-moderate policies that appeal to most Americans, or is he a far-left dream-come-true radical?
He can’t be both, despite campaigning that way.
Follow-up question: Is your answer to the above question different now than it was during the election?
Consider this your token bone thrown from the Almighty One himself. This way Captain Barry can try and make himself look like a moderate against the lunatics running Congress.
The White House disagreed this afternoon with the contention by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, that the disruptions at town hall meetings are “un-American,” as the Democratic congressional leaders contended in a USA Today op-ed this morning.
“I think there’s actually a pretty long tradition of people shouting at politicians in America,” White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton told reporters on Air Force One when asked about the comments.
Clever how Team Barry words this, right? They want you to know that they don’t think you’re being un-patriotic, but still can’t acknowledge that you’re doing anything more than “shouting at politicians.” Good call, Mr. President.
The White House might not think we’re un-patriotic, but they definitely think we’re delusional. Their new website to confront the “myths” about “health insurance reform” was put together to give us “reality checks.” And the links to share such “reality checks” via Facebook and Twitter have the condescending instructions to “Give others a healthy dose of reality.”
Well, gee thanks Mr. President. I really appreciate you listening to my concerns about healthcare reform. Er, I mean, health insurance reform. It’s good to know that you think I’m in need of a “healthy dose of reality.” At least you don’t think I need a “healthy dose of patriotism.”
If this nervous, stuttering, man who has an absolutely horrible time speaking in front of the camera doesn’t scream “organized astroturfer” then I’m not sure who does.
And I say that with all do respect, of course. This guy is clearly just an average American worried about healthcare for his son. He isn’t polished and he’s not rattling off talking points that sound like they’ve been force fed to him by the RNC.
So what say you Ms. Pelosi? Is this one of the un-patriotic Nazis that the Republican opposition has been organizing into fake protests and angry mobs? Or are you just as full of it?
In an attempt to keep things business as usual for Team Barry, it looks like the White House has launched another website so that they can “combat misinformation about [healthcare reform].”
Citing what it calls “a troubling trend” of “wild rumors and scare tactics,” the White House Monday announced the launch of http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/, a new Web page which “focuses on what reform really means for you and your family” and “debunks some common myths along the way,” White House New Media Director Macon Phillips wrote on the official White House blog.
In keeping with President Obama’s use of social networking sites to engage and utilize his network of supporters during his presidential campaign, the new page also provides users with a number of ways to notify their own networks of contacts about the page and its content.
The Web page features half a dozen videos from Obama aides who discuss various aspects of health care reform and it also has a set of “faq’s” or frequently asked questions about health care reform.
I think the only thing Obama has done as frequently as appoint a new czar is create a new website. I mean seriously – is this the best that The Most Intellectual Cabinet Ever can come up with every time there is a problem? How do we give people more faith in the stimulus? Start a website! How can we find out who is dissing healthcare? Post a blog entry! How can we stop healthcare from turning into our Waterloo? Uh.. how about we… uhh.. start a website!
We get it Team Barry: You guys are like, the most, tech-savvy administration ever. You even had your own iPhone app! Wow! You uber-tech trendiness makes me really feel like I can relate to my government. I’m so glad we didn’t elect John McCain because I heard he didn’t even use e-mail or something.
But do the Democrats really think they are going to turn this mess around with a website that repeats the same lies, over and over? If you go to the new “Reality Check” website, it’s a collection of videos defending ObamaCare. And do you know what these super-persuasive videos are? People working for the Obama Administration (or former Obama cronies) saying that what everyone else says about healthcare reform is wrong.
Now tell me, how convincing do you think this is really going to be? Obama has had more than one prime time press conference to defend his attempt to socialize medicine, and the more people hear about it, the more they don’t like it. What good do Obama and his fellow Democrats really think they can do talking about it more and more?
One dominant theme we’ve seen in these exploding town halls is that Americans feel like they are being lied to by supporters of ObamaCare. Don’t get me wrong – people are furious about what’s in the bill – but they’re even more furious about their congressmen lying about it. What’s the logical conclusion here that Obama and crew are missing? The more you say things that people now know are lies, the bigger the whole you are digging. You doubt that’s the case? Try and convince me that people like this guy are going to see the light just because they watched a video where people working for the White House put up a video online.
So good luck, Team Barry. I’m sure your new website is going to work flawlessly. Or, at least as well as Pelosi calling grassroots opponents of the bill Nazis and “un-American” has.
There’s a wonderful little gem coming out of Fox News today about how Obama’s “tip line” – where loyal Obama followers can report healthcare naysayers to the White House – is probably illegal. But it gets better! Not only is probably illegal, but getting rid of it is too!
“The White House is in bit of a conundrum because of this privacy statute that prohibits the White House from collecting data and storing it on people who disagree with it,” Judge Andrew Napolitano, a FOX News analyst, said Friday.
“There’s also a statute that requires the White House to retain all communications that it receives. It can’t try to rewrite history by pretending it didn’t receive anything,” he said.
“If the White House deletes anything, it violates one statute. If the White House collects data on the free speech, it violates another statute.”
Whoops. Who knew that encouraging citizens to report each other for disagreeing might cause some, er, problems?
I’ve been away for the last week and haven’t really had the opportunity to blog since all of this tip line nonsense began. Plenty has been said across the blogosphere and elsewhere about Obama’s new snitch line. Clearly any level-headed person who hears that our executive branch is collecting information about people who disagree with them is going to be suspicious. Add that to the White House’s threats to “punch back twice as hard” and people are going to start to wondering what country they live in.
Here’s the real question though: how is that a party and ideology that is so obsessed with privacy when it comes to aborting children during pregnancy can, with a straight face, say that they don’t see what is wrong with our Commander-in-Chief collecting names for a political hit list? How can the party that spent 8 years telling us that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, actually see nothing wrong with our President collecting names to punch back against twice as hard?
Bush took enormous amounts of criticism over his tenure – probably as much or more than any recent president especially given he was the first to have to deal with being attacked from the blogosphere. Not once did he encourage his supporters to start ratting out people they heard disagreeing with his policy. And let’s be clear about one thing: Obama is collecting names of people who disagree with him on policy and nothing more. These aren’t people making threats to him, Democrats, or the nation. These are people who have nothing more than policy disagreements with him and the Democrats.
If the exploding townhalls aren’t a clue to the Obama Administration that things aren’t going according to plan, I don’t think anything will wake them up. And if they don’t wake up soon, they’re going to start punching back twice as hard against the people who put them in office.
A great piece over at Legal Insurrection looks at how the Democrats might start wishing they weren’t pushing the Birther story so hard. What they thought was an excellent way to destroy the public perception of Republicans (likely to distract them from Obama’s healthcare reform blowing up in his face), might end up backfiring:
Kuhn plays it a little coy, but he basically has it right. Media Matters, Think Progress, and a host of left-wing blogs all became obsessed with the Birther theory and movement in the past month, as opposition mounted to Obama’s health care plans. What better than to distract attention.
But it is backfiring. It’s like telling people not to think about something, which virtually guarantees they will think about it.
Oops?
By now you’ve probably heard about the WSJ poll that recently dropped showing ObamaCare support plummeting faster than anyone can keep track of.
An economic writer for the WSJ told Megyn Kelly this morning that ObamaCare requires too many “leaps of faith” than Americans are willing to take right now while the economy is still slumping and jobs are scarce. Of particular interest here is the point that women are starting to defect in a major way from ObamaCare – which is really affecting the polling because women are also the primary spenders of healthcare money. It’s bad news for the Democrats if women find themselves particularly displeased with healthcare reform. They happen to be a pretty important part of every Democrat’s reelection plans.
This clip is double awesome. Not only does Pence lay down in clear, understandable language why the public option will mean an indirect government takeover of the healthcare industry – but you also get the joy of of watching Andrea Mitchell make a fool of herself.
Pence suggests that ObamaCare is going to cause up to a trillion dollars in new taxes and Mitchell wants to correct him. You see, ObamaCare doesn’t call for a trillion dollars in new taxes, she says, it calls for a trillion dollars in new spending. Uh, and how exactly are we going to pay for that new spending, Andrea?
Wait for the Easter egg at the end when Pence says Medicare ending up costing more than we thought it would and Mitchell takes that to mean he is against Medicare. Is she seriously this crazy?
What is it exactly that makes this so hard for liberals to understand? If the government starts undercutting private insurance companies – because their plan is being paid for by taxdollars - then those private insurers are going to go out of business. Sounds simple, right? Tell that to Andrea Mitchell.
You know who I’m talking about. He’s the same guy who voted for Obama while insisting that it’s important to keep our government small and efficient. Oh, and not too long ago he let us know that Republicans aren’t very nice to minorities so we should probably support Sotomayor’s nomination to make up for it or something.
That’s right, it’s Colin Powell:
“I think Skip, perhaps in this instance, might have waited a while, come outside, talked to the officer and that might have been the end of it,” Powell said in an interview with CNN’s Larry King. “I think he should have reflected on whether or not this was the time to make that big a deal.”
If Powell is throwing in the towel I’m not sure who is left out there to give credible support to Gates (and Obama). The news dropped yesterday that some Obama voters on the Cambridge police force (specifically, an African American) won’t vote for him again because of this.
Is there any bright side for Obama after his indefensible accusation that the Cambridge police force acted stupidly? Maybe:
At this time, voters are skeptical about the ability of the reform effort to help control the cost of health care. Just 23% believe passage of the reform legislation will lead to lower health care costs. Most voters (53%) say it will lead to higher costs, while 18% expect prices to remain about the same.
Okay, so maybe it isn’t that bright of a side. But if we had seen this past week’s news cycle focusing solely on healthcare and Obama’s terrible press conference, the number of people thinking that prices will go up because of ObamaCare might be even higher.