Never Promised a Rose Garden

A delicious irony was played out in the Rose Garden adjacent to the White House the other day when the president and a bevy of democrats performed a political end-zone celebration complete with everything but the crotch-hops and chest-bangers and other obscene gestures that athletes sometimes produce after making a score. There was even a bit of trash-talk as the president gleefully excoriated the press corps for its savaging of the unbelievably flawed “healthcare roll-out” back on October 1.

The irony involves the degree of lying that has taken place in the Rose Garden in recent memory. So...one has to wonder at the president's exultation over his claim of 7.1 million enrollees in the plan. There's a great difference between an enrollee and an enrollee who has actually made a premium-payment and is therefore covered by an insurance policy. No statistic was given for that number and probably for good reason—either that it wasn't known or that it was and wouldn't have added to the celebration.

One remembers 12 September 2011, when in the Rose Garden the president said that the Benghazi Massacre was perpetrated by a senseless movie of 13 minutes duration that made it to You-Tube and stirred up a ruckus in Cairo, nearly 700 miles away. He was lying through his teeth, as was his state-secretary, Hillary Clinton. They both new better but the president was still insisting on that humongous lie in a speech at the United Nations two weeks later.

Or...how many times may one suppose that the president lied in the Rose Garden about the fact that under Obamacare no one would lose a desired policy or doctor? And then there's the matter of the “red lines” in Syria that Assad dare not cross—how many times did the president draw those lines in the lawn of the Rose garden but paid them no attention in the sand of Syria?

One remembers that, depending on the source, there were 30-40 million without healthcare (insurance) when Obamacare became law to reverse that situation. Under the law, 6 or 7 million lost their insurance, so added to the (split the difference) 35 million already uninsured the figure became 42 million without insurance. Now, the president crows about a 7.1-million sign-up without even indicating how many of those are among the 6 million who became uninsured under the law—the president's big LIE. So, about 34 million are still uninsured. Nothing's changed except that the entire medical enterprise has been upended in a nation owning the best healthcare and hospitals in the world.

The celebration in the Rose Garden was the product of juvenile minds conjuring up something to fool the public. The adolescent mindset is what triggers the antics in the NFL when someone scores or just when someone makes a tackle and then crotch-hops ten yards toward the opposite goal line beating his chest like a chimpanzee in the local zoo. The president had his cheerleaders on hand—like House Minority Leader Pelosi, who famously said no one would know what was in Obamacare until it was passed. Like all the other congresspersons who voted for the thing, she had never read the act and likely still has no idea what's in it.

In any case, there are problems; otherwise, the president would not have by executive order changed the new law about 29 times in order to influence the elections in November. Two of my family members have suffered, one because of increases in both premiums and deductibles and the other because his company is canceling its policy altogether and has explained the reason to be Obamacare. The extant policy didn't suit, probably because it didn't cover condoms. Shouldn't everyone have free condoms actually paid for by the people who have sense enough not to need them?

The system has been designed from the beginning to fail—to implode as the insurance rates went out of sight and people couldn't pay the premiums and especially the deductibles required before the insurance benefits kick-in. Already, hordes of doctors and a plethora of hospitals are out of the system, understanding that it just isn't worth it. Their decisions would have been made in Washington, not in their institutions or private offices. When the presidential-delayed company-mandate kicks-in, there will be weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the president figures that won't happen (by his fiat) until AFTER November. This is an example of exponential cynicism.

The Rose Garden is most famous now as a place of the BIG LIE and adolescent shenanigans. And one plaintively cries, “How long, how long?” Almost three years—so sad for the nation to be in the hands of children!

And so it goes.
Jim Clark