Come now. Who didn’t expect a non-apology apology from the faculty-lounger-in-Chief for the spectacular early failure of his “signature legislation”? I mean, Christ, I’m still a bit shocked he didn’t blame white privilege, Bush, Big Pharma, or AIPAC, which controls both Big Banking and the media.
Andrew Malcolm, IBD:
Attempting to staunch the growing furor over his countless misrepresentations about Americans keeping their existing health plan under ObamaCare, the Democrat granted an exclusive interview to NBC News’ Chuck Todd.
“Exclusive” is what politicians grant 1) to get extra oomph from their interview with one media outlet and 2) to avoid the news conference’s reportorial feeding-frenzy that accompanies the scent of political blood in the water.
First, what Obama didn’t do. He didn’t apologize for misleading the entire country for three-plus years by saying without qualification dozens of times that if Americans like their existing health insurance plan, they can keep it. “Period.” The Real Good Talker didn’t admit any mistake there, not even an inadvertent one based on his enthusiasm for what he believes is best for his countrymen.
Such bald statements, which documents show he knew were false in mid-2010, played a key role in calming latent fears about his massive federal government plan to reshape nearly a fifth of the country’s economy.
That soothing claim also helped convince the majority Democrats in both houses of Congress to pass the bill in 2010 without a single Republican vote. Obama showed no sympathy when early ObamaCare opposition overwhelmingly turned the House over to the GOP that year.
With their Senate margin of control slim heading into the 2014 midterm balloting, Obama now hears worried Democrats whining about polls showing voter opposition threatening their reelections. Why should he care? As Obama told the Russian president last year, 2012 was his’ final election.’
In his NBC interview Obama, who like Congress is exempt from ObamaCare’s provisions, said the usual feel-good non-specifics about asking “my team” to examine ways to ameliorate the pain for millions of Americans losing their existing plan.
And he even emphasized his belief that ultimately the new forced policies would be upgrades. No sedative now for anyone saying goodbye to their existing, affordable plan, unable to shop on Obama’s crippled, half-billion-dollar website, facing much higher prices for plans including options they don’t want and facing federal financial penalties for non-compliance.
“I am sorry,” Obama said, “that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.”
I think on that last we can all of us agree. Obama is most definitely sorry.
See? Bipartisanship! Why, I’m just like Chris Christie now! #winningheartsandminds!
#winningheartsandmindswhileriddingtheworldofjewswithoutaspeckofdirtonhands!
Obama’s “apology” is a lot like me saying “I’m sorry this jackass got elected.”
Apology? Ha! That was CYA and not very convincing.
As my pastor said in a sermon about forgiveness some months ago, “sorrow for a bad act without repentance and recompense is meaningless.” In the present context, he could’ve done more by ordering his HHS Secretary to delete the rules that caused this. Don’t think we’ll be seeing that though.
While guest hosting Bill Bennett’s show this morning, Mark Belling had a caller who IDed her self as a former school psychologist (IIRC) who worked with the “behavioral issues” students. She said that there are four things that have to be present in order for an apology to be genuine:
1. A clear acknowledgement of what the offender did wrong. (“I’m sorry that I lied to you.”)
2. A statement of intent to change. (“I am going to try to tell you the truth from now on.”)
3. A statement of desire to make it right or make restitution. (“What can I do to make it up to you?”)
4. Follow-through on making it right/restitution.
The Prevaricator in Chief’s “apology” failed on all four points. He’s not sorry for what he did; he’s sorry that his sorry-ass subjects are so purblind to his beneficence that we reacted so badly to it.
TW, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong. He is only making an “Apology” because his “team” (He referenced “my team” a couple of times) sent him out to do some damage control. It isn’t working.
The uninsured (raises hand) who are going to sign up for his bullshit plan, are now standing at 22%, down from 44% one month ago. I don’t see the numbers growing in his favor.
. . . he doesn’t think he did anything wrong.
Indeed. StalingradOCare will bring about total victory. Only believe.
Just like Tinkerbell.
train wreck news
Obamacare adviser says healthcare website encountering new issues
It’s way beyond train wreck — more of a CFIT with the TAWS alarms turned off.
— more of a CFIT
Except that the intention of the ongoing conduct of the thing won’t be quick in that way SBP, a big Kaboom with the onlookers picking up tiny pieces of clothing and flesh to place neatly in evidence bags or whatever. No, it will grind on for months and years, dismembering and consuming individuals in its maw one by one, until the remnants of the ClownDisaster6thWehrmacht decide ( quite apart from the ClownDisaster himself, who will never go down) to surrender themselves in an effort to save their own skins.
It’s like one of those conceptural art pieces: It’s a bizarrely complicated machine that is designed to slowly tear itself and the country to pieces while we watch. No cord to unplug. No kill switch.
Everybody’s seen Jonah Goldberg’s latest bit a happy-clap-trap, right? This is one of those teeth-grinders that makes me want to slap him up the side of his fat head and tell him to lose the chin hair and start looking like a goddamned adult.
From this week’s G-File:
And what, pray tell is the lesson that’s being taught here, exactly? That government has no business mucking around in 1/6 of the U.S. economy because nobody has the knowledge to manage that many transactions and interactions rationally (by which I mean, “planned”)?
Or that Republicans are better at managing the welfare state, running the economy and overseeing your life than the Democrats are?
Because I’m pretty damned sure the message we’re getting out of D.C. is the latter, when it should be the former.
It’s like one of those conceptural art pieces: It’s a bizarrely complicated machine that is designed to slowly tear itself and the country to pieces while we watch.
This: http://laughingsquid.com/suicide-machines-kinetic-sculptures-that-slowly-destroy-themselves/
h/t David Thompson’s Friday Ephemera, 25 Oct 2013.
Obama Considering Obamacare ‘Fix’ That Will Make the Bloody Mess Even Worse
An Underappreciated Man of Brilliance – Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Provides Progressives With All Their Requests…. Now They Beg Him To Stop….
ot but this is good
ZoNation rips Kanye for confederate flag publicity stunt
effin comedy gold
he is “sorry” some Americans are losing their current health insurance plans as a result of the Affordable Care Act, Obama promised fixes to the system, specifically the program’s glitchy online portal.
“I wanted to go in and fix it myself, but I don’t write code,” he said of Healthcare.gov.
Bye-bye, privacy: The other problem with Healthcare.gov
His “apology” is simply another lie tossed up by a man who couldn’t find the truth if it was stapled to his tongue. There is no truth in him when he is speaking to the general public.
At least that is what his base believes and they see his lies as the left’s taqiyya.
They, which never included the big “He”, wrote something which could have protected policies that people already had but as it was “interpreted” in regulations done under his administration any pretense (which was all the protection was, a ruse, like the one on abortion that got Rep. Stupak to sign on) of such protection vanished like Keyser Soze.
It was said by a man who knew him that Bill Clinton would rather climb a tree to tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. In the ClownDisasterObama, truth has no existence other than it is whatever is expedient to say today. Living the BAMN life. Filling the air with the taqiyya of his progressive-socialist “religion”.
Bruce Thornton talking sense
Also, the government is right to think you’re stupid.
After all, if not you personally, then a majority of people just like you put them in power and keep them there.
So who can blame them for playing the odds?
Tell those idiots at The Weekly Standard that that’s called a feature, not a bug.
Something like that (feature, not bug), until it isn’t.
I have only glanced through Mr. Thornton’s essay and intend to read it soon, but, if he composed the sub-headline – ‘Today, we treat politics as a sport, but it’s really a conflict of ideologies between federalists and technocrats’ – then I know I will ultimately be disappointed.
To be a conservative is to reject Ideology, so the real conflict is between Ideologues and Anti-Ideologues, who reject, in John Randolph Of Roanoke’s words: ‘a country governed by mathematicians and star-gazers, from light-houses in the sky’.
Perhaps also a useful thing to consider, Harvey Mansfield’s conversation with Milt Rosenburg.
Not all conservatives reject ideology. And not all ideology rejecting conservatives use ideology in exactly the same way.
Some of us conflate ideology with “worldview” and “worldview” with an Oakschottian …
..well, something or other.
That said, some ideologies are more doctrinaire than others.
[By the way, earnest Empiricism, led directly to the Ideologists who took up the necessary epistemological study as a question of the making of “ideas”, of the materio-physical conditions of the human thought-organ, the brain, or mind, the “psyche“. Ridiculous, right? Well yes, in a very direct sense: the histology of that age was entirely undeveloped! It didn’t exist! But we were told it was to be a question of “matter in motion”. And yet, a couple of hundred years later, here we are, with each political faction proclaiming “We are not ideological! Our political opponents are ideological. Not us.” The once humanly common, the presumptive universal human condition, the material ground truth of human physicality — accounting for human thought! — has become politically impossible. Weird.]
Thornton is arguing that the Federalists (meaning the founders and especially the authors and supporters of The Federalist Papers believed that human nature was shitty, and the way to keep shitty people from shititing all over you and yours was to divide power so that the mongers and persuers of power would be too busy shitting on each other to shit on you and yours.
Later, Thornton continues, the Progressives, also agreeing that human nature was shitty, nonetheless came to believe (probably because they thought their shit didn’t stink) that the way to change human nature was to concentrate power so that you could force the people shitting all over themselves and each other to take enemas until their colons were as clean and fresh as were the colons of the Progressives themselves.
Hopefully that wasn’t too scatological. But my inner Deutscher is feeling especially Lutheran right this moment.
I gotta tell you sdferr, and since I’ve been drinking 90 proof rye whisky, I don’t mind telling you,
I don’t have the first fucking clue as to what the hell you’re talking about
[goofy grin]
Mansfield talks about that improving men business with Milt, saying that in an odd way, Machiavelli is the true idealist who thinks he has the answer to making men better. It is, if we stop to think about it, a rather hilarious reversal, or a nice bit of philosophical jujitsu Mansfield owes to Strauss, I think.
I don’t have the first fucking clue as to what the hell you’re talking about
I’m more or less inclined to agree, as I don’t generally have one either.
okay, thank you.
My mentor argued that you can’t read The Prince without also reading the Discourses and then trying to wrestle your way towards which Niccolo was the real Machiavelli. So your report of Mansfield’s argument makes sense.
T. Jefferson was a keen student and admirer of Destutt de Tracy, who was one of the leading lights among those early Ideologists. If I recall right, T.J. was recommending Tracy to John Adams in their correspondence of their elder years, and Adams also took an interest.
I would argue that it’s a grand idea to read Strauss’ Thoughts on Machiavelli. If, that is, one doesn’t mind having one’s socks blown off.
I’m just giving you grief about your, shall we say, affected style?
I know you’re a smart, well read guy. You don’t need to prove it by writing incomprehensibly dense prose.
I mean, who the hell do you think you are? Some fucking German post-doctorate academic climer? (he joked)
I plan to get to Strauss after I work my way through Vogelin.
So we both know I’ll probably die first, don’t we?
Descriptively speaking, I’m far closer to the arthritic retired carpenter than anything close to an academic. It’s just that I takes my leisure more seriously than most.
good for you
As regards the problem posed by the Prince and the Discourses — i.e, what’s what and what’s he doing? — both Strauss and Mansfield seem to say that the distinction between the books primarily amounts to a question of the audience to whom each book is addressed, so that the books themselves deal with the same subjects, Machiavelli’s knowledge of the world, but the one fashioned for the actual Prince (who’s a busy man) and the other fashioned for — in Strauss’ terms, the “potential” princes, and in Mansfield’s terms, the people.
And here I thought Discourses was for good Republican Florentines, and the The Prince was for those shitty other Italians.
-Ernst: Not all conservatives reject ideology.
I submit, then, that such people are laboring under a delusion. I believe Russell Kirk was dead solid perfect when he wrote:
-Sdferr: Let us not forget that T. Jefferson was a Pinko.
-Ernst: I plan to get to Strauss after I work my way through Vogelin.
You’re a braver man that I, Gunga Ernst. I’ve heard that reading Gerhart Niemeyer on Eric Vogelin is a big help, but I found myself dazed and confused for the most part, instead.
And Locke? Also a pinko?
I’m still debating whether he was one of the Fathers of the Ideologues.
Heck, I’m still debating whether or not I approved of the English Enlightenment [I certainly do not countenance the French version].
Hell, I tend to agree with what Enoch Powell said in this interview:
Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy, translated by . . . a pinko. heh
It is available as a downloadable PDF here:
http://mises.org/books/tracy.pdf
Locke was most definitely a pinko.
It seems, Leigh, that Edmund Burke thought him the 18th Century equivalent.
I’m going to have to re-read him, but your opinion is valued.
He wasn’t nearly as bad as Mill who was a real pie-in-the-sky pinko.
(I feel kind of bad knocking Locke since I believe that is Spies avatar. But, the damage is done.)
John Stuart Mill…don’t get me started.
I think it’s actually a bit less functionally interesting than that.