[Yes, I know I’ve had this video up twice already, but since the mainstream media is pretending that it either doesn’t exist or is the equivalent of one showing a cat getting its head stuck in a jelly jar—come to think of it, they would probably show that—I’m going to keep posting it, and asking you to send it far and wide, until every American with two objective brain cells to rum together can see it and consider what their elected leadership thinks of them.]
Give credit to the Washington Post: four days after a video surfaced in which Affordable Care Act architect Jonathan Gruber told an academic audience that the Affordable Care Act was intentionally written to hide the fact that it was a tax and that the process intentionally avoided transparency to deceive “stupid voters,” it is the only member in good standing of the Mainstream Media Obama Administration Promotion and Defense Club to mention Gruber’s revelations. Not in its print edition, mind you (well, not exactly: more on this in a bit), but online. That’s still an achievement, because as of my writing this, news sources referencing Gruber’s cheery admission that the Administration willfully lied to the American public include: Hot Air, Fox News, The Weekly Standard, The Huffington Post, Mediaite, Politico, The Boston Herald (Boston’s conservative alternative to the Globe), The Washington Times, Bangor News, Forbes, The Free Beacon, The Federalist, The Blaze, National Review, Bloomberg, and the Daily Caller. (Oh: MSNBC, the official Obama shilling network, put Gruber on to defend himself on friendly turf. His defense? His words were “inappropriate.”)
See a trend? No NPR, CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, New York Times….it’s a conservative story, you see. Pay no attention, you know how those “baggers” are. They make stuff up, or twist things, or edit tapes to make it look like Democrats and Obama are doing bad things. It’s mostly racism. Bigotry. You don’t want to go there. Stick with us! We’ll tell you the Truth.
The problem with this approach—-which has certainly served Obama well, as the media has largely minimized the damage from multiple scandals and flagrant instances of disastrous incompetence that the same news media would be proclaiming its horror in skywriting if the Administration was headed by a Reagan, Bush or Romney—-is that this one can’t be hidden, won’t go away, and has unavoidable significance. Obamacare is going back to the Supreme Court, you see, and the issue will turn on what the words and the intent of the law is. Will it make a difference that one of the key figures in writing the law—which never went through a House or Senate committee, nor was subjected to floor debate in its final form—admitted, indeed boasted in public that the text of the law was an exercise in obfuscation and deception? It just might. That makes the video not just news, but big news, news the public has a right to know, news that is fit to print.
Thus this is a journalism scandal as well as a scandal of trust. The smoking gun Gruber video slipped under the Post’s radar, and probably under the radar of most of its readers, in a column by Kathleen Parker, the sort-of-conservative, wishy-washy op-ed columnist who was brutalized and humiliated when she tried to be yin to Eliot Spitzer’s yang on a disgusting CNN talking heads show. I usually don’t read Parker—could you guess?—but today I was searching for hints of Post coverage of the “stupid voter” statement, and Parker had it, deep and anonymous, in her essay. She wrote (the links are in the online Post version):
“There’s also no denying that the midterms were a referendum on President Obama. The president prefers to say they were a referendum on his policies, which is perhaps an easier pill to swallow. But Obama is his policies, which happen to rub many Republicans (and at least a few Democrats) the wrong way. Moreover, people don’t like being insulted and misled, as many feel they have been by this administration. This is not just a feeling but a demonstrable fact, especially vis-a-vis the Affordable Care Act. And it’s not just the far-right fringe who object to the strategic misrepresentations along the way.These obfuscations include telling the American people that they could keep the insurance they had if they liked it and also writing the law in such a way that the ACA’s mandate to purchase government-approved insurance was not a “tax,” despite the Internal Revenue Service’s role in policing its compliance.
The keep-your-insurance ruse is history now, but the memory still lingers in the minds of voters, who, contrary to what the Obama White House thinks, are not stupid. There’s no dishonor — and it certainly isn’t stupid — to not understand the ACA. The then-Democratic-controlled Congress that passed the thing didn’t even understand it. I’d wager that most still don’t.
Punditry aside, there’s no mystery to the midterm shellacking. It was a loud, clear shout-out to Congress to Just Stop It. Not only stop Obamacare, which more likely will end up being tweaked, but to stop executive overreach and disinformation to sway votes while betraying voters.”
It should never happen.
“I saw David Cutler, Zeke Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, people like that. I wondered if these guys had some type of paper trail. So I looked into what Dr. Cutler had said and written, and it was generally all about cost control. After I finished with Cutler, I went to Dr. Gruber. I assume I went through every video, every radio interview, every podcast. Every everything.” Weinstein dug and dug and eventually discovered the first Gruber quote, known in conservative circles as the “speak-o.” Gruber had been on TV arguing that the case against subsidies in non-exchange states was ludicrous. Yet at a January 2012 symposium, Gruber seemed to be making the conservatives’ argument. “What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill,” said Gruber. “So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country.”
This was the first Gruber admission that contradicted the official cover-story of the law’s defenders. The latest of Weinstein’s discoveries contained the revelation that the law was sold to the public using language designed to fool “stupid voters.” Snarks the Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds: “Nice work. Imagine if we had actual journalists doing this sort of thing.”
Exactly.
The reason, I surmise, that the mainstream media is trying to bury the story as long as possible is that progressive and Democrat responses to it are likely to be as desperate, ugly and revealing as the story itself. That has certainly been the case on Ethics Alarms, where the various invited defenders among the depleted ranks of Obama supporters here, if they didn’t duck the challenge, resorted to alternate universe fantasy, ends justify the means rationalizations, the still popular “Yeah, but Bush!” reflex, and putting their fingers in their ears and humming, denying everything. The only network, other than MSNBC, to mention the videos and their implications of arrogant, undemocratic manipulation, and to ask for explanations has been Fox News. On “Fox and Friends,” “independent” Maine Senator Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats , sounded like a 12-year-old caught with his hand in the cookie jar (and remember how hard it is to sound more juvenile than the hosts on “Fox and Friends”). They played the video, and this happened:
KILMEADE: So he’s basically saying that he didn’t tell the truth when the law was passed; neither did Democrats when they put it forward. Your reaction to that? Are you as outraged as most of America?
ANGUS KING: Well, he shouldn’t, I don’t know what he was talking about. I certainly don’t endorse those kind of comments. But I can recall that debate. I wasn’t in office, but it was a very vigorous debate. Everybody knew that there were going to be additional taxes required to support the premiums under the Affordable Care Act. I don’t see it as any deep dark conspiracy. There were all kinds of –
BRIAN KILMEADE: Really? He said he wasn’t transparent. Senator, he said he wasn’t transparent. He wasn’t telling the truth.
SEN. KING: Who was he? I don’t know where he was in the process. There were hundreds of people –
KILMEADE: He wrote it!
KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE: He’s the architect of Obamacare. He’s the one who put it together, one of them, and said in fact that they weren’t transparent and forthcoming with the CBO because if they were, then the American people would know that in fact this was going to be something that was going to tax and penalize them and then they wouldn’t go for it.
KING: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Tax and penalize, hold it, hold it, hold it. We’ve got eight million people that have insurance now that didn’t before and don’t lecture me about this because 40 years ago, I had insurance. If I hadn’t had it, it caught a cancer that saved my life. If I hadn’t had insurance I’d be dead –
KILMEADE: What does that have to do with it?
GUILFOYLE: But that doesn’t have anything to do with it.
KING: It does. It has to do with having insurance, man. If you don’t have insurance, it’s a high risk.
KILMEADE: They just lied about a health plan to the American people, called the stupidity of the American voter and bragged about the lack of transparency.
KING: This is one guy. I don’t know who this guy was. All I know is that it’s important for people to have health insurance. And if you guys are saying people shouldn’t have health insurance, I don’t know where you’re coming from.
GUILFOYLE: That’s not what we’re saying, sir.
KING: Are you that cruel? That is what you’re saying.
GUILFOYLE: No we’re not.
KILMEADE: Oh my goodness!
“Oh my goodness” is right. Uh, Maine? You might want to consider finding a U.S. Senator who 1) pays attention to his job, 2) can think on his feet, and 3) doesn’t think that “the ends justify the means” is a good way to run a republic:
- The claim that nobody heard of Gruber and that he is “only one guy” echoes one of the lamer defenses offered on the previous Gruber threads here—look for Liberal Dan’s dazzling footwork. Nobody ever hears of whistle-blowers until they start blowing. Nobody heard of John Dean, Edward Snowden, Linda Tripp, of Joe Darby, who exposed Abu Ghaib.
- King’s ultimate answer is, in essence, “But we got what we wanted! Who cares how we did it?” (Or, in the Hillary variation, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”) The ends justify the means, and if you object to the means, then you are a cruel bastard who also hates the objective. I presume I don’t need to expound on the dangers and ultimate destination of THAT governing philosophy. Except perhaps to King, of course, who obviously needs a refresher course in 20th Century German, Chinese and Russian history.
Then there was Democratic pollster Bernard Whitman, who made Fox’s Megyn Kelly faceplant by spouting a trio of rationalizations. Whitman argued :
- While Gruber might be expert in his field, “he’s a political idiot.”Ah! A smart politician would never admit this was how Obamacare was passed, he would just do what was needed and lie to pass it. Got it. And why do you work for these people, Bernard, you toady?
- The Affordable Care Act has done a lot of what what promised. Ah! Then lying to pass it is OK! . See: Angus King, “Fox and Friends”
- “Everyone knew what they were getting.” KABOOM! Brains on the ceiling! The biggest lie of the debate so far. How can anybody say that and not be terrified that if there is a God, He will strike him dead? NOBODY, including the lazy legislators who voted for it “knew what they were getting.” We STILL are arguing over what we are getting.
MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber, if there is justice and order in the world, will go down in history as the man who exposed beyond question or rebuttal the rotten, corrupt, cynical and undemocratic core of this Administration, which gained power promising to be open and fair to the American public, then wielded that power by exploiting and betraying their trust.
And in its attempts to hide the revelations of this Human Smoking Gun, the mainstream media may just prove beyond denying just how partisan it is. I guess when evaluating this horrible ethics train wreck, that is as close to a tangible benefit as we are likely to get.
Ethics Alarms 
Uhhh… Jack? Error alert. Angus King didn’t vote for the ACA (I’ve little doubt that he would have, but he was elected in 2012 and the ACA passed (as if we need a reminder) without a single Republican vote and signed into law in March of 2010.
As for our Junior Senator: most of us in Maine who pay attention have long realized that Angus King is an Independent the same way Bernie Sanders is: as political theater. I suppose some people genuinely believed he hadn’t decided which party he’d caucus with before he won his seat (those would be the stupid ones), but those of us who watched him expand state government during his two terms as governor had no doubt. If it walks like a duck….
King has proven successful with the Maine electorate because he’s a cheery, affable guy, and managed to ride the same largely positive economic wave that makes people think fondly back upon Billary Round One; King’s term as governor largely coincided with it.
I suppose the good news is that he’s now 70, two years into his first term, and if he goes for another that’ll almost certainly be the last one.
Thanks. I should have said that he almost certainly would have, but I forgot that he was governor then, not Senator.
He WAS still an idiot in 2009, though, right?
King is no idiot. He’s actually quite smart, but he is a big-government statist. Maine’s budget skyrocketed during his tenure as guv. Example: he decided that it would be a good idea to buy a laptop computer for nearly every kid in the state entering middle school. The D-controlled legislature thought that was a nifty idea. To save money, if memory serves, now we just buy the little dears iPads.
Oh, and by the way – King wasn’t guv during the passage of the ACA. His terms were in the 90s. During the time period of the ACA, Angus was in private enterprise – or, what passes as private enterprise for him: working in the windpower industry, which survives here in Maine (and elsewhere) thanks to massive government subsidies.
If he isn’t an idiot, how do you explain his conduct on Fox?
Ummm… he’s a politician?
Not good enough. Politicians have to know how to avoid looking like idiots if they are not idiots.
I’ll repeat my previous answer – he’s a politician. Evidence for claim? That particular clip of him on Fox has been posted numerous times by various Facebook “Friends.” The conservatives think Fox took him to school. The progressives all think King took FOX to school. This is known as playing to the base.
Please tell me that screaming, “It was a good bill so the fact that we lied doesn’t matter” isn’t what progressives will cheer.
Sadly enough, I got that message from a guy I know who’s actually fairly conservative on a lot of issues. As for the rest of the progs…. yeah, straight out of Machiavelli. As for our Junior Senator, I suspect it was his “are you that cruel?” that had them clinking their glasses.
Yeah, that was the one that had me reserving a booth for him in the sideshow next to the pinheads and Fish-boys. The all-purpose cheap rejoinder to any opposition of any give-away, any expensive, badly conceived entitlement. I don’t care if it’s popular—it is per se stupid.
Given that they already repeated the refrain “the ACA is law, Obama was reelected, it’s here to stay, you lost, we won, so get over it already” during the admittedly ill-conceived government shutdown, I can’t tell you that isn’t what the progressives will cheer. This is Obama’s signature achievement and is likely to form his entire legacy apart from his color (he put color front and center, so calling him out on that isn’t racist) so it has to be saved and burnished and made to seem like it is the greatest thing in the world since sliced bread at all costs.
You knocked it out of the park, Jack. And most telling of all is the Liberals utter silence when confronted by the plain facts of his admission. “It was for the good of the country (as defined by your Betters, so you watch your mouth), and thus it’s okay.” Jackboots, even Jimmy Cho jackboots, are waiting to go across the necks of all those who think the wrong thoughts, I suspect.
Unfortunately true, as I pointed out elsewhere. It’s never about trying to do what’s good for the nation or the people any longer. It’s about the side that believes it is right putting its boot on the throat of the other side while high-fiving the like-minded.
Ooops… we’re all out of thread.
You wrote: “The all-purpose cheap rejoinder to any opposition of any give-away, any expensive, badly conceived entitlement. I don’t care if it’s popular—it is per se stupid.”
Sure about that? The people who can’t see past that… THEY’RE likely to be stupid. And I’ll gladly concede that it was cynical, manipulative and unethical.
But I can’t agree it was stupid.
Success!! CNN has realized that there is a story here! But it took a THIRD, shockingly evil Gruber video to get it done….
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/12/politics/gruber-obamacare-third-video/index.html
I like how Gruber says basically that “it was a mistake and I misspoke when I said all those things multiple times at different public forums in different years.”
Bingo.
Additional observation on the King interview, he blustered out at the very end with the signature Leftist “Oh you meanies just don’t want people insured! Discussion over you meanies!”
Given that another meme working its way around the social media says in so many words that Republicans are “against children eating” this should not surprise anyone. Sure, we GOPers want children to starve and have declared armed conflict against half the species.
Can you imagine the liberal media’s response to this story if the guy in the video was an oil executive who was bragging about how the gulf oil spill was intentional to save a few bucks? Or if it was a fatcat corporate CEO bragging about how he and a bunch of his rich friends successfully evaded income taxes? Or a Wall Street executive telling how they purposefully sold bad securities leading up to the housing collapse?
That smoking gun would be front page of the NYT for weeks. Every mainstream news station would lead with the story and follow up morning and night. They might even do some “investigative journalism” and try to dig deeper into the story. You think?
“The Bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes”.
It seems to this is worse than calling the American voter “stupid”, because the dishonesty with Congress implied by ‘tortured’ is worse than the expression of contempt for the public.
When you have a significant number of influential people – Gruber did not act alone – who would rather win a rigged game than lose an honest one, everything is at risk, everything.
Bingo. By the way, my sister’s answer to this—she was one of the bill’s authors—was “everybody games the CBO.” But if the CBO is being deceived, then the CBO’s evaluations are deceptive too. The defenders of the process here cited the CBO as gospel. Corruption. That’s all it is.