Cruz missiles, train wrecks, and broken promises

Bluebird of Bitterness

“We had a problem in this nation because so many people couldn’t afford health insurance. So what’s Obama’s plan? Simply charge those folks money for not having enough money! Brilliant! Oh, but his master strategy doesn’t stop there. It used to be expensive to buy insurance on the individual-market — now it will be TWICE as expensive for men, and only almost twice as expensive for women!

“Do you see how this works? Problem: Insurance is expensive. Solution: Make it more expensive, and then tax people for not buying it.” —Matt Walsh  

“Proving that everyone hates it, Congress has now exempted itself from Obamacare’s provisions, having asked for, and received, a waiver from President Obama. Yes, these are the exact same politicians who lecture us that Obamacare is ‘the law of the land!’ (So are our immigration laws.) The same ones who huffily announce that the Supreme Court upheld it! (The court also upheld the First Amendment in Citizens United, but that doesn’t stop Obama from demanding Congress overturn the First Amendment.) They are the same sanctimonious frauds who tell us that Obamacare is ‘the right thing to do!’

“Those guys waived Obamacare for themselves. If national health care is so great, why don’t they want it?

“In every single category of Crap Forced on the Country by the Left, liberals always have a work-around for themselves. They love the public schools and denounce school choice – but their kids go to St. Albans or Sidwell Friends. […]

“Liberals are always eager to release criminals and block crucial crime-fighting strategies such as stop-and-frisk – which they announce from the safety of their antiseptic, crime-free neighborhoods. […]

“They tell us guns won’t protect us – and then we find out the loudest of them all have armed guards. Staunch gun-control advocate Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago had three armed guards with him at all times, as well as an armored car. Mayor Rahm Emanuel also has armed guards and an armored car. […]

“Liberals love affirmative action – provided their offspring still get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton. How about they give up their kids’ seats to disadvantaged minorities?

“Class warriors Warren Buffett and the Nation magazine’s Katrina vanden Heuvel hired phalanxes of lawyers to fight the IRS when informed they weren’t paying the government what they owed. George Soros and the Kennedy family stash their money in offshore accounts, safe from U.S. taxation. […]

“And now these government do-gooders shoving Obamacare down our throats have managed to exempt themselves from its wonderful provisions. Supreme Court justices won’t have to suffer under Obamacare, but will continue to have their health care subsidized by us, the hapless taxpayers forced into this rotten system.” —Ann Coulter

“Nearly the whole story of American liberalism is a story of dedicated ideologues seeking to overturn what they consider to be bad laws and replace them with good ones. Sometimes those efforts were laudable, as when they fought to overturn the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ (despite fierce opposition from Democrats). And sometimes they are lamentable, as when they routinely labor to overturn or deny school-choice laws, consigning underprivileged children to horrible schools just to placate teachers’ unions. But when conservatives try to do the exact same thing, they can’t simply be wrong, according to liberals. They must be demented extremists, anarchists, and — another favorite epithet these days — nihilists.

“The hypocrisy goes deeper though. Yes, Obamacare is the law of the land. But it is President Obama — who is legally and constitutionally required to faithfully execute the law — and not Republicans who has openly defied it. He has unilaterally and often with no statutory authority opted to waive and delay the parts of the Affordable Care Act that are politically inconvenient to him (or that his administration has been too incompetent to implement).

“Obama has declared that in states setting up their own exchanges, no one will have to prove his income in order to sign up for subsidies. He is so desperate to get the subsidies rolling — and thus, he hopes, buy support for the unpopular law — he’s willing to let people skip the part in the law where it says they have to prove they qualify for the goodies. He delayed the requirement for large businesses to comply with the law because the initial turmoil of having millions kicked off their insurance plans was more than he could bear politically.

“While this is closer to anarchy than anything the tea partiers have pushed for, anarchy still isn’t the right word for it. Because President Obama still believes people should obey the law of the land — when it pleases him, that is.” —Jonah Goldberg

“I’m honestly at a loss as to where one might start with President Obama’s healthcare speech earlier. It was so utterly mendacious and cynical as to inspire awe. Perhaps one should begin with the outrageous claim that healthcare is an American ‘right,’ which is not only untrue but was bizarrely allied with the insistence that, before Obamacare came along, health insurance had been reserved to the ‘privileged few’ (also know as 90 percent of the country)? Perhaps one should start with that lawyerly language in which the the president insisted that premiums would be ‘lower than expected,’ an irrelevant, vague and misleading metric that conveniently ignores his specific promise that costs would either go down or stay the same for absolutely everyone? Maybe one should start with the peculiar claim that ‘there’s no widespread evidence that the Affordable Care Act is hurting jobs’? Or, perhaps, with the president’s singling out of a silly and fringe HuffPo piece that compared the law to The Fugitive Slave Act, which was pulled from obscurity and launched into the mainstream in order to tar all conservatives as extremists and racists?

“These were all astonishing and infuriating in equal measure. But they paled in comparison to the dishonesty of the president’s central claim, which was that the attempt to link defunding to the debt-ceiling fight is illegitimate because Obamacare has ‘nothing to do with the budget.’ I struggle to imagine how the president could have kept a straight face when he said this. This is a law, remember, that was crowbarred through Congress with the questionable use of reconciliation, a parliamentary procedure that is reserved exclusively for budgetary matters; a law that was sold as a deficit-reduction measure; a law that contains a significant spending component, including a 5-10 percent increase in the size of the federal budget; and, alas, a law that boasts a central mandate that was upheld (rewritten) by the Supreme Court as a tax, thus ensuring that any changes to the penalties must be approved by the House. ‘Nothing to do with the budget’? This is what we call a lie, Watson.” —Charles C. W. Cooke

“Obamacare may be the best thing to happen to the Republican Party’s fortunes. When voters see 1) that their premiums rising; 2) that wait times to see a doctor are increasing; 3) that they are forced to buy insurance they don’t want or pay a fine; 4) they find that their spouses are no longer covered by their employers’ plans; 5) learn that they cannot, as promised, keep the plan they were happy with, and more, they will not blame Republicans. Nor will Obama be able to blame this one on Bush. Republicans who focus on the small number of Americans who will get subsidies under Obamacare are missing the bigger picture, which will be widespread discontent.

“It may well represent the best political opportunity for Republicans in more than a decade. If they take the Senate in 2014 and the presidency in 2016, it will not be too late to repeal Obamacare. At the rate it’s going, it probably won’t even be fully operational by then. But Republicans will have to cease their fratricide to take advantage of it.” —Mona Charen