They’re still spinning the Lie of the Year

In response to The Evolution of Politifact’s Lie of the Year:

As humiliating as Politifact’s panicky walkback of their previous Obama defense may be, for my money they’re still spinning like crazy.  The premise of this year’s “Lie of the Year” award – is that normally given for things that were actually said several years ago? – is that the whole “like your plan, keep your plan” thing was some kind of inscrutable mystery that nobody could have figured out until events actually began proving that it wasn’t true.

That’s hogwash.  Politifact was dead wrong, and everyone of their ilk was openly hostile, even contemptuous, toward people who were right all along.  And the people who were right, including Mitt Romney, did not merely “guess” right.  They didn’t put their chips on ObamaCare failure and get lucky when the roulette ball of current events stopped bouncing around.  They understood the reasons Obama was lying, and correctly explained why it was impossible for most insurance plans to continue unchanged, as President Obama swore they would.

Everyone other than the Politifact stooge crowd also knew that Obama knew the truth.  Some of the more mild castigation he gets from former allies today implies that he was mistaken when he made the “like your plan” promise, or that he spoke with excessive confidence.  On the contrary, he knew he was lying.  He was privy to studies that predicted what was going to happen.

And a lot of this retroactive “lie of the year” stuff misses the most crucial point: insurance cancellations aren’t just an unfortunate side effect that Obama should have been more up-front about.  They’re a feature of his scheme, not a bug.  This was supposed to happen.  It was vital to blast a huge number of people into the ObamaCare exchanges.  The sheep had to be lined up for shearing.  

The current crisis did not come about because Obama tried to “boil down the complicated health care law to a soundbite,” and he didn’t apologize for it.  He made one of those arrogant non-apology “sorry you misunderstood me” speeches.  He claimed we all should have known what he really meant.  And deep down, he doesn’t view any of this as a mistake.  Obama doesn’t think he told the Lie of the Year.  He thinks he told the Lie of a Lifetime, because that’s how long it will take the American people to recover from it.

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