The Daily Gouge, Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

On November 11, 2013, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Tuesday, November 12th, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, in the “Speak for Yourself, Lurch!” segment, the densest cloud ever to envelop Foggy Bottom assures the world…

Kerry: United States not ‘blind’ or ‘stupid’ in Iran talks

For once, Kerry is right. It’s not the United States which is blind or stupid in its interactions with Iran; just the idiots…

…conducting the conversation! Whooda thunk we’d ever be thanking the French, at least for now, for riding to our rescue for the first time since the Battle of the Virginia Capes?!?

Speaking of the most inept foreign policy team to threaten American security since the Carter years…

America’s top UN diplomat has high praise for ‘Hanoi Jane’

New U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power didn’t waste her diplomatic skills on Vietnam veterans at a New York speech, praising actress Jane Fonda for “being outspoken on behalf” of her convictions. “Hi everybody,” Power said, according to a transcript. “You know life has changed when you’re hanging out with Jane Fonda backstage. There is no greater embodiment of being outspoken on behalf of what you believe in — and being ‘all in’ in every way — than Jane Fonda. And it’s a huge honor just to even briefly have shared the stage with her.”

Further proof birds of a feather…

…really do…

…flock together! That she’s married to Cass Sunstein should come as no surprise.

For more on The Dear Misleader and the liars he hires, we turn to Commentary Magazine, where Jonathan Tobin details how and why…

Obama Is Lying About Iran Sanctions

…Like the clandestine manner with which the administration has already weakened the existing sanctions, this (which France, thankfully, rejected) deal breaks a promise the president made to the American people as well as to our allies. All Americans as well as Israelis and moderate Arabs worried about the Iranian threat have to hold on to now are more of Obama’s promises. But with a presidential credibility gap that is currently as big as the Grand Canyon, anyone who takes him at his word without a look at the fine print is making a colossal error. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/11/08/obama-is-lying-about-iran-sanctions/

Turning now to the domestic front, Seth Mandel offers his thoughts on The Apology That Wasn’t, aka, The Great Prevaricator’s most recent lie straight in the face of the American public:

His Excellency Regrets

There have been several pithy reactions to President Obama’s “apology” for having misled the American people on the basic promises of ObamaCare. But the one that gets closest, I think, to the public mood is Dennis Miller’s take: “Mr. President, if you liked your apology you can keep it.” In the wake of the disastrous ObamaCare rollout and the confirmation that Obama made false promises in order to pass legislation that would negatively impact millions, some liberals tried to argue that the promises don’t matter: the policy’s legacy will rest on whether it works. That’s true enough in the long term, though it’s worth pointing out that the policy “working” is actually quite harmful to a broad swath of the country, so defining its success won’t be so simple for the administration’s defenders.

In the near term, this defense misses the impact on Obama’s approval numbers and those of his party’s congressional delegation, and thus on his and their political capital. Americans have no good reason to trust what Obama says anymore, and I think that has some practical implications. But it’s true that in the long run the popularity of the policy will depend less on the arguments employed to enact it. And that is where Miller’s response comes in. The American people are due far more than an apology (though, as apologies go, this one was lawyered into the ground). They deserve a change in the policy. Will they get it? Perhaps we can look for clues as to whether the president intends on righting this wrong in his “apology” statement, in response to a question from NBC’s Chuck Todd:

You know– I regret very much that– what we intended to do, which is to make sure that everybody is moving into better plans because they want ’em, as opposed to because they’re forced into it. That, you know, we weren’t as clear as we needed to be– in terms of the changes that were taking place. And I want to do everything we can to make sure that people are finding themselves in a good position– a better position than they were before this law happened.

Keep in mind that most of the folks who are going to– who got these c– cancellation letters, they’ll be able to get better care at the same cost or cheaper in these new marketplaces. Because they’ll have more choice. They’ll have more competition. So– the majority of folks will end up being better off, of course, because the website’s not working right.

That’s not going to be very reassuring. Part of the problem with ObamaCare is that it’s quite difficult for the president to be truthful about any part of it, because he sold the (shoddy) reform on false premises. So Todd asks Obama if the people deserve an apology from him, and his response begins immediately with another baldly false claim. The intention, he says, was for people to be shifted onto different plans–an acknowledgement that he intended for people to lose their insurance from the beginning–by their own choice, not “because they’re forced into it.” This is, as we know, completely untrue. Between all the mandates and the new requirements, the entire structure of ObamaCare is built on coercion. You are “forced” by law to buy a policy whether you want to or not, and you are “forced” by law to abandon your old plan if Obama doesn’t like it.

But words can mean whatever Obama wants them to mean in the brave new world of the liberal welfare state. So it may seem like people are being “forced” into the uncharted waters of the health-insurance exchanges, but that’s because they don’t see it the way the president does. Obama says they’ll have more choice once they do what the government forces them to do against their will. True choice, to the statist, begins once the government has control.

And in the last part, just before his “apology,” the president dishonestly downplays the number of people who will be affected by this and then explains that the people who are upset–and he’s sorry they’re in this situation, which he painstakingly planned–just don’t know how much better off they’ll be when (if?) the website ever starts working. So we’re back to the argument that, according to Obama, it’s for their own good. It’s unclear whether, at this point, even the president believes that, but it’s doubtful ObamaCare’s victims do.

But as James Taranto reports, the bigger the lies, the greater the effort of Der Obafuhrer’s disciples to convince us up is down:

…Then there’s an op-ed from New York’s Daily News by Michael Cohen of the Century Foundation:

In selling the health-care plan that bears his name, President Obama has, according to the fact-checking website Politifact, said at least 34 times that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” That statement was not completely true, and it’s a lie that is today causing the President no end of political headaches.

Oddly, in one sentence, he goes from the “not completely true” equivocation to the straight-up acknowledgment it was a “lie”. But then he tries to justify the lie as follows:

Still, before we fully castigate the President for his rhetorical flights of fancy, it’s important to keep in mind that Obama was–to a large degree–telling Americans what they wanted to hear. In fact, he was giving them the type of comforting assurances they insist upon getting before backing any major policy change from Washington.

So we’re right back to equivocation with “rhetorical flights of fancy.” But we mustn’t “fully castigate the president because he was “telling Americans what they wanted to hear” and “giving them…comforting assurances.”

Surely Bernie Madoff, when he was swindling his clients, also gave them the comforting assurances they wanted to hear. That is the nature of a swindle — yet Cohen asks us to accept it as a mitigating factor?

Of course; as that is the nature of propaganda…