The president’s approval rating hovers around 40 percent.
Swamped by numerous polls showing President Obama’s plunging approval ratings and stories critical of Obamacare, it appears the president and his party are suffering appropriate political punishment for their serial lies regarding the legislation.
Hardly. The Obamacare Lies (keeping your health-care plan, keeping your doctor, saving money on premiums, bending the cost curve down, reducing the deficit, etc.) stand apart as a different genus from modern political lies. Pause for a moment and consider the astonishing breadth, depth, brazenness, and repetitiveness of the mendacity.
The Obamacare Lies were first told to pass a massive bill nobody had read on a strict party-line vote, using procedural legerdemain never seen in legislation of this magnitude.
From its passage in 2010 to the present, Obamacare has always been opposed by significant pluralities, if not outright majorities, of voters. So the lies continued to be told to change public perception and political fortunes. Even more lies, many vile and despicable, were told about the opponents of the legislation — they were racists, terrorists, anarchists — all in an effort to ridicule and marginalize the opponents so that the Obamacare Lies wouldn’t be revealed to, or identified by, the American people.
Polls now show, quite unremarkably, that had the president told the truth about Obamacare, he’d have lost the 2012 election. The Obamacare Lies, told in service of the president and his party’s political advantage, corrupted the electoral process and conscripted diverse segments of the government to perpetuate and/or conceal the Lies.
And now the Obamacare Lies have adversely affected, in ways no longer speculative, the lives of millions of Americans — with tens of millions more to follow — more profoundly than the sterile manner depicted on the nightly news. Not only did the president lie about substantial cost decreases ($2,500 annually!) and the ability to keep our plans, but he lied about the very essence of our health care. Barring some dramatic development over the next few weeks, millions of Americans who had health-care coverage won’t have coverage come January, barely a month from now. Large numbers will be left to satisfy medical bills that could easily devastate their personal finances and those of their families. Many will simply go untreated. The more fortunate will “only” lose their personal physicians, professionals with whom they’ve developed a unique relationship of trust and understanding, who know their histories, idiosyncrasies and circumstances, who may be in the neighborhood and may have treated their parents and kids.
The president and his administration were not alone in telling and perpetuating the Obamacare Lies. Congressional Democrats — now frantically trying to evade responsibility — as well as myriad organs of the mainstream media not only repeated the Lies but directed calumnies toward the law’s opponents, seemingly — at least at times — with glee. These are the same people — congressional Democrats and their abundant allies in the media — who now express astonishment and breathlessly report each new Obamacare debacle as if caught by surprise. Yet for nearly four years they blithely waded about in Obamacare’s sewer of ineptitude and deceit to promote an agenda.
And yet the president still has a 40 percent approval rating, even though his lies were indiscriminate — they were told to those who continue to approve of him as well as those who don’t. He and his supporters meant to deceive everyone — at least until they’d succeeded in fundamentally transforming America.
And that’s what makes the Obamacare Lies so insidious. Obamacare — government-controlled health care — will itself change the relationship between citizen and state, to the probable detriment of the citizen. But when free people of a democratic republic permit themselves to be lied to in such fashion on such a mammoth scale, the relationship evolves beyond one of citizen and state, to one of vassal and lord.