The truth, the whole truth: the Obamacare Plan
Reading the administration’s announcements about how many people have signed up for Obamacare so far*, I realize that not only do I not trust the figures to tell the whole story, but I don’t trust them to have any relation to reality at all. Whether they are based on something (how many people have placed a plan in their carts without paying?) or on nothing except the wishful thinking and imagination of those issuing them, these statistics have become so much blah blah blah. Pure propaganda.
And that is true of just about everything this administration says, as Victor Davis Hanson points out. It’s not that previous administrations have always told the truth—they most certainly have not—but the frequency, scope, and nature of this administration’s lies have caused not only the opposition to distrust what he and his spokespeople say but have even caused Obama’s followers and supporters to distrust what he and his spokespeople say. The difference between the first and the second group of distrusters is that, to a far greater extent, his supporters accept, defend, cover up, and even in some cases admire his lies for their strategic value.
Obama has discovered something about the American people, which is that most are not following things that closely or thoughtfully. And so if you are audacious enough (and your name is Barack Obama) you can fool most of the people most of the time. And your supporters will defend you for it, as long as you’re not lying to them about some pet issue of theirs.
This is not a discovery that bodes well for the country. It’s one of those things that, once seen, cannot be unseen. With the press behind you and the wind at your back, you can do just about anything.
[*NOTE: Something about the whole process reminds me of the Soviets’ Five Year Plans and especially the propaganda surrounding the announcements of their success.
Fiddling around on YouTube I found the following Soviet propaganda animation. It’s from 1939 and the graphics are really wonderfully done. I think it demonstrates very well the sentiments that were played on, both the hatred and the hope:
The Kulaks were “eliminated.” Quite a verb, that.]
As correlating information I’d recommend the following essay published yesterday at American Thinker.
A teaser:
When the Left has a solution, it tends to be final. Whether that produces respect or fear, depends.
The Left’s power is such that in 2007-8, I considered it strategically unblockable given people’s resistance values at the time. I reread some posts here marked 2009, and while they clearly disliked Obama and his policies, it wasn’t enough.
The strategic envelope of the Left technically doesn’t need Obama. It’s a logistics, regenerating, chain of unions, lawyers, police, money laundering, political power, and money printing. Like the many headed Hydra, it will takes a Hercules an extensive number of Labors to atone for past mistakes. And it’ll take an extensive amount of time to even do enough damage to a self regenerating creature like the Ourobos.
Ymarsaker,
I agree with your thesis, but I am not sure that an “Obama” is unnecessary. He provides a focal point which helps to direct the otherwise independent attacks of the left; he, or some leftist focal point like him (Hillary?), turns disconnected and independent battles into a directed and focused war.
Detestable! The following article from Forbes shows how important the “lie” is to the Democrats.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2014/02/12/new-signup-numbers-show-why-obamacare-may-be-impossible-to-repeal/
Anyone who had a career in teaching high school or college can tell you that we have not been turning out many young people who were capable of and interested in serious thought for many decades. That includes the teachers we have been turning out.
That said, there is a small group that is very bright and capable. Unfortunately, many of them are wedded to the ideology of the left where the ends justify the means.
“You *can* fool most of the people…”
These are scary words, but I’m afraid they’re true.
T, that position you describe is real but it doesn’t need Obama. It just required somebody with the guts to actually use the Leftist alliance’s power. The LA was waiting for someone like their messiah, but it didn’t need to be Obama specifically. Which is why defeating Obama specifically, is only a tactical victory, at best.
The Left has dictators a thousand times worse than Obama, waiting in the reserves.
The Left already has black ops and death squads trained using police SWAT/union resources. They just need a “leader” to coordinate their attacks as well. A Eric Holder for the SWAT death squads, and not just ATF/Black Panther ops.
He can fool most of the people because he has the MSM (and even the entertainment industry) working for him.
Ymarsaker,
I was speaking of Obama figuratively (as in “an Obama”). It doesn’t need ot be Obama personally. It’s simply a matter of having a focal point to focus otherwise loosely related “battles.”
The idea that the administration does not know how many people have paid Obamacare premiums is risible. Insurance companies collect the payments, and they are fully automated. At any moment they can tell you how many payments have been processed.
Interesting how the 1939 Soviet film shows military might, with a lot of bayonet- thrusting cannonfodder, at its close, and the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact soon to be signed.
But I dont get the “VKP” emblazoned on the locomotives.
This really isn’t something totally brand-new, though, is it? I don’t know about a comparison with lying and fooling, but FDR was a god-like figure to many Americans who believed he could do no wrong.
JFK was admired by black Americans as well, even though JFK and Johnson put the final cap of destruction on black families.
‘Propaganda is vital–the heart of our struggle. We can never abandon propaganda…Use a lot of sleight of hand and smiles with everybody. We must follow the same tactic we employed in our trial; defend our points of view without raising hackles. There will be plenty of time later to crush all the cockroaches.’
The obamacare numbers are just as reliable as the manufactured unemployment number and the rate of inflation.
Neo comments:
Interesting. Another blogger has recently pointed out Jesse Myerson’s (whoever he is) witless and outrageous apologia for communism over at Salon, titled
“”Why you’re wrong about communism …”
It’s form is that by now standard leftist “irony litany” template; which seems to satisfy a particular mental itch the kind has.
That is to say it’s in the form of a list of propositions, usually conservative, which are supposedly rebutted with ironical flourishes and deconstructive reasoning in the form of “you do it too, you hypocrite”
In this vein Myerson offers the following remarks regarding one of straw man propositions he is concerned to knock down in his article: that, “3. Communism killed 110 million* people for resisting dispossession. ”
“Pretends to care about.” says the reptile.
You find yourself armed and in a lifeboat with this clown, there’s no question what you will ultimately be forced to do.
I went and read Meyerson in Salon pursuant to DNW’s post. There is no point in reading Salon and Meyerson’s drivel, I conclude after this first and only time.
Meyerson’s point seems to be, never mind the Kulaks, Stalin killed millions of communists too. And yeah, Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed beaucoup but….
Meyerson’s no clown. he is like a bad case of scabies. And he’s using precious oxygen.
I keep thinking of Newsweek’s headline: “We’re All Socialists Now.”
We’re in the hands of honest-to-God parlor Pinkos and Bolsheviks.
Remember that term “Pinko”? for Western commie symps? We need to bring that back, AND resume calling the Reds by their right nick: REDS.
More seriously, what can we do to give the pols the incentive to do the right thing? (bearing in mind Milton Friedman’s admonishment that you can’t count on electing “good men,” you have to make it more appealing for the guys you do elect to do the right thing).
Can’t do it, Bev. Been pre-empted. GOP states are deemed “Red”, and feminists/breast cancer ‘awareness’ have taken ownership of Pink, even to the point of some NFL teams wearing pink shoe, albeit briefly.
I think tagging us as “Red” was a brilliant Leftist ploy, but I can’t prove it was a ploy; it began ~20 yrs ago and I could not satisfactorily discover a group of plotters al la Journolist when I checked several yrs ago.
Just call them what they are, evil monsters. Don’t even give the human label until they pay up.
Seems it was Tim Russert who got the ball rolling with those red and blue tags, and then, according to the Wash. Post:
Love that “magically reached consensus”.
Yes, Russert, deemed in death to have been “widely respected”, was present at the Red-Ain’t-Left birthing, but evidence of the organization of the “magically reached consensus” remains damn elusive. Kinda like It Was The Video That Caused Benghazi.
“Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the power of government agencies to do good.” Pat Moynihan
Ah for the days when democrats were actually patriots.
The singing will be a next step. I noticed the trend during the Occupy – of chanting, talking in unison, mob-unity behavior.
Next will be songs people are expected to sing – singing the praises of socialism. Soon they will not hide the word, socialism. They will be very upfront about everything.
Someone will miscalculate though. They will miss something. An unexpected reaction will come from somewhere. Then they will move to overt violence, or try.
Coming is the most dangerous time for America ever.
It may even be the end.
50/50 at best.
The leftists I know are still decrying the Koch Brothers and Trump (!?!) in memes circulating on Facebook; meanwhile they know nothing about stories that have appeared in even MSM: waivers, economic projections, etc.
They remind me yet again of union auto workers who owned a summer cottage down the road from my childhood home. My father said that they hated their employer with a passion, badmouthing the company all the while enjoying higher-than-average pay and later good pensions.
The one I’m closest to in this generation* badmouths the big-box store (where her husband works part-time) for their evil capitalist ways, yet shops and gets prescriptions there because it’s cheaper. I asked if she would be willing to pay more so that workers get more money, and she did NOT understand that there is a connection between low wages and low prices.
Really, she didn’t understand. To her, everything a business takes in is profit; there is no overhead. Therefore, her actions should have no consequences economically-speaking. To leftists, the lies mesh perfectly with their belief that the wrong sorts of people are withholding things they deserve.
*I know this sentence is garbled, but for some reason I cannot think properly in English tonight. Please forgive me.
Mac, 3:41 pm —
“You *can* fool most of the people . . .”
These are scary words, but I’m afraid they’re true.
M J R, now —
They can fool enough of the people enough of the time.
We’ve already seen it. The details are purely academic.
Woe is us.
“Therefore, her actions should have no consequences economically-speaking. To leftists, the lies mesh perfectly with their belief that the wrong sorts of people are withholding things they deserve.”
They covet what they have not earned through their own efforts. It leads them to ‘cultural revolution’ and other forms of mass murder. Deja vu tout recommencer. Nous avons été ici é de nombreuses reprises. Bienvenue é la prochaine révolution.
parker…
Don’t overlook ‘plastic time’ — this is the kind of clocking seen on the silver screen.
Plastic time causes dreaming audiences to believe that feats of art that take great care and effort — take no time at all… and that low odds, utterly fantastic events happen with assembly-line predictablity.
This frame of dreaming is where the adolescent mind conjures up easy profits.
The general public is quite unaware that tremendous amounts of talent have to be employed to even get the ball rolling.
Between these two, gross profits are wildly overestimated and net profits hyper-overestimated.
The other factor is that the public and line employees never imagine that a firm have to eat loses.
This latter phenomena is the primary reason that budding entrepreneurs go bankrupt. They NEVER figure on sustaining negative gross margins — under bidding — eating mistakes.
$$$
In the same vein most employees can’t even figure out that W-2 wages are NOT an accurate measure of their own earnings.
For Big Government spends a hefty fraction of one’s earnings before they even hit any payroll check. Congress has PRE-SPENT everyone’s wages.
The effect is to massively hide just how deeply Big Government has invaded your wallet.
In all my days, none of my employees EVER figured out that government was pre-spending their money.
I almost wish that were true, Ymarsakar. You will no doubt be aware of what happened when Stalin died: Beria moved 8 MVD divisions to Moscow; the Army moved 40 divisions to Moscow and that was the end of that.
The same thing would happen if it were tried here. While Holder (he does make a fine Beria, though, doesn’t he?) might be able to find some cops and federal agents to attempt a takeover — and I very much doubt that he could: cops, despite their union affiliations, are generally pretty conservative — the military, which is very conservative, would immediately intervene to stop it.
That’s why nothing so sudden and striking will never happen — it will be a case of slowly raising the temperature so the frog never jumps out of the pot.
Some would say Americans are disinterested. Others would say we’re slow to anger.
Whatever the case, the MSM hasn’t sold their integrity without consequence. Their ratings are collapsing, while Fox’s seem to go up.
And that’s an encouraging thing.
The same thing would happen if it were tried here.
If you are referring to the SWAT teams, it’s already been field tested.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=SWAT+raid+wrong+house+fatality&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=target+focus+training&sc=8-18&sp=-1&sk=
Even at the local news and net level, it’s not hard to find them. And the police aren’t punished, because this is part of the legitimate ROE they are given, the military scale conditioning they are undergoing, and the union paychecks they are getting for the kill shots.
Death squads aren’t normally used as part of army divisions. The purpose is different.
After the Civil War, various Republican Presidents tried to move the national army to the South to stop the KKK lynchings. Didn’t work. How many divisions did they invest to the point where their occupation was called a federal army occupation of the South?
How many troops did the US put in Iraq and how many Sunni and Shia death squads did that stop? Not all of them.
In Vietnam, the Vietcong death squads killed several villages and politically influential families, why were the Marines still sitting at their firebases though before and after Tet? Because the army does not function the same as the guerilla death squads. Nor the Marines.
Obamacare enrollment is growing, it’s a baby give it some sweet time.
I could swear I saw that very same cartoon on NPR just the other day, in support of the ongoing economic policies.
Larry – It’s growing like cancer grows.
Obamacare is a cancer on America. So are Liberals. In fact, the Liberal is the Cancer. Obamacare did not make liberals; Liberals make things like Obamacare.
The Liberal destroys from the inside; Obamacare only one’s health and bank account and human freedom.
Ann,
You are correct on FDR. But we partially recovered after he died.
}}} but have even caused Obama’s followers and supporters to distrust what he and his spokespeople say.
… and yet they STILL don’t regret voting for the $%^$%%$ PoS.
>:-/
}}} The Left already has black ops and death squads trained using police SWAT/union resources. They just need a “leader” to coordinate their attacks as well. A Eric Holder for the SWAT death squads, and not just ATF/Black Panther ops.
I have no doubt the modern versions of William Ayers are out there, just drooling at the thought of free reign over a helpless populace…
But then stuff like this happens, and I think their reign is going to be shorter than the Thousand Year Reich…