Is Obama lying about his healthcare proposal? The truth is I don't really know. Maybe he is... but my bet would be against it. Of course that doesn’t mean he isn’t still terribly wrong or that his bill won't be a disaster for Americans; of course it will. Anyone who knows ... really anything about economics can tell you that. But the fact is, in order to be lying he has to know that the things he says aren’t true, and I don’t think he has any idea one way or the other. He doesn’t know anything about healthcare… even the people that work for him apparently don’t know all that much. But they know about political power and that’s what this bill is really about.
He went on TV and said “This bill will cut healthcare costs”, and that is absolutely untrue. But if he believed it to be the case then I can indict him for being stupid, or clueless, but not being a liar. Still… if he had just gone on TV said “The goal of this bill is to lower healthcare prices regardless of their cost.” he might have actually been telling the truth. I think he’d really like it if his infantile ideas about government mandates and price controls would have some support in the real economic world, but regrettably that is not the case. Price controls have never worked, but it won’t stop him from trying them again. And even though they will be no more helpful than when Jimmy Carter used them to moderate the price of Gasoline, for a progressive true believer like Obama, it's the only trick in his bag.
Even when Obama went on TV and said something as obviously ridiculous as his great quote: “I’m not an ideologue” I’m not certain he was lying. In his circle of friends he probably looks like a real pragmatist, and probably doesn’t think of himself as an ideologue at all. Remember, he hangs out with literal bomb throwers who still want to change America by killing people who don’t agree with them. Measured by that standard, he really is a comparative moderate. So the fact that he clearly is an ideologue compared to most Americans will probably come as quite a surprise to him when it's finally revealed to him. But that is certainly the way history will see it, regardless of his level of shock and surprise.
They say Obama is smart, but I haven’t seen it. It’s probably just the media saying that he seems smart because he says so much that they agree with. (Funny how the people you agree with always seem smarter than the people you don’t isn’t it?) But they also say that Nixon was the smartest president so far so maybe we can all agree that there might be character traits that are more important than intelligence for an American president. In my world ‘smart’ is usually determined by looking at results, and by that metric Obama is unexceptional at best. And thank god for that because if he manages to fulfill his vision of America’s future, then the world be much worse off for it.
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