A really important question was being debated on TV last Sunday. Has the president lost the American people and will he recover from this very bad year. Of course Bill Kristol and the Right were loaded for bear, championing the two big accusations against Obama; Benghazi and –“ if you have insurance you can keep your insurance.” Anyone who has done any serious investigation of Benghazi knows that the GOP stance is pure bullshit. The White House had nothing to do with it nor did the State Department. It was a CIA operation from beginning to end and all the mistakes associated with it were the CIA’s fault. What the White House did wrong was try to take the heat off the CIA by making statements that it should never have made, simply because the CIA hadn’t given it the correct intelligence. This was dumb and for that, Obama should take a modicum of heat, but nothing like what the desperate GOP has fired up.
The statement about keeping your own insurance was dead wrong and repeating it was almost terminally dumb but it was in keeping with that universal political disease, that never allows a politician to admit he was wrong or guilty and then just say I’m sorry, I screwed up – about anything. Oh, wait a minute, Obama did do that. He went on National TV and said that he had screwed up and that he was wrong and that he was sorry. Strangely enough, no Republican saw that part; just as none of them saw Dick Cheney claim that he never did anything wrong when he and baby Bush were starting two wars, ignoring Katrina and bankrupting our country. Points of view are really funny.
What Obama should have explained in the first place was that if your insurance stunk, then you wouldn’t be able to keep it; that even if you were too dumb to see this, he wasn’t, and for not adding that statement, he was wrong. He is the president and part of his job description is to protect the people even if they are, for whatever reason, unable or too stupid to protect themselves.
Those seem to be the two issues that the Right has chosen for the big fight. Is there any President in American history that you can only say two bad things about? Of course you can find a lot more that Obama has done wrong but the Right is so limited in its views that those two are all they can come up with. Do you really want to listen to people so limited in intelligence?
I will be delivering another column on Benghazi so let’s stick to the ACA in this one.
Big discussion of it on Meet the Press. A really interesting argument between David Brooks, E.J.Dionne, Anna Novarro and Robert Gibbs No matter what political arguments develop there is one insurmountable fact that is true about the ACA. The country needs healthcare and the people want it. The GOP can rant about all the problems with it and how the people in their districts hate it but they have come up with absolutely no plan to replace it. They’re talking about it now but so far nothing. It’s real easy to sit on your fat ass and downgrade something, but it takes work and intelligence to come up with a replacement and so far the GOP has shown neither the ability to come up with a plan that is better than the one they continue to call failed, nor to convince even their most witless followers that they are better off without healthcare. So where do we go from here?
Brooks points out that the American people don’t like mandates and that every time the administration has been faced with pushback on any of the mandates they have backed down. He’s right and this policy has to stop. This is the law. Learn to live with it until we can fix it, but no one will be able to fix anything if all that the White House does is back off each contended point and the right looks only to scuttle instead of to repair.
Dionne counters by saying that anyone who says government can’t deliver healthcare is nuts; all you have to do is look at Medicare or Medicaid. This is a point that defies argument – as long as you don’t talk cost.
Navarro make the statement that fixing the website is easier than fixing the policy. What she fails to understand is that the policy doesn’t need fixing, the details do and if all the aggressive Republicans like her, that are continually harping on the law’s problems, would take just a tiny bit of the energy they spend attacking it, and try to help fix it, it would be an overwhelming success much faster. The problem with Navarro and her compatriots is that they don’t know how to fix anything. They have all developed the process of doing nothing to a fine art. This won’t work, they whine, you can’t do this, they moan, this is going to destroy us as a nation they cry, stamping their feet, twisting their hands and looking like they need a quick trip to the can, but still doing nothing to solve the problem, which is, after all, that there are people who don’t have healthcare and who need it desperately. So the answer to all of them, is if you can’t help and you don’t have a plan of your own, sit down, shut up and continue doing what you have been doing for the last five years – nothing.
When David Gregory makes the statement that people don’t want the government telling them what to do, which is why they are revolting against the mandates he is dead wrong. People absolutely want he government to tell them what to do, at least most of them. Most people don’t want to have to think or make decisions. Part of the problem with the ACA is that it gives people too many options and if there is one thing most people cannot do, it is make decisions. If those people could handle more than two options, most would have had the capability to make better career decisions and would now have an employer who was paying for their healthcare. I know, that’s facetious but sometimes there just doesn’t seem any other way around what’s out there.
This constant right wing assault on something that is not going to go away and could indeed be of great profit to the country if dealt with intelligently is such a waste of human potential. Right now there are almost 9 million people out there who have either enrolled freshly or updated their coverage in some way, due to this program. That’s incredible. Think how much good has been done. And yet, the right continues to find any little problem to harp on. For some reason they seem to think that the only chance they will have to succeed in the next election is if they can discredit or destroy the ACA. But that’s not really a solution. If, and the chances are awfully slight, they did manage to repeal the law, what would happen to those who are already benefiting from it? Does even the most brain dead Republican think that those people would turn right? I doubt it
So the only chance the GOP has, is to exploit the problems of people who are having trouble with the new program. But these are logistic problems and not the kind of thing that either can’t be fixed or for which, a replacement can’t be found. They are problems that are endemic to any new program and will eventually be solved and will disappear. And still, no better plan has come out of all those Republican think tanks. Why not? Much as I like to attack the intelligence of many right wing ideas, their failures are not always due to the fact that there are no intelligent people on the right. There are in fact, many of them. No, the problem is that the basic concepts and prejudices from which these otherwise functional men and women work, are flawed. In this case they are not against he ACA because of anything that is or is not in the law. The basis for the ACA was, originally set up by their own Mitt Romney and is right now, for all practical purposes, working extremely well, in Massachusetts. The real reason they hate the ACA, is that a President, whom they hate more than they like their own constituency put it into law. This, of course, isn’t an adequate reason for their actions, but for the most part they aren’t men and women who look at things in such a balanced manner.
At this point the right has painted itself into a corner. They put all their water into one bucket and it appears that the bucket is full of holes. It appears that at this point, enough thinking people can see that with some substantial fixes, the ACA will be just as big a success as Social Security and Medicare. If the GOP is successful in ruining it, those people who can see its advantages will be bloodthirsty in their reprisals. On the other hand if they don’t stop it and it achieves the expected success, those who opposed it will be run out of town on a rail. It appears that the only way for the GOP to not be crushed by the ACA is for some other circumstance to come along and remove it from the headlines. They are already starting to once again bang the drum for the elimination of abortions and the limiting of birth control. A brilliant concept if you happen to be a religious fanatic or a desperate member of the Tea Party. There are plenty of potential headlines out here that can achieve this, but only if the Democrats are dumb enough to let that happen.