In the midst of all this speculation regarding Anthony Weiner’s potential resignation decision and his wife’s role in it, the WSJ’s James Taranto is the only commentator who actually makes sense by pointing out the absurdity of expecting his wife to “talk him into resigning”.

He writes:

House Democrats are anxious to be rid of Anthony Weiner the Tumid Tweeter, National Journal reported yesterday:

They conceded that their best strategy for getting to that point is hoping that Weiner’s wife will persuade him to go.

“We’re hearing he might resign in a couple of days,” said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y. “He’s waiting for his wife to come home. That’s what we’re hearing from his friends.” . . .

A senior Democratic aide said there was much anticipation expressed by members–if not desperation–that Weiner might be talked into resigning by his wife, Huma Abedin, later this week.

Right, just like Mrs. Weiner’s boss, Hillary Clinton, persuaded her husband to quit politics amid a sex scandal.

Why in the world would the Dems expect Mrs. Weiner to press her husband to resign, thereby cutting the household income in half? Even if the marriage fell apart, the prospect of collecting alimony and child support would leave her with a continuing interest in his gainful employment.

Is Mrs. Clinton threatening Mrs. Weiner’s employment or advancement in order to pressure Mr. Weiner to resign? That’s the only way in which this plan would make sense. Though as the Democratic aide suggested, it could just be a desperate hope. And hope is not a plan.

 

James Taranto posted this great piece in his Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ site:

Administration officials and sympathizers have continued to fire back against the argument that the Osama bin Laden raid vindicates the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. As we noted Friday, the counterarguments have been notably weak, and that continues to be the case.

Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, was interviewed by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” Wallace asked him: “Why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding of a detainee under very strict controls and limits–why is that over the line?”

Donlon tried to evade the question by giving a long justification for the shooting of bin Laden, but Wallace pressed the matter:

Wallace: Mr. Donilon, let me just make my point. I’m not asking you why it was OK to shoot Osama bin Laden. I fully understand the threat. And I’m not second-guessing the SEALs. What I am second guessing is, if that’s OK, why can’t you do waterboarding? Why can’t you do enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was just as bad an operator as Osama bin Laden?

Donilon: Because, well, our judgment is that it’s not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary in terms of getting the kind of intelligence that we need.

Wallace: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?

Donilon: We are at war with Osama bin Laden.

Wallace: We’re at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Donilon: It was a military operation, right? It was absolutely appropriate for the SEALs to take the action–for the forces to take the action that they took in this military operation against a military target.

Wallace: But why is it inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

Donilon: I didn’t say it was inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Wallace: You said it was against our values.

Donilon: I think that the techniques are something that there’s been a policy debate about, and our administration has made our views known on that.

Writing in The Daily, the usually sensible Judith Miller offers this bit of sophistry:

Effectiveness should not be the sole standard in determining how America treats terrorist suspects [sic] in detention.

Terrorism, after all, was an effective tool for bin Laden, at least for a while. That made it neither moral nor politically justifiable.

This analogy is completely empty. Not only are bin Laden’s means (murdering civilians en masse) not comparable to America’s (frightening mass murderers in ways that pose no actual threat of physical harm), but the ends are not comparable either. The objective of an al Qaeda attack is not to save civilians.

The atrociously poor quality of the arguments against enhanced interrogation are all the more reason to think the bin Laden raid vindicates it.

 

James Taranto of the WSJ’s Best of the Web Today is reporting on three new partisan commentators taking up the cause for the release of Obama’s archival birth certificate.

He writes:

Three partisan commentators are calling on the state of Hawaii to release President Obama’s archival birth certificate, Mediaite reports. What makes this worthy of note is that all three are liberal Democrats: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, the Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page and Mother Jones’s David Corn.

On “Hardball” yesterday, host Matthews noted the report that new governor Neil Abercrombie was looking to “end this nonsense” (we also noted it). Matthews asked his two guests: “I don’t understand why the governor doesn’t just say, ‘Snap it up, who’s ever over there in the department of records, send me a copy right now’? And why doesn’t the president just say, ‘Send me a copy right now?’ Why doesn’t [press secretary Robert] Gibbs and [White Obama aide David] Axelrod say, ‘Let’s just get this crappy story dead’?”

They resisted at first, but eventually Matthews brought them around:

Matthews: I’m just asking the obvious question. Why not–will there be any harm done by releasing the original document?

Page: No.

Corn: I will take the brave position of saying that if they can find it, they should put it out there, and then we can make even more fun of the birthers.

Page: I’ll take the brave position of saying, yes, put it out there, and the birthers are still not going to believe it. They’re going to say, “Well, that governor is part of the conspiracy, too, because he’s a Democrat.”

So we now have three or four liberal Democrats–the “Hardball” trio and possibly the Aloha governor–taking what had been a birtherian position in favor of releasing the archival certificate.

Our view has long been that the birthers are playing a sucker’s game–that they are aiding Obama by making it easier for his supporters to depict his critics as wackos and divert attention from real questions about his political character. This change in liberal attitudes may be a sign that the game is no longer working to Obama’s advantage. It could be that his baneful policies have led more Americans to harbor doubts about his very legitimacy.

Granted, many people are skeptical of the skeptics—and sometimes even embarrassed by their incessant demand for the birth certificate. But, even a broken clock like Chris Matthews is right twice a day, and let’s face it: all this stubbornness by Obama, his administration, and the Hawaiian authorities starts to look… well, a little guilty… after a while. After all, when it’s that easy to end the debate and leave the birthers with egg on their faces, why wouldn’t they do it?? Unless they… can’t?

The Director of Hawaii’s Department of Health at the time this all started, Chiyome Fukino, issued a statement saying she had “personally seen and verified that the Hawaii state Department of Health has Senator Obama’s original birth certificate on record.” Okay, if it’s that accessible that she has seen it with her naked eyes, then how much harder is it to take it and bring it to the same press conference at which she issued that statement?

Not that I’m ready to start beating the drum myself on a full-time basis, but like many Americans at this point, I can’t help but wonder why all the suspicious diversions and “he saw, she saw” when there’s an easy way to end the speculation?

Come on, Obama, prove us all wrong and make us all look foolish. Show us your birth certificate!

By now, we’ve all heard Obama’s car analogy ad nauseam. It’s getting so elaborately bad that I seriously think that Obama and his advisers and speechwriters must be either brain dead… or just that they don’t watch any TV or read any newspapers to know that the whole country is sick of this stupid-to-begin-with analogy. Clueless. And do you really want such a clueless buffoon shuttling you around in a motor vehicle?!?  (Sorry, I just had to borrow the analogy haha.)

The mockery of it (which, again, Obama clearly doesn’t hear about), just gets funnier and funnier in the process. Check out this analysis by the great James Taranto of the WSJ in his Best of the Web Today column:

By defeating Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama was supposed to have supplanted the Clintons. Instead he seems to have been assimilated by them. Lately Bill Clinton has been everywhere campaigning for Democrats. And, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports, Obama turns out to be borrowing heavily from Clinton’s 1994 midterm campaign:

“It’s up to you to remember that this election is a choice,” Obama said in a recent speech. “It’s a choice between the past and the future; a choice between hope and fear; a choice between falling backwards and moving forwards. And I don’t know about you, but I want to move forward. I don’t want to go backward.”

Compare that to this common Clinton passage from ’94: “Ladies and gentlemen, this election, all over America, represents a choice, a choice between hope and fear . . . between whether we’re going forward or we’re going to go back. I think I know the answer to that. You want to keep going forward.”

Of course, this is blandly generic rhetoric. “This election is a choice” is tautological, and it would be highly unusual for a politician to call for going backward in fear. But it also turns out that Obama’s most vivid metaphor bears a striking resemblance to one Clinton used in 1994.

Clinton: “You know, if you drive your car and there’s a lot of stuff on the windshield, you could think it’s dark outside when the sun shining. . . . That’s what they’ve done. They’ve put a lot of dirt on America’s windshield. We got to clean it off between now and Tuesday. Will you help? Will you do your part? Will you go forward? . . . Think about it like this: Every one of you is in the driver’s seat.”

And, of course, Obama: Having driven the car into the ditch, Republicans were “kicking dirt down into the ditch, kicking dirt in our faces, but we kept on pushing. Finally we got this car up on level ground. And, yes, it’s a little beat up. . . . But it’s pointing in the right direction. And now we’ve got the Republicans tapping us on the shoulder, saying, ‘we want the keys back.’ You can’t have the keys back. You don’t know how to drive. You can ride with us if you want, but you got to sit in the back seat. We’re going to put middle-class America in the front seat. . . . I’m going forwards, with all of you.”

Incidentally, Obama has come in for some criticism for that new flourish, “you got to sit in the back seat.” His critics suggest it is reminiscent of the pre-Rosa Parks era, when blacks had to sit in the back of the bus. But as we all know, the only thing Obama does with buses is throw people under them. In a car, as blogger Tom Maguire notes, the guy who drives while others sit in the back is a chauffeur.

Yesterday at the White House, CNN’s Dan Lothian quizzed press secretary Robert Gibbs about the metaphor:

Lothian: Robert, to follow up on the story about the Republicans driving the car into the ditch, the President has now been behind the wheel of this car for two years. At what point does he stop–

Gibbs: Well, just — I would say pushing the car out of the ditch first, right? Yes.

Lothian: Right, but he has been trying to move the car–

Gibbs: Let’s be faithful to the story.

Lothian: So he has been moving the car–he has been moving this car now for two years. At what point does he stop talking about the people who were last driving that car? I mean, does this continue after the midterm elections?

Gibbs: Well, Dan–

Lothian: It becomes his car and he’s behind the wheel.

Gibbs: No, and–look, there’s an Obama bumper sticker on the car; we get that.

So wait a second–there’s an Obama bumper sticker on the car? Wouldn’t that mean the guy who drove it into a ditch was a Democrat, or at least Colin Powell? Or is Gibbs suggesting that the Republicans were driving a Democrat’s car? And could someone please pass the Slurpee?

Then we get yet another metaphor:

Lothian: You would think you would be talking about the incremental steps of getting that car down the road now, as opposed to how that car got in the ditch. It gets to be somewhat of a broken record, does it not?

Gibbs: No–well, the record of the last eight years was pretty broken, I would give you that.

At least now we know the car in question is a 1956 Chrysler.

Anyway, to return to the main road, Clinton was in Chicago yesterday for a “get out the vote rally” that WLS-AM’s Bill Cameron describes, Bob Dolefully, as “the most unenthusiastic WLS veteran political reporter Bill Cameron has ever witnessed”:

Clinton was an hour late for the Tuesday afternoon rally at the Palmer House and droned on for another hour, sending dozens of the few hundred Democrats in attendance for the exits.

“Well, all we’re really asking for is two more years, that’s a total of four, to get us out of the hole and get us into the future. That’s half as much time as you gave them to dig the hole. Seems fair to us,” Clinton said.

Oh no, another metaphor! And a deep question: If it takes eight years to dig a hole, how long does it take to dig half a hole?

In an interview with ABC News during the Chicago visit, Clinton sang another familiar refrain:

The former president said Democrats are having a hard time getting their message out, in part, because the news media focuses more on politics than on the substantive differences between candidates. He said he can relate to President Obama’s troubles.

“Anybody who has ever been there will tell you how hard it is to get a fact-based message out,” Clinton said.

“It’s what happened to me in ’94. When you get in, you are wanting to do things,” he said. “There’s almost an inverse relationship in how much you accomplish and what people know about it.”

Where have we heard that before? Lots of places. From Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker: “It is often said that Obama–in 2008, a gifted orator with minimal national experience–has been better, as President, at ‘governing’ than at ‘politics.’ ” From Kevin Sack at the New York Times: “The Democrats’ inability to control the messaging during the legislative debate [over ObamaCare] bled unstaunched into the campaign, as Republicans appealed to base voters with a bumper-sticker pledge to repeal the law or, if unable, to drain its financing.” Even from the Onion: “Democrats: ‘If We’re Gonna Lose, Let’s Go Down Running Away From Every Legislative Accomplishment We’ve Made.’ ”

The Democrats’ message, in short, is that the Democrats are really lousy at delivering a convincing message. Since nobody finds this message convincing, it has a certain surface plausibility. But “We’re really lousy at delivering a message” is a lousy message–so the problem actually is one of substance, not delivery.

What gives with all the Clinton nostalgia–specifically, nostalgia for the 1994, election, which was the low point of his presidency? Maybe the Democrats have already written off this year’s election and are really nostalgic for 1995 and 1996, when they staged a comeback. “It will be a great mistake to count us out,” Clinton told ABC News. “Reports of our demise have been exaggerated.” That was true in 1994, after the election, and maybe he and his party are hoping it will be true a week from now too.

It’s also possible that they fear even bigger losses. The Hill reports that its latest poll of 42 toss-up districts “points to a massive Republican wave that, barring an extraordinary turnaround, will deliver crushing nationwide defeats for President Obama’s party. The data suggest a GOP pickup that could easily top 50 seats.” The GOP pickup in 1994 was 52 seats. If the Hill estimates are at all cautious, 1994 could end up looking good for the Dems by comparison.

Check out this hilarious commentary that James Taranto of the WSJ sent out as part of his Best of the Web Today on Wednesday:

The president’s efforts to “educate” the ignorant public have been unyielding. The Washington Post reports on the latest:

Obama was raised in a condominium apartment, and later he lived as an urban apartment dweller. Perhaps that helps explain his new favorite hangout: other people’s back yards.

On a whirlwind trip across this country this week, Obama is venturing into the yards of “real people” to push out several messages on the economy. His backyard visits over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday will each feature a specific topic: education in Albuquerque; fighting for the middle class in Des Moines; tax cuts and deficits in Richmond.

Not in my back yard, responds reader Brian O’Rourke in a masterful email rant:

This is sad-larious. (sad + hilarious) He won’t shut up on TV, so we’ve tuned him out. We just flat-out don’t watch. So now he’s coming over and crashing our backyard barbecues. And if we turn off the propane, put the cooler away, and douse the citronella tiki torches–just leave him in the backyard, that is–will he still be in the backyard when we wake up?

Is it possible to stalk an entire nation, and if so, where do we get a temporary restraining order that covers the president?

You’ve gotta love the scare quotes around “real people” in the second paragraph. A man could write an entire Modern Language Association thesis on that one. Are they “really” “real”? And if so, why the quotes? If not, are they “fake” real people? Are they some “mythological” character rumored to exist, but unknown to staffers or press corps in the White House? What qualifies as real, anyway? And if there are “real people” outside the Beltway, does that imply that there are not inside it? It’s almost tautological to suggest that most people in government are phonies, but who knew they were actual fakes?

The same paragraph says the visits “will each feature a specific topic: education in Albuquerque; fighting for the middle class in Des Moines; tax cuts and deficits in Richmond.” But the third paragraph from the bottom says, “For Obama, though, there is an additional selling point to the backyard events: he simply likes them.” Possibly, since the article makes clear that Obama grew up in condos where people don’t have backyards, the president is unclear on the difference between a seminar and a barbecue. Or possibly Harvard Law School always had themes to its student barbecues and so that’s all he knows.

But honestly, if you lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, wouldn’t you skip the block party knowing what you do now? A neighbor invites himself over and then dominates the conversation with a lecture on a topic of his choosing, the main subject of which is riding his favorite hobby horse about how a political party is ruining America, all in a didactic tone that brooks no argument and that condescends to those who have not yet seen the light. Seriously, we’ve all had a guy on the street or down the hall like this. Yet no one in the White House has the nerve to tell the president that no one likes that guy. Change the subject to “9/11: What REALLY happened” or “There is NO LAW that says you have to pay income taxes!!!!!!” and it is clear what a foolish idea this is.

James Taranto relates a great Obama-Seinfeld comparison in today’s Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ site:

Reader Daniel Loomis sends along his capsule summary of “The Summer of George,” the eighth-season finale of “Seinfeld,” which aired May 15, 1997: “George uses his severance from the Yankees to stimulate the perfect summer–the ‘Summer of George’–but spends it playing frolf (frisbee golf), watching ‘The White Shadow,’ ‘investing’ in a recliner with a built-in refrigerator, taking midmorning naps, banging his head on tables, and having insignificant telephone conversations. Eventually, he ends up in the hospital having to relearn to walk.”

And here is Loomis’s capsule summary of “The Summer of Recovery,” the finale of the first full season of “Obama,” a midseason replacement that premiered to hype and high ratings but is now struggling and may face cancellation: “Barack uses his trillion dollar stimulus to create the best summer ever–the ‘Recovery Summer’–but wastes hundreds of billions on things like studies on how cocaine affects monkeys, investigating the link between yoga and hot flashes, bus-stop art, international ant research, and an upgrade to the statehouse and political offices in Topeka, Kan. Eventually, the economy ends up barely ambulatory.”

There are other parallels. Like “Seinfeld,” “Obama” is a show about nothing. Like George Costanza, Barack Obama is ending his summer with a fall, albeit a figurative plunge rather than a literal one. Oh, and Obama’s “Summer of Recovery” has actually turned out to be a summer of George, though we don’t mean Costanza.

“As Obama Struggles, Bush’s Legacy Recovers” reads the CBSNews.com headline on a picked-up Slate piece. Obama “is not consciously trying to improve the public’s view of the Bush years,” writes Slate’s John Dickerson. “Indeed, he is actively reminding people of the mess he inherited from his predecessor.”

The problem is that Obama’s leadership has been so ideologically extreme, and so politically and administratively incompetent, that every time he reminds us of his predecessor it makes Bush look good by comparison. Little wonder that a new survey of Ohio voters by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, finds that “by a 50-42 margin voters there say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama.”

Last night, in an Oval Office speech, Obama said something nice about Bush for the very first time: “No one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.” At one time, such an uncharacteristically gracious statement might have made Obama look good. But our hunch is that among those who bothered to watch the speech, a common reaction was: I miss having a president whose support for our troops, love of country and commitment to our security no one could doubt.

The show must go on. The network is committed to another 2½ seasons of “Obama.” If the star is hoping for renewal after that, he could do worse than to study another “Seinfeld” episode about George Costanza: “The Opposite.”

James Taranto, in his WSJ Best of the Web Today column last week, commented on Mayor Bloomberg’s asinine comments regarding the Ground Zero Mosque:

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, has an op-ed in today’s New York Post defending the Ground Zero mosque. Actually, the Post informs us, it’s an adaptation of “Bloomberg’s prepared remarks for his annual Ramadan celebration at Gracie Mansion yesterday.”

It is a low performance. Bloomberg panders to his audience by slandering the two-thirds or so of Americans who take offense at the idea of a fancy new mosque near the site of an Islamic supremacist atrocity:

Islam did not attack the World Trade Center–al Qaeda did. To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American.

The substance of this statement is unremarkable: Obviously it is wrong to implicate all of Islam in the 9/11 attacks.

But the mayor employs scurrilous McCarthyite rhetoric in an attempt to inflame emotions and divert attention from a point that should be equally obvious: The Ground Zero mosque planners have implicated themselves by seeking to exploit the symbolism of the site, whatever their purpose is in doing so.

Taranto points out one obvious flaw in Bloomberg’s statement: that the mosque supporters have essentially inserted themselves into the controversy by the very fact that they deliberately chose the site of the mosque solely based on the symbolism of the site and the opportunity to exploit that symbolism. THAT is why we are targeting them, and NOT simply because they are Muslim.

Another entirely different flaw in Bloomberg’s statement that I have yet to see anyone pick up on is the fact that Bloomberg simply shifts the blame from “Islam” to “al Qaeda”.

Using Bloomberg’s own logic for defending “Islam” in that ridiculous statement, one could just as easily say that it wasn’t all of al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11; it was only those 19 hijackers! So, if he wants to be so technical about over-generalizing, why is he careful not to attribute the attacks to “Islam” (in whose name they were carried out), but not similarly careful when  attributing them to al Qaeda (also in whose name they were carried out)?

Ultimately, if one truly wants to be “fair” about it, one should do the judging not by religion or organization, per se, but by affiliation. In other words, anyone who affiliates themselves with individuals who publicly support such terrorist attacks should be equally condemned. As George W. Bush succinctly stated: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” It’s that simple.

So, if those behind the Ground Zero Mosque have been known to be affiliated with terrorists or supporters of terrorists (as has been widely reported), then it doesn’t matter whether they are with “al Qaeda” or with “Islam” in general. They chose to be with the terrorists, and they don’t belong in this country, let alone at Ground Zero.

James Taranto had this hilarious commentary today (under the title, “American Nero”) in his Best of the Web Today column:

President Obama has been coming in for a lot of Jimmy Carter comparisons recently, but Fox News’s John Gibson, writing in the New York Post, points out one way in which the 44th president’s style is worlds apart from the 39th’s:

Last week’s jobs report tanked the stock market; the president took weeks to assert control of the oil spill that threatens doom on the Gulf Coast–but at the White House the Gatsby-like parties roll on as if happy days were here again.

Just yesterday, President Obama held another fun-filled White House event, a picnic for Congress members, complete with hot dogs, cold beverages and a fire pit.

All told, during the last seven weeks of spewing oil and rampant unemployment, he has frolicked and danced through three major White House music parties.

Gibson allows that “the president looks elegant and cool in his tuxedo, dancing to Jay-Z or the aging ‘cute Beatle,’ ” by which he does not mean Ringo Starr. And we have to say that if forced to choose, we’d take glib Obama in his dinner jacket over dour Carter in his sweater.

Still, there’s got to be a happy medium here between Jimmy Carter and Nero.

James Taranto writes in today’s WSJ Best of the Web Today about the damning report publicized by The American Spectator two days ago, implicating Obama and Democrats in what is clearly a health care bill coverup—where they worked together to ram through and sign the bill before evidence of its true costs to consumers can come to light:

The Department of Health and Human Services is disputing a damning claim published Monday by The American Spectator. First the Spectator:

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

“The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote,” says an HHS source. “Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think.”

Now the HHS response, via Jake Tapper of ABC News:

“That story’s not true,” Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told ABC News. . . .

“I have no idea how that rumor got started, but it’s completely unfounded,” he says.

Foster tells ABC News that he received a copy of the bill on March 18, and knew then that he wouldn’t be able to do a thorough analysis of it before the vote. He informed Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, about that fact in a letter on March 20.

“We could not have given anything to them the week before the bill was held,” as the Spectator item claimed, Foster said, because he didn’t receive the bill until March 18.

The House passed the Senate Democrats’ health care reform bill on Sunday night, March 21, as well as “fixes” to the bill.

Four days later, on March 25, Senate Democrats passed the fixes.

We’re not sure who’s right, except that Scott Ott is dead on:

Contrary to statements from Republican operatives, the Medicare actuary’s report on health care reform did NOT languish on HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius’ desk for a week before the bill passed.

It appears those GOP rascals are lying again, according to ABC’s Jake Tapper.

What really happened, is that Congress passed that bill before the actuary, Richard Foster, had time to analyze it. In fact, he had warned them he couldn’t get it done before the hastily-scheduled vote. . . .

So, President Obama didn’t hide the negative data until Democrats could ram the bill through, Democrats rammed the bill through so negative data would not appear until after passage.

The HHS actuary looks a lot better in Tapper’s account than in the Spectator’s, which is not surprising since Tapper’s account is based on an interview with the HHS actuary. But either way it is clear that the president and congressional Democrats worked actively to conceal just how bad ObamaCare was until after they had imposed it on the country.

Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers is reporting on all the people who are completely confused about Obama’s health care bill and are wondering when their “free health care” kicks in. She writes:

Two weeks after President Barack Obama signed the big health care overhaul into law, Americans are struggling to understand how — and when — the sweeping measure will affect them.

Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resources departments and business groups.

“They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com. The California-based company sells coverage from 185 health insurance carriers in 50 states.

McLean said the call center had been inundated by uninsured consumers who were hoping that the overhaul would translate into instant, affordable coverage.

…Adults with pre-existing conditions are frustrated to learn that insurers won’t have to cover them until 2014 (though those under 18 will be protected in late September); then they become both hopeful and confused upon learning that a federal high-risk pool for them will be established in the next few months. “Health insurance is so confusing. You add this on top of it and it makes it even more confusing,” McLean said.

In other words, thanks to Obama, health care is now just as complicated and frustrating as the federal tax code.

It’s all part of Obama’s comprehensive federal shell game. Welcome to hope and change!

James Taranto of the WSJ’s Best of the Web Today, in his usual humorous style, has the following commentary on this:

What’s especially good about this is that the “Where do we get the free ObamaCare?” line is only the second-funniest thing about the article. The funniest is McClatchy’s gross display of political bias. President Obama claimed that ObamaCare would give everyone health insurance and improve the quality of care while reducing the deficit–and McClatchy thinks it’s the fault ofopponents that some people expect to get something for nothing?

It occurs to us, too, that the overwhelming public opposition to ObamaCare is all the more remarkable given that there are people who have been led to believe it means free stuff for them. If you take out these misguided souls, and the people who are happy about a partisan victory (which includes many in the media), are there any supporters left?

James Taranto writes a particularly insightful piece today describing what could quite credibly be a slippery slope towards eugenics for the Democrats’ healthcare bill. In fact, it is particularly frightening just how credible it all is:

National Review’s Bob Costa catches up with Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who, although not opposed to ObamaCare, has said he and a dozen or so like-minded colleagues will vote “no” if it includes subsidies for abortion:

Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance,” he says. “Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered.” The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, “are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party.”

What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue–come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”

Stupak frames his argument too narrowly. Forget about “life” for a while–the Democratic leaders’ position ought to be equally shocking to those on the pro-choice side of the abortion debate.

What Stupak is hearing from his colleagues is not the pro-choice argument that the government should permit abortion as a matter of individual liberty. Rather, they claim that the government should encourage abortion as a social expedient–a cost-cutting measure.

The first thing one must say about this position is that when stated categorically, it is nonsense. Sure, babies are expensive. But from society’s standpoint, that expense is a necessary investment–the only way to produce the next generation of productive adults. A society in which babies are a net long-term cost–in which the average person consumes more over his lifetime than he produces–is unsustainable. A policy aimed at reducing the number of babies born would be economically ruinous, because within a few decades it would result in a shortage of workers and taxpayers.

But as a matter of cold cost-benefit analysis, not all babies are equal. Some are costlier than others, and not all grow into productive adults. In particular, certain disabilities and diseases are very expensive to treat and limit productive adulthood by causing either early death or lifelong dependency.

In order to be effective, a policy of using abortion as a cost-cutting measure would have to aim at preventing the birth of babies with such pre-existing conditions. The goal would be not a reduction in the number of babies, but an “improvement” in the “quality” (narrowly defined in economic terms) of the babies who are born. This is known as eugenics.

Getting government into the eugenics business would have disturbing implications for reproductive liberty. What would happen to a woman who received, say, a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome? She would be free (as she is today) to exercise her right to have an abortion. But would she be free to exercise her right not to have an abortion?

Presumably the government could not directly force her to abort, as this would provoke political outrage and run afoul of Roe v. Wade and subsequent rulings. But one can easily imagine softer forms of coercion coming into play. A government-run insurance plan, for instance, could deny or limit coverage for the treatment of certain conditions if diagnosed before fetal viability, on the ground that the taxpayer should not be forced to pay the costs of the woman’s choice to carry her child to term. Perhaps the courts would find this an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to choose, but that does not strike us as an open-and-shut case.

Pro-choice advocates have argued that even persuasive measures aimed at curtailing abortion are objectionable, although the Supreme Court has disagreed. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey,the court by a 7-2 vote upheld a Pennsylvania law mandating “that counselors provide women seeking abortions with information concerning alternatives to abortion, the availability of medical assistance benefits, and the possibility of child support payments.”

It’s not hard to imagine the federal government’s establishing counseling protocols designed to encourage abortion in certain situations–for example, informing a woman after a Down syndrome diagnosis of the burdens (but not the joys) of rearing a child with that condition. This seems no less an infringement of reproductive liberty than the Pennsylvania law to which the pro-choice side objects.

For Bart Stupak, who believes abortion is a form of homicide, opposing abortion subsidies is an easy choice. But those who are pro-choice–as opposed to pro-abortion–should object as strongly to government policies designed to encourage abortion as to those intended to discourage it. “Keep your cost-cutting measures off my body!” may not become the new pro-choice rallying cry, but it should.

Last Friday, James Taranto had this hilarious observation in his Best of the Web Today column of Paul Krugman arguing with his past self:

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what he calls “the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties”:

Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

“What Democrats believe,” he says “is what textbook economics says”:

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

Krugman scoffs: “To me, that’s a bizarre point of view–but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.”

What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called “Macroeconomics”:

Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of “Eurosclerosis,” the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.

So it turns out that what Krugman calls Sen. Kyl’s “bizarre point of view” is, in fact, textbook economics. The authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Miss Wells is also known as Mrs. Paul Krugman.

It seems Krugman himself lives in two different universes–the universe of the academic economist and the universe of the bitter partisan columnist. Or maybe this is like that episode of “Star Trek” in which crewmen from the Enterprise switched places with their counterparts from a universe in which everyone was the same, only evil.

Like Spock, the evil Krugman is the one with the beard.

Here’s one more gem from James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today:

See if you can guess the topic of the New York Times op-ed piece whose first paragraph is this:

Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials. Milton Berle famously joked: “You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.” These days, though, the institutional inertia gripping Congress is no laughing matter.

Wrong! The subject is why Evan Bayh is leaving the Senate. The author is Sen. Evan Bayh. We figured out the subject from the headline, which reads, “Why I’m Leaving the Senate.”

And it’s a good thing the Times used that headline, because without it we’d have read the whole 1,600-word op-ed and had no idea what it was about. Bayh doesn’t say a single word about why he’s leaving the Senate!

Still, the op-ed makes the answer clear: Bayh is leaving the Senate because the place is full of blowhards. His departure won’t solve that problem completely, but it will reduce the number of blowhards by one.

James Taranto wrote such a great piece in today’s Best of the Web Today, that I simply have to include the entire section that I found so appealing here:

“Audiences Hate Modern Classical Music Because Their Brains Cannot Cope”: an arresting headline from London’s Sunday Telegraph. This is the argument of a new book, “The Music Instinct” by Philip Ball:

Mr Ball believes that many traditional composers such as Mozart, Bach and Beethoven subconsciously followed strict musical formula to produce music that was easy on the ear by ensuring it contained patterns that could be picked out by the brain.

In the early twentieth century, however, composers led by [Arnold] Schoenberg began to rally against the traditional conventions of music to produce compositions which lack tonal centres, known as atonal music.

Under their vision, which has been adopted by many subsequent classical musicians, music no longer needed to be confined to a home note or chord.

But such atonal music has been badly received by audiences and critics who have found it difficult to follow.

These modern compositions “confuse listeners’ brains,” Ball argues, and thus put them off. The idea may have broader implications:

Dr Aniruddh Patel, a researcher at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, said that tonal music such as traditional classical music uses some of the same mechanisms needed for processing language.

“This may be one reason such music is congenial to the human mind,” he said. “It may be a reason why atonal music is more difficult when first encountered.”

Hmm, does this remind you of anything? Here’s a hint:

Still, this is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people.

That, of course, is President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, on the failure of ObamaCare. His excuse so closely parallels Ball’s explanation of modern music that you could have written essentially the same headline: “Voters Hate ObamaCare Because Their Brains Cannot Cope.”

But what’s striking about the Telegraph piece is that Ball and others who study this stuff go out of their way to avoid making any qualitative judgments. After explaining that Schoenberg’s music is “fragmented,” making it “harder for the brain to find structure,” Ball adds this disclaimer: “That isn’t to say, of course, that it is impossible to listen to, it is just harder work. It would be wrong to dismiss such music as a racket.”

Yet David Huron of Ohio State University describes such music this way: “The result is an overwhelming feeling of confusion, and the constant failures to anticipate what will happen next means that there is no pleasure from accurate prediction.”

So the modern compositions sound disorderly and give the listener no pleasure. Is this not the definition of a racket? Ball seems to be suggesting that while these pieces are aesthetically displeasing because they are defective in form, some sort of underlying substance makes them worthy. But this is bunk. The value of music consists only in its appeal to the human mind.

On this point, the analogy to politics and policy breaks down. It is possible for a good policy to be inartfully presented (or, for that matter, for a skilled politician to make a bad policy attractive). The claim that ObamaCare is a good idea but Obama presented it badly is not inherently absurd, as is the claim that a piece of music is good even though it sounds bad.

Or is it? Obama is asking voters to believe that ObamaCare is a good idea and that the reason they think it is a bad idea is that he isn’t good at persuasion. But if he can convince them of that, he can convince them of anything–which means that the claim that he is bad at persuasion is wildly false.

The result is an overwhelming feeling of confusion. It would be wrong not to dismiss ObamaCare as a racket.

The Boston Globe has this doozy of a story:

The western Massachusetts university town of Amherst is mulling a resolution urging the Congress to release cleared Guantanamo Bay detainees into the United States and calling for the town to welcome those detainees into the community.

The town’s Select Board voted 2-1 Monday night to endorse a warrant article titled, “Resolution to Assist in the Safe Resettlement of Cleared Guantanamo Detainees.”

“The United States has a long history of being a place of refuge and asylum for persecuted people. There’s nothing new about this,” said Gerry Weiss, one of the two selectmen supporting the resolution. “This is the tradition of the United States.”

The resolution was submitted by Ruth Hooke, a Town Meeting member and a member of Pioneer Valley No More Guantanamos.

In briefing material supplied to the selectmen, the group said the resolution “asks our local community to look beyond the stereotype that all the men at Guantanamo are ‘terrorists,’ and instead to look at each man as a human being who deserves human rights and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.”

Are these people nuts? Besides the obvious absurdity of calling war criminals “innocent until proven guilty” (should WWII soldiers have conducted quick field trials before shooting at the enemy?), do these Amherst schmucks think that terrorists are going to just “settle down” in their cozy little insane town and join the local Kiwanis club? Maybe throw a nice barbecue party on Memorial Day…

No. The first thing these terrorists are going to do (not that this bizarre proposal is ever even going to come close to fruition) is to get the hell out of the one town in the country filled with people even more insane than they are, which means that the rest of the country is going to be crawling with terrorists on the loose. At least the idiots of Amherst can take comfort in the fact that no one really cares enough about their ridiculous existence to incinerate their whole town, but as for the rest of us [saner] people living in cities that these terrorists are targeting… thankfully, we have more of a say (for now).

SIDE NOTE:
James Taranto of the WSJ introduces the Boston Globe story above with a great opening paragraph:

President Obama’s promise to empty the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has run into a little obstacle: It turns out the place is full of terrorists! Like everything else, this is not Obama’s fault. The terrorists are there because George W. Bush put them there, leaving poor Obama once again stuck cleaning up someone else’s mess.

As Taranto (and many others) point out time and again: poor Obama should just shut up already about whose mess this is and instead should start cleaning. He didn’t “inherit” the mess, as he loves to claim, as though it was never his idea to get stuck with it; he enthusiastically pursued the very office that comes with the entire mess (not to mention his knack for taking the mess to new heights).