If Jonathan Gruber, the Obama administration and the establishment press thought that Gruber's faux mea culpa appearance on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon would get them off the hook and avoid the need to deal with and cover the Obamacare architect's exposure of the left's mendacity, they were sadly mistaken.
There's yet another damning "stupid voters" video. Megyn Kelly was all over it Tuesday night, exposing the defiantly silent White House's and others' former financial and emotional love for and dependence on the MIT economist's work.
Saturday afternoon, P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters gave an October 2013 video where Gruber told an audience that "lack of transparency" largely explained Obamacare's 2010 passage — because of "the stupidity of the American voter" — long overdue exposure.
The video has since gone viral — except in the establishment press, where a search on Gruber's last name at 11:55 PM ET Tuesday evening at the Associated Press's national web site still returned nothing relevant.
Tonight, there's more. Megyn Kelly opened her show by exposing the new video, and the Obama administration's breathtakingly hypocritical attempt to distance itself from one of the co-architects of their "signature achievement" (HT Josh Feldman at Mediaiate and Fast News at YouTube:
Transcript (bolds are mine; stay with this to the end for the facts Kelly exposed in the final minute):
MEGYN KELLY: Breaking tonight, a scandal over what looks like an intentional effort to mislead voters explodes, with new video of a key White House advisor underscoring just how stupid he thinks Americans are.Welcome to the Kelly file, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly.
In the last 24 hours, a scandal involving a key White House advisor has blown up. And now we are waiting for some sort of on the record explanation from the administration.
It started when video surfaced yesterday (as noted earlier, it really "surfaced" Sunday afternoon — Ed.) of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the key architects of Obamacare. Speaking at a healthcare forum last year, describing on camera the effort to hoodwink what he called "stupid American voters."
JONATHAN GRUBER (Oct. 2013): This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure that CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If scores the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay? So it was written to do that.
In terms of risk-rated subsidies, you get a law which said healthy people are going to pay in, it made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. Ok? Just like the cal – people transparent – lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to getting this thing to pass.
And you know, it’s the second-best argument. Look, I wish Mark was right, that you could make it all transparent, but I'd rather have this law than not. So it's kind of like his reporter story. You know, there are things I wish I could change, but I’d rather have this law than not.
KELLY: That caught fire. And today, Mr. Gruber, who declined our invitation to explain his remarks here on the Kelly File, went on a little watched daytime broadcast on MSNBC to say his remarks were "spontaneous" and, "careless"?
GRUBER (earlier today on MSNBC): The comments in the video were made at an academic conference. I was speaking, speaking off-the-cuff, and I basically spoke inappropriately, and uh, I regret having made those comments.
KELLY: It was off the cuff. He didn't mean it. But now tonight, more video has surfaced, showing that this was not the first time Mr. Gruber called the American people "stupid" in an off-the-cuff remark. In this next clip, from, also last year, Mr. Gruber explains how Democrats played with the language of the Obama care law, so that it achieved their goals by, again, fooling the stupid public.
GRUBER (Oct. 4, 2013): (mostly unintelligible until the end — Ed.) ... The American voters are too stupid to understand the difference.
KELLY: "Too stupid to understand."
Hours ago, the White House distancing itself from Mr. Gruber by refusing to give any on the record response to his comments.
But that wasn't the White House attitude when it was selling the healthcare law. In fact, the White House could not get enough of Jonathan Gruber. By 2010, the administration had paid Mr. Gruber nearly $400,000 for his "expertise." The White House dedicated a web page to his healthcare analysis. White house visitor logs reportedly show senior officials, there at the White House, had a dozen meetings with healthcare advisors, including Gruber. And one of those meetings with Mr. Gruber was personally chaired by the President in the Oval Office.
And here's how one top Democrat described Gruber at the time:
MAX BAUCUS (then-Senator from Montana, in Dec. 2009): The Congressional Budget Office and Professor Gruber are both credible and unbiased sources. We're not bought and sold by the insurance industry.
KELLY: Boy, they loved him. They loved him back then.
Kelly wasn't through. In a second video seen at Mediate, she went after her guest, a Democratic pollster who should have known better than to try to defend the indefensible in front of Fox's street-smart siren.
Here is most of the transcript of that video's first two minutes:
KELLY: Joining me tonight, Bernard Whitman, a Democratic pollster and President and CEO of Whitman Insights Strategies. This is not the first time Mr. Gruber has been, professor, has been caught misleading us. He said in January that Obamacare was never meant to save money, don't worry about that. But before it was passed, he said it was a deficit reducer, that it's a cost effective step towards healthcare problems. He said once before that if you're A state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits. Then when the states decided not to set up exchanges and they go on HealthCare.gov and they want their tax credits anyway, he said "Hey go ahead, you can have them! Forget all that stuff I said before."
Now he comes out and says, all that stuff we said about taxes, that's BS. And this other stuff that's all BS. We had to do it, because we had to get this law passed, and sorry.
BERNARD WHITMAN: You know what it proves. It proves is that Gruber may be a decent policy expert with respect to healthcare but that he's a political idiot. That's what it proves, and the fact is the Affordable Care Act has brought down the deficit by over $100 billion (no it hasn't — Ed.) ...
KELLY: Speak to the substance of this. But what he was saying in the first clip, the long one, he said "We had to write it in a way where they didn't score it as taxes. That would've been a problem. He said that the system is set up to hide its true nature, which is wealth redistribution. He was saying, if we said explicitly that we were going to make the young and healthy people pay, and that the old healthy people, it would not have passed. So we had to lie.
Even though Kelly continued to conduct herself admirably, the video's final two minutes are virtually unwatchable, as Whitman tries to claim that everyone knew what they were getting with Obamacare when the law was passed, that the Supreme Court has in essence ended any and all debate, and that the new law is accomplishing wonderful things — and too bad, so sad about those deceptions.
Right, Bernard. The fact is that no one knew what they were getting with the new law, which is why Nancy Pelosi said that Democrats had to pass the bill before the rest of us could find out what was in it. And Obama, of course, lied repeatedly, saying that Americans could keep their existing plans and providers ... "period."
Is it really possible that the establishment press, and especially the White House press corps, can continue to pretend that Gruber's damning, insufferably arrogant tales of unprecedented deception don't exist, and don't matter?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
