Liberals really ought to thank the heavens above for George W. Bush, he comes in so handy for them. Whenever anything goes wrong in their hermetically-sealed reality, as everything connected to them eventually does, their Pavlovian response is to misdirect attention toward Bush.
Latest example -- rollout of the misnomer of a track wreck known as the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, which became law three years ago without a single Republican vote on the basis of one of the most audacious lies repeated ad nauseum by an American politician -- if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. What President Obama could not bear to say was what he actually meant -- if I like your health plan, you can keep it. Seeing how you're too stupid to know what's best for you. (Audio after the jump)
On his radio show Wednesday, libtalker Bill Press predictably invoked Bush and Iraq to divert attention from Dear Leader's egregious disaster (h/t for audio, Brian Maloney, mrctv.org) --
What about President Obama, did he, uh, tell the exact truth? I'd have to say no. Should he have conditioned it? Yeah! He should have said, and Congressman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said this yesterday on our show, the president probably should have said 99 percent, he would have been absolutely right on. Or he should have said, by far most Americans, and he would have been absolutely right on. Uh, he didn't, but I just have to say, uh, for the Republicans to make a big deal of that, I remember another president saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and we had to invade that country and we did. What did that cost in lives and in dollars? I remember another president saying Iraq had nuclear weapons and a vice president, the capacity, they either already had nuclear weapons or they could have one, like, within a year. I remember another president saying Iraq was a direct threat to the United States and we had no choice but to send our military in unilaterally in an illegal war and invade Iraq. So don't talk to me about a president telling the 100 percent truth. President Obama was selling a good plan, uh, and now we see there's one little wrinkle in the plan. You know what my reaction to the whole thing is? So what, it's no big deal.
Half to three quarters of the 14 million Americans who buy health insurance on the individual market are likely to receive cancellation notices due to Obamacare -- and the Obama administration, contrary to the president's insistent claims otherwise, knew this was coming three years ago, NBC News reports. But Bill Press shrugs this off as "one little wrinkle" and "no big deal." After all, to paraphrase Stalin, a single person getting bumped from his insurance is unfortunate, but millions getting burned is a statistic.
Something tells me the distinct possibility of Democrats losing the Senate in 2014 as a result of widespread outrage over Obamacare won't be enough to dissuade Press of his delusions. Heck, he'll robotically point out, didn't Republicans lose the House in 2006 under Bush? On the liberal map of the world, all roads lead to that spot marked Dubya.
Press does have a point, however, about what Obama "should have said" instead of that frequent lie about keeping your health plan come hell, high water or both. Perhaps what Obama should have said is that if you're a middle-aged woman who's had a hysterectomy, we're mandating that your health insurance includes maternity care -- just in case. Your health plan to this point foolishly did not include such essential coverage and has since been deemed "junk insurance". Or if you're a person well into adulthood who's never smoked a butt or drunk a drop of booze -- much less ingested illicit drugs -- we're going to mandate that your insurance cover substance abuse. Why? Because liberals know so much better how to run your life, you silly thing you.
By the way, Mr. Press, it wasn't just George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who believed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. So did the spy agencies for our allies in Europe, the ones allegedly not involved in that "unilateral" war. So did Iraqi generals, for that matter, as we learned after they were captured and interrogated. What Saddam did was build a Trojan Horse facade of WMD capability because he was convinced that his indisputable possession of these weapons in the past had twice saved him -- from Iran during the 1980s and in preventing an all-out invasion by the allied coalition during the Persian Gulf War.
There's little doubt, however, that Press is hardly alone in believing the Bush lied, people died mythology. Which made it all the more incumbent upon his successor to avoid making a grandiose, repetitive claim that was self-evidently false -- and has now been proven so.
