Okay, who slipped truth serum into Evan Thomas's coffee?
On Friday, Newsweek's "Editor at Large" (according to his bio here) appeared on "Inside Washington" (link to entire show is here; transcript not yet available). After being cued up with a softball from host Gordon Peterson about how supposedly great Friday's news about the drop in the national unemployment rate was (uh, not exactly, Gordon), Thomas segued into a somewhat surprising comment about how ObamaCare's implementation is going as it meets the real world. In a word (Thomas's), it's a disaster (HT Daily Caller via Instapundit):
GORDON PETERSON: A minute ago we heard a Congressman talking about repealing the, quote, "job-killing affordable health care law act." "Job-killing" is now attached to everything the Democrats love, apparently. But on Friday we learned that the unemployment rate had dropped to 9.4%. Uh, that's good news for Democrats, not so perhaps such good news for people who talk about job-killing legislation.
EVAN THOMAS: Because of Congress. I mean, y'know, the unemployment will go down a little bit, but the game in Washington, it will still be this unreal game. On health care though, I gotta say that's one place where the Republicans are right. Uh, the health care bill is, is a disaster, we're sort of slowly learning that. It's not working. It's interesting, that through implementing it, and it's not working out at all as people anticipated. There's also wildly wrong projections. People aren't -- As it's been practiced, it's failed.
In discussing the "good news" about the unemployment rate drop, Peterson "somehow" forgot that about half of the reason why it occurred is that over a quarter-million of the unemployed stopped looking for work. An Investors Business Daily editorial noted: "Today, the labor force is actually smaller than it was when the recession began. President Obama's economic program is driving people out of the work force faster than it's bringing them in. Some progress."
Apparently assuming that no one in the panel's viewing audience could possibly be interested in learning some of the details of the ObamaCare failure Thomas cited, Peterson quickly changed the subject to how new Majority Leader John Boehner is supposedly breaking a fall campaign promise by not allowing debate or amendments on an anticipated up-or-down vote to repeal ObamaCare. This was a real hot button for fellow panelist Mark Shields, who could barely contain himself before weighing in with his faux "gotcha."
Geez, one of the core promises in the GOP's Pledge to America is to repeal ObamaCare in its entirety (from Page 6 of the Plan; large PDF):
Of course, Americans remember that President Obama argued his government takeover of health care was the single most important thing we could do to address our growing debt crisis. This notion has since been thoroughly discredited: we now know the new health care law will mean more financial pain for seniors, families, and the federal government. We offer a plan to repeal and replace the government takeover of health care with common sense solutions focused on lowering costs and protecting American jobs.
Hello, Gordon and Mark? The Pledge promises full repeal, not a piecemeal mush. Allowing any kind of water-down would be the real promise-breaker.
As to Thomas's comments on ObamaCare, don't wait by your computer for follow-up reports from anyone, including Thomas himself, identifying the specific ways in which ObamaCare has failed thus far.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
