The White House is apparently so desperate to pump anything positive about the disaster known as HealthCare.gov that it took a reporter's ability to "set up an account" as proof that the web site is working fine for some users.
Uh, no. Early Thursday afternoon, Ryan Lizza, the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker (also the guy who may have been in the best position to prove that Barack Obama was lying when he said in 2008 that he never read the church bulletins at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, and passed), tweeted the following: "I just tested http://healthcare.gov for the first time and I was able to set up an account with no trouble." Well, setting up an account is a step, but is hardly the end of a HealthCare.gov user's journey. As seen at Twitchy, that didn't stop White House press secretary Jay Carney and senior communications adviser Tara McGuinness from retweeting Lizza's tweet — except Lizza wasn't done, and got stopped dead in his tracks when he tried to move on:
Oops.
Late Friday night, Lizza was still sucking wind on progressing further:
Lizza tweeted Carney late Friday night, about 32 hours after his original report of difficulties, that "(my original account set-up) tweet is very outdated. As I've subsequently noted on Twitter and on CNN, the site is still broken."
Carney's retweet was still present (second item at link) when Twitchy created its post this morning. I guess there's no interest in the truth getting in the way of a good story.
The establishment press would be hounding a press secretary who allowed erroneous tweets to hang around uncorrected for so long in a Republican or conservative administration, and would likely be covering it as a story, which isn't happening now.
Lizza did note a silver lining for the web site's secondary mission: "The link to register to vote does work, though."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
