Imagine if a former Republican presidential candidate and U.S. senator had called a current Republican president a delusional liar whose programs are wasteful. Would the mainstream media not be all over the story? Such a person would be interviewed at length by Wolf Blitzer on CNN as well as made the rounds of the morning talk shows and the Sunday news programs as well. The media buzz would be red hot on this topic for days extending into weeks.
Well, there is such a person but because he is a Democrat saying these things about President Obama, we can expect him to become an MSM nonperson. Such seems to already be the fate of former presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey. It is no surprise that his extended criticisms of Obama appeared in in a Daily Mail article in Britain, not in America where the shunning seems to have already begun. Here is what Kerrey has to say about Obama which you most likely won't see in any major liberal news outlet in America:
The Nebraskan straight-talker told MailOnline in an exclusive interview that Obama isn't up to the job of bringing liberals and conservatives to the table to rescue America's slowly choking entitlement programs.
And Obama, he said Wednesday in his Manhattan office, knew full well he was lying when he promised that the Affordable Care Act would allow Americans to keep insurance plans they liked.
'He had to know he was misleading the audience,' Kerrey said quietly, recalling the newly minted president's countless promises as Congress and the public debated his signature health insurance overhaul.
'On the other hand, he may have said it so many times,' he added, 'that the spell-checker wasn't in the room – the spell-checker, the fact-checker – somebody who says, "Excuse me, Mr. President, but I hope you know this..."'
Obama's infamous four-Pinocchio pledges, Kerrey explained, never stood a chance of being fulfilled because there were 'a million people out there with policies that, for one reason or another, run short of the minimum standard. I mean, they bought something cheaper!'
Wow! Pretty strong stuff. But wait...there's more!
The worst lie Democrats told about Obamacare, Kerrey reasoned, 'is not "If you want to keep your health care plan..." – the worst one is, "Everybody deserves high-quality, affordable health care."'
'Excuse me? Uh, I don't know if you've heard about the bell curve?' he snarked.
'If I've got 1,000 doctors, 100 are great, and 100 are not so good.'
He outlined the shape of a bell curve with his hands, and then threw them skyward.
'It's absolutely impossible,' he said.
'And affordable? Forget about it.'
When the Affordable Care Act met its most vigorous Republican opposition in late 2009, the U.S. economy was still floundering and the business community's eyes were focused on GDP growth, not a new set of health-benefit mandates.
'I wouldn't have done health care,' Kerrey said.'I think the big mistake was ... to say, "Whew! We've got the stimulus done, okay, the economy's going to come bouncing back in 12 months – let's do health care,"' he explained.
'Only the economy didn't come bouncing back.'
'We're teetering on the edge of going out of business through most of 2009,' Kerrey recalled. 'And I think you need to just keep driving, driving, driving on the economy, and make it as bipartisan as possible.'
So Kerrey compounded his "heresy" by claiming Democrats lied as well. And he still is not finished...
Asked how to break the congressional logjam, Kerrey thought for a moment and said, softly, 'It takes a president. It takes a president.'
Is Barack Obama that president? Kerrey stayed silent but shook his head.
'I'm shaking my head "no,"' he acknowledged, finally.
'If he was up to it, he would have done it. He can't run for re-election.'
Another of Obama's failings, according to Kerrey, is an inflated sense of Americans' appetite for programs to correct what the White House calls 'income inequality,' through new taxes and other income-shifting initiatives that transfer wealth from the rich to the poor.
The president's re-election 17 months ago wasn't a mandate to conduct class warfare, he said.
'After the 2012 election, what the president needed was somebody to say, "Mr. President, I'm thrilled you won. You stand for all the things I support. But honestly, you won this election because you sucked less than Romney."'
Americans, Kerrey believes, lost patience equally with the GOP and the White House during the kabuki theater of fiscal cliff, congressional 'super committee,' budget sequester and tense partial government shutdown.
Obama stuck to his guns at the time, holding out for a 'balanced' budget-gap fix that included new taxes on upper-income Americans.
'Everybody since 1913 has had a mandate to raise taxes on the rich,' Kerrey scoffed at his party's leader. 'This isn't something that you've earned, something that's unique.'
Obama isn't the first president to make that kind of miscalculation – Kerrey calls it 'self-delusion' – while in office.
He joked that geneticists will one day soon 'find a base pair' of genes that predisposes people to deception.
And he predicted, half-seriously, that 'they'll find another base pair which say that politicians have 25 per cent more capacity for – you call it lying, I call it self-delusion.'
Citizen Kerrey! This is to inform you that you have become an MSM nonperson. Your name has been tossed down the memory hole. Wolf Blitzer has already forgotten that you even existed. Oh, and forget about being invited to exclusive Manhattan and Georgetown parties in the future. The shunning has already begun!
