Thank you, Rush Limbaugh, for answering a persistent question about the deceitfully-named Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare -- where have I seen this before?
Turns out something similar was pulled off in a major Hollywood film from the early '70s, Limbaugh pointed out to his radio listeners yesterday.
Limbaugh made the comparison after playing a clip of Obama's disingenuous denial that erstwhile invaluable health care adviser Jonathan Gruber had hardly anything to do -- really! -- with the massive health reform law enacted in 2010 -- despite voluminous evidence that Gruber was there through the thick of it, as he was when Massachusetts passed a similar law in 2006.
Limbaugh also warned about so-called net neutrality, the next great con from Obama (audio) --
There's a teachable moment, there's something for everybody to learn here. Given the size and scope of Obamacare and given what everybody knows about it now, what Gruber said over and over again, you even got Bob Schieffer, poor old Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation," he's just devastated when he heard what Gruber was saying, he just can't believe anybody in government would lie like this. He can't believe anybody in a high position in the government would talk about the American people this way. Bob Schieffer! In all of his years. He's dinosaur status now, he can't believe this.
And of course the smart thing to do is to distrust anything coming out of this regime. There's something out there that they're pushing and it can be really complicated if you listen to the wrong people about it and that's called net neutrality. It's something that is totally mistitled. There's nothing neutral about net neutrality, what the regime wants to do. But here's the thing, I'm telling you -- you don't even need to know what it's about. All you need to know is who is behind it and that alone should disqualify your support! The same people that had given us Obamacare and the way they did it, lied through their teeth, misrepresented, ran a con game! They're still running the con.
Here's the thing -- you remember the movie "The Sting"? I remember that movie, I liked that movie and one of the reasons I liked the movie is because I figured it out before it happened. ... It's one of the few times in a novel or a book or a movie that I actually was ahead of the plot and figured, normally I read a novel, a mystery novel and wait for things to be revealed, I don't try to figure it. But in "The Sting" for some reason it all came to me, so when the final sting happened I had already suspected that's what was going to, so I wasn't as shocked as the rest of the audience was.
But one thing I remember about that movie. I think it was the (Paul) Newman character, Henry Gondorff, said the key to the con is that it's never over. You never let the person you conned know he's been conned, never. The con goes on. (Gondorff in the movie -- "You have to keep this con even after you take his money. He can't know you took him"). Well, that's what's happening here -- they have run a giant con game on the population of this country, of Obamacare, and they are continuing to run the con. They are not giving it up. They are not going to admit they've been had, they are not going to admit they've been exposed. They're going to continue to operate on the belief that got them here and that is that you're too stupid to figure this out and that you still love and respect the office of the presidency enough that you will believe what your president is telling you about this, that he didn't know about it, that he's angry about it, what Gruber's saying didn't happen, that Gruber had no power, he was a simple adviser, he had no influence, that our process was wide open and transparent and everybody knew everything about it. They're running a con game and they're demanding you to deny it -- you never admit the con. Because that would then, in the case of a politician, that would damage any future cons that you want to run.
Well, I'm telling you, net neutrality is the next con game they're running. And the question you need to ask -- do you want the people -- you may not like Comcast and you may not like AT&T and you may not like Time-Warner and you may not like -- but do you want the people who gave you Obamacare running your Internet service? Do you want them in charge of what you can get and when you can get it and how much it's going to cost you?
Limbaugh's not the only conservative drawing this parallel -- GOP Senator Ted Cruz dismisses net neutrality as "Obamacare for the Internet."
The target in "The Sting' could not learn he'd been conned because Doyle Lonnegan (played by a malevolent pre-"Jaws" Robert Shaw) was viciously vindicative and would have spared no expense to hunt down those who cheated him. Obama and his apologists can't admit Obamacare is a con (Exhibit A -- the "Cadillac tax") because the American people, once they learn they've been had, would turn on the Democrats even worse than in the midterms. (And liberals should thank the stars above that the Gruber videos didn't surface in mid-October).
That the leading stars of "The Sting" were prototypical Hollywood libs Paul Newman and Robert Redford only sweetens the analogy. And the movie was set, fittingly enough, in Depression-era Chicago at the end of iconic Dem Franklin Roosevelt's first term.
