POSTED AT 8:31 PM ON NOVEMBER 14, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
I wanted to do a big recap of today’s presser for you but, candidly, I lack the mental strength. Someone on Twitter said it sounded more like a therapy session than a presidential news conference; it was, very possibly, the single lamest moment of his presidency. You can slog through the whole rambling mess here if you’re morbidly curious. My big takeaway from it:
The “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” press conference in January will be amazing— Allahpundit (@allahpundit) November 14, 2013
We’re not done with “they-a culpa” statements from The One about ObamaCare, by a long shot.
Here’s 60 seconds of what he had to say about the Healthcare.gov apocalypse, although it isn’t the entirety. Later he hinted that, while things will be working better on November 30th, America shouldn’t assume that they’ll be “working,” exactly, which is really just crap icing on the sh*t cake he served to Democrats today. The point of what he says below is to minimize his culpability for that failure too. Sure, he’s to blame in a vague buck-stops-here sort of way, but of course he didn’t know in advance just how terrible the launch would be. It’s worth noting that his old friends in the insurance industry think that’s transparent BS; they knew it was in trouble early on and they didn’t have Sebelius and Marilyn Tavenner available at a moment’s notice to answer questions like O did. As it is, he told Chuck Todd last week that he met with the two of them “once a month.” Once a month — to oversee the biggest liberal domestic policy initiative in probably 50 years, whose humiliating failure could be catastrophic for his party in the midterms and beyond. After watching this clip, my first thought was, “If it’s true, shouldn’t he fire Sebelius for misleading him?” But really — if it’s true, shouldn’t he resign for being too incurious about the rollout of his signature “achievement” to anticipate the problems? My hunch is he knew full well how bad things were but, by touting it as an Amazon.com for health insurance in the weeks before launch, he created enough plausible deniability that he could claim later that he was kept in the dark about the whole thing. Better to be seen as a passive administrator whose underlings abused his trust than the guy who aggressively masterminded the most epic website catastrophe in the history of the Internet to date.
I’ll leave you with this from MK:
Our go-to defense is utter ignorance, but trust us to do Big Things.— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) November 14, 2013
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