The Health Care Follies Continue

Matt Welch says the President's pants are on fire.  Well, actually, he just calls him a liar, but they mean the same thing if I recall third grade correctly...

During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.


And yet it smacks of something worse still. When a politician cannot fathom opposition to his policies except as the manifestation of wicked manipulation by bad guys, remediable only by more thorough “explanations” from the good guys, it indicates an unseemly paternalism. And if he cannot take the hint that Bush-Obama bailout-and-spend economics are deeply and increasingly unpopular, that indicates something immovable about his core economic ideology. With those two factors as backdrop, it’s hard to say which would be worse: if the president didn’t really believe what he said, or if he did.

Welch should feel better, since Dick Durbin, Obama's former Illinois Senatorial colleague and member of the Democratic Senate leadership, seems to agree.



(hat tip: Moe Lane and Instapundit) I'm guessing Durbin might end up falling off the White House Christmas card list.