On February 25th, Obama's health care summit/theater/reality show was held at Blair House. One week of dissecting, analyzing, interpreting, and consideration has been invested into annotating Obama's fusion of powers exposition. For the myopically infirmed Left, Obama was spectacular as usual, displaying his super-intellect; for the moderately myopic-- independents whose allegiance changes with the wind-- Obama's debacle of a circus caused more than a statistical trifling to shift back to the right under the cloak of self-loathing; and for the confederacy of patriots, constitutionalists, those with discernment for manufactured competence, and those blessed with an abundance of commonsense, the show was nothing more than an exponentially expanding substantiation of incompetence and fundamental constitutional illiteracy.
Barack Obama was the architect and producer of this health care summit/theater/reality show. This was definitive Barack Obama theater, but arrogance exposed two major flaws in the production, which in turn exposed Obama's noxious deficiencies as he took center stage without teleprompters and with script.
Revelations about Obama from the health care theater:
After producing a substantial record of accomplishing nothing of substance or rectitude in his first year, Obama demonstrated his penchant for public discussion of issues rather than actually making a genuine effort to fix them. His entire professional track record has revolved around discussing rather than doing; he continues unabated. Obama was elected as president of these United States, a leader, not as the meretricious philosopher laureate of America.
Obama grossly overestimated his performance at the Republican retreat in Baltimore in January when he challenged Republicans to an open debate. To his credit, he did have a solid performance. The cameras were focused on him the majority of the time, which was unfair to the Republicans, but should not take away from his performance. But when a grandiose ego trumps diminutive commonsense, as was proven at this health care theater, Obama is not a master, but rather a slave, to unrehearsed debate about policy or topics of substance. Conventional wisdom dictates that Obama should never be more than a few feet from his teleprompters, unscripted, and should never bandy rhetoric with an opponent that is prepared, able, and argues from the vantage of reality.
Obama's character flaws manifest when he is challenged intellectually and on substantive issues, sans script and teleprompters. He is not mesmerizing or dominant, but will display the temperament of frustrated l'enfant, with an arrogant and combative demeanor. When confronted on the facts while moderating the show, Obama addressed his challengers with condescension and insolence, all the while allowing the Democrats more than double the minutes of the Republicans by not counting his own pretentious monopolizing of the minutes. For a man who has ascended to president of these United States, it is astounding that he has never developed tolerance for differing opinions.
Obama demonstrates an overwhelming fetish for displaying his exhaustive constitutional illiteracy
Obama demonstrates an overwhelming fetish for displaying his exhaustive constitutional illiteracy. There are three separate branches of our government. Obama, having a law degree from Harvard, has probably never been exposed to the influences of the Founding Fathers of this country, as case law trumps constitutional law within those hallowed confines. To thoroughly understand the Constitution, knowing what influenced the Founding Fathers is compulsory. The spirit of our Constitution lies in the separation of powers, which can be directly attributed to French philosopher Montesquieu and his book
The Spirit of the Laws. Trias politica, the separation of powers, is the foundation of keeping the federal government's powers in check. It is impossible to reconcile Obama having a health care legislation writing party in the White House with various union representatives, presenting his own health care legislation, then conducting this circus with legislators, without being in direct violation of the Constitution.
Obama's penchant for prevarication is becoming legendary. The spectacle lasted 7 1/2 hours. Obama stated regarding the meeting, "We’ll go section by section. America can’t solve our economic problems unless we tackle some of these structural problems." The math: 2700 pages, at least one hour of complete and honest argument per labyrinthine page equals 112 days of debate. For a bill that equals 1/3 of the entire United States economy, an average of 10 seconds per page was invested. At 2700 pages, this bill is not about health care, Obama knows it, the Democrats know it, the Republicans know it, and the majority of the American people know it.
This meeting was never about bipartisanship
This meeting was never about bipartisanship. The summit was held on Thursday, but on the preceding Monday, Obama posted on the White House website his own version of health care legislation. The summit was pure political theater. Harry Reid, before the meeting, was already planning on reconciliation the following week. Obama has made it clear that reconciliation will be used if the bill cannot reach cloture. Which, oddly enough, is another lie. His fabrications: On 11/02/2004: "My understanding of the Senate is that you need 60 votes to get something significant to happen. Do we have the will to move an American agenda forward and not a democratic or republican agenda forward?" On 29/25/2007: "We are going to have to ask a 60% majority in the Senate to actually get a health care bill to my desk." This week regarding the bill: "...deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children's Health Insurance Program." Up-or-down equals reconciliation.
Rep. Paul Ryan spent six minutes debunking the chicanery of subsidizing 30 million Americans with government run health care, while miraculously lowering the deficit by increasing spending with money the government does not have. Obama's health care bill is a mathematical achievement that would have Isaac Newton scratching his head and rethinking his life's work. Ryan dazzled attendees with sophisticated mathematics: If you have $100 and you spend $150, how much do you have left? This was actually his methodology. Obama and the Democrats' reaction to Ryan was the unintelligible retort of one who had not read nor comprehended the bill, and would be hard pressed to pass a primary school math quiz.
In their usual liberal fashion, the Democrats lamented about various anecdotal stories of the inhumane suffering of people who died or were horribly mistreated because the government was not providing them with health care. The morbid ruse about these stories is that, in the past, most of the heart wrenching tales the Democrats have paraded about have been either fabricated or immensely aggrandized to the point of emaciation. The Left will continue to subject one and all to their
anecdotathon--a phrase coined by Missourah.
Not one to be surpassed with pointless rhetoric, Obama resorted to his own personal anecdote about insurance:
When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won’t name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company — let’s call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months, I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I’d like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn’t serious insurance.
Now, it’s one thing if you’ve got an old beat-up car that you can’t get fixed. It’s another thing if your kid is sick, or you’ve got breast cancer.
First, anyone who owns a car has the option of either purchasing full coverage insurance including collision, or the state mandated liability minimum insurance. Obama was covered by the latter. Second, according to Obama's analogy, to "treat a sick kid or breast cancer," either dental insurance or the insurance on a boat should suffice. Third, Obama, in his attempt to annex one-third of the U.S. economy through the insurance sector, knows less about insurance than a bourgeois automobile owner. This anecdote proves that Obama did not understand how insurance worked as a college graduate, and does not understand how insurance works as president.
Should the Republicans have even attended the summit? It was a disappointment that they did not challenge Obama's authority to be directly involved in legislation, or challenge the myriad unconstitutional provisions within the health care bill. The Republicans should have insisted on preconditions before attending. They should have insisted that the bill be legal before debate. But in retrospect, they did expose the deceitful math, the unpreparedness, and the ignorance of the Democrats and Obama regarding the substance of the bill. The bill presented by Obama, much like Obama himself, was all style and no substance as the Congressional Budget Office was not able to analyze Obama's bill because it was sufficiently lacking in details.
