ObamaCare - No Sale as The Disinformation Rachets Up

Since Obama is trying to sell a crap sandwich to America, they are spinning disinformation like crazy ....

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/The-empty-words-of-a-journalist-turned-flack-52619647.html

The empty words of a journalist turned flack
By: Byron York Chief Political CorrespondentAugust 7, 2009

Linda Douglass, the former CBS and ABC News correspondent who joined the Obama presidential campaign and later the administration, has emerged as the point person in the White House push back against “disinformation” regarding national health care.
She’s one of several former journalists who are part of Team Obama, and her story, in particular, illustrates the difficulties that politically connected Democratic journalists can face both inside and outside the government. (Although a few Republican reporters have joined GOP administrations, this is mostly a Democratic problem, given the left-leaning sympathies of most journalists.)

As a reporter, how does one keep from rooting for the home team? And as a government official, how does one flack for the boss while ignoring the questions any journalist should ask?
This week Douglass undertook to debunk a video going around the Internet showing Barack Obama, before he became president, endorsing a single-payer national health care system. “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan,” Obama said at a conference in 2003, as he was beginning a run for the U.S. Senate. “That’s what I’d like to see.”
A viewer might reasonably conclude that, at least in 2003, Barack Obama was a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan. Not true, said Douglass. In a video posted on the White House Web site, she explained that there was a lot of “disinformation” going around these days about health care reform. Opponents of reform have been “taking sentences and phrases out of context” to create a “false impression.”

“There are people out there with a computer and a lot of free time, and they take a phrase here and there — they simply cherry-pick and put it together,” Douglass said, “and make it sound like he’s saying something that he didn’t really say.”

A few years ago, Linda Douglass the journalist might have asked just how Obama’s 2003 declaration of support for single-payer health care was taken out of context. Now, Douglass the White House spokeswoman didn’t even address the question.

Instead, she played a clip of Obama as president, at an AARP forum in July, pledging that people who like their current insurance will be allowed to keep it.

A few years ago, Linda Douglass the journalist might have asked what caused the president to change his mind — and why the American people should take seriously what he says now. But Douglass the White House spokeswoman had nothing to say about that. That’s the problem of the journalist-turned-spokesperson.

Douglass experienced the Democratic journalist’s dilemma from the other side during the Clinton years, when she and her husband, lawyer and sometime Democratic fundraiser John Phillips, were close to members of the president’s inner circle. They had been longtime friends of Mickey Kantor, a key figure in Bill Clinton’s political world, and during the 1992 campaign, Kantor introduced them to Bruce Lindsey, Harold Ickes and others on the Clinton team.

Douglass and Phillips also became close with Webb Hubbell, the Justice Department official who stole from his old law firm and cheated on his taxes. Douglass and Phillips dined and socialized with Hubbell and his wife, Suzy, and the couples even took a trip to the Greek islands together.
They remained close after Hubbell got in trouble. Phillips helped arrange for Hubbell to make some easy money during a period when Hubbell was suspected of withholding information from Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr. (A foundation Phillips was connected to agreed to pay Hubbell $45,000 to write an article on public service.)

The friendship ended badly when the full extent of Hubbell’s corruption became impossible to deny. Douglass and Phillips were never suspected of any wrongdoing, and Douglass said she informed her bosses and recused herself when it came to covering Hubbell and Kantor. But the episode revealed the complexities that can arise when top journalists are close to top government officials.

Now, Douglass is experiencing the problems of life on the other side of the divide. She’s free to be partisan — no recusals necessary — but she’s squandering the credibility she built earlier in her career. You can be the most polished communicator in the world, but you can’t make a convincing argument if you have nothing to say.


http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Remember-when-protest-was-patriotic-52767517.html

"Miss Information"* [Jonah Goldberg]

Byron has a good column on Linda Douglass and her new role as White House flack. One point he raises, that has been bugging me since I first saw her "rebuttal" to the YouTube video showing Obama endorsing single payer, is just how non-responsive Douglas' video is. She makes no attempt whatsoever to prove her assertion that Obama's comments were out of context or irrelevant.

And that's what's sort of interesting to me. Her rebuttal technique is truly Obamaesque, in that she does what Obama himself does: Quotes Obama as proof that Obama is always right. As has been noted many times around here, Obama has this tic where he says "As I've said before" or "As I said at the time" or "I've said repeatedly" etc etc. to make a point. Sometimes Obama is being less than truthful when he says he's said X before. And sometimes the fact that he said X before in no way bolsters the case he's actuall trying to make.

Douglass does the same thing. She simply quotes some boilerplate lines from Obama saying you can keep your own health insurance (which is not exactly true) and apparently that's supposed to obliterate any claim that Obama favors single payer, even though there's extensive evidence that he does favor single payer (he said it many times in the past when he wasn't trying to sell this specific health care bill) and there's serious concern that the public plan approach would lead, over time, to single payer. But rather than substantively deal with any of that, Douglass accuses people of "disinformation" and simply invokes the divine authority of Obama to rebut any criticism.

* The title "Miss Information" comes from one of the commenters to Byron's column.

Update: From a reader:

Mr. Goldberg-I wholeheartedly agree with your comments on Linda Douglass' non-rebuttal rebuttal.Imagine if the left had some clip of Bush before the invasion of Iraq saying he did not believe that country possessed WMD, and then some White House spokesman tried to defend Bush by countering with other statements he had made to the contrary. The outcry would have been deafening .Best regards,


Call 1-800-CHEST-PAIN [Mark Steyn]

Here's one of those anecdotal horror stories from Scotland's National Health Service that we are enjoined by American "reformers" to pay no heed to. From The Daily Record:

A mum suffering chest pains died in front of her young son hours after being sent home from hospital and told to take painkillers.

Debra Beavers, 39, phoned NHS 24 twice in two days before getting a hospital appointment. But a doctor gave what her family described as a cursory examination lasting 11 minutes, before advising her to buy over-the-counter medicine Ibuprofen...

Seven hours later, the mum-of-two collapsed and died from a heart attack in front of her 13-year-old boy.

It's one of those stories that has all the conventions of the genre: The perfunctory medical examination; the angry relatives; the government innovation intended to pass off an obstructive bureaucracy as a streamlined high-tech fast-track ("NHS 24" is some sort of 1-800 helpline). Indeed, in the end, it's all about the bureaucracy: The 1-800 guys don't think you're worth letting past the health-care rope line. So you call again, and ask again, and they say okay, we'll find you someone, but he can only spare 11 minutes of his busy time. And, while you're being carried out by the handles, the bureaucracy insists that all went swimmingly:

NHS 24 executive nurse director Eunice Muir said: "We can confirm Ms Beavers contacted NHS 24 and that her onward referral was managed safely and appropriately."

Phew! Thank goodness for that. I

n The Wall Street Journal, our old friend Theodore Dalrymple writes:

In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog.

As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.

The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs.

That's because, in their respective health systems, Fido is a valued client, and poor Debra Beavers wasn't.


How Stupid Can They Possibly Be? Part Two [Benjamin Zycher]

Readers of the Corner will recall my earlier post about the “negotiations” over how much the feds will be allowed to steal (at first) as part of the “reform” effort to bring health-care socialism to America, and the utter stupidity of those smart businessmen who tried to induce the White House and congressional alligators to devour someone else first. It was easy to see that this tactic wouldn’t work. Can a deal with the White House be imposed on the Waxman/Pelosi/Reid Axis? Would Obama veto a bill that failed to honor, say, the “negotiated” $80 billion limit on the “contribution” to be made by the pharmaceutical industry? Did those smart businessmen not ask themselves these obvious questions?

So obvious indeed are the questions that they answer themselves.

From yesterday’s New York Times:
“Democrats Say No to Cost Cap for Drug Makers.” Thundered the ineffable Pelosi (through a spokesman): “Ms. Pelosi supports House efforts ‘to squeeze more money out of . . . the pharmaceutical industry.’” Also spake Comrade Waxman: “I think that PhRMA [the drug makers’ industry group] should contribute more than PhRMA wants to contribute.”

“Contribute” is an interesting euphemism for wealth transfers coerced by the federal government. In any event, it is truly amazing that the pharmaceutical industry actually believed that the $80 billion ceiling it negotiated with the White House would not become a floor in a Congress that has not patients but instead interest groups. That observation leads inexorably to the realization that price controls are the real issue to be negotiated, with current patients the winners and future patients the losers. (For my paper on the adverse effects of such price negotiations for pharmaceuticals, go here.)

One would think that those smart businessmen could have see all this coming, particularly after having spent decades or centuries cumulatively inside the Beltway. And one would be wrong.

— Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.


France Gets a Clue [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Just as we lose our minds. From the Wall Street Journal:

France Fights Universal Care's High Cost By DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARSWhen Laure Cuccarolo went into early labor on a recent Sunday night in a village in southern France, her only choice was to ask the local fire brigade to whisk her to a hospital 30 miles away. A closer one had been shuttered by cost cuts in France's universal health system. Ms. Cuccarolo's little girl was born in a firetruck. France claims it long ago achieved much of what today's U.S. health-care overhaul is seeking: It covers everyone, and provides what supporters say is high-quality care. But soaring costs are pushing the system into crisis. The result: As Congress fights over whether America should be more like France, the French government is trying to borrow U.S. tactics. In recent months, France imposed American-style "co-pays" on patients to try to throttle back prescription-drug costs and forced state hospitals to crack down on expenses.

"A hospital doesn't need to be money-losing to provide good-quality treatment," President Nicolas Sarkozy thundered in a recent speech to doctors.And service cuts — such as the closure of a maternity ward near Ms. Cuccarolo's home — are prompting complaints from patients, doctors and nurses that care is being rationed. That concern echos worries among some Americans that the U.S. changes could lead to rationing.The French system's fragile solvency shows how tough it is to provide universal coverage while controlling costs, the professed twin goals of President Barack Obama's proposed overhaul.


The Contradictions of Health-Care Reform [Ramesh Ponnuru]

My column in Time:

There are two basic points about health-care reform that President Obama wants to convey.

The first is that, as he put it in an ABC special in June, "the status quo is untenable." Our health-care system is rife with "skewed incentives." It gives us "a whole bunch of care" that "may not be making us healthier." It generates too many specialists and not enough primary-care physicians. It is "bankrupting families," "bankrupting businesses" and "bankrupting our government at the state and federal level. So we know things are going to have to change."

Obama's second major point is that—to quote from the same broadcast—"if you are happy with your plan and you are happy with your doctor, then we don't want you to have to change ...

So what we're saying is, If you are happy with your plan and your doctor, you stick with it."
So the system is an unsustainable disaster, but you can keep your piece of it if you want. And the Democrats wonder why selling health-care reform to the public has been so hard?


If Obama Loses Boulder . . . [Mike Potemra]
A delightful ex-girlfriend in Boulder, Colo., sends me some not-so-delightful news for Obama and his health-care plan. Boulder is a notorious liberal stronghold, but the local congressman was mobbed today by constituents — many of whom, in the video posted by the liberal (natch) local paper, appear very angry about Obamacare. And this doesn’t look like an issue of airy theorizing or mere partisanship — of socialism versus free markets, or Democrats versus Republicans. It looks more like a dinner-table issue: If this reform plan becomes a reality, will we be better off four years from now? If Obama’s having trouble selling it in Boulder freakin’ Colorado, you can stick a fork in it.