Stay Angry, Jonah

A great post by the usually mild-mannered Jonah Goldberg on NRO's The Corner. He's responding to WP columnist Greg Sargent's call for a reasonable debate about Obamacare's tradeoffs.

"...Obama’s statements were not  ”narrowly untrue.”  They were broadly, knowingly and entirely untrue. He repeated them over and over again, often straight into the camera. It’s nice that Greg Sargent concedes now that the president “could have been clearer.” But “could have been clearer” implies that he was a little clear about how this would work and just didn’t clarify enough. The truth is the complete opposite. He wasn’t even deliberately unclear. He was clearly dishonest. Obama was stridently deceitful.

...what is so infuriating to many of us is that now that it’s the law of the land, Obamacare supporters act as if all of the lies were no big deal and no serious person believed them anyway. But as anyone can tell you, if Obama had been honest about the trade-offs in his signature piece of legislation, it would never have become his signature piece of legislation. So please, don’t tell me the lies don’t matter.

...Republicans (or at least a great, great many of them) know that this law glided to passage with tracks greased with b.s. And not just about the ability to keep your plan and lowered premiums, but endless balderdash about extending life-expectancy, bending the cost curve, etc. When they pointed out that what the president was saying was flatly untrue, even impossible, they were called fools or racists.

...The president and the Democrats lied us into a bad law. The right opposed the law on principle. A single party — the Democrats — own this law in a way that no party has had complete ownership of any major social legislation in a century. They bought this legislation with deceit and the GOP said so. Now that it is going into effect, the facts on the ground are confirming that deceit. Moreover, the same haughty condescending bureaucrats and politicians who told us they were smart enough and tech-savvy enough to do just about anything are being exposed as incompetent political hacks. And this is the moment when Sargent thinks the GOP should simply throw in the towel and work with the Democrats to make Obamacare bipartisan?
I find that puzzling."

There's more, including a video compilation of Obama's serial lies.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/362467/why-wont-gop-let-us-have-normal-debate-why-jonah-Goldberg

A couple of other We Told You So's.

Jim Geraghty (NRO)

"Wouldn't you love to meet the woman who wrote, "I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it"? Ma'am, this is what happens when you refuse to listen to anything the Republicans say. I don't want to scream at you for being foolish, ignorant, close-minded and so on, but...really, this is what the whole fight for the past couple of years has been about. And you really could have and should have paid a little more attention to all this."

Allahpundit (Hot Air)

"Democrats made a cold calculation. They had the numbers in Congress to do this and they were going to do it even if it meant lying repeatedly to the public about the cost and consequences, even if it meant forfeiting a majority in the House for the next decade. This is what they wanted and now they've got it and they can't stand it. Enjoy."

And finally, Kevin Williamson (NRO) examines the successful national health care systems of Singapore and Switzerland and contrasts them with the dysfunctional ACA.

"...it is worth remembering that under Obamacare there will still be millions of Americans with no health-insurance coverage, while many (and possibly most) of those added to the coverage rolls will simply be given Medicaid cards, which practically come with their own spinal infections.* All together, that means that we have managed to combine the worst elements of the state-run systems with the worst elements of the private systems. We have designed a structurally defective system and entrusted its execution to a gang of politically connected incompetents with less technological sophistication than your AOL-using grandmother."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362443/obamacare-worst-case-scenario-kevin-d-Williamson

*  Researchers analyzed data from nearly 1,600 patients who had spinal surgery over two years. ...They found that Medicaid patients had a 68 percent higher rate of complications than patients with private insurance and that the link between Medicaid coverage and increased risk of complications remained strong even after other factors were taken into account, according to the study, which was published in the July 15 issue of the journal Spine.