I think that I misunderstood Obama when he vowed to be transparent... he meant to be hard to pin down."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 tick 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.
Reporting dissent is the highest form of patriotism! Is your neighbor suspiciously “well-dressed”? Is he mouthing off about cancer-survival rates under socialized-medical systems while wearing a cravat? Give us his name, and we’ll give you his spats! Just go to flag@whitehouse.gov, not to be confused with flagging@whitehouse.gov, which is the e-mail address for reporting President Obama’s latest approval rating. Go to flay@whitehouse.gov if you’d like Speaker Pelosi to walk across your back as a whip-wielding SS dominatrix barking “Vee haff vays of making you tokk less casually, dummkopf!” Go to flange@whitehouse.gov if you need parts for your new government car, or your new government hip replacement. Go to flaunt@whitehouse.gov if you’d like a special preview of President Obama’s latest bare-chested pictorial for Vanity Fair. Go to flatulent@whitehouse.gov if you’d like to report your neighbor’s cow for excessive CO2 emissions. |
