A dandy speech - if truth doesn't matter
8:45 AM, September 10, 2009
www.nypost.comPresident Obama wants to rewrite the calendar.
As far as he's concerned, the year has progressed from June to July to September. August is to be forever erased from our minds and our hearts.
His speech to a joint session of Congress was delivered as if the late unpleasantness of last month never happened, or as if it were all simply "bickering" and "games" on the otherwise smooth, consensual path to reordering one-sixth of the nation's economy in one fell swoop.
"Now is the season for action," Obama intoned.
In other words, please don't bother me with your inconvenient Congressional Budget Office reports, with your tiresome concerns about ballooning government in an era of exploding debt, with your facts -- yes, the House bill would end up covering abortion -- that I prefer to deny.
Now is the time for all good men to vote with me or get out of the way.
Obama mouthed his usual platitudes about drawing ideas from Republicans and seeking common ground.
By implication, he characterized Republican opposition to his plan as devoid of "facts and reason," even as he called for civil debate.
And he ended his speech with a long, heartfelt passage defending government activism as essential to the national character. This was the speech of an ideologue posing as a pragmatist.
Of course, it was an able and spirited performance. Obama with a TelePrompTer is like Yo-Yo Ma with a cello.
In the near term, the speech might even help him. But circumstances are different than his storied oratorical performances of the past. Now his rhetoric is tethered to 1,000-page legislation that bears little relation to his key representations.
For such a reputedly fine, nuanced policy mind, Obama can't get basic things right about his party's proposals.
Last night, he again insisted that the Democratic plans will reduce health-care costs when there is no serious mechanism to do so (outside eventual rationing, although Obama insists that will never happen).
Obama said more preventive care saves money, when it isn't so.
He relied on an intentionally misleading formulation to reassure people that they wouldn't have their current arrangements disrupted.
"Nothing in our plan [requires] you to change what you have," Obama said, twice. True enough, but note the cagey choice of words. It wouldn't be mandated by law, but the effect of the plans would be to detach millions from their current coverage.
Obama portrays the Democratic proposals as utterly cost-free. They won't add to the deficit and they will be paid for painlessly.
In language that will be closely parsed, Obama strongly defended the public option, but also said it's only one part of his plan. He wants to forestall a progressive revolt in the House over the public option, evidently doomed in the Senate.
But besides this, there was little the left wouldn't love. For weeks, it has urged the president to get more confrontational and adamant.
Last night, Obama signaled that he will happily bulldoze an opposition that he believes deserves its fate. So, in the face of a skeptical public, he and his Democrats will set about pushing through a massive, Great Society-style program all by themselves.
As they relegate August to the memory hole.
comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
________________________
________________________
__________________
This article only covers the surface of the lies Dear Leader told last night.
