Don's Tuesday column

                 THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   10/29/2013

Checkin’ on the government—FUBAR Supreme

It was a toss-off line I heard in an episode of “Branded” on Saturday morning: “Since the government’s checkin’ on me, I’m gonna do a little checkin’ on the government.” Thankfully, our news media—always eager to dig dirt and sully conservatives or Republicans in the process—have rediscovered their collective “bloodhound” noses and are “checkin’” on the massive disaster of the Obamacare website rollout. Had they been equally eager to dig in the dirt of Obama’s other massive government catastrophes like the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack, “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal, the despotic unleashing of the IRS on Obama’s political opponents, and the lies told by Obama mouthpieces, including the President—we might not have the Obamacare fiasco staring us in our collective faces.

We had a glimpse into the cause for reticence by news media to report unflatteringly about Obama when CNN Newsroom anchor Carol Costello made a stunning, if cryptic, revelation. In a discussion over the firing of national security official Jofi Joseph, she agreed with another panelist’s contention that the administration “can be thin-skinned.” She said, “President Obama’s people can be quite nasty. They don’t like you to say anything bad about their boss, and they’re not afraid to use whatever means they have at hand to stop you from doing that, including threatening your job.”

The Obamacare website rollout foul-ups have been described as glitches, kinks, and so on, even by President Obama, but World War II sayings are better. One phrase, “Systems Normal, All (Fouled) Up,” or SNAFU for short, would certainly apply. I believe, however, that the more appropriate one would be FUBAR, or “(Fouled) Up Beyond All Recognition” (originals substitute another word for “fouled”). If you don’t see it that way, you are either paid to put a happy face on this fiasco, limiting yourself to ever-shrinking sources of Obama-friendly information, or are blinded ideologically by belief in Obama and his utterances (Obamacare: “It’s really good”). In any case, such self-deception reminds me of “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam Hussein’s mouthpiece during the Iraq war, who uttered inanities to gathered reporters about how the American military forces weren’t anywhere inside the city, while the split screen showed our tanks rolling through Baghdad streets.

Later in the same “Branded” episode, Chuck Norris’s character dresses down an ethically challenged rancher by telling him “You know, you have yourself an empire but you don’t have a title.” We now truly have a government and governing class that considers itself entitled, even endowed, by law, regulation and executive/judicial fiat, with the right to arbitrarily query, direct, restrict and punish otherwise free-born Americans. How else to take HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s astoundingly arrogant utterance, speaking of vocal critics of the disastrous Obamacare rollout under her watch, “I don’t work for those people.”

Well, I happen to be one of “those people” whose collective taxes pay her salary and benefits and have quite a few criticisms of her job overseeing Obamacare. My health care and health insurance is quite personal to me; I wouldn’t put it past politicians in Sacramento to decide to save the state billions of dollars and move retired state employees, their spouses and families off of current health plans and dump them onto the kind graces of Obamacare exchanges. It happened decades ago when they reneged on assurances given workers that, upon hitting age 65, they would be able to keep their state-provided health insurance, rather than be forced into Medicare. Sounds a lot like the smug (and ultimately empty) assurances Obama uttered over and over about keeping health plans and doctors we like.

About the website fiasco, it may be possible to have it running smoothly in the mid-to-late November time frame but I’m quite doubtful based on what I’ve read. Healthcare.gov’s 500 million lines of code are more than online vendors like Amazon and Apple combined. In April, HHS predicted consumers would need less than a half an hour to complete online registration—not half a day or half a week (Sam Batkins, American Action Forum: “time spent online has ranged from seven hours to several days.”

It also turns out that crass political considerations entered the timeline for putting the web portal together: Obama’s people didn’t want insurers to know of mandatory covered health items before the 2012 election so that it wouldn’t leak to reporters and the public how much higher the monthly premiums would be. We are now seeing “sticker shock” from California to Illinois to Florida as individuals learn their policies are being cancelled, and will pay 30, 50 or even 70+percent more. Obama’s minions and mouthpieces assure us we’ll have more health issues covered—yeah, like the elderly couple forced to pay for maternity care.

Then, as October 1 approached, they were determined to force people to provide personal information, cross checked with other agencies, all to make sure applicants would only see their premium cost after the subsidy. SNAFU! GOP Congressman Fred Upton: “And unless the system gets fixed by Jan. 1, a lot of folks are going to be very angry as they’re left out in the cold.” FUBAR, supreme! African-American pediatrician, Dr. Ben Carson, said that Obamacare is “the worst thing since slavery,” for the intrusive, controlling and despotic nature of the law.

From “Les Miserables”: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people, Who will not be slaves again!”