Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll returns to comment on GRUBER: THE POLITICAL EQUIVALENT OF EX-LAX. She writes:

I grew up in the Fiber-Free Fifties. With a steady diet of Jello, Twix, Wonder Bread, and Velveeta, small wonder laxative ads were prominent on television. Housewives discussed the issue openly in commercials, usually with their pharmacists and often volunteering that their husbands who were standing right there, humiliated, also had issues with regularity. One popular remedy was Ex-Lax, a product that masqueraded as a chocolate bar, and one that many many children sampled. But only once.

In truth, even disguised as a chocolate treat, the taste was a dreadful disappointment, even to a toddler. We weren’t really very fooled. But by then it was too late. I imagine that some marketing executive was paid a handsome sum of money to come up with the idea of making it look like candy. And if a few hundred thousand children spent a day chained to their potty chairs, well, a small price to pay to sell more product.

Fast forward to the early 21rst century. With Hillarycare a dim memory, the Left became urgently concerned once again about the “uninsured.” It was a crisis, we were told. The system was broken! Why, there were upwards of 40 million people without health insurance! Dying in the streets, they were. Yes, not even in their own beds, but staggering into the streets! Russell Brand said so, and inasmuch as he’s never had an original thought in his life, he was not alone.

Never mind that the uninsured included among them millions of people who made over $75,000 a year and just didn’t find health insurance a very sexy thing to buy when you could just show up at the ER for the flu or a broken arm and they had to take you in. Another large percentage included people who qualified for Medicaid but were too lazy or uninformed to apply for it. The young and invincible didn’t want to pay for it when they could get another tattoo instead. Yet another large component were, of course, illegal aliens, but the U.S. Taxpayers were called heartless for refusing to provide platinum health care coverage for all of Mexico. Just for starters.

Enter Jonathan Gruber and his co-conspirators with both hands out to Grub in the bottomless government money trough while trying to make the one-size-fits-all steaming disaster that is Obamacare work its way through the body politic. First, make the plan many thousands of pages long so that nobody, even serious policy wonks, could read it or make sense of it. Second, make it impossible for the CBO to score it accurately. On purpose. Third, ram it through on strict party lines with no input whatsoever allowed from the other side. Trot out heart-rending examples of what happens to people without insurance, and allow no unseemly digging into the actual facts of the narratives, not one of which held up to close scrutiny. Are you calling that sweet little orphan boy’s dead mama a liar?? Bribe, wheedle, threaten, strong-arm. Repeat.

But, mostly, lie through your teeth. You can keep your doctor or current insurance: wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It wasn’t a tax! Hell, no. Until it needed to be. Death panels? Sarah Palin is a lunatic. Grant thousands of exceptions to the more onerous rules to your homies. The lying had to be done, doncha know, because the American people are just too slack-jawed stupid to understand any complexities. Did YOU go to M.I.T.? I didn’t think so. Me neither. With all the lies to chocolate coat the process of moving the bill through the system, Nancy Pelosi was more prescient than she knew when she said we had to “pass the bill to see what’s in it.”

One thing that has become apparent with the left wing is that they are just terrible winners. When a single gay judge in California overturned the defeated gay marriage referendum, which itself was back on the ballot in defiance of the previous overwhelming defeat, it wasn’t enough to win. People who had opposed redefining marriage, even years previously, had to be punished, including with loss of their jobs.

And it wasn’t enough for Jonathan Gruber to help provide the chocolate in the Ex-Lax to make Obamacare progress smoothly. It wasn’t enough for him to walk away with tons of “street cred” for future consulting and wheelbarrels full of money. Enough money that he would never need to “work” again. (Please, God.) Think of that — set for life.

No, he had to taunt. He had to brag. He had to chortle about the knee-slapper he put over on us rubes. Never mind that that’s yet another lie – it never had majority support in polls. Maybe from the usual beneficiaries of freebies, but not from actual taxpayers footing the bill. We weren’t fooled. Like the kid with the crummy chocolate Ex-Lax, it was simply too late. Is there no remedy to recoup any of our money from these criminals and liars? The Solyndra thieves, the multimillionaires at the top of the Fannie Mae food chain, the “hide the decline” frauds in the global warming bidness? John, Paul, Scott, anybody? I’m just a retired comic, not an attorney, but isn’t deliberate, admitted fraud still a crime?

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses