THE PERILS OF DENIAL-79

By this time everyone who is paying attention knows about the infamous videos of Dr. Jonathan Gruber, professor at MIT since 1992, discussing the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He was honest, but decidedly politically inept, and certainly arrogant and elitist in revealing, at a series of technical conferences over several years, how this law was formulated and passed by congress. In a naïve, one could even say incredibly clueless, manner he admitted lies and deception were necessary to get the law passed and repeatedly characterized the American public as being stupid. Because the evidence is so clear in this series of videos what he said cannot be disputed so this has made Dr. Gruber toxic – a pariah to the supporters of the ACA. For his consulting work on the ACA Gruber was paid $390,000 by the federal government and approx. $1.7 million by various state governments. All totaled Gruber was paid around $6 million over the years by the feds and state governments for consulting work, going back to the Geo. W. Bush administration. Most of these payments were made by the Obama administration, including work on the immigration issue. How did these videos come to light? That is an interesting story and goes like this: After the ACA law went into effect a Philadelphia investment advisor, Rich Weinstein, found out that his health insurance policy was cancelled because of the ACA and his new insurance premium would be double what it had been for essentially the same coverage. He was ticked off (How could he be so unreasonable?) so he began investigating various aspects of the law and how it came about. Weinstein spent many hours looking into it and this including watching videos, monitoring Facebook, Twitter, etc. After watching interminable boring videos he finally came across one where, at a conference, Dr. Gruber admitted that deception was used to get the ACA passed and said that was necessary because the public was so stupid. Realizing this was a potential goldmine of information concerning the ACA, Weinstein pursued that line of inquiry and the result was some of the videos that have been exposed. This is not the end of the story of the videos. After discovering several of these Gruber videos, Weinstein used every media he could think of from Facebook to phone calls to contact Fox News, Forbes, the National Review, Glenn Beck, and a TV network affiliate in Philadelphia where a friend of his worked. None responded. Not a single one. He finally posted a comment on the web page of the Volokh Conspiracy, a group of conservative lawyers whose blog is hosted by the Washington Post. A conservative activist picked it up, and Forbes wound up carrying a piece by contributor Michael Cannon, dubbed by the New Republic “Obamacare’s Single Most Relentless Antagonist.” From there Fox News and the Daily Caller ran with the story and discovered additional videos of Gruber explaining the deception used to pass the ACA and denigrating the public in the process. When contacted by reporter and commentator Howard Kurtz, Weinstein declined to be interviewed on TV and would not give Kurtz a photo of himself saying he did not want to become “Rich The Plumber.” You may remember when Barack Obama was on a presidential campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio in 2008 Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher (aka Joe The Plumber) questioned him about his purposed Small Business Tax. Obama responded, “When you spread the wealth around it is good for everybody.” For that affront to the News Media’s darling presidential candidate, poor Wurzelbacher, referred as “Joe The Plumber” was trashed as only the left can do. How about the Main Stream Media (MSM) of the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC? What was their response to the Gruber story? The short answer is there was no response except for a short comment by CNN for four days after Fox TV ran the story every day. Finally after days of coverage by FOX, talk radio, and the internet; the New York Times, Washington Post ant the TV networks felt compelled to cover the story or lose credibility as news organizations. Now we come to the title part of this essay. Because the statements made by Gruber in the videos were so explicit in how deception was used in getting the ACA passed and how necessary that was because the public is so uninformed and dense there was no gainsaying what Gruber said. What options then were left for the Democrat supporters of the ACA to react? The only options were to downplay the contributions to the ACA made by Gruber and try to distance themselves from him. As it turns out, good luck with that. The disingenuous President Obama said that Gruber was not a member of the White House staff and so implied that he had little to do with formulating the law and nothing to do with selling it to the public. The House minority leader, the dummkopf Nancy Pelosi, said “Gruber, who is he?” The Democrats in the House wrote the law and Gruber had nothing to do with that. The egregious Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, likewise said Gruber was a minor figure in contributing to the law. The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, trivialized the roll Gruber played in formulating the ACA and said he did not contribute in any way to its implantation. Stay with me and let me take a slight, but cogent detour in this continuing narrative. In the Republican Presidential Primary in 1980 G.H.W. Bush said of his then competitor, Ronald Reagan, that Reagan’s proposed economic policies were “Voodoo economics.” After Reagan secured the Republican nomination for president and chose Bush as his vice-president running mate the news media ask Bush on TV about his Voodoo Economics remark. Bush replied that he never said that. The next thing viewers saw and heard was Bush making his Voodoo Economics remark. That was, and now is even more so, the age of permanent video and audio recordings of people’s comments. In his so-called “whistle stop” campaign aboard a train for the presidential election in 1948 Harry Truman addressed crowds in various cities across the country. A reporter travelling with the press contingent confronted Truman at one point saying that what he had just said to one crowd contradicted what he had said to the crowd at the last stop. Truman told him that he never said that. The reporter demurred, showing Truman what he had written in his notes about Truman’s previous speech. Truman insisted he had never said that. What was the reporter to do? What he had written was his word against the President’s. There was no “gotcha ” moment then – there is now. I do not mean to denigrate the 33rd president of the United States who I consider one of the great presidents of the 20th century along with Ronald Reagan. I only intend to state that presidents, even the ones that are relative honest and plain speaking, are politicians who occasionally put their own interests above being completely forthright with the people. This does not exclude one of the two greatest presidents of the USA, Abraham Lincoln (see my essay The Sultana Disaster and President Lincoln). Just as with Bush in 1980, the Democrats today either do not comprehend the age we are living in or they are so used to being shielded by the MSM that they believe their words will never come back to haunt them. They are mistaken on either count. What are the words that show these aforementioned Democrats were lying with their comments belittling the importance and the contributions of Gruber to the ACA? In 2006 then Senator Obama said that he freely stole ideas from the likes of Austin Goolsby, an unreformed Keynesian economist, and from economist JONATHAN GRUBER. Nancy Pelosi said in a 2009 speech in the House that Dr. Gruber, a professor at MIT, was a major contributor to the ACA and Harry Reid said in the Senate that Dr. Gruber was one of the most highly respected economists in the world and contributed mightily to the ACA. Josh Ernest is merely a hack propagandist and not a very clever liar. Gruber made a recorded 19 trips to the White House during the writing of the ACA and met with President Obama on more than one occasion and in one instant was one of only six people who had a conference in the White House with President Obama. Would you describe politicians who are so careless, so forgetful, or so dim that when they make contradictory statements they do not realize that in this technological age their previous words on a particular subject will come back to prove they are deceitful and completely untrustworthy as being clever? Of course not and neither would any honest and informed person.