Obama Gaffes Just Keep On Coming

Is this guy trying to sell his bill or kill it? Here is a humorous look at one of his less than eloquent findings before I get on to the rest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozdMZ3ypmtg

But perhaps his dumbest healthcare gaffe was as follows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqUmuZnmf7A

Why in God's name would he point out, while attempting to push Government Health Care, that it is private companies that are cleaning the Governments clock in other areas? Wasn't this guy supposed to be the genius? This is one of those gaffes that is so ridiculous that it threatens to shift the poles of intellectual rationalization. It baffles me as to why he would even go there in the first place. The comparisons to the current debate are there, no doubt, but none of them bode well for him.

For example, the recession has hit the profits of FedEx and UPS, but they are doing well by any standard of measurement that includes the Post Office. It is on track to lose seven billion dollars this year, despite and potential branch office closings and cut delivery days. By the same token, profitable Health Insurance Companies  can point to the failures of medicare, an insurance alternative already dun by the Government that is failing and headed straight to bankruptcy. This galactic misstep lead to the following question raised by Red State.

This brings up a very important question: Why, with the coverage equivalents of FedEx and UPS already serving the American people (at least, as well as they can under a mound of cost-increasing regulation), would we have any desire to hand over our health care to the same crew of failures that runs the Post Office, which even the President concedes is a failure?

Yet even this gaffe loses some of its luster when compared to the Grandma gaffe. Just as the left had begun to convince people that the right was off its rocker with the "death panel" talk, Obama entered the conversation with this gem.

“I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost,” Obama said in the interview. “I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother.”

Obama said “you just get into some very difficult moral issues” when considering whether “to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill.

“That’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues,” he said in the April 14 interview. “The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health- care bill out here.”

Ummm... did Biden get a hold of the teleprompter? You see, it starts out well. Let's look at this through the WWTTD (What Would Trailer Trash Do?) lense. First, find a personal experience of a sympathetic figure, especially a relative, who needed health care and got it when they were terminally ill. Obama did well here, choosing his dead (so she can't talk back) Grandmother to throw under the bus (again, she's a typical white person) for the sake of the plan. Now, bemoan the fact she got healthcare on the public dime despite the fact that she was terminally ill. This will give it "street cred", cuz it's your own Grandmother you are referencing, and will keep the opposition from saying "but what if it was your family". Sure, some may get their feelings hurt, so toss in a mention of how you would have paid for it yourself. See? It's textbook to this point. Terminally ill people like my Grandmother shouldn't get hip replacements because they are going to die soon anyway. I like it. I'm impressed. But where in the hell did this line come from?

 “The chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health- care bill out here.”

He was almost through it, and then he mentioned those who are just old, and not terminally ill.  And this is where you lose people. I think we could all agree that resuscitating granny for one last hip reconstruction probably isn't a great idea. But now he isn't talking about someone on their death bed, he is talking about people who are just old. They are near the end of their lives, and we don't need to be wasting money on them. DOH! You were supposed to keep that part a secret until after your plan was implemented. We were supposed to all applaud when Granny's everywhere limped off to the great beyond on their broken hips, then gasp when we got to be about sixty and got the "sorry, we can't do that for you right now" memo. 

But with all of these gaffes, the question we all want to know is will this disaster be implemented or not? Until now, I had been citing the polls that show the American people are against it. This is a rather futile effort, after all, since the people pushing the bills have already defined the American people as a "mob" and "political terrorists".  That's why I appreciate this take on it from National Review.

Rasmussen now reports that elderly folks over 65 are against Obamacare by 56 to 39 percent. That’s a bad number for Democrats who rely on seniors to maintain their governing coalition. Incidentally, polls also show that about 75 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health-care services.

It’s still tough to know whether this behemoth government takeover of health care will actually pass. But two key markets are betting against it. First, over at the Intrade pay-to-play online-betting parlor, the bid for the U.S. government health-plan contract is only 38 cents. That’s down from 50 cents in late July. Second, the share prices of big private health insurers have rallied in recent weeks. UnitedHealthcare is up 13 percent, Humana is up 12.4 percent, and Aetna is up almost 10 percent. These firms will be decimated if the government insurance plan passes. But investors are now predicting it won’t.

For the sake of economic freedom, liberty, and fiscal sanity, let’s hope the markets are right.

At the rate Obama is going, they just may be.