Our Double and Now Down Talking President

In a film well known to the many movie buffs on OS, Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) says to Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), “I’m nobody’s fool, least of all yours.”

Americans had every right to repeat that line to Barack Obama after his latest (would that we could say last) pep talk on health care reform.  Shortly before his “go team” wrap up, Obama actually had the temerity to state something like, “Health care legislation has passed the House by a majority vote and has passed the Senate by a super-majority vote.”

If that alarming statement were true, Obama could simply sashay over to the Oval Office and sign our way out of the torture with which our president has been distracting America for more than a year.  But as every thinking American knows, the bills that passed the House and Senate were very different from each other in critically important respects.  So it is disingenuous in the extreme for Obama to suggest congressional consensus on the matter.

To make matters worse, this laughingly misleading statement has been parroted by our hapless Secretary of Health and Human Services and for all I know by Robert Gibbs as well. (I qualify the latter because I simply cannot bear to watch or listen to that particular secretary press on.)

I can already hear some of our more rabid Obama apologists state that the president was not talking about particular bills but rather the general concept of health care reform.  Aside from the fact that Congress doesn’t generally vote on concepts, we could answer that if we’re talking concepts, the health care reform one has been approved virtually unanimously by not only the Washington legislatures, but also the American public as a whole.  No, the devil continues to be in the details, and vastly different ones were before the House and Senate when they took their respective votes.

We’ve come to expect from our newbie president the semi-circular rotations in positions, most recently evidenced regarding reconciliation, his tentative grasp on American geography and national holidays, and his pronunciation mangling regarding those who are merely under his command.  But I can’t recall any prior instance where he has been so flagrantly contemptuous of the basic intelligence of the American public.