If wishes had wings…

The problems facing the Affordable Care Act's website have given the law's critics no shortage of ammunition to take potshots at President Obama's signature legislative accomplishment. But to hear those critics tell it, the ACA's problems are a growing catastrophe in which Democrats are poised to jump ship – and the law is just a second away from repeal. Repeal of the ACA is and always has been a fantasy. And right now this fantasy is being enabled by members of the mainstream press for whom the ACA's problems somehow merit embellishment. Apparently, they have nothing else over which to cry that the sky is falling – and they have to be able to scream about something that is devastatingly world changing to justify their existence.

Tea Party congressmen and conservative pundits have been keeping the repeal fantasy alive ever since the law was signed back in 2010. The backlash from the government shutdown, which was inspired by Tea Party efforts to gut the ACA, did nothing to dull enthusiasm for the "repeal Obamacare" crowd. "Obamacare will be repealed well in advance of the 2014 elections," conservative writer Steven Hayward wrote in Forbes on November 11. "There is a chance Obamacare could be repealed in a bipartisan vote," wrote Ed Rogers in the Washington Post. Peggy Noonan  wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Congress "could try to vote now, under new conditions and with the American people behind them, to repeal the whole thing… And who knows, they just might." 

No… they will not. 

This is nothing but empty wishing. Even if Republicans in the Senate did somehow manage to pass a bill ‘over Harry Reid's dead body’ repealing the ACA, it would absolutely be vetoed by President Obama. Congress does not have the two-thirds votes in both houses to override the President’s veto.

But this is what pundits and activists do: shape and spin stories to conform to their preferred outcome. The National Journal's Josh Kraushaar, rather than tamping down this irrational enthusiasm among the law's opponents, is giving it a big push. "There's a growing likelihood that over time enough Democrats may join Republicans to decide to start over and scrap the whole complex health care enterprise," Kraushaar writes in his November 18 column. He argued to the point of being meaningless – he is saying there is an increased chance of something possibly happening over an indeterminate time period if everything lines up perfectly – but Kraushaar nonetheless wants us to think that the threat of repeal is real:

"Consider [this],” wrote Kraushaar, “Despite the White House's protestations, 62.4 percent of the House voted for Michigan GOP Rep. Fred Upton's legislation (261-157) was just shy of the two-thirds necessary to override a veto." 

Kraushaar is comparing apples to oranges. Upton's bill was not about full repeal of the law. Upton's bill, which would permit health insurers to continue selling plans that don't meet the ACA's minimum standards, reflected Democratic frustration with the website. The vote itself was essentially symbolic. The bill will not be taken up by the Senate – Harry Reid will never bring it to the floor – and it would never survive an Obama veto. Those Democrats went into the vote knowing that it would not have any impact on policy.  They did it for cover back home. So you cannot extrapolate from that symbolic expression of frustration a desire to scrap the whole law. 

Kraushaar arrived at the notion that repeal is visible on the horizon by sketching out immense political shifts and alignments of the planets and stars that must occur in order to arrive at veto-proof majorities.  In doing so, Kraushaar unwittingly demonstrated exactly how the repeal fantasy will never come true.
 
Republicans are all wishing and dreaming. “If wishes had wings…” my grandmother used to say.

Enough already, part 2: Benghazi

60 Minutes apparently believed in the right wing storyline about Benghazi. As a result, they produced a story that never should have aired – and they ended up with egg on their faces. CBS News is now trying to say they were misled by their source, when the reality is that they had ample opportunity to challenge the story before they aired it. But just like every other Benghazi story told by the mainstream media, Davies’ account lacked evidence. In fact, their source, Dylan Davies, was a liar who was looking for fame and fortune.

Lara Logan of 60 Minutes, CBS, claimed that their source had been properly vetted, but it is clear that they heard what they wanted to hear. They wanted a big Benghazi story that would show the President as having covered up what “really happened.” To make matters worse, CBS never disclosed that Davies’ book, Embassy House – about his supposed participation in fighting terrorists during the Benghazi attack – is being published by a subsidiary of CBS. If 60 Minutes would have done even the most basic of investigations into their source’s ethical background, they would have found a liar who has changed his story numerous times. 

All of this should have given CBS News reason for pause, but it didn’t. It is one thing to get a story wrong, but it is quite another to look the other way and air a partisan story that is full of holes from the beginning. CBS has participated in another right wing attempt to smear President Obama and Hillary Clinton. But the story has crashed and burned – and it took the credibility of 60 Minutes down with them too.

Most of us would agree that any time our diplomats are not protected from a terrorist attack; it is a failure of security measures and intelligence. But after 14 months, we should be able to look at what happened with some rationality. The attack was terrible, but Benghazi was just one of at least 157 attacks on our diplomatic facilities over a 15-year period, 9 of which resulted in U.S. fatalities, which many of you have forgotten because they were not covered hourly for 14 months on Fox News.

There have been several investigations into Benghazi by an independent panel and by congressional committees, none of which have found a scandal or a cover-up. Yet the attack on Benghazi has been politicized by Republicans eager for a second-term Obama scandal or to embarrass Hillary Clinton – and by Fox News to pump up their ratings. 

Apparently the media does not want to believe that there is no administrative cover-up regarding Benghazi. Several times, the mainstream media, eager to show its ‘toughness’ on Obama (and there are so many opportunities to do exactly that, from drones and illegal spying to the botched Obamacare website), have fallen flat on their face. It started with a false story by ABC's Jon Karl, but now "60 Minutes" has been duped to a new low in Benghazi coverage:

NEW YORK -- Security officer Dylan Davies admitted this weekend that he lied to a superior in September 2012 about his whereabouts the night of the Benghazi attack. But Davies says his latest version of events, told on CBS' "60 Minutes" and in a new memoir, are true.

“I am just a little man against some big people here,” Davies told The Daily Beast in an interview published Saturday, suggesting he was the victim of a smear campaign.

Davies’ account of the night four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in a terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi has been challenged since he appeared Oct. 27 on “60 Minutes,” in an interview CBS billed as “the first eyewitness account from a westerner” on the ground that night.

The Washington Post revealed that Davies once provided a different account of the events. The Post reported that Davies previously claimed to have never reached the compound on the night of the attack, saying he only arrived the day after. But in the version he relayed on “60 Minutes,” as well as in a new memoir published under a pseudonym, Davies arrives at the compound as the battle rages on and tangles with a terrorist.

Davies landed a coveted "60 Minutes" interview to promote his book, Embassy House, published by Simon & Shuster, a business partner of CBS under the Viacom umbrella. But other journalists had serious problems with his story. Fox News Channel, believe it or not, had problems with reporting on Davies when he started asking for money, which is a huge no-no.

The real problem here is one that we have seen time and time again. In trying to show that it was "fair and balanced" and could report a story on an issue being pushed by conservatives, CBS twisted things to where it was completely unfair and unbalanced, abandoning the basic journalistic tenet of following the truth, no matter how inconvenient. 

CBS News deserves credit for one thing. Unlike when ABC News pushed a false story on Benghazi that made the President look bad, CBS apologized and retracted their story. The nation is still waiting for Jon Karl and ABC to apologize and retract their story about the Benghazi emails.  When "60 Minutes" got it wrong nine years ago on the details of George W. Bush leaving the Texas Air National Guard, people lost their jobs, including Dan Rather. And, in just the same way, heads need to roll at "60 Minutes" for its completely false Benghazi report – especially since it stirred up another round of Benghazi hearings by the GOP this week so that many Teapublicans could quote the lies from the CBS report.

Damn. Enough already. 

The right wing needs to quit with the false Benghazi stuff. Sadly, Benghazi is one of many embassy attacks through the decades in which Americans lost their lives. (One of the worst was the Lebanon attack during the Reagan years.) The President and Hillary Clinton did what they were supposed to do – which was to call in reinforcements.  But those reinforcements did not get there in time. 
 
Give it up, Righties. There is no smoking gun.

To the GOP: Enough Already

Do you remember the rollout of Medicare Part D? It was a mess.

I have had enough of this Republican gloating about HealthCare.gov. Yes, the website was and is a major and inexcusable fiasco. So they were entitled to a week of “we told ya so” – or even two. But really, it has practically been a month now. Enough already. 

I know that we can expect no decency from the GOP, so this will sound naïve, but truly, what they should be doing is helping their constituents figure it all out. That is what the Democrats did in a similar situation not too long ago. I refer, of course, to the Medicare Part D implementation in late 2005 and early 2006. That was the big prescription drug bill passed in 2003. You remember – it is the one where the Republicans did not have the votes in the House, even though they controlled the House, and Speaker Tom DeLay held the floor open for 15 minutes after the bell rang as his lieutenants went around and badgered and threatened some GOP members until they changed their vote from nay to aye. 

Most Democrats voted against the bill. In the House just 16 of 203 Democratic members voted yes. In the Senate, however, 11 of 48 Democrats voted for the new Bush entitlement. First, let’s just stop right there. Could you imagine 16 and 11 Republicans ever voting for an Obama legislative priority, something that was clearly Obama’s “baby” in the same way that the Part D bill was Bush’s? There would be no end to the slobbering over Republicans for being so reasonable. As I recall, the Democrats were attacked at the time for not supporting the bill enough. 

Two years later, the rollout came. It was a mess. In mid-October 2005, the Bush administration announced a delay. But a month later, as Jon Perr noted recently at Crooks & Liars, the planned comparison-shopping website still wasn’t up and running. Even after it finally was, it was confusing and a mess. Some sample headlines: “Web-based Comparison of Prescription Plans Delayed,” The Washington Post; “Glitches Mar Launch of Medicare Drug Plan,” The Wall Street Journal; “President Tells Insurers to Aid Ailing Medicare Drug Plan,” The New York Times.

Needless to say, some of the same people now trying to put the hex on Obamacare spent 2006 pooh-poohing the glitches – as Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) put it back then. I’m sure they would say the two laws are different things, and it is true that the Affordable Care Act is a bigger undertaking. But they are precisely similar in spirit – big, new government programs that depended largely on citizen interaction via personal computer. And the Obama law corrects what was conspicuously awful about the Bush law – the so-called doughnut hole in prescription drug coverage.

But the biggest difference between the two laws is not how Republicans behaved back then but how Democrats did. Most Democrats voted against the law; but they did not then sue the Bush administration and try to take the thing to the Supreme Court and get it invalidated. And then, when the start-up was a mess, Democrats did not go around saying it was proof the law had to go. They tried to help fix it.   

Hillary Clinton, then a senator, said: “I voted against it, but once it passed I certainly determined that I would try to do everything I could to make sure that New Yorkers understood it, could access it, and make the best of it.”  It is interesting that we have this quote from someone the press has described over the years as one of the most polarizing women in America. Here she was being the exact opposite of polarizing, just doing what was then her job, being a normal and rational human being and public servant. She was deciding, amazingly enough, that the needs of her senior-citizen constituents who might benefit from the law once the kinks were worked out were more important than any grudge or animus she might bear toward the sitting administration. Her husband said it well Sunday, while campaigning with Terry McAuliffe: 

“But our side, we are not so ideological. So instead of bashing them and screaming about how incompetent they were, most of our people just tried to help people understand the law and make it work, and then wait for it to get fixed.”

And yet here was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) on TV on Sunday spouting the same lies and scare-tactics that has been gushing from their mouths for a month. And there was Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), having no earthly idea what she was talking about on CNN. Neither Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell nor Sen. Rand Paul had one kind word to say for Kentucky’s excellent implementation of the law under Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear. About 15,000 Kentuckians had enrolled as of last week. 

This is yet another stomach-turning GOP-induced state of affairs. I am sick and tired of hearing that Obamacare is an existential threat to their idea of America. Grow up and get over it. You lost this political fight. You may someday win, but until the day you do, behave like adults and as if you actually love the democracy you live in.  And you might consider behaving like the Democrats did back in 2006 when you passed the unpaid for Medicare Part D that added millions of dollars to the deficit. 

Edited from: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 29, 2013 Grow Up And Get Over It: Enough Already On HealthCare.Gov, Don’t You Remember Medicare Part D?