The Obama administration once gave us \u201cman-caused disasters\u201d for acts of terrorism and \u201cworkplace violence\u201d for the Fort Hood shootings. Now it has trumped those past linguistic contortions by changing words to mask the ![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/322616749_6367a7a474.jpg?resize=300%2C199&ssl=1\" "\\"Photo")
Obamacare disaster.<\/p>\n
The president and his advisers apparently knew long ago that millions of the insured would face cancellations or premium hikes once Obamacare was fully implemented. Yet to get the 906-page bill passed, they had to convince the public of the very opposite scenario. So they repeated ironclad guarantees that no one would lose their coverage or doctors \u2014 \u201cperiod!\u201d<\/p>\n
Now the administration explains the deception by going after both the ethics of the insurers and the intelligence of the previously insured. That task required language to be altered. The newly canceled health plans are suddenly rebranded by the administration as \u201csubpar.\u201d Only in autumn 2013 is the supposedly unaware public told that, years ago, \u201cbad apple\u201d insurance companies sold them \u201csubstandard\u201d plans.<\/p>\n
According to Obama, millions of Americans were once ignorant or uninformed, and thus will soon be pleased about their cancellations: \u201cSo the majority of folks will end up being better off. Of course, because the website\u2019s not working right, they don\u2019t necessarily know it.\u201d<\/p>\n
By that logic, the legions of Obama supporters who desperately sought and won exemptions from Obamacare are not \u201cbetter off\u201d now, but those stuck with it will be?<\/p>\n
The president was not through reinventing history. If Obama spoke untruths on more than 20 occasions in selling Obamacare, he also made a post facto attempt to sneak a qualifier into his serial false promises: \u201cWhat we said was you can keep it if it hasn\u2019t changed since the law passed.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there is no record that Obama or his lieutenants had ever publicly said such a thing. The president\u2019s attempt to airbrush history is similar to the commandments on the barn wall in George Orwell\u2019s\u00a0Animal Farm<\/em>. One day the commandment \u201cAll animals are equal\u201d mysteriously appears rewritten with a new qualifier beside it, as if it had been there all along: \u201cAll animals are equal \u2014 but some animals are more equal than others.\u201d<\/p>\n The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 which not long ago gave us the new term \u201cwhite Hispanic,\u201d to deemphasize the minority status of George Zimmerman in the Travyon Martin case \u2014 is also guilty of Obamacare-speak. The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0rebranded Obama\u2019s untruths about Obamacare by simply declaring that Obama \u201cclearly misspoke.\u201d Does the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>think a real-estate agent \u201cmisspeaks\u201d when he sells a two-bedroom house by falsely assuring that it is a three-bedroom home?<\/p>\n The administration has also downplayed the disaster by claiming that the more than 30 million who lost their coverage represent only \u201c5 percent\u201d of the insured. But even if that number is not far too low, try using that minority-percentage argument on issues like gay rights. If millions of gays represent only about 5 percent of the population, is federal policy that affects gays negatively not really that important?<\/p>\n A national website that has completely failed and for nearly two months denied millions of applicants the chance to sign up for health insurance is dubbed a mere \u201cglitch.\u201d Had the website been down for only a day or two, would that foul-up be called a \u201cglitch-let\u201d?<\/p>\n From the very beginning, Obamacare defied the laws of common sense and basic logic. Providing more coverage for more people cannot result in radical reductions in costs, as promised \u2014 unless a shopper normally can buy more and better groceries for cheaper prices. How logical was expecting indebted young people to voluntarily pay more for insurance they would rarely use in order to pay for others to use it a lot?<\/p>\n Not a single Republican congressman voted for Obamacare. Some skeptical Democrats had to be bought off with the promise of special deals. Pet businesses, unions, and congressional staffers were given exemptions not available to the public from coverage that was supposedly wonderful.<\/p>\n The freebie provisions of keeping kids on parental plans until they turn 26 and ensuring coverage for those with preexisting conditions were cynically frontloaded before the 2012 election \u2014 while the painful details and higher costs were backloaded after the president\u2019s expected reelection.<\/p>\n An architect of the bill, Senator Max Baucus, called it a \u201ctrain wreck.\u201d Before full implementation, the Affordable Care Act became emblematic as the president\u2019s \u201csignature\u201d achievement and thus had to be airbrushed as something successful and popular to cement Obama\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n To square that huge circle, words had to change their meanings to fabricate a reality that did not exist.<\/p>\n So what takes away patients\u2019 insurance and costs more was declared the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Keeping your existing plan was \u201csubstandard\u201d coverage. And Obama had warned us all along that it might be canceled.<\/p>\n All that is now there on the barn wall.<\/p>\n Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.<\/em>\u00a0His latest book is<\/em>\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a>,\u00a0published this spring by<\/em>\u00a0Bloomsbury Books.<\/em>\u00a0You can reach him by e-mailing\u00a0author@victorhanson.com<\/a>. \u00a9 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Obama administration is altering its language like there’s no tomorrow. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 The Obama administration once gave us \u201cman-caused disasters\u201d for acts of terrorism and \u201cworkplace violence\u201d for the Fort Hood shootings. Now it has trumped those past linguistic contortions by changing words to mask the Obamacare disaster. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[278],"tags":[12,674,726,40,369],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Lk","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6745,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamacare-is-dead-long-live-obamacare\/","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":0},"title":"Obamacare Is Dead. Long Live Obamacare!","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 In the next 90 days, the Obama administration will have to declare victory and then abandon most of Obamacare. The legislation defies the laws of physics\u2014more and broader coverage for more people at\u00a0less\u00a0cost\u2014as well as logic: Young people, on average as a cohort\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Healthcare"","block_context":{"text":"Healthcare","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/healthcare\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6799,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/affordable-care-of-patient-protection-or-obamacare\/","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":1},"title":"Affordable Care or Patient Protection or Obamacare?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 2, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 There are some rumors that the administration wants to distance itself from the slang \u201cObamacare,\u201d a term the president embraced in the 2012 campaign but now finds hurtful to his polls and his colleagues in the Congress. But what would be alternatives? We\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Healthcare"","block_context":{"text":"Healthcare","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/healthcare\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6702,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obamacare-ten-step-self-help-program\/","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":2},"title":"The Obamacare Ten-Step Self-Help Program","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 4, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner As all the still underappreciated contours of Obamacare become known, and as those who hold employer-provided plans will soon discover their existing \u201cscams\u201d also do not pass ACA muster, the public will begin to understand that Obamacare is another redistributive zero-sum plan to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Healthcare"","block_context":{"text":"Healthcare","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/healthcare\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":307,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/let-obama-be-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":3},"title":"Let Obama Be Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services After his party's devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, Barack Obama was re-elected earlier this month by painting his Republican opponents as heartless in favoring lower taxes for the rich. They were portrayed as nativists for opposing the Dream Act amnesty for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Obama Administration"","block_context":{"text":"Obama Administration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6614,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-as-chaos\/","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":4},"title":"Obama as Chaos","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 14, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obama\u2019s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute. By that I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Commentary","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/commentary-obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8109,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fantasyland-u-s-a\/","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":5},"title":"Fantasyland, U.S.A.","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 5, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJMedia One way of reinventing reality is to warp the meaning of words. No president in memory has waged such a war on the English language as has Barack Obama \u2014 changing the meaning of vocabulary to hide what he fears might otherwise be unpopular.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Mr. President, honest, I did not write 1984 as a how-to guide.Photo via Eddriscoll.com ","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/orwell_obama_12-21-14-3-500x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6780,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778\/revisions\/6780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}