King Barack of Bullshitiana

Charles Cooke has a great piece up at NRO about the lies Obama used to sell Obamacare.   They include:

• “I will sign a universal health-care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”
• “If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this plan is the amount of money you will spend on premiums.”
• “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”
• “For people with insurance, the only impact of the health-care law is that their insurance is stronger, better, and more secure than it was before. Full stop. That’s it. They don’t have to worry about anything else.”

Lies.   Baldfaced lies.   Here's the money paragraph:

Looking back, it is amazing that Obama wasn’t laughed off the stage at the outset. His central claim — that premiums would drop for the typical family by $2,500 — could literally have been taken from the back of an envelope. As the New York Times explained back in 2008, the $2,500 number came from economist David Cutler, who predicted that Obamacare would reduce all health-care spending by $200 billion a year. Candidate Obama, looking for a good sound bite, simply divided this number by the number of families in the United States; then, calculating inexplicably that total health-care spending and family health-insurance premiums were exactly the same thing, he concluded that all money saved would be returned to the people. That Obama considered this a reasonable way of selling a plan that reorganized one-sixth of the economy betrays either a fundamental economic illiteracy or a deeply troubling readiness to mislead.

TFG almost got us into a war in Syria because of his off-the-cuff bullshit about a "red line" on chemical weapons.   Now it turns out that he got us into an epic, country-killing fiasco on Obamacare because of still more off-the-cuff bullshit.

The Emperor Has No Clothes.   The grown-ups in Washington realize this.  Putin realizes this.   Assad realizes this.   Rouhani realizes this.   Now we're reaping the whirlwind of our folly.