Monday, October 21, 2013

The “unacceptable” speech is a staple of the Obama presidency. Through gritted teeth, the president acknowledges something he’d rather not, usually something his administration has screwed up royally—Benghazi, the IRS scandal, or the push for intervention in Syria. He detaches himself from the situation and all responsibility for what he’s acknowledging while offering a stern lecture for those who caused the problem...

Obama has declared Healthcare.gov problems unacceptable. Problem solved. - HotAir

...In his “unacceptable” speech on the rolling calamity of Obamacare’s launch, the president didn’t even evince the minute and a half of anger he generally musters for such a speech, until he got to the part about Republicans, but that’s a part of every single speech. This is his legacy! From his point of view, someone (maybe the same person always preventing him from being clear?) is ruining his signature achievement, and we got a surreal campaign speech instead of any real reckoning with the problems before him....

Obama thinks when he says things, they just happen. There’s no small part of his entire candidacy and presidency founded on a sort of magical thinking. His presence would fix Washington even as he did nothing to fix it and exacerbated many of its worst features. His words would heal our divides and probably the ocean. It’s not surprising that his signature law would be animated by a lot of the same. He said “Travelocity for health care,” didn’t he?

He said Benghazi’s perpetrators would be brought to justice, didn’t he? He said the IRS acted inappropriately, didn’t he? Problem solved....

In the meantime, all of the people who’ve been calling us liars for three years will now be insistent that we stop talking about Obamacare’s problems and become part of the solution, man. If they’d stopped blindly believing in the power of big government to do big things a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, they might have actually heard some of our criticisms and been able to correct the problem. But they opted for “Attack Watch.”