RUSH: I have a story here, Dana Milbank. Dana Milbank is an MSNBC liberal, which means he’s a wacko. He writes for the Washington Post. He’s a frequent guest at MSNBC. He’s got a column. He has a piece today: “A Reversal of Fortune for Democrats After Obamacare.” I want to read excerpts. I don’t want to read the whole thing, but this is a piece about North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan, who is a genuine idiot. Do you know that her website — I don’t know if it still posts this way. This is Wednesday, but as recently as Monday, Kay Hagan, North Carolina senator – her website still promised you if you like your plan you could keep it. As recently as Monday, and maybe yesterday as well. In fact, it may still say that; I don’t know. But I know it did on Monday.
Here are a couple pull quotes from Dana Milbank’s piece. “Hagan hosted a conference call for reporters Tuesday morning to discuss the problems with the health-care lawÂ’s rollout, and the Q&A session was so painful that the senator should qualify for trauma coverage under the Affordable Care Act. … But HaganÂ’s reversal of fortune — and similar troubles for other vulnerable Senate Democrats such as Mary Landrieu (La.) and Mark Pryor (Ark.) — should make it clearer than ever to the White House that the administration must put everything it has into salvaging the health-care rollout before it undoes congressional Democrats and the Obama presidency. If the administration can get its top priority so wrong, Republicans will say that the presidentÂ’s party doesnÂ’t deserve to govern, and they will have a point.”
They should have been saying this since day one, in my opinion. They got elected, they deserve to govern in that sense, but their incompetence or worse has been on display since the stimulus package. Here’s how Milbank begins his piece. “Two months ago, polls showed Democrat Kay Hagan leading prospective opponents by double digits in her quest for a second term representing North Carolina in the Senate.
“So why is she so nervous? Well, her problem begins with Obamacare, ends with Obamacare and has a whole lot of Obamacare in between. Hagan hosted a conference call for reporters Tuesday morning to discuss the problems with the health-care lawÂ’s rollout, and the Q&A session was so painful that the senator should qualify for trauma coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
“Fox NewsÂ’s Jim Angle asked what she thought about the reports showing that only 50,000 Americans had enrolled in the health-care exchanges on HealthCare.gov. ‘You know,’ she replied. ‘I know the — I believe this coming Friday, those numbers are going to be published and uh, you know, as soon as I see them, you know, obviously itÂ’s, itÂ’s m-much fewer than the administration expected.’ A reporter from the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record asked why Hagan, like President Obama, had told people that if they liked their health plans theyÂ’d be able to keep their health plans.
“There was a long pause before Hagan responded, then a deep intake of breath. ‘You know, Doug,’ she responded, ‘the, um’ — here she exhaled and paused again — ‘the way these, the — the regulations and the law, uh’ — pause — ‘came forward recently, I think people were surprised that the, uh, the — the actual original plans would be, um, would be canceled.'”
She said she thinks people were surprised.
“Another North Carolina reporter asked Hagan what she is telling constituents whose premiums have doubled or whose plans have been canceled. Deep inhalation. ‘Well, a lot of people, I, I am encouraging everybody to go on the site, uh, uh, I — look through it, find out what the benefits are,’ she began. She also said constituents could call her office, ‘and we will certainly, uh, do what we can to help those individuals and put them in contact, uh, with the right — with the right person, and, and, and help them.’ News reports about the law in HaganÂ’s home state have been brutal: businesses cutting workersÂ’ hours, 160,000 people receiving cancellation notices, hardly anybody signing up for the health-care exchange.”
And, remember, her website as of Monday was still guaranteeing if you like your plan, you get to keep it.
“Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, released a poll Tuesday showing that 69?percent of North Carolinians think the Obamacare rollout has been unsuccessful. Probably because of that, Hagan is now in a dead heat with would-be challengers.”
This woman had a double-digit lead, well into double-digit leads over any Republican opponent and now she’s in a dead heat. That’s the albatross of Obamacare, and that’s why they’re worried about what happened in Virginia. Now, Milbank thinks that the poll doesn’t mean anything right now, ’cause “thereÂ’s a year until the election, and a challenger to Hagan has yet to emerge from the Republican pack.” It’s almost like it’s a generic poll. Any Republican ties her. “Just a month ago, when the government shutdown was dominating the news, it looked as though Democrats could make gains in the 2014 midterms.”
See, that’s my point. A month ago, the government shutdown, the Republicans were evil, rotten SOBs. Ted Cruz was an idiot terrorist ransom taker, hostage taker, what have you, and they were all right. Everything they were trying to warn us about they were dead right about, and look at just in 30 days the reversal of fortunes, if you will here. These same Democrats who were running around beating their chest and bragging about what a stupid idiot Ted Cruz was and how they were sweeping to reelection because the Republicans were so stupid to shut down the government trying to stop this. The government was shut down, the Republicans had the guts to do that because they wanted to make sure that this that’s happening now wasn’t happening. They deserve everybody’s thanks, and they deserve apologies.
Just one more paragraph from Dana Milbank here on Kay Hagan. “But HaganÂ’s reversal of fortune — and similar troubles for other vulnerable Senate Democrats such as Mary Landrieu (La.) and Mark Pryor (Ark.) — should make it clearer than ever to the White House that the administration must put everything it has into salvaging the health-care rollout before it undoes congressional Democrats and the Obama presidency. If the administration can get its top priority so wrong, Republicans will say that the presidentÂ’s party doesnÂ’t deserve to govern, and they will have a point.”
I don’t know if the Republicans will ever say that. That would require the willingness to criticize Obama, and if the Republicans criticize Obama, then a lot of people jump on the Republicans for being racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, and what have you. But it’s clear, at the very least we’ve got incompetence here. So what can they do to salvage this? There’s nothing they can do. They can’t fix the website in time. The only thing they can do is Santa Claus. And that is offer everybody whose lost their policy that they liked a giant subsidy to make up the difference. And the government will never run out of money. If they want to spend it, they can. The government can print, they can borrow. They will never run out of money, $17 trillion national debt, no big deal, that doesn’t bother them. Doesn’t bother half the Republicans, apparently.
The private sector, they think, is a never ending golden goose. It’s pooping money every day. It’s just theirs for the taking. Always gonna be the case. The thing they forget, though, is that it is in the private sector where money gets its value, not government. Government destroys the value of money, creates inflation with all this printing it. But the value of money comes from the private sector in the form of price for product, services rendered, what people are willing to pay for something they want or need. That’s where value happens. Government has nothing to do with that. All they can do is destroy it, which is what is happening.
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