Sometimes you read something so absurd that you’re laughing about it before you even get to the end of the sentence. Liberal pundits have a talent for making our blood boil with their brazen bias and un-American view of democracy, but sometimes their claims are so outrageous that all you can do is laugh. If some idiot tells you that the sun is blue, you don’t get angry, you just shrug and shake your head. Because why worry about it, right? We have to take this latest column from The New York Times’s Paul Krugman is the same spirit. Or at least we would, if we didn’t have a sneaking suspicion that many of his readers will be nodding along and agreeing without the slightest amount of critical thought…or memory.
In his column, Krugman rejoiced over the failure of the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, saying that it was the culmination of seven years of lying about the healthcare policy.
“Given this history,” he said, “the Republican health care disaster was entirely predictable. You can’t expect good or even coherent policy proposals from a party that has spent decades embracing politically useful lies and denigrating expertise.”
On the other hand, Krugman wrote, President Obama’s administration “was remarkably clearheaded and honest about its policies. In particular, it was always clear what the A.C.A. was supposed to do and how it was supposed to do it — and it has, for the most part, worked as advertised.”
Are you laughing yet?
Krugman has apparently forgotten PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year”: If you like your doctor…
And he’s apparently forgotten the admissions made by Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, who told us all in 2014 that the administration deliberately lied to the American people about the effects and mechanisms of the Affordable Care Act.
We won’t defend the Republican Party. Krugman is right when he says that conservatives have been lied to by their elected representatives, no doubt about it. But these were lies of political expedience, not lies about the underlying problems with Obamacare itself. Whether Republicans ever had the backbone to actually repeal this law remains a question shadowed in doubt. But there is NO DOUBT that the ACA remains one of the biggest financial disasters to ever befall this country. And for any Obama defender to still pretend that this isn’t the case…well, it’s laughable.
Except, it isn’t.
