Republicans are not going to like the New Yorker’s latest cover.
The illustration nods to Obamacare’s recent victory, and shows President Obama feeding medicine to a little boy…
Artist Barry Blitt told the magazine ‘I enjoyed drawing Ted Cruz, John Boehner, and Michele Bachmann as petulant children — and I especially wanted to draw an open-mouthed Mitch McConnell being spoon-fed his meds.’
(Huffington Post, April 7, 2014)
Priceless!
Recall that Republicans tried their damnedest last October to convince the American people that the rollout of the Obamacare website, healthcare.gov, was so incompetent and portended such doom that President Obama should do the honorable thing and resign.
Therefore, who can blame Obama for making quite a show last week of announcing that, despite those infamous glitches with the website, Obamacare (officially, the Affordable Care Act) actually surpassed its March 31 goal of getting seven million poor Americans to join the ranks of the insured?
Yet Blitt’s illustration highlights the fact that, instead of celebrating like sensible, patriotic Americans, Republicans reacted to Obama’s announcement as if he had trumpeted enrollment figures for his new socialist party.
Now comes the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reporting this week that Obamacare will cost less and cover millions more than even the Obama Administration projected, making a mockery of Republican projections of doom and gloom:
The Congressional Budget Office has released updated estimates on the Affordable Care Act’s impact on both the budget and the health insurance industry. The findings show that the president’s signature health care law is actually growing cheaper to implement, costing the government $5 billion less in 2014 than was previously projected…
Twelve million more non-elderly people will have health insurance in 2014 than if Obamacare had not become law.
(Huffington Post, April 14, 2014)
To be fair, all of this good news must be a bitter pill for Republicans to swallow. Especially when you factor in leading economic indicators, which show the Obama economy continuing in strong and sustainable recovery mode.
After all, they have staked their political fortunes for the 2014 congressional elections and 2016 presidential election on not just Obamacare but Obama’s whole presidency turning out to be an abject failure. And no Republican personified their perverse hope for failure more than the “open-mouthed” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – who sounded this treacherous clarion call:
The single most important thing we want to achieve [as Republicans] is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
(Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2010)
Clearly, after failing in their mission to make him a one-term president, Republicans redoubled their efforts to make Obama a failed president. And nothing would signal success in this regard quite like undermining this signature legislative achievement of his presidency, which they have attempted to do, to no avail, by voting 54 times on measures ranging from repealing Obamacare in its entirety to defunding or delaying key provisions.
All of their partisan talking points and political posturing aside, these are people who hate Obama(care) more than they love their country.
Not to mention what a mockery their obsessive, delusional opposition to Obamacare (yes, Obama cares) makes of the most fundamental calling of their Christian faith, which, of course, is to help the poor. (In this case, it’s clearly too inconvenient for these Bible-thumping charlatans to ask: what would Jesus do?)
(“Bob Woodward: Republicans Are Trying to Blackmail Obama,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 1, 2013)
Meanwhile, Obama could only have exacerbated the bitter taste in their mouths by choosing this moment of triumph to give Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the boot.
After all, Republicans made quite a show of demanding her head last October when technical glitches with the rollout of healthcare.gov made that March 31 goal of signing up seven million people seem like a pipe dream. By waiting until now, Obama not only highlights how inured he is to the “nattering nabobs of negativism” Republicans have become, but also demonstrates that he will hold people accountable on his own terms … and in his own time.
Kathleen Sebelius … is resigning, ending a stormy five-year tenure marred by the disastrous rollout of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act.
Mr. Obama accepted Ms. Sebelius’s resignation this week, and on Friday morning, he will nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to replace her, officials said.
The departure comes as the Obama administration tries to move beyond its early stumbles in carrying out the law, convince a still-skeptical public of its lasting benefits, and help Democratic incumbents, who face blistering attack ads after supporting the legislation, survive the midterm elections this fall.
(New York Times, April 10, 2014)
I’m on record stating (as I did most recently in my October 17, 2013 commentary, “Republicans Grant 90-Day Reprieve from Economic Armageddon”) that everything from the 2008 financial crisis to the 2013 government shutdown seems pursuant to an open conspiracy among Republicans to make America look like a dysfunctional Banana Republic.
Indeed, at the National Action Network’s 2014 Convention in New York City just last week, no less a person than (Black) Attorney General Eric Holder insinuated that only one word explains why Republicans would rather see their country fail than see Obama succeed: racism.
A fed-up Attorney General Eric Holder is accusing congressional critics of launching ‘unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive’ attacks on him and the Obama administration.
‘Forget about me [specifically]. Look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a [Republican] House committee,’ Holder told the crowd. ‘What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?’
(ABC News, April 10, 2014)
Mind you, Republican talking heads, deploying reverse psychology, would have you believe that, far from being disrespected, Obama and Holder are benefiting from affirmative action-like, liberal media bias. Except that I doubt Obama would think he got a pass from the putatively liberal Washington Post with its Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, which made his administration look even more secretive than Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon’s.
But just imagine Holder’s righteous indignation at having Whites who can be fairly judged racists accusing him of “playing the race card” — as if he were no different from (the reformed) Reverend Al Sharpton….
Of course, for far too many Republicans, it would seem a natural fate for the first Black president to preside over what they claim are the worst years in U.S. history. Their ulterior motive or misguided hope being that this would ensure no Black is elected president (or appointed attorney general) for at least another 100 years.
Enough said?
Related commentaries:
Computer glitches…
Republicans trying to blackmail Obama…