By Scott St. Clair | The Save Jersey Blog
For a guy as smart as Jonathan Gruber, he sure is dumb. In the Internet age, where everything you say or do is recorded for posterity and available in three seconds via Google, did he really think he could call us names and get away with it – over and over again?
Last week, several videos were released that document Gruber’s blasé contempt for the American voter. In the first one of several discovered by a Philadelphia-area investment consultant who lost his health insurance because it didn’t meet Obamacare standards, Gruber blithely confesses that the president’s healthcare plan was conceived in secret double-shuffle trickery and dedicated to the proposition that the American people are too stupid to understand when they are being conned (the juicy part starts at the 20:25 mark and runs for one minute):
To hear that the funding scheme was deliberately made confusing to hide the fact that it’s a tax – “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” – and that the geniuses who cooked it up figured it would be easy to put one over on those of us in the great unwashed – “stupidity of the American voter” – by itself should be sufficient to outrage the average voter.
But there’s more. Throughout the week on a daily basis, similar videos starring Gruber at a number of venues around the country spanning a couple of years surfaced. You can see them here (31:00 minute mark “too stupid to understand the Cadillac tax”), here (29:00 minute mark again on the Cadillac tax, former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry called “a hero” and “lack of economic understanding on the part of the American people”), here (22:00 minute mark on the Obamacare taxation con game and phony “cost control” sales pitch) and here (1:26 clip where Gruber laughs at and mocks Obamacare concerns of a Vermonter as “adolescent”).
Lest you think he is a one-hit wonder, week two of Gruber releases started out with a slide presentation he prepared wherein he said America’s senior citizens “do a terrible job” selecting health care plans. What will tomorrow bring?
Gruber, an M.I.T. professor and economist and a primary author of Obamacare, has long been a quotable embarrassment to the Obama administration. Earlier this year, videos surfaced of him explaining how coverage subsidies were only available for those in states that had their own healthcare exchanges, a position diametrically opposed to that being taken by the administration to the Supreme Court in a case that may cause Obamacare to collapse.
He recanted his comments once they went viral saying he didn’t know why he made them, chalking the remarks up to being “off-the-cuff” (more on cuffs later).
Now, however, the professor has his own daily reality TV show featuring gaffes, insults and snide remarks. Johnny Gruber’s love affair with the camera is such that he needs a sidekick to introduce each episode much like another Johnny had in avuncular Ed McMahon. Only our Johnny’s would look and sound more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLEdpDpoTTA
By the way the woman in the video, that’s not Nancy Pelosi disavowing any knowledge of Johnny, even though astute observers might think so.
Gruber was quick to disavow SOME of the comments in last week’s videos, again chalking them up to “off-the-cuff remarks.” But at this point, the “cuffs” people care about are steel ones that should be placed on his hands as he is frog-marched off to jail for fraud.
Put a checkered sports jacket on him, and you’d swear he sold you that used 1972 Buick with sawdust in the transmission, a cracked block and bald tires that broke down and burst into flames 15 minutes after you drove it off the lot, which pretty much also sums up how Obamacare has performed explaining why progressive Democrats are climbing aboard the repeal-Obamacare bandwagon.
And wouldn’t you know it that Johnny has been made rich beyond the dreams of avarice because of his snake-oil shtick? Crime and government work do pay well, or are they one and the same?
Disgust over Gruber’s comments and the thinking behind them spanned the political Spectrum. Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate, former Vermont governor and, from 2005 to 2009, chair of the Democratic National Committee, hammered him on MSNBC, of all places:
Right after Dean’s off-camera expletive prompted by Gruber’s comments he says, “The problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it. I’m serious. The core problem of the damned law is that it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is.”
When it comes to academics and other smart guys calling the shots, National Review founder Bill Buckley, as smart and well-educated man as has ever walked the planet, said in 1965, “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” To that, we can add the M.I.T. faculty starting with Johnny Gruber.
Guys like Gruber – include President Obama and most of his administration in the mix – don’t believe in the American people. In 2008, then Sen. Obama was caught demeaning rural Americans – “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” – an attitude he either borrowed from Gruber’s playbook or Gruber borrowed from his.
Calling voters “stupid” or “adolescent” isn’t a winning strategy, especially when you get caught in the act doing it. But Gruber, et al, are not ashamed of it – they don’t give a damn one way or the other what we think about it.
Certainly, they aren’t devotees of Abraham Lincoln’s wisdom: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Instead, they believe they can fool all the people all the time because they are so much smarter than us.
It’s interesting that a new Rasmussen Poll conducted on the heels of Gruber’s remarks shows that 32 percent of those surveyed do agree that the American people are too stupid to understand Obamacare, a number suspiciously close to the 36 percent of those polled by Gallup who identify with the Democratic Party.
The Gallup number represents a new low for the Democrats, but one sign that the “all of the people some of the time” on Obamacare and its backers is falling apart.
But the question is begged: If this is how Gruber and gang are gaming Obamacare, what other policy-books are being cooked by the administration – what other policy initiatives are based on a pack of lies?
