Burning stupid hypocrisy
Now that they have performed a near-perfect National Faceplant with the Great Hostage Taking of 2013, the Republican Party has decided to wave the white flag and return to actually helping move the country forward in a spirit of bipartisanship.
Hah! Just kidding.
In reality, after spending the past three years trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act at every juncture AND performing their historic National Faceplant, the Republicans are actually staying the course. They’ve have taken a page out of the playbooks of Glenn Beck and faux-pimp James O’Keefe and have turned their attention to getting Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius fired. Why? Because the website that provides a portal into allowing people to sign up for affordable health insurance wasn’t perfect out of the chute.
Here’s Reince Preibus, chair of the RNC, in an op-ed in Politico:
What a train wreck. Even former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs says, “This was bungled badly,” adding “I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work.”I agree. And the first person fired should be Secretary Sebelius.
This message was amplified in an email sent to the GOP.com mailing list titled, “She has to go”.
Despite Sebelius’ confident predictions that the site would be accessible on October 1st, millions of Americans are still struggling to enroll online since then. Sebelius tried to label the fundamental flaws as “glitches.”This is more than just a glitch – this is systemic failure.
Despite three years to prepare, Sebelius ignored red flags and repeated warnings that ObamaCare wasn’t ready for primetime…Sebelius needs to be held accountable for this rollout malpractice.
The even have a Fire Sebelius website.
The reality, of course, is that Priebus doesn’t really care if there are some initial problems with Healthcare.gov. What he cares about is making sure that he scores political points off from anything that makes the Obama administration look bad, even if it means destroying someone’s career in the process.
The irony in all of this is that Priebus himself admits that “millions of Americans” are eager to sign up for affordable, quality health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, a law that he and his Republican cadre have spent enormous amounts of time, money, and energy trying to convince us all that it’s something Americans don’t want.
Now the GOP can go back to their "millions getting health insurance is terrible"/ "people can't get health insurance fast enough" argument.
— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) October 17, 2013
Here’s the thing: most of these Americans are going without health insurance now. They’ve been waiting for years, even decades, for something to be done to help them get affordable health insurance so that they don’t have to go to the emergency room for their healthcare. The deadline to apply isn’t for a few months and, even if you pay NOW, that insurance doesn’t kick in until next year. So, while the website is flawed, it can and will be fixed and these “millions of Americans” will be able to sign up for life saving health insurance before the deadline arrives.
They’ve waited this long so waiting a bit longer for a more perfect website is simply not an issue, as Amy pointed out in this morning. The fact is, they have to wait anyway. And, a year from now, nobody will remember that the website had a crappy roll out.
No matter how much Priebus channels his inner Beck and his inner O’Keefe, Sebelius has no plans to resign and the Obama administration has no plans to fire her.
One more bit of irony/hypocrisy: In 2009 when the GOP rolled out its new website, it was a complete disaster:
The Republican National Committee on Tuesday tried to downplay criticism of its newly unveiled website www.gop.com, which was plagued by embarrassing omissions and numerous crashes on its first day of operation…[T]he site was inaccessible for much of the day.RNC New Media Director Todd Herman said the site was struggling from attracting “an enormous amount of traffic” […]
Asked why the site kept crashing, Steele quipped, “It’s a little thing called traffic.”
“This thing has exploded off the blocks,” [RNC Chairman Michael] Steele insisted. “It’s a good thing when you get another email from Todd saying, ‘It’s down again.’”
I don’t recall the GOP firing Michael Steele over that “disaster”.
Meanwhile, the Republicans wasted $24 billion just in the past three weeks with the Great Hostage Taking of 2013, all to stop a law that doesn’t even affect ~80% of Americans and helps the rest. So much for their hypocritical fake concern that the government is wasting money.
How many people could get health insurance for 24 billion dollars?
— Anne C. Savage (@Anne_Savage) October 18, 2013
Photo by Chris Savage | Eclectablog
