George Rebane
Obama, astute politician with global aspirations or functional idiot (who are his handlers)? In these last months he has my pendulum swinging again, literally from day to day. Obamacare’s healthcare.gov predictably blew through its 1dec13 deadline as an ongoing dysfunctional front end for the next phase of socialized medicine. His legion of lackeys are on the airwaves today talking about “dramatic progress” while admitting that the site is still not “performing optimally”. Hell, it isn’t performing at all according to 20th century WWW standards, let alone those of the 21st century.
In commercial terms, the site is not even providing minimal functionality. The front end UI (user interface) design is sophomoric, totally unreliable, and its back end that sends data to the insurance providers does not work. That yet needs to be designed and built. But few people listening to the administration’s hacks can add the required 2 and 2 to understand that the more they brag about their ‘progress’ in fixing the site during the last two months, the more they indict themselves for perpetrating months (years?) of fraud on the American public (please look up the definition of fraud).
The best case that could be made for the administration is that they have been and continue to be massively incompetent in everything beyond bamboozling their preponderantly ignorant constituents. Today a she-hack on Fox News was telling us that everything is working fine because 70% of Obamacare recipients will eventually get subsidies. And they don’t want to touch the devastating stat that for every one that has successfully applied for Obamacare through the exchanges, fifty have lost their health insurance.
But the next Big Lie queued up that has yet to impact is “If you like your doctor, you get to keep your doctor.” The truth is that physicians are leaving the ranks of Medicare and Medicaid providers in droves as these programs become the real fiscal disaster recipients of those forced into Obamacare. And that is more so as next year hundreds of thousands of small businesses start dropping their employees from health plans that worked beautifully for tens of millions of workers. Obamacare will do anything except lower the national cost of healthcare in addition to reducing the level and access to health services. Deficits will soar. But enough about Obamacare for now, this program has tons more disasters to play out in the coming months and years.
The President’s foreign policy accomplishments lie in tatters. Former CIA and NSA chief Gen M. Hayden makes a good case that Obama’s minions have now abrogated the UN resolutions stating that Iran may not continue to refine fissile materials. Kerry’s missteps have made it certain that after the next phase of negotiations Iran will become a “nuclear threshold state” because its development is already “far too close to (producing) a nuclear weapon.”
Obama’s weakness and blunders in Iraq, now Afghanistan, Syria, in addition to Iran have convinced the world’s bad actors to step out and start testing the new boundaries of America’s deteriorating resolve to protect its interests. China’s sudden and unexpected extension of its ‘air defense identification zone’ boundary to include the Japanese Senkaku Islands is both “dangerous and dumb” according to Gen Hayden. You can bet that Russia, North Korea, and other authoritarians will step up their probings all over the world as the US cuts back on its military budgets and ability to project power. Abetted by poor economies, the world will now become a much more dangerous place.
And if that is not enough, former NSA contractor Snowden, now in Russia, is threatening to release the remaining tranche of stolen documents. Those in the know uniformly agree that that release will be “catastrophic for our security as a nation.” Snowden has made it known that if anything untoward happens to him, those documents will become public. For anyone familiar with systems and web programming, it is not that hard to code up a ‘dead man’s switch’ that requires regular encrypted deactivation. If a deactivation is missed, the program executes and transmits the catastrophic tranche of documents to several servers located all over the world.
There is a very good chance that the US will make a sub rosa deal with Snowden in which he winds up with an identity change and a comfortable life out of the public eye, but under the secure watch of our intel organs in a kind of a Mexican stand-off. If the documents are released, he will be quietly and quickly killed, else he gets to live as the intelligence and political harm of that document tranche decays over time. And there are other scenarios.
[2dec13 update] Well, this morning the ‘mission accomplished’ banners are fluttering in the hot air dispensed by Team Obama and its media minions. National Propaganda Radio led the parade with a piece on the “dramatic progress” made on healthcare.gov. The problems with Obamacare, as seen by NPR's national correspondent Cokie Roberts, turned out to be all due to Republicans who have now poisoned the atmosphere to such an extent that “they don’t even want to have their picture taken with the President.” No kidding. But she failed to mention the real news that it’s the Dems who don’t want to be seen with their fearless (feckless?) leader.
In any case, “progress” and “improvement” since 1 October are now touted as stand-ins for the most recently promised accomplishment. Always in short supply from this administration is the simple truth that “the system isn’t working and the website is not fixed.” More sober reporting on the status of Obamacare can be found here and here.
rebanesruminations.com 
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