I normally don’t like to watch Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, because he doesn’t always get it right, according to most of the American people. But in an interview he had with Obama, aired on the day of the 2014 Super Bowl, he did quite well.
O’Reilly quickly gets the disingenuous formalities out of the way by thanking Obama for “doing this” interview. Obama disingenuously replies “Great to be with you.” Somehow I get the sense that it’s not really great for Obama to be with O’Reilly, knowing that he’s going to be grilled for the next ten minutes.
Right out of the gate O’Reilly brings up the healthcare debacle, erroneously titled the Affordable Care Act, and better known as Obamacare, and sets up his first question. Upon the October 1st rollout of the law, there were problems with the computers. (Actually the problem he was referring to was the massive amount of confusion people had getting onto the healthcare.gov website to enroll in the unconstitutional mandate, not the computers involved.) “When did you know there were going to be problems with those computers,” O’Reilly asks.
Obama casually responds that they anticipated that there were going to be glitches in the rollout, as there always are in any high-tech system, he just didn’t know the “degree” of the glitches. Well, that makes us all feel a lot better. For $634 million, the estimated cost paid to a Canadian tech company to put the website together, one would presume there should be no glitches. Further, intensive testing should have prevented that.
Trying to weasel his way out of the bad situation he finds himself in, Obama retorts that the “good news” is that they immediately figured out what they were going to do to fix the problem and in a month and a half’s time it’s running fine because three million people have signed up for it. Three million out of 310 million people in the United States seems like a fine proportion.
O’Reilly informs the president that an Associated Press poll shows that only 8% feel that it is working well. Oops. Why wasn’t Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius fired, since she had to have known it wasn’t going to work, O’Reilly asks.
Glibly, Obama states that his main priority is to make sure it delivers for the American people. Well, most of the American people want this entire law to go away. They don’t want to be burdened by an enormous bureaucracy telling them what they can and cannot have where their health is concerned. The federal government has no business coming between patients and their doctors. It does not belong in healthcare, period.
Refusing to answer the question and boasting of the non-accomplishments they’ve made, Obama continues with the tired theme of their objective of trying to improve the website and making sure that people can get better and more affordable healthcare. However, Obamacare is neither better nor more affordable than what we already had.
After being pressed about Sebelius not being held accountable, Obama assures O’Reilly that they’re “holding everybody up and down the line accountable.” But Sebelius has not been fired, thus, not held accountable. Why do I get the feeling that Sebelius will be held as accountable for the healthcare.gov mess as Attorney General Eric Holder was held accountable for the Fast and Furious scandal, or as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was held accountable for the murders of four Americans at the American Embassy in Libya?
“Was it the biggest mistake of your presidency to tell the nation over and over ‘if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance,’” O’Reilly asked next. I was actually really proud of him for asking that. It’s a question that anyone from ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN would never think about asking. Obama admitted that it was something he regretted (although he makes excuses for saying it) and that he tries to focus not on the fumbles but on the next play. So, following his football analogy, when a team has an inordinate amount of fumbles, interceptions, missed tackles, etc., they usually lose the game.
When asked about Libya and whether or not Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Obama the incident was an act of terror, Obama again evaded the point of the question and gave his own answer. This was a yes or no question, but instead of answering yes or no, Obama took the familiar route of skating around the real issue. Which begs another question: What is Obama trying to hide?
Why this is so important is because the White House sent then U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice out on five different Sunday morning news shows to lie to the American people and tell them that this act of terror was a result of an anti-Islamic video some amateur wannabe filmmaker made and posted on youtube.com. Never mind no one had ever heard of him. And never mind no one in Libya even knew about such a video.
That Sunday, when this became an even bigger story, the White House and Obama knew they were busted, caught red-handed lying to the American people, and like they always do, scattered to find a way out of it. Much like the way Obama scattered to find a way out of O’Reilly’s questions by saying “when you look at the videotape of this whole thing unfolding, this is not some systematic, well-organized process.”
Um, excuse me. Heavy artillery used at an American embassy on the 11th anniversary of our nation’s most devastating terrorist attack was just an informal uprising? Are we to believe that there were troublemakers loitering outside our embassy who happened to run into some other troublemakers also loitering outside the embassy that day? And it was a coincidence that they had weapons that could blow up the embassy? Sounds like a well-organized process to me.
The final scandal O’Reilly hit Obama with was the IRS targeting TEA Party groups. The president doesn’t recall meeting with former IRS chief Douglas Shulman, although he was provided with clearance inside the White House 157 times. Obama claims his being there had to do with routine meetings about healthcare.gov and denies that it had anything at all to do with targeting certain groups. Why, they’ve had multiple hearings on it, says Obama. Mass corruption in the White House? There’s not even a smidgeon of corruption, he asserts.
Well, there you have it. That proves it. And we’re just supposed to take his word for it. As entertaining as that interview was, I thought Bruno Mars and Red Hot Chili Peppers were just a smidgeon better.
