Obama the scare monger

David Hirsayni:

President Barack Obama grimly warned America this week that if his health care plans fail, the nation will go "bankrupt."

Sure, adding another trillion-dollar entitlement program to our $12 trillion debt may seem like a counterintuitive way to stave off economic ruin, but who are we to argue? The president's got smarts.

And like with so many issues, Obama adorned his rhetoric with sharp warnings of calamity should he fail, fabricated consensus to buttress his case and a promise of rapture should he succeed.

You'll remember it was Obama who cautioned that failure to pass the stimulus boondoggle would "turn a crisis into a catastrophe." He claimed that a failure to act on cap and trade will lead us to "irreversible catastrophe" and a failure to pass a government-run health care system will mean "more Americans dying every day."

It's like living the Old Testament. Scary.

Holy burning bushes! Did you know that everyone, and I mean everyone, agrees with the president? Obama stressed this week that you can "talk to every health care economist out there, and they will tell you that whatever ideas are — whatever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve and starting to reduce costs for families, businesses and government, those elements are in this bill."

Not "some" or "most" or "Peter Orszag on a two-day bender" but "every" health care economist in the entire world would tell you as much.

This sort of exaggeration reminds us of another whopper the president unloaded in January while promoting the stimulus plan, when he claimed that "there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help jump start the economy."

No disagreement whatsoever . . . until the CATO Institute found 200 economists from major universities around the country that did have a disagreement — and judging from the stimulus plan's impressive impotence, perhaps Obama should have lent them an ear.

So when Obama says that "whatever ideas exist" to help with cost are featured in the health care bills, let's chalk it up to his propensity to exaggerate, embellish, or worse.

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Obama is also the first to accuse his opponents of using scare tactics to discredit the Democrat bill. Both sides exaggerate to make a point, but Obama stretches than tendency to its breaking point.