Why Obama lied about Obamacare

John Podhoretz:

People are puzzled: Why would Barack Obama have lied about how wonderfully everything was going to go with ObamaCare when officials in his administration knew perfectly well that disaster was going to strike?

In one sense, the answer is simple: At the time, just before Oct. 1, Republicans were insisting ObamaCare be delayed or defunded. The president and his team weren’t going to give the enemy the satisfaction of agreeing — or the potent ammunition that would have come from a rueful admission the system wasn’t ready.

Today, a bipartisan agreement to delay ObamaCare seems like it would have been a pretty good deal. It didn’t look that way at all in the last two weeks of September.

But there’s a deeper reason he and his people lied: They did it because they could. They did it because nearly five years in the White House had given Obama and his team confidence they would not face the music and they could finesse the problems until they got fixed.

Consider the events that would have been unprecedented scandals in a Republican administration — with teams of reporters digging and scratching daily at every nook and cranny in every bureaucratic corridor — that have instead been covered dutifully but with relatively little passion and almost no follow-up. Why? Because it would have hurt Obama, that’s why.

First, the Obama Justice Department.

Attorney General Eric Holder has survived three scandals that would have felled a Republican. His department attempted to soft-pedal its responsibility for the so-called “gunwalking” policy called Fast and Furious — which led to the murders of US border agents by Mexican drug-cartel members with guns effectively provided to the killers by the Justice Department.

He approved the secret surveillance of Fox News Channel reporter James Rosen in a leak investigation on the outrageous grounds that Rosen was a possible “co-conspirator” in an act of espionage. And he approved similar tactics against reporters at the Associated Press in another leak investigation.

Holder’s still there. Obama defends him. When was the last time you heard Rosen’s name mentioned, or the AP story referenced, or Fast and Furious come up?

Second, the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS’s own acknowledgement that it had targeted conservative groups with anti-liberal agendas has led to shamed retirements, hasty changes at the top of the agency and officials pleading the First Amendment. These efforts were clearly undertaken to find means by which to aid Democratic efforts in the 2010 and 2012 election. One can only wonder at what would have been done to George W. Bush by the media had similar outrages been perpetated on leftist groups in 2003 and 2004. Obama suffered . . . a little. A very little.

Third, the State Department.

The unconscionable behavior of State Department and White House officials during and after the killing of four Americans in Benghazi at the height of the 2012 race — during which the American people were deliberately and consciously misled — has had no lasting consequences whatsoever. Obama felt free to select the chief liar, Susan Rice, as his national-security adviser without experiencing a moment’s fear about how her appointment might become a scandal.

Fourth, making law from the White House.
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There is more.

While it has been clear for sometime to conservatives that the media has been an enabler of Obama's abuses, Podhoretz puts his finger on why they are not this time and it is because the failures are a betrayal of liberalism this time.   But they are still largely AWOL on what are Obama's other scandals.