OPINION:
The historic blunders of President Obama’s embarrassing health care rollout demonstrate spectacularly the utter failure of what? Let me tell you. They are the blunders of what was once called the “brightest generation” in American history, the 1960s generation. It did not start with Mr. Obama. His blunders were just a continuance of their blunders.
By the 1960s generation, I mean the pot-smoking, war-protesting, guitar-strumming children of the left — not the majority from the 1960s generation, not the silent majority, but the minority. They were the miracle workers in politics: Jean-Francois Kerry, the Clintons, Al Gore, Joe Biden and all the rest. Their sages, such as Saul Alinsky, formalized their balderdash in learned tomes for their successors; for instance, our president. The media kept whooping it up for them. Their every pratfall was portrayed as a great success. Even the health care rollout is presented as a success.
The health care disaster, first suggested to the American people by Hillary Clinton in the 1990s and then rammed through a Democratic majority of both chambers of Congress by Mr. Obama and the dunderheads on his staff, is the most incompetent piece of legislation in American history. Not incidentally, it is the most energetic piece of legislation in American history. It envisages a nation of robust Americans mandated by law to have perfect health and then to die, all according to a national standard formulated by the Independent Payment Advisory Board.
Just consider a part of the master plan — the rollout. It utterly failed. When the quacks are done tweaking its various computer portals and other applications to get them upright and facing the dubious American public, the next disaster will be the hackers’ feast. HealthCare.gov will be a swindler’s dream come true. Its problems will go on for years to come. Donald Trump saw it all coming. At The American Spectator’s annual Robert L. Bartley Dinner last week, he incisively remarked that all Mr. Obama had to do was go to Google or Amazon, and they would have gotten it right. They would probably have volunteered their services.
Yet now we know that the Obama administration had the services of Michelle Obama’s college chum. At Princeton, Mrs. Obama became fast friends with Toni Townes-Whitley, who now is employed by CGI Federal. The administration handed CGI a no-bid government contract to build HealthCare.gov, and they blew it. Yet that is the way crony capitalism works. If it was not such a stupendous disaster, we might never know what a con job was at work here.
Crony capitalism is now the 1960s brats’ favorite instrumentality. There was a day when the 1960s brats advised America to take up the “mixed economy” with big government quietly in control behind the scenes. Then they favored big government stepping forward. They favored socialism. Now they favor the likes of CGI with its no-bid contracts. They favor crony capitalism.
With Obamacare, crony capitalism has been given control of fully one-sixth of the American economy, and we can see how effective it is. With the military-industrial complex, the cronies will have still more of the economy, and with the proliferation of no-bid contracts, soon the military will be as effective as Obamacare. Then there is Wall Street. Such monstrosities as Dodd-Frank will soon give the crony capitalists control of Wall Street.
Let the rollout of Obamacare serve as a stark warning to us. America is done with the 1960s brats and their idiotic disciples.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of the American Spectator and the author of “The Death of Liberalism” (Thomas Nelson, 2012).
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