My must read of the day is "President Obama: Lying liar or media target?" in Politico:
To the media, Obamacare is such a catastrophe that mere words cannot describe it. Only comparisons can.
So Obamacare is Hurricane Katrina (The New York Times), the Iraq War ("Meet the Press"), Watergate (Bill Kristol) and "the worst thing since slavery" (Dr. Ben Carson, a columnist and Fox News contributor).
Some people who never had any faith in government have now had their faith in government shaken.
Some people who believe Obama has never told the truth about anything (including where he was born) are now wobbly with shock that he "lied" about Obamacare.
A lie, however, is an intentionally false statement. An unforgivable screw-up may be unforgivable and a screw-up, but it is different than a lie. […]
"If you like your plan, you can keep it" is a lie only if Obama intended to deceive. (But how did he intend to get away with it?)
In a news conference last week, Obama said: "With respect to the pledge I made that if you like your plan, you can keep it, I think — and I’ve said in interviews — that there is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate. It was not because of my intention not to deliver on that commitment and that promise."
Translation: I wasn’t accurate, but I didn’t lie.
Many of the analogies that have been drawn between Obamacare and other historical events are exaggerations. Some are even inaccurate. (But not my boss’s!)
But making a comparison does not mean you are saying two things are exactly the same. By definition, a comparison is "the act of looking at things to see how they are similar or different." It’s merely a thinking tool.
Roger Simon wants readers to accept the premise that criticisms of the administration are invalid if they come from people who didn’t support Obamacare to begin with. That is preposterous.
To give President Obama the benefit of the doubt that "you can keep your health plan" wasn’t a lie, you’d have to assume the president and his administration are so incompetent that in the three years after the regulation was modified no one read the legislation or the rule.
At the end of his piece, Simon provides a condescending anecdote:
Though comparisons will be made. And comparisons do sometimes help us understand things. Last Thursday night, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told an audience that he really just sort of fell into his job on the high court. The audience erupted in laughter.
Thomas corrected the audience. "No, it was like, totally, ‘Forrest Gump,’"
Thomas said.
That’s the kind of comparison I think Obama would want to avoid.
Yet that’s essentially the comparison Simon has made. In his defense, Simon has painted the president as grossly incompetent: "Good hearted, but painfully slow." Next time you have the opportunity to read a Roger Simon column, watch Forrest Gump instead.