November 3, 2013

The Sebelius lie: "We didn't have the luxury of [more website testing] with the law that says, it's go time on October 1."

On "Fox News Sunday" today, Chris Wallace played a video clip:
KATHLEEN SEBELIUS, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: I think that there -- in an ideal world would have been a lot more testing. We didn't have the luxury of that with the law that says, it's go time on October 1.
He then said:
But it turns out, that is just not true. Take a look at this. "According to the law, the enrollment period shall be, "as determined by the secretary." Secretary Sebelius. Nothing about October 1. So, she decided to go ahead with this plan of October 1ST.
Incredible... not just that she would lie but that she'd lie about something so easily shown to be false. Just astounding.

60 comments:

Curious George said...

"ncredible... not just that she would lie but that she'd lie about something so easily shown to be false. Just astounding."

Seriously? We are talking about Kathleen Sebelius. She is a pathetic horrible person.

Freeman Hunt said...

People who operate like this fail in the private sector.

Greg Hlatky said...

"Not just that she would lie but that she'd lie about something so easily shown to be false."

Maybe she thought the news media was so much in the administration's pocket that she'd be taken at her word. I mean, have they been very inquisitive in the past?

paminwi said...

I don't know. Isn't it faux news? That's what all the liberals says. Or Fox News lies!

Nothing to see here, move along, move along!

rhhardin said...

It only has to work on women.

Bob Boyd said...

She misspoke.

YoungHegelian said...

Listened to the Sunday news shows on C-span today.

Being an Obama administration official on a news show is now starting to remind me of this famous painting.

kimsch said...

Just astounding.

Not astounding at all. It's the arrogance of the Obama Administration. Their bubble is such that no one they know ever questions them. And for such a "tech savvy" administration they always forget that everything lives on the internet forever, and we don't have to get a FOIA to read a bill or a law.

rhhardin said...

It only has to work on women because women determine the narrative that the MSM runs with, by what they'll stay tuned to.

If women are satisfied with it, they'll watch that narrative and that narrative takes over the terrain, as it has so far.

If women won't go with it, they'll tune out and the narrative will change to get the women back.

Soap opera women are the nation's editors.

Left Bank of the Charles said...

If only they'd thought to slap on the label "pilot program for early enrollment". Then they could be out there talking about how it's still just early enrollment and they've understandably got a few glitches to work out and thanking all the early enrollees for helping them.

I suppose though it's not a lie if someone else told her the law said October 1 and she never read it herself.

Still, floating the idea that a working website is a luxury not an entitlement ...

rhhardin said...

Feminism has to start teaching women about gender differences.

In particular, foolishness ("He means well") is the female failing.

It's not hard to defend against but you have to know about it.

The corresponding male failing is skepticism ("How can I tell for sure...").

Hagar said...

I don't think Sebelius "lied." I think she is absolutely clueless about what goes on in her own department.

YoungHegelian said...

@rh

In particular, foolishness ("He means well") is the female failing.

Oh, rh, we grew up in the time when "Sugar & Spice & everything nice -- That's what little girls are made of" was just the ending of a misandric nursery rhyme. Now, it's a whole industry.

Paul said...

Test Pilot: "SIR!! The new XB-382 is not ready to fly. If we fly it, it will crash"

Obama: "That is ok, I'm sure the bugs will fix themselves. Fly it anyway."

Sebelius: "When I say fly, it will FLY!"

Test Pilot: "But sir, this could KILL someone."

Obama: "That is ok, I'm really good at killing people. "

pm317 said...

By declaring "astounding" Althouse is trying to wake dumb people like Scher.

Paul said...

Freeman Hunt said...

"People who operate like this fail in the private sector."

Yea, but such people bankrupt companies in the process.

Obama and Sebelius will bankrupt us all.

Shouting Thomas said...

You know what's really astounding?

Candy Crowley still has a job on a major network!

Original Mike said...

Ahh, but when she lies, it's done in service to the greater good.

Isn't that what the left is saying about the "you can keep your health insurance" lie? We had to tell the lie to get people out of their "substandard" insurance plans. They'll just do it again over this. It doesn't matter if it's demonstrably false.

augustus said...

It really is not astounding, people who lack a conscience or who are never held to account do such things all the time.

Anonymous said...

As for paintings, I was thinking more along the lines of dogs playing poker.

They can't do that!

John henry said...

"I did not do anything wrong. The hatch just blew. It was a glitch! Why won't anybody believe me?"

Fred Ward playing Gus Grissom channeling his inner John Belushi and reminding us of Obama.


http://youtu.be/2F8XgJE4hA4

rehajm said...

The unwavering creative support you receive from your media allies convinces you no lie is too large. Until it is.

madAsHell said...

I think the date was set to minimize damage at the polls. By November, 2014, there will be a complete spin, and this will be mostly forgotten.

William said...

In the Zimmerman case, I watched the media rewrite history almost as it unfolded. I don't think Obamacare will be an insurmountable challenge for hem. They'll find someone with a pre existing condition who, with tears in his eyes, will tell the camera how the ACA saved his life. They'll interview some insurance executive on his yacht or some doctor in his mansion and let them present their views on why Obamacare sucks.

Glenn Howes said...

My impression was that once the date was set, and there was an earlier date when the Secretary was required to set the date, then the date was set. Presumably, last year when she set it to Oct. 1st it would have seemed plausible. There's a lot of lying going on, but this might not be an instance of it.

cassandra lite said...

She lied, which in the Obama WH is a prerequisite for keeping your job.

The only two people who've lost their jobs are the only two didn't lie.

chickelit said...

Shouting Thomas said...
You know what's really astounding?

Candy Crowley still has a job on a major network!


I blame the "old girls network."

Crimso said...

The law being the law and all, it's good to see the employer mandate will happen as the law dictates.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

Actually, the really funny thing about this is that the date for the "employer mandate" really is hard-written into the law; but the Administration decided that, hey, it would just read so much better if we pretended that the enacted text had a different date in it.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

Dammit, Crimso, I had dibs on that :-)

Crimso said...

And do you know why they tell such lies? Because they believe a certain percentage of the voting public is stupid and will swallow their load of shit without question. Just enough to let them keep getting away with it. I suspect they're right, since they...keep getting away with it.

jacksonjay said...


What Hagar said!

Crimso said...

MDT and I will be meeting at dawn. I'll let her choose the weapons.

jacksonjay said...


Phony Scandal!

MSM is already working ever spin angle possible! My favorite is that "only" 5 million people will be effected, ignoring the HHS estimate that 93 million will be effected!

Davy Gregory gave Mittens a good grilling today on MTP! Why in the Hell did you do this to us, Mitt?

Lydia said...

You know what's really astounding?

Candy Crowley still has a job on a major network!


Yeah. Wonder if that will hold since the whole topic of the second debate is coming to the fore again with the publication on Nov. 5 of a new book that takes a close look at what was happening in the White House after Romney destroyed Obama in the first debate:

He’d blown the first debate. Now he was on the verge of blowing the second and risking his reelection. In an excerpt from their new book, Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann describe the moment when a president was talked away from the edge."

And, lo and behold, Candy waves that piece of paper. But I'm sure she never, ever had any conservations with, say, David Axelrod or David Plouffe, aren't you?

Elliott A said...

CLEARLY, these people are not populating the same planet the rest of us are. They are WAY down the rabbit hole.

Anonymous said...

Longer Sebelius is in the news, it is BAD news for Hillary!

You will see that by end of the year (during Christmas time), Sebelius will decide that she wants to spend time with her family in Kansas.

No one can stop the Hillary! Common-Ground juggernaut with ONE exception.

The one exception: Scott Walker/Kelly Ayotte.

Oso Negro said...

Oh, pick on a 65-year-old lady, will ya?

grackle said...

Incredible... astounding.

Only to those who voted for Obama the second time. The rest of us knew. We tried to warn, to point out the incredible, astounding lies already uttered by Obama and his minions but folks did not listen, didn't believe or just didn't care. Or disliked Romney so much they stayed away from the polls or actually voted for Obama.

Why should they stop lying now? They will easily get away with these lies and others yet to come. The MSM dictates opinion in this nation and the MSM will never give up on Obama. The denial by the "journalist" in the Blogginheads video post that Obama lied should tell all of us how this is going to ultimately play out.

Obama is just another(better-looking) Al Sharpton, playing the Race Game at the highest level. What I think is incredible and astounding is that so many are so surprised. Highly educated folks are supposed to be smarter than that. I would have guessed that the educated elite knew it was all lies but wanted Obama anyway.

Obamacare will not go away, will not implode, explode or fizzle. It was locked in when Obama won his second term. Obamacare will morph – is already morphing what with the illegal exemptions and delays granted by Obama.

Prediction: The unions WILL be exempted. Congress and their staffs will be either exempted or get a huge subsidy so it will cost them almost nothing.

Better be ready for a single payer system as the "fix" for Obamacare. Single payer is already being "floated" to gauge reaction. Those pesky young healthy citizens will never sign up in numbers enough to make the scheme succeed as it is. If I were them I would stop using the term "single payer." Oh, and retiree medical benefits from universities will also disappear sooner or later – just as in any large corporation. The educated elite will always have the income to buy the good private healthcare like they do in England. But it will cost them dearly and THAT will rankle.

After 3 or 4 years all will calm down, the yoke will be firmly in place, and socialized medicine will be the law of the land.

The Godfather said...

Look, there's always been this aspect of the federal government, that sometimes it's more important how you spin the problems than how you do the job. But the Obama Administration has raised this to a whole new level. Sebelius says. I take responsibility, but she doesn't. No one expected her to write the codes, of even to oversee the people who write the codes. But back in the day, she would have known that if the website roll-out was a political disaster, they would have thrown her on the funeral pyre -- so she would have had an incentive to do everything she could to lean on the people whose job it was to lean on the people whose job it was to oversee the people whose job it was to write the codes.

This doesn't happen anymore. Nobody gets blamed in the Obama Administration for screwing up. The Obamacare website is a disaster, but Sebelius won't be fired. The IRS illegally targeted conservative groups, but no one will be fired. The State Department refused to provide additional security for Benghazi, and the Secretary of State is praised as one of the greatest in history.

And I won't even mention Fast and Furious.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

Crimso,

MDT and I will be meeting at dawn. I'll let her choose the weapons.

Hmmm. I'm torn between viola bows and chili peppers. I've been known to be fairly dangerous with both.

Skeptical Voter said...

Face it Ann--the Bamster and his appointees lie. That's just what they do. It's as natural as breathing for them.

And you marvel that they lie at something where they are so easily caught. But give a born liar the choice between lying and telling the truth, they revert to default mode--every time.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Incredible... not just that she would lie but that she'd lie about something so easily shown to be false. Just astounding.

I suppose if you are going to lie, to lie big is the better bet.

The bigger the better.

The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

Hagar said...

According to NYT it is not lying if it's for doing good.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The damage of the Obama lies are not so much in the 'accomplishments'* of the lies per say... but the legitimization of lying as a worthwhile tool of governing... if not yet virtuous.

Clinton's effective 'it's not lying if it's about sex' defense opened some sort of door, window, word, milky mouse

(*they had to lie to pass it)

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

mickey mouse

Levi Starks said...

Of course she had a choice, a choice between looking bad, and looking bad.
Wait.....

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The Edward M. Kennedy Prize could double as a contribution.

Think how many Booker's the theater could produce.

Carl said...

Incredible... not just that she would lie but that she'd lie about something so easily shown to be false.

Oh nonsense. The stuff they lied about in 2008-12 was just as easily shown to be false, but nobody was interested. I suspect the only reason the same people are interested now is that Obama is constitutionally barred from re-election. He can't fail to be re-elected, because he can't even run, so now it's safe to discover -- I'm shocked, shocked! -- that he was a lying bullshit artist all along.

Everyone got their frisson of helping elect The First Black President, and re-electing him, and now we can say oh but had we only known at the time...!, very firmly locking the barn door so no similar horse magically materializing therein can possibly escape, and move on to...the First Woman President! Or something equally banal.

David said...

There is no material consequence for political lying. Unless a politician lies about sex. But about their actual work, it's expected. They do it literally every day. The lying is not unusual. The unusual part is that a member of the news media takes the trouble to point out the lie with particularity. No cute Pinnochio rating. Just calls it a lie.

If this were the NYT rather than Fox News, it would really be a surprise.

YoungHegelian said...

@Carl,

I suspect the only reason the same people are interested now is that Obama is constitutionally barred from re-election

The reason the media cares about the Obamacare clustefuck is because Obama has now hosed the Democrats coming into the 2014 elections. He just gave the Republicans a cudgel with which to beat the Democrats who all had to back the passage of ObamaCare or else. Worst of all, he just made the Republican stand against ObamaCare that shut down the government, look in retrospect not to be an insane act of kamikaze politics, but rather to be a prescient act that offered the Democrats a face-saving out of the 10/1 deadline. It was an offer that the Demos now look insane for refusing to take.

Anonymous said...

Why is this incredible? While it may be very easily shown to be false, how many ordinary people take any time to get informed?

Sebelius, like most other politicians, is making the calculation that the proportion of people who discover her lie are small and that out of those who do, even fewer are genuine swing voters to whom this will make a difference.

MayBee said...

How can people want government to run so many things once it becomes obvious how easily they lie to us?

Clyde said...

Who could possibly imagine that Barack Obama could have anyone working under him who is not as honest as he is? I'm only surprised that Pinocchio and Joe Isuzu don't have cabinet positions.

Larry J said...

Carl said...
Incredible... not just that she would lie but that she'd lie about something so easily shown to be false.

Oh nonsense. The stuff they lied about in 2008-12 was just as easily shown to be false, but nobody was interested.


There are millions of us who've been pointing out since 2008 that Obama is the Emperor with no Clothes. How is it that we could plainly see him for the nothing he is but so many others, especially the self-proclaimed "elite", couldn't?

Who in their right mind couldn't see this coming? From the Washington Post yesterday (emphasis added):

In the end, the economic team never had a chance: The president had already made up his mind, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid. Obama wanted his health policy team — led by Nancy-Ann De­Parle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform — to be in charge of the law’s arduous implementation. Since the day the bill became law, the official said, the president believed that “if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.”

Three and a half years later, such insularity — in that decision and others that would follow — has emerged as a central factor in the disastrous rollout of the new federal health insurance marketplace, casting doubt on the administration’s capacity to carry out such a complex undertaking.

“They were running the biggest start-up in the world, and they didn’t have anyone who had run a start-up, or even run a business,” said David Cutler, a Harvard professor and health adviser to Obama’s 2008 campaign, who was not the individual who provided the memo to The Washington Post but confirmed he was the author. “It’s very hard to think of a situation where the people best at getting legislation passed are best at implementing it. They are a different set of skills.”

Abdul Abulbul Amir said...


It may not be a lie. It could be incompetence in that she may not understand the law she is supposed to implement.

traditionalguy said...

That is the new way it's done in DC:
Confident assertions of big lies as truth covered up by a media conspiracy accompanied by a drumbeat slandering truth tellers as the problem preventing "good government."

Sebelius is a good player.

Pettifogger said...

Almost everyone in the administration will tell such lies, surely in part because, for so many years, they have been able to count on the MSM covering for them. If that is changing, things will get interesting, because I doubt Progressives'ability to adjust in the short run.

Strelnikov said...

Why shouldn't she tell a self-serving lie, even though one easily found out? That is the basis of every Leftist operation.

Note than when she told the lie, no one questioning her was prepared to contradict it. Result: A win for the team.

Anonymous said...

Really, Ann? You're surprised that a Democrat politician lied? Why?

All the Democrats have is lies and fear. The American people don't want what the Democrats are selling. The Democrats don't want to offer anything that Americans would actually want, because the Democrats hate the majority of America. So the Democrats lie.

Once you've become willing to say that "The Constitution is a Living Document", and that there's a "Constitutional right to abortion", telling ant other just becomes par for the course.