Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Gruber


The Republicans did NOT buy his bullshit. 

Republican voters rejected the entire process as perversion of our cherished system. His lies only worked on Democrats who are willing to overlook that series of perversions.

Children who grew up with Schoolhouse Rock "I'm Just a Bill" with their Saturday cartoons all knew that the way the ACA was passed is flatly unacceptable.  

He is calling Democrat voters stupid outright, not Republican voters nor their representatives. They were literally shut out of the process behind locked doors. Everyone observing knows that to be wrong. Saying voters wouldn't have gone for it without his misrepresentation does not make sense to people who rejected the whole thing as pure lies and malfeasance straight up from the start. Members of his own party are the people who should be offended, but they wanted the same result so yet another effrontery they're willing to overlook for the sake of protecting their party. They would scream bloody murder endlessly for decades to come were parties reversed.  He is calling Democrats stupid. Then he lies about his lying. How he manages to keep his job at MIT is beyond me. Why any student would sign up for a class of his there defies reason. Were he to sit there on the panel and say nothing at all the tell would still be apparent in the way he nervously knits his hands showing his audience a silent insecurity. It suggests some unspoken psychic disruption that is quite sinister. His pleasant soft tender smile tends to aggravate more than ameliorate. 

26 comments:

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

We'll put ChipA. After reading your well reasoned brief it dawns on me where I seemed this before.

Gruber is trying to pull a Dan Rather "fake but accurate" bit but of a massive scale and scope.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

That is how "the big lie" works btw.

edutcher said...

I like that Ernst Stavro Gruber thing.

So many of them come across that way.

Anonymous said...

How he manages to keep his job at MIT is beyond me.

This assumes Gruber's example represents an aberration, which my anecdotal experiences of late among several institutions have not supported.

Fr Martin Fox said...

I love the argument being made in defense: Republicans lie to the voters, so it's perfectly OK for Democrats to do the same.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

A neighbor's cat shows up regularly in our garden to hunt voles among the Lambs Ears.

From what I can tell by watching the cat's back-and-forth pouncing and clawing behavior, it's a pretty terrifying experience for the voles.

I seriously doubt that the cat thinks much about our national politics.

AllenS said...

And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter -- Gruber

I have to say that those words are accurate.

Need proof? Look at the POTUS and the VPOTUS.

Christy said...

Well done Chip. I am appalled that THE Engineering School has him on the faculty. Imagine, if you will, an Engineer from M.I.T. who designed a nuclear weapon he knew had an 80% chance of blowing up on launch from a silo, ship, plane.... He misrepresents it to DOD because he knows he can dazzle them with expertise and, in his opinion, we are better off with a 20% success rate than nothing at all. Or a M.I.T. Civil Engineer who sells DOT a bridge he hides the known flaws from, a geneticist who sells HHS an Ebola cure that only works if the patient takes the full course of meds and mutates into a more virulent strain if not. Such deceit would lose an architect or engineer his or her license.

Dad Bones said...

There's always room for another Gruber in the IRS.

Michael Haz said...

How he manages to keep his job at MIT is beyond me.

Tenure. It is a magic barrier that makes its owners bulletproof.

Michael Haz said...

In my neck of the words, the name Gruber conjures up the relentless barrage of commercials run for local tort attorney David Gruber, known for his catch line "one call - that's all!"

ndspinelli said...

"Obama lied, people died." That needs to be our new mantra.

bagoh20 said...

I'm not one of the dummies, but I know a lot of people who this guy suckered like a Bernie Madoff investor. At least I had a choice to not give Madoff my money. Thanks for dragging me into your scam, boneheads, and making me one of the victims too. This is a basic flaw of socialism. It always ends up rule by the least honest by appealing to the most naive.

Unknown said...

A scheme passed on party line vote, in the dead of night.

I repeat this so often, because, imagine the outrage from the media and the dems (but I repeat myself) if the R-party did such a thing.

Good morning!
It's -1 right now in Denver. (feels like -19)
Bullcrap right there.
High today 5. I doubt we will even get there.

virgil xenophon said...

Hazman/

Must be a franchise marketing operation. In New Orleans that EXACT same "One Call That's All" has been used by an ambulance-chaser named Morris Bart for years

Unknown said...

...lifted from a commenter on top.


"That's really the only position for Gruber to take. The basis of health insurance, as long as it has existed, has been precisely that healthy people pay in and sick people get money. But traditional insurance did so at actuarially fair rates, which means, in the last analysis, rates that healthy people in substantial numbers will pay voluntarily to avoid the risk of being unable to care for major medical expenses. That is, commercial insurance is led as if by an invisible hand to create a scheme of redistribution that people will take part in voluntarily.

What the Affordable Care Act does is to make health insurance affordable for the expensively sick by making it unaffordable for the healthy. And since the healthy won't go for that deal for long, it makes their signing up compulsory, with a scheme of penalties. It destroyed a system of workable voluntary income redistribution to create one of unworkable coercive income redistribution."


Bingo.

edutcher said...

Wasn't the hitman in "Our Man Flint" an escaped Nazi war criminal named Gruber?

And that guy was likable.

ndspinelli said...

"Obama lied, people died." That needs to be our new mantra.

It has been since Benghazi.

chickelit said...

There's something about the word Gruber that reminds me of the German word Gräber which means to dig and to bury (cf. sing sang sung).

And Gruber said "We will Barry you."

Unknown said...

heh.. Barry us they did.

KCFleming said...

Also, perfect image here, Chip.

ampersand said...

Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Pajamaboys.

Amartel said...

He said this over and over and over. There's three instances at least on record. Previously, the people who supported Obamacare could at least resort to quoting gibberish numbers that could not be refuted in the moment. Not anymore! We already know the keep your doctor/save $2500 was a lie. Now the Obamacare architect admits, repeatedly, that the next level of sell was also a big lie.

There's talk of putting Gruber under oath. Great idea! The more publicity, the better. Cockroaches meet sunlight.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Republicans technically never lie because their threshold for believing their empirically invalid policy aims just happens to be quite low. They're more gullible about the things they believe in.

But so is everyone.

Unknown said...

Mika Admits: If Gruber Were Republican, MSM 'Would Be Exploding'

rcocean said...

Of course Democrat party voters are stupid! Their party is a coalition of a bunch of special interests, some very smart amoral people at the top, and bunch of very stupid people at the bottom.

The Democrat party is an alliance between the PBS viewers and the Jerry Springer fans.

Lydia said...

In April Apple's linked piece, Howard Dean schools us on the fine points of reporting deception:

I think there's a big stature [gap] between the office, the Director of the OMB and a consultant for the -- so that's why it's not a big deal.

Nah, nothing to do with bias. No siree.