Mr. President: Don't Tell Me It's Raining When You're Pissing on My Leg.

One could not have written a script on how not to achieve health care reform any better than Obama and his Democratic cohorts in Congress. The hubris of these folks verges on the incomprehensible. Just as it’s not nice to full Mother Nature, Congress and the President should never fool the American public. Ask Richard Nixon (Watergate), Bush 1 (Read my lips, no more taxes), Bill Clinton (I did not have sexual relations with that woman), and Bush 2 ( let’s go get those weapons of mass destruction).

The latest contestants in the game of “Let’s Fool the American Public” have attempted a ideological coup to take over 1/6th of the American economy. The issue for these folks was never reform. It was always control.

First they thought they could pass it before anybody was paying attention. Then they thought they could lie to the public about the cost. Then they thought they could lie about how to pay for it. Then they thought they could lie about how health care would be administered. Then they lied to the seniors about Medicare cuts. And when they couldn’t lie anymore, they simply and literally shut the doors to any outside scrutiny of the negotiating process with the Democratic caucuses, and pushed ahead with reckless abandon to pass a left wing health care takeover that the American public clearly doesn’t want. Sooner or later the public would catch on, and it did.

Will some version of health care plan pass sometime in the next few months? I suspect it will; but not in the form that these guys tried to foist on us. For right now, we would be better off with nothing.

What President Obama should have done is spell out to the public in simple understandable terms the problems our health care system faces, and a number of alternatives to solve those problems with associated costs. An issue as personal as health care deserves a straight forward statement of problems, solutions, and costs. Two thousand pages of legislation loaded with boards and bureaucracies and coercive mandates and hidden taxes and fees and flimsily disguised health care standards review boards (the death panels) is NOT the way to go. And you NEVER make deals with the major players in the game and then renege on what you agreed to do for them in exchange for their support. After agreeing to help him, Obama stuck it to big pharma, the hospitals, the AMA, the insurance companies, the doctors, seniors, and just about everybody else. As the saying goes, don’t tell me it’s raining when you are pissing on my leg.

We all know that health care reform is needed, and buried in these massive bills are some potentially good ideas. The real shame in all of this is that Obama is missing a golden opportunity to show real leadership in an honest discussion of the issues, solutions, and costs. Instead, in a bid to get the long term Democratic dream of a single payer health care system ala Britain and Canada, he and his colleagues have resorted to chicanery and trickery and lies, all while the American people are dealing with a major recession and massive unemployment.

They assumed the American public, blinded by the light of the Messiah Obama, would not see what is going on. Lesson # 1 for any President: the American public may be many things, but it is not stupid. It appears that Barack Obama is now the next in a long line of Presidents who have learned that lesson the hard way.