Schadenfreude and the Dear Leader

Monday, October 21st, 2013 by Claire

I know it’s ignoble, but is anybody else enjoying the spectacle of the Obamacare crash? Or more specifically, the spin on the spin on the spin coming from the administration and its media toadies?

First it’s, “Oh, our wonderful system is … just so wonderful that it’s being overwhelmed by the gazillions of people who want to sign up!”

Then as tech types began to look into the code, as more horror stories began to emerge, as unnamed “inside sources” spoke up, and as it became clear to that the back end (the part of the federal exchange that feeds data to the insurance companies) was as broken as the public interface, even some of Obama’s biggest supporters were forced into using terms like trainwreck and catastrophe.

Now Team Obama is getting on its feet again. Dear Leader himself proclaims prissy indignation: “I think it’s fair to say that nobody is more frustrated by that than I am. … Nobody is madder than me about the fact that the website is not working as well as it should …”

And the DC wonk crew rushes in to cry, Obama was blindsided! Yes, how could anybody expect the president to know what was going to happen? It was those techies who covered up the mess. It was their managers hiding the truth from their managers. It was anybody, anybody but Dear Leader’s fault.

“Nobody expects the chief executive to be reviewing computer code or hosting East Room ‘hackathons.’”

In a lesser way* it reminds me of the excuses made for Josef Stalin’s misrule. The failures and famines? All the fault of wreckers and saboteurs. The brutality? Underlings exceeding their authority.

But of course Obama really didn’t know. His aloofness (is that a word?) from his own policies is infamous. He delegated to Pelosi and Reid, who delegated to bureaucrats, who spent $400 million supervising and tinkering with tech they didn’t understand. And no doubt toward the end every desperate soul working on the now-infamous federal exchange was trying to hide from superiors just how huge a mess the whole thing was going to be.

So now all Dear Leader (who doesn’t have a leaderly bone in his body or a leaderly wrinkle in his brain) can do is stand in the White House rose garden and POUT. But by golly, as he himself proclaims (though not exactly in those words), “Nobody, but nobody, has more to pout about than ME. Because I’m so very special.

And because it’s your name going doing in infamy, Boss Man.

But worry not! Because another five year plan “tech surge” will fix everything in two shakes of a jiffy.

(And meanwhile the sick are the only ones desperate enough to keep trying to sign up while the young and healthy whose blood contribution is most needed say no way.)

Seriously. This is great comic theater.

Yeah … we all know that the screwed up website is only one tiny part of the much larger mess. And the big picture isn’t funny. These people are going to destroy what’s left of all that was good in the American health care system. They’re jeopardizing the well-being of millions. They’re going to wipe out the middle and working classes. They’re Sovietizing our country. They’re plunging us into debt so monumental that even seeing is hard to believe.

Still, this whole business with the exchange and all this spinning, spinning, spinning is hysterical.

Enjoy it while you can.

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* Everything about the US mis-managerial state remains “lesser” at this point. But give gov time; it’s working on improving its ineptitude.