Michelle Bachmann A Gaffe Machine? If Liberals Want To See A Gaffe Machine, Have Them Look At Their Fool-In-Chief

You want to see a gaffe?

Here’s a pretty darned good gaffe:

“Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma. They end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs when, if you, they just gave, you gave, treatment early, and they got some treatment, and uhhh a breathalyzer, or uhh, an inhalator, not a breathalyzer…”    

Here’s a REAL good one:

“I’ve now been in 57 states  I think one left to go.”

Oh!  There was this one, where Obama clearly couldn’t tell the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day (unless you want to argue Obama was having an “I see dead white people” moment):

“On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes and I see many of them in the audience here today.”

There was this gem of intellectual horsepower in which Obama went to Israel and assured that country:

“Well let me be absolutely clear.  Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s.”

There was the very recent moment in which Obama spoke to the 10th Mountain Division and said that their hero SFC Jared Monti was “the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually  came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously.”  SFC Monti had in fact been mortally wounded in action.  His audience was grieving for their fallen comrade, not celebrating a living hero.

There was this statement of Obama meeting his future self and talking about the encounter:

“I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”

Which of course was balanced out by Obama’s future self going back in time and signing in for him:

Obama got the date wrong by THREE YEARS.  I’ve done that “sign the check with the wrong year” in January thing.  But this is beyond the pale.

Obama has also demonstrated that he didn’t understand the difference between the Congressional Medal of Honor (which is ONLY given to war heroes who demonstrated extraordinary heroism and gallantry under enemy fire) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (which is a political award a president can give to anyone he wants for whatever reason he wants to give it).  And the surrounding instance of that horrendous gaffe was even more horrendous as Obama was giving “shout outs” AFTER he had just heard American soldiers had just been ruthlessly gunned down on an American base by a Muslim terrorist Major.

Along with Obama’s saluting of a Navy “corpse man,” demonstrating he had absolutely no idea whatsoever what corpsmen are or what they do.

And there was that recent moment when Obama continued to chatter on and on over the British National Anthem – which is a no-no pretty much EVERYWHERE.

Now, I see those, and I’m supposed to think that liberals are right for believing that Michelle Bachmann is too stupid (or what’s that word?  Flaky?) to be President of the United States because she mistook John Wayne – who was born in Winterset Iowa – with John Wayne Gacy – who was born in Waterloo Iowa?

But you consider the mainstream media that pretty much glossed over ALL of that, and then suddenly making Michelle Bachmann’s gaffe about John Wayne Gacy the absolute CENTERPIECE of their questioning of her, and you realize that there are two Americas out there – the one the liberal mainstream media propagandists hate and the one the liberal mainstream media propagandists love.

Unlike Barack Obama, Michelle Bachmann doesn’t take a teleprompter every damn where she goes.  Unlike Barack Obama, Michelle Bachmann isn’t a hand puppet reading a script.  And unlike Barack Obama, most of Michelle Bachmann’s gaffes have nothing whatsoever to do with governing the nation.

If you believe that Michelle Bachmann isn’t fit to be president because of gaffes, and you aren’t loudly demanding that Barack Obama resign from office for crimes against intelligence, than you are a hypocrite and a fool.

The media gets on the liberal warpath, and it just doesn’t stop.  So they are already on another one out of their contention that our founding fathers were a bunch of racist bigots bent on keeping black people in slavery forever (because liberals always have hated America and always WILL hate it until it embraces Marxism and becomes the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of America.  Until that glorious day when the workers of the world truly unite into global socialism and America crawls into that coalition of hell they will continue to come unglued over candidates like Michelle Bachmann.

The founding fathers did NOT want slavery; but they were in the impossible position where they either allowed it or did not have a nation.  There was simply no way the pro-slavery states were going to give up slavery in 1787.  What the founding fathers did was compromise in such a way while writing our nations Constitution and laws in such a way that it was merely a matter of time before slavery would necessarily have to be abolished.

Take the three-fifths compromise that liberals often dump on to dump on America.  First of all the compromise had nothing whatosever to do with the ontology or humanity of black persons; it was completely directed at the extent of representation that slaves would have politically in determining the number of representatives and the distribution of taxes.  Second, which side wanted the slaves to have full representation?  THE SLAVERY SIDE.   The anti-slavery side wanted slaves to be accorded no representation at all, because counting them meant the slavery states would have more power and more money and therefore be able to resist demands to end slavery forever.

The southern states wanted to count slaves in the population of the nation, so that they could have more seats in the Congress, thereby increasing their political power. The northern states, on the other hand, were against including slaves in the population for the fear of increased Congressional seats in the southern states.

It was the pro-slavery side that demanded FULL representation.  In other words, Democrats – who demanded to hold on to slavery during the Civil War – CONTINUE to support the pro-slavery side even 225 years later!

Just to point out one more fact about the three-fifths compromise, one of the agreements reached was an END to the transatlantic slavery trade after twenty years.  Apparently, Democrats have always wanted that trade to continue.

P.S. Just in case you didn’t already think the media is cynical, vicious and biased enough as it was, George Stephanopoulos basically warned Michelle Bachmann that if she ran, the media would crawl through her five children’s and 23 foster children’s lives with the same anal probe they used on Sarah Palin’s emails.  ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, for the official record, was a Democrat media spinner prior to becoming a “journalist.”  If ABC asks Karl Rove to be an anchor, call me.

And, of course, we’re already seeing the same rabid leftwing dishonest smear propaganda beginning from the media that they used against Sarah Palin.

The media is just crossing out “Sarah Palin’s” name and scrawling in “Michelle Bachmann’s” name.  Because they’re cockroaches.  A recent attack on Michelle Bachmann was to call her “Barbie with fangs.”  Because liberal “journalists” can hate on women as much as they want to knowing they have a Holy Warrior’s Absolution from the so-called “feminist groups” to do so.

Update, June 29: How about THIS for a gaffe: Barack Obama screwed up the age of HIS OWN CHILD.  Obama TWICE referred to his oldest daughter Malia as being 13; she’s 12.

Health Care Bankruptices: More Liberal Lies

What was that line from Mark Twain?  “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.”

In the course of the last two days – and watching mostly Fox News, no less – I have at least four times heard an advocate for the Democrats’ health care boondoggle recite the crap statistic that “60% of bankruptcies are due to health care costs,” with nary a reply by the journalist who should be able to separate fact from fraud.

If you’re going to interview a liberal, be aware that lies tend to accompany the movement of their lips.  When you have the latter, you almost certainly have the former.

It’s not that this hasn’t been repeatedly refuted.  It’s that the lies are piling up far faster than the refutation can keep up with them.  Democrats know from Hitler and Goebbels that if they keep telling a lie over and over again, people will eventually believe it.  So we just keep hearing about this massive number of bankruptcies over and over again.

It’s not true.

From ABC News:

Medical Bankruptcies: A Data-Check

March 05, 2009 12:37 PM

(3 p.m. update: See italicized items with responses from the lead author of the Harvard study, Dr. David Himmelstein.)

President Obama’s kicking off his health care reform today in the worst possible way: with a mischaracterization of data.

“The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds,” Obama said at the opening of his White House forum on health care reform. The problem: That claim, based on a 2001 survey, is simply unsupportable.

The figure comes from a 2005 Harvard University study saying that 54 percent of bankruptcies in 2001 were caused by health expenses. We reviewed it internally and knocked it down at the time; an academic reviewer did the same in 2006. Recalculating Harvard’s own data, he came up with a far lower figure – 17 percent.

A more recent study by another group, approaching it another way, indicates that in 2007 about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs. That rings a little less loudly than “one every 30 seconds.”

The extrapolation of Harvard’s data to “a bankruptcy every 30 seconds,” which Obama also mentioned in his address to a joint session of Congress last month, comes, per the White House, from a 2005 Washington Post op-ed by Prof. Elizabeth Warren, a co-author of the Harvard paper. Fact-check.org has noted that even using Harvard’s numbers, it’s more like a bankruptcy every minute; indeed if you add up all bankrputcies in a year you barely get one every 30 seconds. (I’ve e-mailed Warren for comment.) But more to the point is that the Harvard data are clearly inflated, or at best, mischaracterized.

Himmelstein tells me that the reason for the difference is a change in federal law that sharply reduced the number of bankruptcies. In 2005, the year he and Warren wrote their op-ed, there were just over 2 million bankruptcies. Data out just today say that in 2008 there were 1.1 million (up sharply, by the way, over 2007). So this error in the White House claim stems simply from the fact that it’s using out-of-date information. The next question is whether the estimate of “medical bankruptcies” is reliable in the first place.

A good part of the problem is definitional. The Harvard report claims to measure the extent to which medical costs are “the cause” of bankruptcies. In reality its survey asked if these costs were “a reason” – potentially one of many – for such bankruptcies.

Beyond those who gave medical costs as “a reason,” the Harvard researchers chose to add in any bankruptcy filers who had at least $1,000 in unreimbursed medical expenses in the previous two years. Given deductibles and copays, that’s a heck of a lot of people.

Moreover, Harvard’s definition of “medical” expenses includes situations that aren’t necessarily medical in common parlance, e.g., a gambling problem, or the death of a family member. If your main wage-earning spouse gets hit by a bus and dies, and you have to file, that’s included as a “medical bankruptcy.”

When I asked the lead author, Dr. David Himmelstein, about his definitions of medical bankruptcy back in 2005, he said, “It’s a judgment call,” and added that any death, for example, “to our mind is a medical event.”

A last problem was sampling: The Harvard researchers surveyed bankruptcy filers in five federal court districts accounting for 14 percent of bankruptcies nationally; projecting this to the other 86 percent is sketchy. Said Himmelstein: “Obviously the extrapolation is rough.”

Of such rough extrapolations are presidential pronouncements made. […]

“It stinks to be uninsured. I don’t want to be quoted saying anything else,” Dranove says. “But there are correct studies, and incorrect studies. For academics, the validity of the research methods matters.”

It should for the rest of us, too.

So you see a horrible study – absolutely horrible – that is clearly biased and filled with faulty assumptions and questionable definitions.  But it’s from Harvard, so it must be true.  Let’s run with it.  I noticed CBS and NBC news articles that did just that.  Factchecks?  We don’t need no stinkin’ factchecks.

ABC took that Harvard study, did their own review simply by recalculating the Harvard leftist professor’s own data – and came up with 17%.  But they were also able to find another study that concluded: “about eight-tenths of one percent of Americans lived in families that filed for bankruptcy as a result of medical costs.”

A professional named Steve Elias who specializes in bankruptcy cases comes to a similar conclusion regarding his own practice — that health care costs are at best a very minor part of our bankruptcies.

So every time I hear someone say “sixty percent of all bankruptcies are the result of health care costs, so we need to pass Obama care right now!” I know I am dealing with an ignoramus, or an ideologue, or both.

And every time I see that comment uttered to or in front of a journalist who doesn’t respond by correcting the record, I know that there’s yet another journalist out there who isn’t good enough at his or her job to pass muster.

Now, I could have stopped here.  But let me go on – because there are WAY too many lies being told by Democrats.

(CBS) Today the President again insisted that his health care reform won’t force you to switch plans or doctors.

“What I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change your plans under health reform,” said Mr. Obama.

That’s technically correct – but what the president didn’t say is that reform could lead your boss to change your health care plan, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Here’s how: 160 million people are insured through work and their employer actually picks up most of the cost. Under the president’s plan, Americans would be required to carry a certain level of coverage, which means many people would have to increase their insurance.

“Employer premiums will go up, and employers might respond by dropping coverage entirely,” said Michael Cannon, with the Cato Institute. “So if you’re one of those unfortunate workers then it will be a government policy that ousted you from your health plan.”

And if you do choose a public plan, you may want to keep your favorite doctors but they may not want to keep you. Under government health care, they could be paid 20 to 30 percent less.

Here’s another gargantuan Obama lie.  And – while I’m surprised and grateful that CBS took a swipe at it – I fear they didn’t go far enough, and won’t come back to the truth often enough.

A Wall Street Journal article absolutely destroys any claim to credibility Obama has in claiming that his plan won’t force tens of millions of people out of their private health care.

The last thing Obama and his Democrat allies have repeatedly lie about is that “Republicans are opposing reform.”

I would confront Obama by saying, “Name one.  Name one single Republican who is on the record opposing any kind of health care reform.”  It is demagogic rhetoric.  And the president is clearly becoming unhinged to rely on such demagogic attacks to force a clearly unpopular agenda down the country’s throat.

President Obama went after Senator Jim DeMint for his “Waterloo” remark.  DeMint, to his credit, fired right back, and pointed out that as a Senator Barack Obama voted against every Republican effort to reform health care.  So, in point of fact, who’s really against “reform” here?  And why doesn’t anybody remind Democrats how THEY were the party of “no” when Republicans were in charge prior to 2006 (which I might point out was prior to when our economy tanked).

There are way too many lies masquerading as truth claims going on.  It’s time to recognize who is lying to you, and to demand a fair presentation of the facts.