The Largest Transfer of Wealth in Recent American History

Charles Krauthammer labels Barack Obama “The Bystander President.” What kind of president favors insurance policies that force a couple in their sixties to buy maternity coverage or teetotalers to buy substance abuse insurance? A bystander president that’s who. Are Americans paying any attention here?

So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.

But perhaps Obama didn’t know. Maybe the bystander president was as surprised by this as he claims to have been by the IRS scandal, the Associated Press and James Rosen phone logs, the failure of the Obamacare website, the premeditation of the Benghazi attacks, the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone — i.e., the workings of the federal government of which he is the nominal head. I’m skeptical. It’s not as if the Obamacare plan-dropping is an obscure regulation. It’s at the heart of Obama’s idea of federally regulated and standardized national health insurance.

Still, how could he imagine getting away with a claim sure to be exposed as factually false? The same way he maintained for two weeks that false narrative about Benghazi. He figured he’d get away with it.

And he did. Simple formula: Delay, stonewall, and wait for a supine and protective press to turn spectacularly incurious.