Obama on Fox News

You may have heard something of the Fox News interview with Bret Baier that President Obama consented to do recently. Aside from the question, if the White House doesn't consider Fox to be a "news organization", as they have famously stated in the past, why would Obama subject himself to a potentially hostile (or at least aggressive) interview with them, if he wasn't in desperate need to pump up his failing health care program?


Of note was a bit of verbal sleight of hand by the President:

BAIER: Let me insert this. We asked our viewers to e-mail in suggested questions. More than 18,000 people took time to e-mail us questions. These are regular people from all over the country. Lee Johnson, from Spring Valley, California: "If the bill is so good for all of us, why all the intimidation, arm twisting, seedy deals, and parliamentary trickery necessary to pass a bill, when you have an overwhelming majority in both houses and the presidency?"

Sandy Moody in Chesterfield, Missouri: "If the health care bill is so wonderful, why do you have to bribe Congress to pass it?"

So, the question is "If the plan is so good, why the hard sell?

OBAMA: Bret, I get 40,000 letters or e-mails a day.

BAIER: I know.

OBAMA: I could read the exact same e-mail --

BAIER: These are people. It's not just Washington punditry.

OBAMA: I've got the exact same e-mails, that I could show you, that talk about why haven't we done something to make sure that I, a small businessperson, am getting as good a deal as members of Congress are getting, and don't have my insurance rates jacked up 40 percent? Why is it that I, a mother with a child with a preexisting condition, still can't get insurance?

So the issue that I'm concerned about is whether not we're fixing a broken system

You catch that? Obama tries to make it a false equivalence: You get a lot of emails, I get a lot of emails. End of discussion.

In reality, the subject of Obama's emails is why haven't you gotten something done, not why haven't you gotten this particular horrible rotten government takeover of the health care system done.

On the fatuous scale, it ranks right up there with "If not us, who? If not now, when?" In 2012, can we elect someone who doesn't speak in fortune cookies?