And now they're mad at the companies they're putting out of business...
...FOR GOING OUT OF BUSINESS!
They're going to have HEARINGS!
What's the word for it? Oh yeah....CLUELESS!
I guess they really are that STUPID!
And here I thought it was just wickedness.
The Gunslinger
Seriously?
[sorry about the yelling]
Obama in Rude Denial
By The Prowler on 3.29.10 @ 6:09AM
IT'S ALL A GOP PLOT
The White House political and legislative operations were said to be livid with the announcement by several large U.S. companies that they were taking multi-million or as much as a billion dollar charges because of the new health-care law, the issue was front-and-center with key lawmakers. By last Friday, AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Co., and AK Steel Holding Corp. had all announced that they were taking the one-time charges on their first-quarter balance sheets. More companies were expected to make similar announcements this week.
"These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general," says a White House legislative affairs staffer. "Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative websites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It's BS."
On Friday White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were calling the CEOs and Washington office heads of the companies that took the financial hits and attacked them for doing so. One Washington office head said that the White House calls were accusatory and "downright rude."
The companies are taking the charges because in 2013 they will lose a tax deduction on tax-free government subsidies they have had when they give retirees a Medicare Part D prescription-drug reimbursement. Many of these companies have more than 100,000 retirees each. AT&T may have more than three-quarters of a million retirees to cover.
"Most of these people [in the Administration] have never had a real job in their lives. They don't understand a thing about business, and that includes the President," says a senior lobbyist for one of the companies that announced the charge. "My CEO sat with the President over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the President what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general. First the President didn't understand what they were talking about. Then he basically told my boss he was lying. Frankly my boss was embarrassed for him; he clearly had not been briefed and didn't know what was in the bill."
It isn't just the President who didn't understand his own proposal. Late Friday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Rep. Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, announced that they would hold hearings in late April to investigate "claims by Caterpillar, Verizon, and Deere that provisions in the new health care reform law could adversely affect their company's ability to provide health insurance to their employees."
Neither Waxman or Stupak -- who betrayed the pro-life community by negotiating for more than a week with the White House to ensure his vote on the health care bill -- had anything more than a cursory understanding of how the many sections of the bill would impact business or even individual citizens before they voted on the bill, says House Energy Democrat staff. "We had memos on these issues, but none of our people, we think, looked at them," says a staffer. "When they saw the stories last week about the charges some of the companies were taking, they were genuinely surprised and assumed that the companies were just doing this to embarrass them. They really believed this bill would immediately lower costs. They just didn't understand what they were voting on."
My wife and I have long said there's really only two explanations for what's going on: they're either complete idiots, or they're trying to crash the country. Now, I know we should "never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity", but the converse of that is true, too.
ReplyDeleteDon't attribute it to stupidity when everything else they do makes you say "malice".
Sorry Gray beard but there is a third possibility - in fact, the case that is almost certainly true. These people are malicious idiots, i.e., malicious in their intentions and idiots in terms of the likely effects.
ReplyDeleteOh rats, Gunslinger beat me to it.
ReplyDeleteYep, malicious stupidity powered by a full tank of self satisfied ignorance. The real problem is that they actually 'think' that they will be able to run, and operate, the economy better than the corporations can, they actually preen for themselves that they will be able to be more fair and compassionate (and reap a few bene's hear and there on the side, it's only fair) than businessmen will agree to. Their economic notions tell them that prices are determined by greedy biz dudes, nothing to do with reality (as if anyone could know anything about that at all anyway! Pshaw!), and they are angry at those businessmen for not doing all the grand and philanthropic deeds they'd do, if only they could control things.
Some of the articles out there on the AT&T, Steel, etc news talk about the administration folks calling the exec's, surprised, shocked and livid at their being 'stabbed in the back' (the phrase worked well way back when, surely it'll be useful again, fashion being what it is) by these surprise (!) expenses and costs being forecast.
They believe what they do... and pardon me, but I don't think anyone in government is bright enough to pull off a widespread conspiracy - Nixon's watergate friends were probably as good as it gets - they do the things they do, because they believe them, they believe them because they were taught them (and the teaching soothed their desire to feel slighted for not being recognized for being as special as they know there are and deserving of being rewarded for it), and their teachers teach such things because they were fed philosophies that were disconnected from reality and which also fed their poor-poor-slighted-me-I-deserve-more egos, and by having no clear connections to reality (thank you Descartes, Rousseau, Hume & Kant), their philosophies make it was an easy con to run on themselves.
The result is that you are able to believe what you want to believe about yourself, able to believe the worst of those it's convenient to think the worst of, and it's simplicity itself to then imagine that if you had the keys to the halls of power, you could 'make everything all better'.
Look at Rep. Nostrilitis Waxman... he's going to drag all these executives before his committee and expose their dastardly plots to make his darling healthcontrol bill look bad.
They are malicious towards those they feel have been 'keeping them down', they are ignorant of all the ideas and facts which would enable them to discover the truth about themselves (thruth? Pshaw! As if such a thing is knowable! HA!), and with nothing to go on but ideas that have little or no relation to reality, they rush about working to put one stupid idea into practice after another, with a passionate zeal which could be fueled by nothing less than the high test fantasy and delusions of grandeur which only leftist philosophy can provide.
Stupid, malicious, ignorant and passionately intent on 'doing good' to you.
What, me worry?
Yep.
Oops... Heathen2002 beat me.
ReplyDeleteCase in point - George Carlin says exactly what the leftists actually believe
ReplyDelete(cover the kids ears)
Forget about conspiracies... put a bunch of people who believe this, into a position to teach your kids, appointed to judgeships, get elected to office, and WTF else do we expect will happen but what is happening?!
Absolutely.
ReplyDeleteThese liberals have (overwhelming) spent most of their lives working in government or academia. Revenues are guaranteed (through taxes) and jobs that are inflation, recession, depression proof with guaranteed cost of living increases, guaranteed salary, pay grade increases with increased time on the job, good health care and retirement benefits.
Some of the things that can't understand:
Businesses don't have huge sacks of money sitting around.
Businesses cannot arbitrary increase wages.
Businesses cannot arbitrary provide boat loads of employee benefits.
Businesses actually expect - need - employees to be productive.
That ordinary people would seriously be worried about being laid off or fired when the economy is in the toilet.
That people would cut spending and avoid higher debt when the economy is in the toilet. They were shocked, shocked!, that people weren't spending like drunken sailors.
That tens of millions of illegal aliens could actually put ordinary Americans out of work or be part of the reason unemployment is around 10% (if not actually higher).
These are simply some of the things that can neither understand or believe because they have absolutely, positively have no experience of these things.
Greybeard, Like you, I've always said they're either Stupid or Evil..
ReplyDeleteHeathen & Van....I think you're right! I never considered a confluence of the two.
Evil AND Stupid.
The problem is, that sort usually ends up in prison...not the White House.
What political party does Big Business cozy up to these days?
ReplyDeleteYeah.
My company hosted Candidate Obama during the campaign (in direct violation of company policy, I might add) and recently hosted the VP.
Let me mop up those big alligator tears for you.
Drunken Sailors spend THEIR OWN money. And when they are out, they go back to the boat to sleep it off.
ReplyDeletePoliticians spend YOUR money, and when they are out they go back to the trough to fill up.
Let's not malign the drunken Sailors, mkay?
Friend of mine, a former sailor....said exactly the same thing!
ReplyDeleteApologies to all. As a former occasionally drunken soldier with a couple of relatives who where occasionally drunken sailors, I should indeed have known better. It was insulting in the extreme to sailors - drunken or otherwise. In fact, it would be insulting to compare politicians to winos or crackheads - insulting to the winos and crackheads that is.
ReplyDeleteDegenerates everywhere, insulted by comparisons to Progressives....forgive you.
ReplyDeleteRetired sometimes drunken Sailor here!
ReplyDeleteBTW, this reminds me of a book I read once...drive the businesses into the red, and then pass laws to keep them from going out of business...
"They just didn't understand what they were voting on."
ReplyDeleteAnd yet another RCOB moment...
Larry, sounds like Atlas Shrugged.
ReplyDelete