[J.P.’s Moment of Common Sense. Listen live every weekend on Renegade Radio, KRNG 101.3 FM Reno.]

The debacle we call Obamacare has gone from delusional to dysfunctional to downright humorous.  Grown men and women are saying things that even comedians wouldn’t dare invent.  On Thursday, President Obama gave a press conference in which he said, “What we’re discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.”

Now he figures that out!  Clearly, when it comes to wisdom, Yoda he is not.

Afterward, Nancy Pelosi gave her own press conference claiming that Obamacare is working just fine, thank you, even though five million people had their health insurance cancelled, even though the government website isn’t working (and isn’t expected to work anytime soon), and even though almost nobody has signed up for it on the federal exchange.  Speaking for Democrats in the House, she said, “I can almost unanimously say that our members were very pleased with the president’s statement today.”

“I can almost unanimously say?”  What does that even mean?

Supposed adults prevaricating, obfuscating, and doing back flips to avoid the obvious is turning the discussion of health care into a vaudeville skit.  Any minute you expect Abbott and Costello to start talking about who’s on first.  The New York Times, for instance, is so desperate to stay in the bag for the Democrat Party and Obama, they absolutely cannot make themselves confess that our president is guilty of serial fraud... even when every TV channel is showing video clips of the dozens of times he made bogus promises about being able to keep your current insurance.  The Times started out claiming he “misspoke”—because that sounds way better than “lied”—but when that excuse didn’t seem adequate, they invented a brand new phrase never before used in the English language: now they say the president made “incorrect promises.”

I can almost unanimously say that’s the dumbest thing I ever read.

The New York Times isn’t the only place where journalists are waxing tragicomical trying to avoid the truth: over at the New York Daily News someone opined that growing outrage about Obamacare is the fault of Americans’ “immaturity.”  The lies they told us were noble lies, don’t you see?  And it’s childish to expect busy, wonderful, honorable people like Barack Obama to waste time on silly stuff like personal integrity.  He lied for our benefit, doggone it, and we’re just too stupid to see how those cancelled health insurance policies and higher premiums are good for us.

For those of us who predicted the unworkability of Obamacare four years ago, the current outrage is both amusing and frustrating.  The falsehoods were obvious from the beginning and we shouted the truth as loud as we could.  Trouble is, the foundation of the Affordable Car Act, this notion that we can increase insurance benefits while reducing premiums, was so outrageous and absurd there was no polite rational way to argue against it.  Democrats not only promised that premiums would go down—“3,000 per cent” according to Obama—they also promised that people with pre-existing conditions would be covered, overall health would improve, total national expenditures on health care would decrease, and even the federal budget deficit would get smaller.

It was like never-ending Christmas with Barack Obama playing the part of Santa Claus.

None of it was true.  None of it.  From the poisoned ground of those original falsehoods we could never end up anyplace else but where we are now, listening to more and more lies growing more and more outrageous to prop up a storyline that grows more untenable every day.

For example, Obama promised on October 1st that Healthcare.gov would be fixed “within hours” but here we are in the middle of November and he admits it won’t be working anytime soon.  The federal government spent six hundred million dollars building a website that doesn’t work and that IT experts say is so poorly designed it’s not even fixable.  (One software designer said he could’ve built a workable site for one million dollars... and he’d feel guilty charging that much.)

“But don’t worry about those website problems,” said the president, “you have until March 31 to sign up.”  Except that’s not true, either, if you’re one of the five million who already got cancelled.  In that case you only have until December 15th if you want to have insurance January 1st.  Oops.

Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says their six hundred million dollar website has no ability to count the number of people who have signed up—they can only estimate.  And they also say their six hundred million dollar website doesn’t know the kinds of people signing up nor the specific policies for which those people are opting.

Guess what: I can tell you exactly how many people visited my website yesterday, last week, last month, or last year.  And I can tell you where they came from and what specific page of my website they visited.  Every website on Planet Earth can tell you that.  What’s remarkable is not that HHS is still lying about Obamacare—what’s remarkable is they’re so ignorant about the Internet they think the lie is believable.  Those are the people promising to fix the website, by the way.

It would all be just funny—first-rate comedy enjoyable to watch—if it wasn’t our health care they were ruining.

That’s... today’s dose of common sense.

“Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.” —John Quinton

“You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.” —Abraham Lincoln

From Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA        Tweet

November 23, 2013 - Even if they get the website up by their now projected date of Nov. 30th, we now find out that the part of the website where one must pay for the coverage, which must be done by Dec. 15th, is only 30% completed. This administration makes the keystone cops look like a well oiled machine. Mitt Romney had it right! "You sure know how to pick losers!" – Pam T., Virginia

November 18, 2013 - I am a good friend of your brother-in-law and sister. I was in their wedding so I assume we have met many years ago. I enjoy your articles very much. The best news now is that the pendulum has started swinging in the opposite direction and I hope it continues to swing the liberals out of office in 2014 and 2016. Our country has never been in this weak financially, morally and internationally. Things had better change soon. – Hiram L., Wisconsin

J.P. replies: If the pendulum swings in 2016, it could mean that governor of yours getting elected president.  He’s my early favorite.

November 16, 2013 - We may yet be avenged for this insult to freedom. Popular sentiment is running unbelievably strongly against ObamaCare, the Obama regime, and the Democrats generally. There's a good chance that they'll lose control of the Senate in the midterm elections, and the White House in 2016 -- specifically because of ObamaCare. It would behoove us to keep green the memory of their arrogance, their dissimulations, and their outright deceits. – Francis W. Porretto, New York