Wednesday, January 06, 2010

C-SPAN Calls for Transparency from Capitol Hill

Lots of news media and blogs are pointing to the fact that the CEO of C-Span, Brian Lamb, is calling out Obama on his repeated promise that the health care legislative debate would be “transparent”. Breitbart’s version of Obama’s promise has a montage of campaign stops in which he re-iterated this promise, but I prefer the one here. It has the virtue of brevity and it illustrates better than anything I’ve seen how Obama truly believes his fantasies…until he stops believing them. Listen to the beautiful picture he paints:


That talk was in Virginia, a little place not too far from us called Chester. Did we go to see him speechify there?
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Lord, no. His make-believe stories were, and are, the most transparent thing about the man. People are calling him a liar, but I think it’s more complicated than that. He has to deep need to tell you whatever it is you want to hear and that’s what he spent his campaign doing: listening and repeating people’s hopes for some fundamental change.

I cannot read another’s heart, though in the case of politicians, one learns to be leery of their promises. Especially one like this, that involves the cooperation of the legislative branch of government, over which he has no control.

In all probabillity, he didn’t fully comprehend the extent to which Congress could and would stiff-arm him. Though when you think about it, his short season in the Senate should have given him a small clue.

Now that C-SPAN has called him out, the Senate and the House of Representatives are in a bind. No way are they going to let us see any of this sausage before it’s made. If you don’t believe me, try reading the original House Bill, the thousand-plus pages before they started adding to it. The thing is more incomprehensible than the Lisbon Treaty. I know because I’ve attempted to wrestle with both documents. They are monuments to the deceptions of those who speak bureaucratese. Even the legislators in the EU and the US admit they don’t read that stuff. All they have to do is pass it.

So let’s see what Mr. Lamb’s polite demand produces from either the legislative or the executive branch. Sorry to say, I don’t think you’ll see any transparency at all. If we’d had such a thing in the last sixty years, we wouldn’t be teetering on the Edge of Fiscal Doom. This mess will continue to be created behind closed doors.

However, I predict that before the decade is out, we’ll have serious reform. There won’t be a choice. I just hope it’s peaceful evolution rather than crowds of angry people in Washington, D.C. They can threaten jail, etc., for the enraged people who show up but if you don’t have a job or a place to live, jail can sound like a nice alternative.

Let’s hope the legislators are looking down the road at their own prospects.

If you want to see the whole Breitbart video in a mode which loads easily, go to Another Black Conservative. That one worked well for my connectivity. ABC simply calls Obama a liar. I think he’s a fantasizer; he paints himself into these corners with wonderful promises and then…oops!

Don’t you think Obama must spin wonderful bedtime stories for his children?

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