Gruber's Greatest 'Hits' - and million-dollar-plus paydays
While the ObamaCare architect was calling American voters 'stupid,' the federal government paid him $400K and several states paid him consulting fees
Editor's note: The following column originally appeared in The Washington Times.
It's the smug, arrogant, elitist attitude heard around the world. In MIT professor and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber's case, you can hear his attitude even before he enters a room. For the man who describes the American people as stupid, either directly or in some variation, with his comments captured now on multiple videotapes, Mr. Gruber seems to be proving that he has an issue with projection.
Yet if you relied on the mainstream media, you would have a hard time learning about the inside story from one of the law's architects. For days, ABC, CBS and NBC ignored the story altogether. The New York Times finally addressed it days after it made international news through new media, The Washington Times and Fox News. How did The New York Times approach it? With a snarky, dismissive blog post, only online. If you rely on the paper version of the Gray Lady, you'd never know this was happening.
Fortunately for the American people, it has been brought to our attention by a thing called the "Internet," and so-called conservative media outlets, which are categorized as such because they dare to cover everything that is of interest to us, even if it runs contrary to what the political establishment may deem in our best interest.
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Newsbusters.org, a project of the Media Research Center, has been keeping tabs on how the Old Media have been covering this story. As of Friday, neither ABC nor NBC has covered the revelation at all, either online or in print.
As Newsbusters Executive Editor Tim Graham put it: "The national media ... have largely reacted to the Gruber story like it is a virus that should be carefully quarantined." To its credit, The Washington Post covered the story very quickly, yet at this time, not a word in The Los Angeles Times or USA Today.
The exposure of this important story highlights the monumental impact that new media allow the individual. Dave Weigel at Bloomberg produced an excellent profile of the "mild-mannered investment advisor who's humiliating the Obama administration over ObamaCare."
Mr. Weigel talks to Rich Weinstein, who describes himself as an "investment advisor ... I'm a nobody... ." Mr. Weinstein is one of those "stupid" people Mr. Gruber describes, as he believed the president when he said we could keep our health plan. When Mr. Weinstein's own plan got canceled and he had to take one with a premium that costs twice as much, he decided to look into what all these "architects" of the law had been saying.
Mr. Weigel describes what happened next: "Weinstein's scoop went around the world in a hurry. American Commitment, a conservative 501(c)(4) founded by Americans for Prosperity veteran Phil Kerpen, published the clip on its YouTube channel. Kerpen promoted it through tweets, which quickly became live coverage of the media outlets discovering Gruber."
This is why the political establishment hates the Internet — it allows regular people, individuals, to change the world. This in itself presents a danger to tyrannical regimes everywhere, and to American administrations that rely on keeping you in the dark.
It must have been rather surprising to Mr. Gruber and all his "Masters of the Universe" friends to be undone by a few "stupid" people. But then again, when you're distracted by the beauty of your own navel, you may tend to underestimate the people you're lying to.
The American people aren't stupid, but the mainstream media work very hard at keeping us ignorant. They're failing at that, too.
In various videotapes, Mr. Gruber didn't limit his confessions to his opinion about cognitive acuity of the American people. He also let spill the attitude fueling the development of ObamaCare in general: a strange combination of arrogance, cluelessness and, ultimately, deceit.
Paraphrasing Mr. Gruber, the American people were too stupid to accept a massive redistribution of wealth disguised as health insurance, so they had to be lied to.
We are too stupid to understand how taxes on the evil insurance companies are actually taxes on us. ObamaCare's architects promoted it as something that would decrease health care costs, but they actually had no idea what would happen with costs. They just said that to the American people because they saw in a poll that it was important to stupid, silly voters.
This environment explains the outright lie by President Obama that we could keep our plans, doctors and hospitals. Period. Most normal people could never imagine a president lying so specifically about things so dramatically important, but he did.
At the time, I noted to my radio audience that lying like that is like eating potato chips — you can't have just one. To be so brazen about something that will be discovered as a lie means this is how you're doing business in general. Now we know deception is at the heart of the very foundation of the law itself.
As the new ObamaCare enrollment window takes affect this week, how much longer will the Republicans and serious Democrats allow this deliberate lie to destroy the lives of the American people.
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