But Watch What He Does

Yesterday, President Obama loudly proclaimed that he was NOT trying to take over the American health care system and he had no intention of instituting socialized medicine here. It's just this tiny matter of increasing competition by forcing private insurance companies to compete with the federal government. His statements make Orwell's Newspeak in the novel, 1984, look completely straightforward.

He was almost as emphatic as when he said he did not want to run the automobile industry just hours before he fired one CEO and hired another at GM before the government bought them out. He told Chrysler they had to merge with Fiat. He arranged for his union friends to get preferred treatment in both bankruptcy proceedings ahead of the legal creditors. He promised that running GM would be "temporary," but gave no exit strategy. (Amtrack was supposed to be temporary too.) And although he arranged for union leaders and government bureaucrats to sit on the board, he swore that the government would not get involved with decisions about minutiae -- just the important decisions.

If I remember correctly, he didn't want to take over the banks either, then tried to keep them from backing out and returning the money when they found how many strings were attached. This week, he "allowed" them to pay the money back to the government, not to reduce the deficit or repay the taxpayers, but to allow the government to "give away" more money.