Jonathan Gruber Tries To Hide His Remarks

Props to Patrick Howley for uncovering this bit of video from Jonathan Gruber, one of the primary architects of Obamacare.

I decided to post this video, even though many people have already seen it. Shakespeare said "at the length truth will out" so we must be at the length vis-à-vis Obamacare because the truth is beginning to gush out.



Here's the text of the clip:

“Mark [Pauly] made a couple of comments that I do want to take issue with, one about transparency in financing and the other is about moving from community rating to risk-rated subsidies. You can’t do it politically. You just literally cannot do it, okay, transparent financing…and also transparent spending.” Gruber said. “In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

Of course there were a lot of people who predicted the truth. Avik Roy from Forbes has this to say:

Gruber made an argument that many of Obamacare’s critics have long made, including me. It’s that the law’s complex system of insurance regulation is a way of concealing from voters what Obamacare really is: a huge redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and unhealthy. In the video, Gruber points out that if Democrats had been honest about these facts, and that the law’s individual mandate is in effect a major tax hike, Obamacare would never have passed Congress.

So this is all sort of infuriating, if you have any fury left. But now we get to the fun stuff.

The University of Pennsylvania which had originally hosted and posted this has now pulled down the video from their site. But this is an attempt on the part of Jonathan Gruber and company to pull their pants up after they got caught. It's already on Youtube, and I downloaded it last night via Keepvid as I'm sure many other conservative geeks did, "just in case". I think it's comical that these people still believe they can say whatever they want in public, but then flip out if anyone quotes them. This story goes hand-in-hand with the story of Lena Dunham sexually abusing her little sister as reported by Lena Dunham in her book. (I like to refer to the incident as "Lena Done-her".)

But that's not all. It appears that the Snopes.com mafia has been called in to cast doubt upon the incident as conservatives have reported it. Here's how they phrase the claim:

"Obamacare architect" Jonathan Gruber recently said Obamacare only passed due to the "stupidity" of the American voter and a lack of "transparency," and video footage of his remarks was deleted from the internet.

Then they call this claim a Mixture of true and false. They accomplish this by pointing out that a Daily Signal article refers to the clip as a "newly surfaced video", which I don't see anything false about, but they paint as a mischaracterization, and refer to the clip as a "newly-circulated video" in their lame conclusion.

While the newly-circulated video of Gruber's remarks is unedited, the comments are neither recent nor complete, and whether the originating source attempted to pull them from the Internet at one point remains unclear.

What in the world remains unclear about what happened? The Snopes page, which is marked 10 November 2014, is pretty high up in the Google search results for Jonathan Gruber currently, about the 7th entry on the first page. Bing has it on the 4th page. Of course I don't have evidence, but this just feels like an attempt at damage control. Snopes has formerly been exposed as untrustworthy and biased, but hilariously the best Gruber and company can get from them is a rating of "Mixture" on the propaganda piece. It should get a rating of Mostly True which they sometimes give out if they're being generous to Gruber, but it appears that even Snopes won't damage their cred further by giving it a False. Factcheck.org doesn't have anything up yet.

Gruber is the fat kid trying to hide behind the phone pole during a hide-and-seek game. His remarks will live on and place him permanently on the elite social-planners' Hall of Shame for calling the American populace stupid, and as a leftist poster child for the ends justifying the means.

Here we go again...

I was reading the Comment magazine post which is referenced by a link Pikkumatti included here when I noticed a little blurb on this page for their next issue. Here we go again, I remember thinking. Looks like more alternative "conservatism", the kind that won't make you unpopular, is completely non-threatening and won't do anything to change the prevailing cultural landscape. No wonder they booked Dreher to write something for the issue.

Here's my, uh, deconstruction of their advertisement:

The Winter 2014 issue of Comment is themed Redeeming Conservatism. Are we out of our minds?

You are out of your minds for publishing a print edition of your rag in 2014. As to your proposed content, you are probably just very confused, arrogant, or both.

If you can't imagine anything good coming out of conservatism, this issue is for you.

There is actually a word for people who "can't imagine anything good coming out of conservatism". That word is liberals. So our guess is that, based on how you are presenting this topic, that word describes most of your readership.

Our hope is you'll discover, first, that conservatism is not what you thought it was ("You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.").

Yes, we saw The Princess Bride many times, too. So y'all are going to explain what conservatism is supposed to be. This should be really instructive. But we could read the Wikipedia pages on it for free—just sayin'.

Second, we hope when you encounter this conservative disposition, you might have occasion to take stock and be surprised to find this names a sensibility you already share.

The disposition and sensibility of this new and improved conservatism you are describing will be so much better because you are going to throw out the views you don't like in mainstream conservatism, i.e., what most people call conservatism.

Our goal is to start a conversation that "redeems" conservatism precisely by deconstructing what we tend to identify with conservatism.

Knew it; told you.

Conservatism, as we mean it, is not a recovery project; it's a preservation project.

Whatever that means.

Is Rod Dreher the last honest conservative?

Surly asks of her Prophet,

Are you the last honest conservative?

His leftist commenters today overwhelmingly seem to think so for his bravely taking on a Megyn Kelly broadcast probing whether George Bush was not in fact right all along about leaving Iraq too soon.

Dreher doesn't deny he was ferociously for the Iraq war himself when he was taking NRO's checks and that was the popular thing to do, before subsequently being against it when the political weathervane swung around one-eighty and threatened to clock him in the head. And because Rod lives in TAC CEO Wick Allison's Obamacon lap these days, Barack's has now become Dreher's master's voice as well.

But we don't have to drop back through too many conservative posts on cooking and American Girl dolls to find the honest conservative shaking his booty on the right side of his stage this time, swaggering fashionably tough on ISIS, albeit using liberal Christian foils as his ostrich feather dancing fans in doing so.

When we finally wade through the typical obfuscating clutter there we find ourselves face to face with the honest conservative: loudly exhorting everyone while strategically committed to nothing at all himself. By all means, somebody should do something about ISIS. He's just not sure it would be prudent to advocate it should be him, or rather, the service men and women of his country acting on his behalf. Better to blog from behind.

Someone should stop those ISIS field trip bullies from pulling Rod's pants down, but we can't possibly expect the honest conservative himself to be the one to do the stopping, can we? Grownups! Grownups! Listen to Rod's cries of calculated, reader-maximizing ambivalence and quit stepping over him in indifference!

Protect this honest conservative Rod Dreher from ever having to take a stand - on anything.