The press doesn’t get Robert Gibbs

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"When a presidential press secretary gets in trouble with the press, it’s usually for accurately reflecting the feelings of his boss.

The liberal blogosphere has been all atwitter recently because White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told Sam Youngman of The Hill that liberals who unfairly criticize President Barack Obama may be living in a chemically altered state.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

Actually, it is crazy. On the most important issue of his presidency — the Iraq war — Bush plunged us into a hunt for imaginary weapons of mass destruction, which Obama says he never would have done.

This the left likes. But some don’t like the political compromises Obama had to make to pass health care, some much preferring righteous indignation to useful legislation.

“Gibbs dismissed the ‘professional left’ in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right,” Youngman went on, “saying, ‘They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.’”

It isn’t. And I’m guessing the president agrees with Gibbs and was neither angered nor disappointed by Gibbs’s statements, which came not in the heat of his daily briefing but in the cool of his West Wing office.

In other words, Gibbs knew what he was doing. And so did Obama."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40970.html#ixzz0wM7Q6GsW

[DJ13]

1. If they knew what they were doing they're dumber than I thought

If Obama wants to suck up to right leaning independents and conservative Dems thats his business, but its damn stupid to do that by alienating those who worked to get him elected.

[Exilednight]

2. "useful legislation"? Nothing in HCR is useful if you can't afford it ..................

the biggest problem with HCWNR is that it does not address the problem of out of control prices, which is the principle problem with health care.

And, it mandates that I put money in the pockets of corporations whose CEOs just issued themselves $200 million raises.

By Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times

August 11, 2010

Reporting from Washington —
The top executives at the nation's five largest for-profit health insurance companies pulled in nearly $200 million in compensation last year — while their businesses prepared to hit ratepayers with double-digit premium increases, according to a new analysis conducted by healthcare activists.

[flamingdem]

3. There are subsidies if you can't afford premiums

I wish it was sooner but it's coming in 2014.

[TheKentuckian]

5. The subsidies do not create affordability

They are what it takes to sate the bloodsuckers after the last drop of blood is squeezed from the stones leaving little to nothing for care our anything else.

[2 Much Tribulation]

4. If they knew what they're doing, then they must be abandoning ME. n/t

[eridani]

6. Wanting Canadian health care = using pictures of Obama on targets at shooting ranges

Both are extremes of left and right that exactly cancel each other out. One is esactly as unreasonable as the other.