Appearing on “Special Report” Monday night, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer railed against the White House and the press following the endless stream of comments from MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, hitting both for treating this as a non-issue.
According to Krauthammer, Gruber’s comments show a “scandal of the first order” on the White House’s part for misleading the public during the public debate over health care reform in 2009 and 2010. The conservative commentator also hit the press for a continued relationship with the administration, saying the two have been “conspiring” together from the outset of the Obamacare debate.
Krauthammer: I think the president was not told about what’s going on. And the reason is that they have had six years experiene of the press essentially conspiring with them and the amazing show of events, that you just had in that piece, in which the administration issues statements, it uses Gruber reports, it’s echoed by their minions in the press, then repeated by Democrats as if this is objective evidence. It’s simply one example of it.
The other one is, I think they calculated the president could go a week without talking about it and then pretend he never heard of it because you wouldn’t hear about it in the press. In fact, except for Fox, you look at all the networks and you showed that last week, it’s been a blackout.
I remember reading, I think it was on Saturday, it was probably the first time in The New York Times on page 12 in a box way down at the bottom and the whole impetus of the story is, Republicans upset about or criticizing about. This is a scandal of the first order and they imagined they would actually get away with it. And when you see everybody pretending that they had never heard of this guy when you show the evidence, he was in the White House 19 times. So when they where the movie called “The Man Who Never Was.” I think this is an extension of the Secret Service scandal. Gruber got into the White House, he got through a side door and he sat in the Oval Office and joined 19 meetings, and that’s exactly what happened.