Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan says the troubled Obamacare rollout could potentially vindicate the tea party for the government shutdown.
“During three and a half years, from 1942 to ’45, the United States government built, with the help of the industrialists, got hundreds of thousands of aircraft, 1600 ships. We armed the United States — 12 million men, Russia, the British Empire — destroyed two of the greatest empires on earth,” Buchanan told “On The Record” host Greta Van Susteren on Thursday. “And you mean to tell me these folks in that amount of time, and with $500 million can’t create a website?
“I mean, Greta, this says something not only about the legendary incompetence of this administration, but about government in and of itself, in which an awful lot of people have invested all their hopes as to the future.”
Buchanan, the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”, explained that if the problems were to spiral out of control with Obamacare, it could undermine the central assumptions of liberalism.
“[N]ow the key question here, I think, is not simply this website. Is it just that? Or are these problems with 300,000 people being dumped off their health care, 150,000 there, doctors having problems, the things that are going to get rid of the individual mandate, is this a debacle for the Obama administration? Is this whole thing a disaster? In which case, I think it’s not simply the Obama administration, which is going to suffer in history, but I think it’s the whole idea of the party of government, that this is the instrument of change and advancement and progress. And that idea is at the heart of the liberal idea, if you will.”
In the mid-to-long term, Buchanan said this could be the vindication of the tea party’s stand during the government shutdown.
“[I]’m one of those individuals who say, look, I like my doctors, I like my programs and like the rest of it,” Buchanan said. “If it helps some folks, fine. If it’s going it cost money, fine. Leave me alone. But instead, they have got this whole thing going here. And I think what you are going to get down the road, briefly, is the potential vindication of the tea party decision to say, ‘we are not going to vote to impose this on the American people.'”We are going to vote to extend it for one year because this thing ought to be taken back to the shop, just like the Dreamliner, if its battery doesn’t work.’
‘They voted that way and they stood up. And all this evidence, night after night, not simply from Fox [News], frankly, the mainstream media, the big newspapers, you pick them up, all over one disaster after another. I think you could move into 2014 with this thing being an albatross around the neck of the president of the United States. And, again, the key question is, is it just this website or is it the whole program that is really a lemon?”