On Greta van Susteren’s Thursday “On the Record” broadcast, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan sharply criticized President Barack Obama’s Faneuil Hall speech in Boston to defend the failed rollout of Obamacare.
Buchanan accused the president of being deliberate in his deceptions regarding the selling Obamacare in 2009 and 2010 and said Obama seemed to double down on what we have found not to be true about the law.
“It’s arrogant, it’s arrogant,” Buchanan said. “The president of the United States unbelievably — he deliberately misled, deceived the American people about whether or not they could keep their health care and this is suddenly discovered and blown up and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, these are bad apple insurers. You can do away with those policies. We can get you new ones. You can go into your exchanges and get a new policy.’ I think the more serious thing here is, really, look this is a manifest act of incompetence on the part of the administration. But more seriously it goes to his credibility, which goes to character, which goes to integrity. Lest we forget, a president of the United States left office because he had failed to tell the truth about a major matter. And we are told for three years these people have deceived and misled the American people. I mean Greta, a lot of us when we were told you can keep your health care policy. You can keep your doctors. We’re relieved. And then we said, ‘OK, we’ll help other folks. We got a program to do that,’ and you forgot about it. They were not telling the truth. They were systematically deceiving the American people. I don’t know how you lead a country after you have done that.”
Buchanan, the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” said he suspected that Obama wasn’t particularly worried about backlash because of the law’s consequences.
“You know, in the last — that’s when you get when I point out the arrogance,” he said. “He is sitting up there in Boston and you know what he is saying to himself? ‘So what if these guys complain about it? This thing is locked in concrete. There is no way they can change it if I’ve got veto power. I will have veto power until January 2017. Things go bad? So what, it’s there, it’s my legacy.’ That’s the attitude I picked up in Boston. I watched that speech from beginning to end. It was really a smugness, arrogance, and self-confidence despite the fact of this revelation, which I find remarkable that he deliberately deceived and misled the American people for three years.”
According to Buchanan, what Obama had attempted to do in that speech was damage control at the behest of one of his aides.
“I think what happened is the speechwriter said, ‘Our big problem are people are concerned, sir, that they might lose their health care, lose their doctors and there are all these rumors going around,” Buchanan said. “You get up there and tell them nobody is going to lose health care they want and nobody is going to have to change their doctor, period.’ And so he said, ‘OK, I will do it.’ But they have to know that there are hundreds of thousands or rather millions of policies that are going to be tossed out because of what they’ve done. Now, when did they find out? We found out the president of the United States now, he really is out of touch. We found that out with Benghazi and all these things. And maybe he was out of touch. But I find it hard to believe at no time did they know what just was revealed this last week was going to be revealed.”
He added that what appears to be at work here is a general aloofness by the president not only on Obamacare, but on other issues including the Internal Revenue Service scandal and the Benghazi scandal.
“[T]he IRS — he didn’t know about it even after the White House knew about it,” Buchanan said. “With, again Benghazi, two weeks later is he over there talking about the video. All these things … he is not engaged. He is aloof. But, so what? I mean, those aren’t sins if you will on the presidency of the United States. But to go out with your signature program and, first, have a rollout of legendary incompetence in that by his secretary of HHS and all of these things happen and then to have it revealed that one of the fundamental points he made, ‘You can keep your own healthcare program’ is basically untruth. He has been telling this for a long, long time. I think that’s a far more grave matter because, as I said, that goes to not only credibility. It goes to integrity and it goes to character.”