I Told You So

Who said the following? (Hint - it was not Ronald Reagan.)

"The theme of this movie is whether men are to be ruled by God's law or whether they are to be ruled by a dictator.... Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today."

These comments were made by Cecil B. DeMille when he introduced his 1956 epic film, The Ten Commandments. He further explained that the story was about "the birth of freedom." The movie premiered during the dark days of the growing Cold War. The Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 and communism was on the march. DeMille gave perspective to the ideological battle going on around the world. How poignant and even prophetic his comments were. How ironic that twenty-two years after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union we are still fighting this battle. Only this time it's not with tyrants around the globe, it's with the one in the White House.

The battleground for the struggle we are in now is the misnamed Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Even though an attempt by the Republican Party to defund or delay the act led to a partial government shutdown, the law went into affect on October 1. It was an immediate disaster. Within minutes of opening the incompetently created website crashed, and it has continued to crash. After six weeks less than 50,000 people have signed up for a policy on the government exchange, and only another 50,000 or so have signed up on state run exchanges. In order to reach its March 31 goal of seven million enrollees, 39,000 need to sign up every day. What's worse, over five million people have had their insurance plans canceled.

Obama's promise about people being able to keep the insurance plan they had was finally exposed for the lie it has always been. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, who is responsible for the website failure, repeatedly lied to the House Oversight Committee about the program's readiness and the progress being made getting it fixed. The president's poll numbers plummeted to under forty percent, and finally some Democrats began to jump ship telling Obama he needs to fix the problem, and preparing bills to authorize a delay in the requirement to get health insurance by March.

Yesterday Obama finally came down out of the clouds to offer a solution. But what he offered wasn't a solution. Without apologizing for anything he told the insurance companies to reinstate the five million policies that they have canceled and to keep them in place for another year. Sounds good except for one thing. The insurance companies have been preparing for this for the last three years. They just spent thousands on man hours, paper, ink and postage sending out cancelation letters, and they've deleted those policies from their computers. Chances are they aren't going to spend the money to rewrite and send out five million reinstatement letters, nor waste the thousands of hours it would take to rebuild the policies they no longer have, only to send out the cancelation letters again next year. Obama's ruling will delay the penalties for not signing up for another year, but chances are most of those five million that lost their policies are not going to get their insurance back within the next year.

There is method to his madness. Democrats are trying to distance themselves from the Obamacare catastrophe so the fix is not so much about the AFA as it is about getting the Democrats off the hook. Obama has now put the burden back on the insurance companies to reinsure people and if they don't you can be sure he will blame the evil insurance charlatans for leaving people without any health care.

The one thing that everybody seems to be overlooking, however, according to Charles Krauthammer, is the continual tromping on the Constitution. He is right. The AFA is law passed by Congress and signed by Obama. Obama's only authority is to implement the law, yet he has personally altered it, given exemptions, and now delayed it, (after shutting down the government because he refused to negotiate on delaying it). He has no constitutional authority to do any of this. It is the responsibility of Congress to make the changes, but even Congress has taken a pass and allowed Obama to get away with it.

This is tyranny. This is a dictator imposing his will on free souls under God. This is the ideological warfare we are waging that will determine whether or not we will continue to be free.

There may be a silver lining in all of Obama's duplicity. The AFA needs seven million people enrolled by the end of next March for the system to work, but Obama just delayed the individual mandate for a year. With the slow number of people signing up now, and with no penalties coming for another year, and with the website debacle as it is, they aren't likely to be anywhere near the seven million needed by next March and the whole program may collapse on itself. Obama may have just signed the death warrant to Obamacare.

And to all those whom I've been debating this with over the internet, probably none of whom are reading this now anyway, those who have called me racist, hateful, ignorant, biased, arrogant, proud, stupid, and told me I belonged on another planet, I have one thing to say, ... I told you so.