ObamaCare and the Totalitarian Mindset: All of us work for the government.

PIGGERY-POKERY: “A new Gallup poll finds that those who know the least about Obamacare tend to be the ones who gave Barack Obama both of his terms in the presidency.” Low-information voters.

BROKEN PROMISE: White House: Obama hasn’t yet signed up for Obamacare.

President Obama has yet to make good on the administration’s promises that he would sign up for health insurance on the new government exchanges, the White House acknowledged on Monday.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said that Obama has not signed up for Obamacare and that he did have a reason for the delay.

A reporter pressed Carney on whether the White House would make it an open-press event if and when Obama does enroll.

“I’ll get back to you,” Carney replied.

Shortly after Obama signed the new health care law in March 2010, a White House official said the president planned to walk the walk and sign up for the insurance exchanges his law created.

“The president will participate in the exchange,” an administration official told USA Today at the time.

Expiration date, hit.

HOW BAD IS IT? SO BAD THAT THIS IS THE POSITIVE SPIN FROM TIME: HealthCare.gov No Longer a Complete Fail. Close enough for government work!

: ObamaCare and the Totalitarian Mindset: All of us work for the government.

“Suppose some inventor hatches an idea for what he thinks would be a great and revolutionary new product. He raises money from investors, sets up office, hires people–and fails spectacularly. The company’s customer service is atrocious, the product is expensive and lousy, and the whole business plan is fundamentally flawed. Who’s to blame?

The news media, of course. After all, journalists could have put out stories touting the virtues of the product and explaining how to navigate the crummy customer-service system, and maybe then the whole business plan would have worked out.

That, at any rate, is the argument Paul Waldman puts forth in an article for the leftist American Prospect. Of course being a good leftist, Waldman is not blaming the media for the failure of a private business. But then neither would any nonleftist. Yet because the enterprise in question is a governmental one–ObamaCare, in case you’ve been away from Earth for the past two months–the argument somehow makes sense to him.

We find it not only wrongheaded but sinister (in every sense of the word). Waldman argues that journalists have a “responsibility” to provide “audiences with practical information that could help them navigate the new system”–and not just that, but to provide such information “repeatedly or people won’t get it.”
JAMES TARANTO
Read the whole thing.

ED DRISCOLL: It’s Potemkin Websites All The Way Down.