Brass Knuckles

The AP reports that President Obama doesn’t consider compulsary health insurance with fines and penalty for non-compliance a new tax.

President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don’t would not amount to a backhanded tax increase.

“I absolutely reject that notion,” the president said. Blanketing most of the Sunday TV news shows, Obama defended his proposed health care overhaul, including a key point of the various health care bills on Capitol Hill: mandating that people get health insurance to share the cost burden fairly among all. Those who failed to get coverage would face financial penalties.

Obama said other elements of the plan would make insurance affordable for people, from a new comparison-shopping “exchange” to tax credits.

Telling people to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase, Obama told ABC’s “This Week.”

“What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore,” said Obama. “Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.”

Well, technically, I guess it’s not a “tax”, if you want to get hard-core technical…  but wonder if the “vote or die”  MTV-grooved 18 to 25 year-olds are going to see it that way, though.   Even a hundred bucks is a lot of you’re young and starting out.

Is Obama’s assertion a lie?  Again, not technically.  I’m one that believes that Obama doesn’t lie.  He misdirects, he shades the truth, he insinuates and he makes implications that require flying leaps of logic and faith, but as Charles Krauthammer pointed out in his Washington Post column on Friday, he doesn’t necessarily lie.

Obama doesn’t lie. He merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another. This has been the story throughout his whole health-care crusade. Its original premise was that our current financial crisis was rooted in neglect of three things — energy, education and health care. That transparent attempt to exploit Emanuel’s Law — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste — failed for health care because no one is stupid enough to believe that the 2008 financial collapse was caused by a lack of universal health care.

So on to the next gambit: selling health-care reform as a cure for the deficit. When that was exploded by the Congressional Budget Office’s demonstration of staggering Obamacare deficits, Obama tried a new tack: selling his plan as revenue-neutral insurance reform — until the revenue neutrality is exposed as phony future cuts and chimerical waste and fraud.

Obama doesn’t lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads — so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.