By Jeffrey Swindoll
I turn on the news to see what people are saying about Obamacare, and it’s almost always the same thing every time. Old men are arguing, not respectively debating or discussing, over Obamacare on television. Who can really blame them at this point?
It’s a complex issue. There’s no doubt that finding the best way to provide citizens health care is difficult to a find a consensus on. But what I do know as a fact is that President Barack Obama did not fulfill his pledge of, “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period.”
I don’t know how other people go about saying “period” as a rhetorical device at the end of their sentences, but for me, it usually is a claim that does not have any hidden condition or if-then statement that the listener should assume is tagged onto it.
Obama said people can keep their health care if they like it, and that is a bold-faced lie. Hundreds of thousands of people recently received notices that their health care plan is now canceled. This is not a result of those people deciding to cancel their plan. The blame falls on Obamacare and Obama.
It’s a disregard of the American people’s trust in his responsibility as our president to go out and state publicly that people will get to keep their health care plan “period,” and then have a law, with his approval and steadfast campaign for it, clearly contradict that statement.
Nobody needs to have any special kind of qualification to tell you that Obama absolutely dropped the ball on this occasion.
What is most frustrating about Obama is his unwillingness to admit he did what he did. His arrogance is annoying, quite frankly, and it’s unacceptable. He is the president of the United States and he expects to get away with his broken pledges once again?
This is the same scandalous behaviour that the president maintained throughout the Benghazi fiasco for two weeks, dodging, delaying and redirecting questions aimed at him and his administration.
One of the most obvious reasons he gets away with these scandals is the “protective press,” as the syndicated political analyst Charles Krauthammer puts it. The media finds whatever excuse or wording to bail out Obama and soften the criticism tagged to his name. Obama failed miserably. He does not want to admit that and neither does the press. That’s a problem.
Probably the most despicable thing about his lies is the fact that he knew what he was saying was false and did not care at all. The law passed on these lies, and if the majority of the American people knew that Obama was going to blatantly lie and disrespect our trust, this law would not have passed. It was because of the lies that Obama was able to get away with this.
No citizen should let any president lie to them and get away with it. If Obama did admit to his huge lie, then it would show his effort in maintaining the integrity of the Oval Office.
But that is something we’ve never come to see out of the White House during Obama’s first and current term — integrity and competency with his decisions, as the commander-in-chief should go about his responsibility.
Obama did not lie to a couple hundred or just a specific demographic. He lied to millions of Americans. He lied to all of us, and we should not stand for that.
Jeffrey Swindoll is a sophomore journalism major from Miami. He is a reporter for The Lariat.
