“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
Politifact .com has called that the lie of the year.
I know how Daryl loves Politifact and how much he loves to show how I’m always wrong when I say Obama is doing something or saying something that Daryl is sure he hasn’t done or said.
I wonder if I’ll get an apology?
Probably not.
So, were you lying when you claimed “It’s Not Personal”?
Comment by Donna — Sunday December 15, 2013 @ 9:54 am
Of course not.
Comment by Don — Sunday December 15, 2013 @ 11:32 am
I had promised myself to not get drawn into these discussions again, but since you called me out I will make a single response.
As I stated several times in comments to your blog and mine, Obama is a politician, and politicians lie. I think he is neither an exception nor an extreme example. If I come across in my responses to your comments as an Obama apologist it was only to try to counterbalance what I saw as one-sided partisan attacks. If you had been praising him as wonderful, I would have been raising counter-examples showing his faults and mistakes.
Regarding the specific example of “you can keep your insurance”, I think when he originally stated this he meant it. The law allowed keeping grandfathered insurance plans. Politifact rated the comment in 2008 as “True”, based on what was known at that time. (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/09/barack-obama/obamas-plan-expands-existing-system/).
The problem came when insurance companies started cancelling plans (about 2% of all plans according to Politifact), and Obama kept insisting that people could keep their plans, when it was obviously not true for everyone. It was certainly not the most egregious nor impactful lie a politician has ever made (e.g. “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”), but because of the public furor and political impact, I can see rating it as the “Lie of the Year”.
That’s all I’m going to say. You get the last word.
Comment by Daryl — Sunday December 15, 2013 @ 1:01 pm