Oh, what a tangled web you've woven, Mr. President

By A.J. DiCintio

Yes, Mr. President, the title alludes to Sir Walter Scott's "Oh, what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive."

And, yes, the web you've woven results from the oxymoronically named Affordable Care Act or, as it is commonly known, Obamacare.

So, keeping cause and effect straight, let's begin with the deception that has doomed you to wriggle and wrangle hopelessly in the webby net from whose remorseless tangles no second term president escapes.

Mr. President, you promised a new, transparent healthcare politics, in fact, one whose deliberations were literally televised on C-SPAN; but you gave us secret congressional negotiations that guaranteed pay offs not just to insurance and drug companies but even Democratic Senators, as exemplified by the sordid vote-buying of the "Louisiana Purchase" and "Cornhusker Kickback."

You promised change, but you gave us two thousand pages of inscrutable law and ten thousand pages of arrogant, bureaucratic regulation that have nothing to do with smart, creative, innovative reform but everything to do with the same decrepit, addictive, mind and spirit numbing opiate that huffed and puffed Great Society welfare programs into being.

You promised hope, but you gave us the kind of despair certain to hang over any society ruled by centralized government gangs, including a healthcare gang not of four or four thousand but so enormous it includes 15,000 mightily armored IRS enforcers.

You promised honesty, but you gave us the fiscally irresponsible lie that Obamacare would cost $900 billion when your own CBO (and every honest actuary) knew the real amount is at least $1.9 trillion.

You promised a new politics, but you gave us an unparalleled instance of arrogant one-party rule when you and your Democratic allies forced a profound change regarding the world's most advanced healthcare system down a dissenting nation's throat.

You promised fairness and honest populism, but you gave us corrupt dictatorial cronyism when you summarily granted waivers to unions and decreed corporations exempt from the employer mandate.

You promised a forward-looking administration brimming with intellect and innovative thought, but you gave us a hastily concocted disgrace which economist Jonathan Tepper has exposed as forcing citizens "to buy insurance from oligopolies and in many cases monopolies."

You promised a triumph of reason over mad irrationality, but you gave us a monstrosity only mindless political hacks could imbue, according to Tepper, with "the worst elements of public and private" healthcare systems the world over.

And, of course, you promised to protect the integrity of every person's current health insurance policy as well as the policy's guarantees regarding doctors and hospitals, but you gave us yet another lie, one currently freezing millions with the terror of cancellations.

So it is that you now find yourself hopelessly tangled in a web you wove with meticulous care from the strongest threads Irony could provide.

The strongest, indeed, Mr. President; for the temporary non-fix you propose to assuage public anger serves only to cause citizens to focus more intensely on the reality that Obamacare was carefully constructed to force millions (especially healthy young people) to lose their current health insurance and then buy policies on federal government controlled exchanges.

That's why your non-fix serves only to focus the public on the reality that when the next cancellation shoe drops with the institution of the conveniently delayed employer mandate in 2014, tens of millions more Americans will find themselves betrayed.

That's also why the more you mangle rhetoric in sorry fits to escape the unforgiving threads, the more tightly you succumb to their grasp as the public comes to understand Obamacare as a con sold under the deception that Yes, Virginia, there is a free lunch.

And that's why in addition to crashing poll numbers and the sting of editorial pages calling you out as a "stone cold liar" (NY Post), you are cursed to suffer the astounding indignity of being upbraided for your deception by none other than Bill Clinton.

Yes, the Bill Clinton who certainly assured his wife (of Hillarycare fame) that acting in concert, both of them can convince the public of the steely truth Hillary uttered when in '08 she solemnly promised that under her healthcare proposal, every last American would be able to keep his or her existing health policy, doctor, and hospital.

That's how unbearably rotten and painful the situation is in the tangled web, Mr. President.

But you have only yourself to blame.

© A.J. DiCintio