Sunday, November 24, 2013

Juan Williams reveals that the White House is calling the Republicans' opposition to Obamacare "the original sin."

Here's Juan Williams this morning on "Fox News Sunday":

Well, you know, I got to go talk with the president and senior officials at the White House this week...
Access!
... and this topic came up. Their position is, look, ObamaCare inherits all the problems of health care generally, but no one was promising that everyone was going to be [in the] executive suite at the Mayo Clinic. 
We paused right there and discussed logical fallacies. We've been reading "76 Fallacies," and it makes you want to name the fallacy, which I'm sorry I can't do.

But look what Williams did there (purporting to convey the White House message). Obama made promises he knew he wasn't going to keep, and he did it to get the law passed, and people are outraged over that.  The White House talking point is to state a promise that Obama didn't make, as if to shift responsibility to the imaginary people who imagined they'd get that imaginary promise met.
The idea is that you had people who were uninsured, people who were underinsured, and what the Affordable Care Act does is it sets minimum standards for networks, to make sure people have someplace to go, and there were so many people who had no place to go, and that's what they were addressing in trying to put in place this program.
Yeah, so they had a problem they were aiming at, but they caused havoc throughout the system even for people who were not part of the problem. The White House message is that we should only judge their actions by the effect on what they targeted, even though there were big spillover effects.

Also, they're saying they only tried to ensure "someplace" for everyone to go, and "place" meant a place with "minimum standards," but those "minimum standards" are actually rather high (higher than those plans that you might have liked and believed you'd be allowed to keep).
And yet I mean, the attacks, I think this is just, again, more attacks coming from Republicans who don't like the plan. 
Come on! I know the name of this fallacy. It's ad hominem. The attacks should be disregarded because of who is making them: Republicans. And, too, the attacks aren't just from Republicans.
Guess what? I've gotten that message. 
Williams is saying "I," indicating his oneness with the administration, which had him over to receive an injection of talking points. I think he noticed that slip with the pronoun "I," because the next thing he said was:
I think the president and the White House has gotten it, they don't like it.
See how he restated who's gotten the message? It's the White House. They don't like it. Williams's "I" is repositioned in front of the verb think, which I find humorous, since he's not thinking for himself. He's delivering talking points.
It's what the White House now calls the original sin. They cannot work or expect Republicans to work with them to fix the plan.
Wow. The Republicans are exiled from the Garden of Legislating. They cannot be worked with, for they have committed The Original Sin.

The hell?!

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