As President Obama’s tenure winds down and the “fundamental transformation” victory lap begins, his aides are getting in on the action, too.
Three Obama staffers appeared with Charlie Rose and, among other things, laughed about writing the line in the president’s health care speech when he said, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
“Lovett wrote the line about ‘if you like your insurance you can keep it,'” Jon Favreau said.
“How dare you!” Jon Lovett interjected, before adding, “And you know what? It’s still true.”
In 2013, Politifact rated Obama’s statement the “Lie of the Year.”
For four of the past five years, PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year has revolved around the health care law, which has been subject to more erroneous attacks than any other piece of legislation PolitiFact has fact-checked.
Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best.
Instead, he fought back against inaccurate attacks with his own oversimplifications, which he repeated even as it became clear his promise was too sweeping.
While Obama’s propaganda lackeys will be laughing all the way into their new consulting and cable news gigs, the joke’s on the thousands of Americans who lost their insurance.
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