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Saturday, January 25, 2014

Botch Watch!

At what point do ongoing successes of the Obamacare rollout stop the ongoing media references to "the botched Obamacare rollout"? Anytime soon? Anyone care to make any bets?

After all, pundits still refer to the "fecklessness" and "failure" of Obama's foreign policy toward Syria... you know, the policy which by leaving open opportunities for diplomacy kept American bombing nobody wanted but pundits described as inevitable anyway from happening and actually managed not only to get Syria to admit it had chemical weapons it had always denied but then to voluntarily begin to destroy its caches of chemical weapons under international supervision.

And, again, after all, pundits still refer -- or allow references to go unchallenged -- to the Fast and Furious "scandal" that is not a scandal (and would be a Bush scandal if anything), and to the IRS or Postal "scandal" that is not a scandal either. At this point there is little to separate the knee-jerk howls of "Benghazi!" (an attack on Americans not by Americans, you know) from the knee-jerk howls for the "Birth Certificate!" or the "College Transcript!" Even so, still pundits regularly allow the former sort of nonsense a legitimacy they no longer allow the latter nonsense, without any reason I can see to distinguish them as nonsense goes.

Hell, it is actually a commonplace of punditocrappic prognostication that "the botched rollout" of "hated" Obamacare gives the GOP an edge in the upcoming mid-terms. I personally think there is little reason to agree with that assumption -- any more than comparably assumption about a polling skew concealing the inevitability of the Romney Presidency -- but it is even more striking to me that those who do propose this observation don't experience it as such an indictment of their own work that they do not either correct the record or retire in shame immediately upon making it.

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