New health care developments

I'm watching a replay right now on C-Span of a joint presser that Senators Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Max Baucus of Montana, both Democrats, held earlier today. (There may have been other Senators participating as well; I tuned in about 10 minutes ago.) Conrad just said that he never did believe that a bill would get through in time for the August recess. And Baucus, who spoke prior to Conrad, had very high words of praise for Doug Elmendorf, the Congressional Budget Office chairman who has come under such fire for insisting that the Obama health care plan is demonstratively unaffordable.

Baucus did spin a little when describing the White House's hardball tactics towards Elmendorf; Baucus opined that Elmendorf hadn't been mistreated, but even with that aside, it is still clear that something is afoot. There is a huge crack in the shield of mystique around this President.

The Congressional Budget Office is one of those agencies that is regarded as independent, yet the Obama White House is playing politics with the numbers that the CBO has run and the ensuing figures that have been produced. Harry Reid snidely asserted that Elmendorf "ought to think about running for office." (Oh, the Freudian layers we could deduce from that.)

I saw probably the last half hour tonight of Obama's own press conference. Bill O'Reilly characterized the press as "docile." I differed with that assessment; I felt the President was actually quite defensive and that the press was very forthright in their questioning.

There are no transcripts up yet that I can find of the questions that the reporters asked, but it was around the third to last question that I noted. It was posed by a female reporter who asked the President if he felt there was anything to the allegations that transparency had been lacking in his White House, specifically surrounding who exactly all the President's appointees are. (I presume she meant the czars.) Obama's reply was very testy, something about "Your cameras have been here all along; you've seen who has been present." Classy.

It is becomingly increasingly apparent, if it ever was not, that this White House has no qualms whatsoever about viscerally personal kneecaps when they feel threatened. The heroic Senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint, has dared to step out and say things about this President's agenda that are perceived as just not collegial enough. His statement earlier this week about universal health care was as follows: "If President Obama does not pass universal health care, this will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

The shoe fit...and the President is hitting back, claiming that DeMint has never done anything to reform health care. DeMint has counterpunched and has an ad that is going up nationwide later this week that, I believe, will reference all of the health care reform bills he has sponsored (of course, the reform is not governmental in its origin, so it isn't legitimate according to the Left).

So clearly, the Saul Alinsky-style tactics are in full swing again, as President Obama seeks to marginalize yet another opponent through smears and innuendo. Let us hope that this particular attempt works as well as the attack on Rush Limbaugh for daring to state that he hoped that the President fails.