Victor Davis Hanson:
Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud.
Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the “stupidity” of Americans as a way to justify misleading them.
Gruber apparently thinks such deception is OK because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage.
Unfortunately, Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses — he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees — is thematic of the last six years.
Another master-of-the-universe drafter of Obamacare was Ezekiel Emanuel. He scoffed on national television that the number of people covered by Obamacare at that point was “irrelevant.”
Emanuel also drew attention for his recent adolescent rant in a men’s magazine about the desirability of everyone dying at 75 to save society the expense of maintaining what he sees as the unproductive elderly.
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lectured of Obamacare that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” The same elitist message reverberates: that government and academic elites are smarter than average Americans, and so need not explain what they are doing.
Former Energy Secretary Steven Chu made a series of astounding statements about energy use, the most inane being that America would be better off if gas costs soared to Europe’s sky-high prices.
Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador and current national security advisor, has misled in chronic fashion. She was untruthful about the Benghazi killings. Rice defended the administration’s surreal Sgt. Beau Bergdahl prisoner swap by claiming that the AWOL soldier had served with “honor and distinction.” She again prevaricated on national television when she boasted of a diplomatic breakthrough in getting Turkey to provide U.S. bases and support against the Islamic State.
Do we recall how Attorney General Eric Holder contemptuously called Americans collective “cowards” because they did not necessarily share his identity-politics idea of race relations? Holder was the first attorney general in the nation’s history to be held in contempt of Congress.
President Obama habitually believes that his own superior talents make him immune from accountability.
