I’ve periodically used “Schadenfreude” to describe my feelings about certain issues.
Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I’ve openly admitted to a perverse sense of happiness at the misfortune of others when, for instance, France’s class-warfare tax policy backfired because successful taxpayers emigrated.
And I’ve expressed similar amusement when writing about Europe’s fiscal crisis and the whining of statist politicians.
But the Obamacare disaster gives me a steroid-fueled feeling of Schadenfreude. As a matter of fact, we need to augment that term with another phrase just to capture what’s happening.
So what’s a good option? Well, according to Wikipedia, “Desert /dɨˈzɜrt/ in philosophy is the condition of being deserving of something, whether good or bad.”
That’s where we get the phrase “just deserts,” and that’s exactly what Obamacare supporters are getting as their cherished scheme for government-run healthcare blows up in front of our eyes.
I’m not the only one who is enjoying this moment in history. Here’s some of Jonah Goldberg’s unabashedly snarky column in National Review.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the unraveling of Obamacare. …If you can’t take some joy, some modicum of relief and mirth, in the unprecedentedly spectacular beclowning of the president, his administration, its enablers, and, to no small degree, liberalism itself, then you need to ask yourself why you’re following politics in the first place. Because, frankly, this has been one of the most enjoyable political moments of my lifetime. …Indeed, not since Dan Rather handcuffed himself to a fraudulent typewriter, hurled it into the abyss, and saw his career plummet like Ted Kennedy was behind the wheel have I enjoyed a story more.
Isn’t that a marvelous excerpt, particularly the comment about the “beclowning of the president”?
But Jonah’s just getting started.
In every tale of hubris, the transgressor is eventually slapped across the face with the semi-frozen flounder of reality. …in the modern era, comeuppance-for-the-arrogant is more often found in comedies, and the “rollout” of Healthcare.gov has been downright hilarious. …Indeed, the whole law is coming apart like a papier-mâché yacht in rough waters.
I don’t even know what “orcs” are, but this next passage does a very good job of nailing Obama for arrogantly refusing to negotiate when the President probably had the most to gain from a delay!
During the government shutdown, Barack Obama held fast, heroically refusing to give an inch to the hostage-taking, barbaric orcs of the Tea Party who insisted on delaying Obamacare. …But we didn’t know something back then: Obama desperately needed a delay of Healthcare.gov. In his arrogance, though, he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. The other possibility is that he is such an incompetent manager, who has cultivated such a culture of yes-men, that he was completely in the dark about the problems. …This is how you know we’re in the political sweet spot: when the only plausible excuses for the administration are equally disastrous indictments.
Jonah also has some great commentary about the role of other Administration flunkies.
The president may now claim that he knew nothing, but he must have wondered why Henry Chao, Healthcare.gov’s chief project manager, set the bar of success at sea level last March: “Let’s just make sure it’s not a Third World experience.” At this point, it could only be more of a Third World experience if Healthcare.gov required enrollees to pay with chickens. …every day Jay Carney looks even more like a little boy who put on his dad’s suit. You have to wonder what goes on in his mind, as a former journalist, when he tells his former colleagues that “the American forces have been completely destroyed with minimal Iraqi casualties.” (Oh, wait, that was Baghdad Bob. I get them confused.) And what about Dan Pfeiffer going on the Sunday shows to insist that no American should believe his or her lying eyes? …the website will get better. It could hardly get worse, short of a finding that it causes irritable bowel syndrome.
Speaking of Jay Carney, Jonah says that the President’s spokesman has reached the point where “the musky stench of fear, sweat, and urine wafting from the podium makes it hard for all but the true believers to put much stock in his words.”
Jonah then makes the very serious point – in a very amusing way – that Obamacare was deliberately designed so that millions of people would lose their old coverage.
Five million people — and counting — have lost their health insurance, despite the president’s years of “you can keep your plan” promises. The president has apologized, sort of. He says he’s “sorry” that people have found themselves in a bad situation because of “assurances” he made. But no one has lost their insurance because of the president’s assurances, they’ve lost their insurance because of the president’s law. If a captain has the lifejackets filled with cement, his assurance that “you can keep your lifejacket” is only half the crime. Obama knew the lifejackets wouldn’t work. …Millions more will eventually lose the insurance they like because of Obamacare, according to the administration’s own internal estimates. The cancellations aren’t a bug, they’re a feature, and the president lied about it over and over again.
So what’s the bottom line? Jonah is reveling in the moment.
…as a political and ideological matter, this is beyond fantastic. For years we’ve been told that Democrats were more “reality-based,” that “facts have a liberal bias,” in the words of Paul Krugman, and that if they could just have their way, they could fix all of our problems. No one represented this arrogant promise more than Barack Obama himself. But, with an irony so rich it would be made of Corinthian leather if it was a car seat, the only way he could get his signature legislation passed was to baldly and brazenly lie about it, over and over and over again. He created a rhetorical cloud castle where no one would lose his insurance, every family would save thousands of dollars, and millions of the uninsured would suddenly get coverage. Anyone who doubted this was called a fool or a liar, or even a racist.
*Several people have asked whether it should be “just desserts.” That was my initial inclination, but I went with the single-S approach based on Wikipedia. Suffice to say, I’m not sure which approach is correct and I’ve certainly made mistakes before. But if this is a goof on my part, at least it’s a lot smaller than the $16 trillion error I made on national TV.
