by: Onan Coca
I think we’ve become used to being derided and disregarded by the main stream media and the movers and shakers of the media world. We are not so used to hearing one of the media’s beloved darlings take our side of any argument, so when it does happen, it takes a little time for us to absorb what’s happening.
I had just that experience watching funnyman and pseudo-news host Jon Stewart interviewing Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.
Stewart’s best attacks came while questioning Sebelius on why the Obama administration would delay the Employer mandate for one year but they refused to do the same with the individual mandate. He could not understand, with all of the problems in the roll out of the Obamacare scheme, why the Obama administration would choose to give big business a pass but not individual tax payers who were bearing the brunt of the problems to begin with.
“But if I’m if an individual I’m wondering — well, an individual who doesn’t want this because there are individuals clearly that want this — but if I’m an individual that doesn’t want it, it would be hard for me to look at big business getting a waiver and not having to do it and me having to because I would think, ‘geez, it looks like because I don’t have a lobbying group’… I would feel like you are favoring big business because they lobbied you to delay it because they didn’t want to do this year but you are not allowing individuals that same courtesy.”
Sebelius really had no answer, simply saying that only a few businesses actually got exemptions.
Stewart pushed on, wondering why the administration would not delay the individual mandate after watching so many businesses cut healthcare programs forcing their employees onto Obamacare rolls. In what Stewart called a massive “loophole” in the Obamacare legislation, it truly seems that the people that the law is supposed to help are actually the ones getting screwed. (Which is what Republicans have been saying for almost four years now.)
Again, Sebelius had no retort, only saying that it wasn’t true that businesses were cutting employee healthcare coverage. (Oh really Secretary Sebelius? Here are just three examples; Home Depot, Walgreens, and UPS. But there are more and more examples every day.)
So unconvinced was Stewart by the entire interview, that at the end of the show he took a moment to express his frustrations to his viewers.
“I still don’t understand why individuals have to sign up and businesses don’t, because if the businesses — if she’s saying, ‘well, they get a delay because that doesn’t matter anyway because they already give health care,’ then you think to yourself, ‘f*** it, then why do they have to sign up at all,’” he said. “And then I think to myself, ‘well, maybe she’s just lying to me.’”
The fact that one of the liberal’s leading lights has begun to question the Obama administration’s official version of events on the Obamacare roll-out leads me to believe that the media spin on which side is winning the public relations battle over Obamacare and the shutdown, may just be spin.
The central Democrat demo are the people watching Stewart’s Daily Show for their news, and they just heard the Republican argument straight from the lips of their own Edward R. Murrow.
Stewart may wear a clown nose, but to liberal American
twenty-something’s, he’s the closest thing to news they’ll get. If
Stewart is indicative of what they’re feeling, then Republicans are in a
very good position to win this fight. If they can find the guts to keep
up the pressure. That’s a B-I-G if.
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