Category: 
by Obama Pundit
One of Barack Obama’s favorite methods for defending embarrassing or politically awkward statements he or others have made is to claim that they are merely ’snippets’ that were ‘taken out of context’.
Then, after pointing this out, he goes on to attack those who would dare hold him or others accountable for such statements. The result is that attention is temporarily diverted away from the statements, usually so they can be weakly disowned later when fewer people are paying attention.
Some examples:
—On his wife, Michelle, after her speech declaring herself to be proud of her country for the first time in her life:
“..to try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her I think is just low class … and especially for people who purport to be promoters of family values, who claim that they are protectors of the values and ideals and the decency of the American people to start attacking my wife in a political campaign I think is detestable.”
—On his spiritual mentor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright:
And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.
—Obama on his Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s racially insensitive remarks:
“There are, of course, some in Washington who are attempting to draw old battle lines and playing the usual political games, pulling a few comments out of context to paint a distorted picture of Judge Sotomayor’s record,” said Mr. Obama.
Those are just three examples. Of course, in each of the three cases, the statements or the subjects of the statements were all eventually disavowed, rendering much of the early criticism by Obama over ‘context’ moot.
And now we come to the latest example. Here is the President clearly advocating for a single-payer health care system that will eventually phase out private insurance:
The text reads thus:
“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”
I’m not sure how this segment can be construed as anything other than a strong endorsement of a single-payer health care system.
But hold the phone! Here is the response from the Obama administration on the words spoken by the President on that video:
“Well, nothing can be farther from the truth. You know the people who always try to SCARE people whenever you try to bring them health-insurance reform are at it again. And they’re taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a VERY false impression. The truth is that the president has been talking to the American people a LOT about health-insurance reform and what is at stake for them.
“So what happens is that because he’s talking to the American people so much, there are people out there with a computer and a lot of free time, and they take a phrase here and there — they simply cherry-pick and put it together, and make it sound like he’s saying something that he didn’t really say.”
WHERE was anything ‘cobbled together?’ It’s a straightforward video of a statement. It’s not re-edited or re-looped or cut differently. It’s straight from a YouTube video originally made by a member of SEIU!
This disavowal is simply amazing and takes us for a bunch of fools. A perfectly acceptable response would be: “The President at one time favored a single-payer system but no longer does. Next issue.” I’m sure many people not on the Progressive side of the spectrum would have no problem with him changing his mind to a more moderate position.
But to claim that it is taken out of context does nothing but increase the suspicion of the President’s intentions when it comes to this bill. Which Obama are we supposed to believe and why? Is everything he said in the past now inoperable if it is politically inexpedient?
He once said that ‘words matter.’ Maybe it was just another cobbled-together snippet that we should all disregard.
