Senator Elizabeth Warren has been making the TV talk show circuit lately, giving her stump speech as her hosts try to carry on a conversation with her. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Tuesday, November 11, 2014, she was at it again.
Ignoring the fact that the Democrat’s message was not received in the recent General Election, she continued unabated, including boasting about the Unaffordable Care Act.
Seth Meyers, to his credit, asked some good questions. But she wouldn’t answer his questions, just continued with her stump speech for the 2016 Presidency or whatever she is running for.
Said Meyers, “A lot of candidates in your Party seemed to distance themselves from Obama during this election, almost saying 'We will fight him as hard as Republicans did.' Do you think, looking back and seeing the results, that that was a mistake."
She didn't begin to answer the question, nothing about why Democrats distanced themselves from President Obama. She just recited a list of what she considers to be the President’s great accomplishments, starting with: "Millions of people in this country have health care who wouldn't have had health care."
First of all, it’s not “health care” that people have signed up for, it’s health insurance. And while we don’t get an accurate count from the government on how many people have actually signed up, we most assuredly have no idea how many have actually received health care as a result of ObamaCare. It's only insurance they are being forced by the law to get, not actual health care. In fact, it is the health insurance industry being turned into welfare.
Warren went on to say: “The Republicans shut down the government, flushed away 23 billion dollars, money that could have been spent on, you know, schools or on medical research and yet weren't held accountable for that."
The “government shutdown” of a year ago was not even an election issue, and didn’t seem to phase us voters as a reason why we should be voting against Republicans. Yes, that shutdown, the one that only closed about 18% of the federal government for a few days, and put National Park officials on overtime so they could blockade sites such as the World War II memorial from the World War II veterans who were visiting it. Never mind that when these sites close every night or on weekends, no blockading of them is necessary. This tactic, meant to be something to blame Republicans for, completely backfired on them.
As to holding Republicans accountable for the shutdown, let’s remember it was the President shutting things down because he refused to be willing to work with Republicans on a spending bill. How about if we hold Republicans accountable for the good they were doing in trying to stop the national debt from skyrocketing? If Republicans had actually united in their efforts, it would have made a powerful statement that said we shouldn't continually be raising the debt ceiling. The national debt has gone up more under the Obama administration than there has been debt under all the Presidents combined.
And then she confuses the issue even more by saying, with her inflated figure, that the cost of the shutdown was money that could have been spent on “schools and medical research.” While fact checkers would question her figure for the cost of the shutdown, it wasn’t schools and medical research that was being shut down.
Meyers, while very accommodating to her stump speech approach to talk TV, did actually try to get some answers to why Democrats did so bad in the election, but to no avail. Instead he gets a rehash from Warren of the issues the Democrats were running on during the election, issues that people resoundingly voted against.
Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years
