Season of the Glitch

The mainstream media is finally waking up to the undeniable fact that Barack Obama lied through his teeth when he promised nobody would lose their insurance under ObamaCare – “Period!” he was known to add for emphasis – and premiums would go down by $2500 a year for almost everyone.  

Better late than never, I suppose.  Well, not really.  The point behind Obama’s lies was to ram this nightmare down our throats and then tell us resistance is futile, it’s the “settled law of the land,” America has been permanently transformed, no refunds, no escape.  One man, one vote, one time, as they say in the banana republics Obama keeps insisting his model of government does not resemble.

One of the coldest of cold ObamaCare showers came from NBC News last night, which ran a blistering report that made it absolutely clear Obama lied shamelessly and repeatedly.  He’s not just an inept boob who didn’t realize that dropping billions of dollars in mandates on insurance companies would lead them to cancel a lot of insurance policies.  He knew this would happen, and he knew he’d never win election, re-election, or the congressional fight over the Affordable Care Act if he was honest about it.  His followers have actually begun whispering to each other of the Necessary Lie, by which idiotic Americans had to be defrauded out of their freedom for the Greater Good.

But not long after it was published, the NBC report vanished from the Internet, replaced by – wait for it, wait for it – a 404 error.  That’s the “page not found” error code so many Americans have been learning about as they try to log into Healthcare.gov.

The NBC report later reappeared at a different web address… with a few of the most damning paragraphs surgically removed.  These were stealth edits, made without acknowledgement or explanation.  Under pressure for watchdogs in the wee hours of the morning, the original article was restored, again without acknowledgement. 

NBC says this was all due to a “glitch” and problems with their “publishing tool.”  It’s hard to remember the last time such a thing happened, especially since the “publishing tool” randomly decided to clip out a few of the paragraphs that hurt the Obama Administration most.

This is truly the Season of the Glitch.  The catastrophic failure of HealthCare.gov is excused as “glitches,” now that the original “it’s so popular we couldn’t keep it running!” lie has been debunk-blasted into standup comedy territory.  But a “glitch” doesn’t render computer systems inoperable.  And glitches aren’t the same thing as known flaws that programmers and testers were howling about for months, without response from the President and his HHS Secretary.

This is our future in the Democratic People’s Republic of Glitchistan.  The government seizes vast amounts of power, waves off its failures as “glitches” – not just in computer systems, but also in “unexpected consequences” like the wholesale disintegration of our insurance policies – and we’re all supposed to tug our forelocks and live with it.  It’s not like we can go anywhere else, right?  There are no competitors waiting to pounce and make incompetent, mendacious managers suffer for their feeble excuses.  

We are all securely chained and padlocked into our roller-coaster seats, as we bounce across the rickety tracks and wait for the next stomach-floating plunge into glitch hell.  Do not blame the people who designed this ride – their intentions were good, which excuses every lie they told, and every error they made.  At any rate, there’s no going back, no way to hold anyone accountable.  Many of the glitches will be our fault anyway – clumsy user errors from the kind of flyover-country nitwit who was satisfied with the kind of substandard insurance plan that didn’t include maternity coverage for men.