CNN's Joe Johns: Not Clear How Many Times Obama Told Truth About People Losing Insurance

To say that President Obama’s repeated promise about being able to keep your insurance, ranks as the biggest political lie of the last two decades, is an understatement. But the media are already trying to find every loophole imaginable to spin Obama’s lie, and it was CNN’s Joe Johns who won the prize for the most desperate example of water carrying with the ridiculous claim that we just don’t know how many times Obama told the truth about people losing their insurance.

What Johns and CNN are doing is trying to mitigate the political damage to Obama by manufacturing the idea that the administration did tell the truth, we just don’t know how many times they did. Except CNN knows the White House didn’t. CNN knows this because they have the resources to find out. And they know this because had Obama ever made that distinction, Republicans would have jumped all over it.

But by dishonestly pretending that we just don’t know for sure how many times the White House told the truth, CNN is able to downplay the potential fallout of a president caught red-handed repeatedly lying to the American people.  

Everything Johns reported was laced with dishonesty:

WOLF BLITZER: Did the White House knowingly, or perhaps not knowingly, mislead the American public when the president so often said, “If you like your health plan, you can keep it”?

JOE JOHNS: Wolf, if you look at some of these statements, they do appear to have made some statements at the outset, while they were selling the program, that appear to have been overbroad…

Let’s stop here. What Johns is saying is simply not true. If Johns wants to categorize these promises as “overbroad,” that’s fine. But the claim that Obama only made this promise early on, while selling the program, if false. It was a promise he repeated during his 2012 reelection campaign. It was a promise he made after his administration knew that up to 67% of the 14 million in the individual insurance market would not be allowed to the keep their insurance.

JOHNS: …They made a blanket statement; they made it sound like they were talking about all insurance, when they were talking about most insurance, especially the insurance people get through their employers.

Let’s stop again. How does Johns know what Obama was talking about, much less what he meant? This wasn’t a promise Obama repeated once or twice. This wasn’t a throwaway comment at a rally. This was relentlessly repeated campaign of reassurance to garner support for ObamaCare and win re-election.

We all know what Obama meant, and that was to mislead everyone until it was too late. So for Johns to imply that Obama “meant” to tell the truth is anti-science. But here is where Johns jumps the shark….

JOHNS: The president said again and again that you can keep your insurance. But it’s not clear how many times he actually distinguished between employer-based insurance and those who bought private insurance after ObamaCare was signed into law. … It’s not clear how often they told people insurance companies might cancel policies because they didn’t comply with ObamaCare.

That is sleight-of-hand propaganda at its slipperiest.

Again and again and again and again, over two presidential campaigns,  Obama made a solemn promise to every American that they could keep their health insurance. He even did so during a State of the Union address.

But here is Johns, without a hint of evidence, manufacturing from whole cloth the falsehood that Obama did tell the truth, we just don’t know how many times he did.

 

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC