Lawrence O’Donnell riffed on Bill O’Reilly’s long-time “pinhead or patriot” schtick at Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry’s expense. And I can’t think of a more deserving target.
For what O’Donnell called the “very first episode of Pinheads and White House Correspondents,” O’Donnell featured Henry’s gotcha question to White House spokesman Jay Carney yesterday. As O'Donnell described it “Ed Henry walked into the press briefing room yesterday with a plan and I’m sure he was very proud of his plan. He knew it would thrill his Fox News bosses and he was sure gonna trap Jay Carney with the brilliant question he had planned.”
The question? Henry asked Carney if he and other White House staff would enroll in Obamacare. “That question could not possibly be more ignorant,” O’Donnell said. “It’s kind of like asking Jay Carney if he’s going to enroll in the food stamp program” or if he’s “going to enroll in Medicare this week.” Why? As O’Donnell explained very nicely, none of those programs are designed for guys like Carney. But, just as O'Donnell also said, the question was shown over and over and over on Fox and held up as an example of hard-hitting journalism.
O'Donnell continued:
Obamacare is a program designed for people who do not already have employer-provided health insurance, just as food stamps is a program for people who do not have enough money to buy food. Most people don’t need food stamps and most people don’t need Obamacare.
The best way for Jay Carney to actively participate in Obamacare is for him to walk out of the White House Press Briefing Room, go to a tanning salon and pay the ten percent Obamacare tanning salon tax that helps pay for Obamacare for people who cannot afford health insurance.
The photoshopped graphic of a ripped and tanned Carney during that last bit alone makes the video worth watching.
“Is (Henry) a pinhead or a liar who is just pretending not to know the truth about Obamacare?” O’Donnell asked. “What do you think?”
O’Donnell said that, unlike O'Reilly, he’d leave it up to us to decide. “You tell me and while you’re at it, tell Ed Henry.”
So here’s how you can reach them, via Twitter: @edhenryTV or @Lawrence and/or @TheLastWord. I checked Henry’s feed before posting and saw a lot of “pinhead” tweets. For what it’s worth, I voted “pinhead and liar!”
Could it be that they know they’re lying? Only reason to doubt is that would imply they know something.
The point for nearly everyone who has coverage through their employer or through their union is that their plan isn’t going to change. I’m covered through the excellent plan of my guild. There will be slight tweaks to the plan to get it to comply with the law, but nothing that I’m going to see in terms of costs.
For people who were refusing to have any coverage, yes, this will wind up costing them some money. Because they were using the Emergency Room as their health insurance coverage, and making the rest of us pay for it.
I’m not a huge fan of this law, since it doesn’t include the Single Payer component that will wind up being the only way we can control the increasing health costs for everyone. But this will at least get us a lot closer to the goal of having everyone covered and it will help start to alleviate a problem that’s been building up for decades. It won’t solve the problem – Single Payer will do that. But it’s a small step toward the solution.
The reason the GOP and Fox News is fear mongering about this isn’t because they think it will hurt the country. It isn’t because they really think that everyone’s premiums are going to skyrocket. It’s because they’re angry that President Obama and the Democrats were able to pass it in the first place. The GOP plan was to call President Obama a failure and to obstruct every single thing he did to prove themselves correct. Since the ACA is the one major legislative achievement during his term, the GOP has been fervent about trying to kill it. But they failed to kill it. They tried to block it through all the parliamentary tricks and it still passed. They tried to get GOP-controlled states to refuse to apply it, and they’ve failed in that area. They tried legal action to get the Supreme Court to throw it out, only to see the law held constitutional.
So now what do they do? They try to selectively fund government programs. Somehow, their new solution is to offer to fund the government – at least everything except the ACA. In other words, they’re trying to break the law and they’re trying to pick and choose which parts of the government they wish to have continue. Aside from being a childish maneuver, the GOP is opening up a can of worms I don’t think they’ve figured out yet. Because there are plenty of government programs the left would be happy not to fund – say funding for military contractors, funding for Dick Cheney’s various enterprises, funding for companies like Blackwater. Is the GOP ready to put all that on the chopping block?
As for Ed Henry, he’s been trying these gotcha questions for years. His entire MO at the Obama White House has been to try to embarrass the President or his spokesperson at every turn. The question about coverage was a cheap shot, but a typical one for Henry. It lines up with plenty of other ones he’s taken, such as last year when he would regularly present Mitt Romney statements as questions on various topics to try to force Jay Carney to answer them. And pretty much every time, Carney would school Henry on the fact that Fox News was acting as an advocate for Romney rather than asking anything approaching a legitimate question.
It’s sad because Henry used to be a decent reporter, but he’s quickly become absorbed by the Fox borg and echo chamber, to the point that he doesn’t even understand, or refuses to understand, what the Obama care exchanges are for.
What a class A jerk.
