Pajama Boys

As many of us predicted at the time it was enacted, Obamacare is spiraling toward oblivion with skyrocketing costs, every increasing deductibles, far fewer participants than predicted, and an exodus of insurance companies from the rolls of those who provide insurance on an increasingly smaller number of exchanges. Obamacare was a hyperpartisan exercise in abject incompetence, from its disastrous website launch to its day-to-day operations in 2016.

But today's post isn't so much about Obamacare as it is about an Obamacare icon, also known as "pajama boy." Pajama boy appeared in a 2013 ad produced by a pro-Obama PAC that was supposed to convince young people to sign-up for the over-priced healthcare program.

Victor Davis Hansen comments:

In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad [as pajama boy], offered a self-portrait of himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described “liberal f***.” “A liberal f*** is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he explains. “I won every argument but one.” I suspect that when Krupp boasts about “making opponents feel terrible about themselves,” He is referring to people of his own kind rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or electrician ...

Krupp is emblematic of an entire class of young smart-asses found in Silicon Valley, on campuses across the nation, and in Hollywood, and now ensconced at the highest levels of American government and journalism. Do we remember Jonathan Gruber, the conceited MIT professor and architect of Obamacare, who bragged that he had hoodwinked a supposedly far dumber America in order to ram the Affordable Care Act down its collective throat ... After President Obama had assured the American people that they could keep their doctors and their health plans, while seeing their premium costs decrease, Gruber high-fived that voters were too stupid to figure out how they had been misled ...

Recently Ben Rhodes — “Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting,” and author of the president’s Cairo speech and the Benghazi talking points — confessed to the New York Times that he salted bogus talking points about the Iran deal among the field of novice wannabe Washington–New York foreign-policy “experts,” on the expectation that Pajama Boy journalists on the make (“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing”) would lazily draw on these pseudo-experts to complete the circular con (“We created an echo chamber. . . . They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say”). Because the postmodernist Rhodes (who says he drives a “Beamer”) is cynical and contemptuous of the value of traditional first-hand experience and classical education, he feels he can construct almost any reality he wishes, such as a manufactured reformist Iranian wing reaching out to the U.S. to offer concessions on a nuclear deal:

“In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he says. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project, and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked. . . . We drove them crazy.”

The arrogance, condescension and outright stupidity of the cohort of pajama boys who think they are the smartest guys in the room is absolutely astonishing. But even more astonishing is the manner in which they reinforce the Team of 2s indictment that I have used quite often during Barack Obama's presidency.

Because Hillary Clinton has stated that she will continue in the footsteps of Barack Obama, it's a little frightening to consider the damage that the Grubers and Rhodes of her administration might do. But maybe Bernie (a man who truly does "construct almost any reality he wishes") will upset Hillary and win the presidency. That guarantees a Team of 1s, and that's not a good thing, not at all.