It is now obvious that that the December 1^st deadline for "fixing" healthcare.gov won't be met. In characteristic Barack Obama fashion, the response of the administration to its latest failure is to play word games. Elise Viebeck of The Hill chronicles the latest flim-flammery:

Administration officials said Monday that some visitors to ObamaCare's federal enrollment site would experience outages, slow response times or messages to try again later during the month of December.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) delivered the message in the latest attempt to downplay expectations surrounding Nov. 30, the administration's self-imposed deadline for fixing HealthCare.gov. 

CMS spokeswoman Julie Bataille said errors that persist past this weekend would be "intermittent" and, in line with a promise made by the White House, would not affect the vast majority of the site's users. 

But Bataille acknowledged that some people would still experience "periods of suboptimal performance" by the system due to either heavy traffic or technical issues that are still being addressed. 

"The system will not work perfectly on Dec. 1, but it will work much better than it did in October," Bataille said. 

So "it will work much better than it did in October" is now the meaning of "fixed."  Or:

Former White House budget director Jeff Zients, now in charge of fixing the healthcare site, said last week that the system will "reach everybody we need to reach" in December, thanks to ongoing fixes. 

And just who constitutes "everybody we need to reach"? Why, anybody that can be reached by the "much better" website.

In other words,  the Obamaites realize they have another big failure on their hands. Expect some diverting news to happen on or about December 1^st. Perhaps a presidential visit to Tehran?

Hat tip: Hot Air