Obama and Emanuel Told Staffers to Brush Up on Gruber's Fake Numbers

Sources told Politico's Mike Allen in November 2009 that Obama was so keyed up about a Ron Brownstein blog post at The Atlantic's political website that he made it mandatory reading for the West Wing.

What was so urgent about Obama's must-read that his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, assigned the article as homework at a White House meeting and, according to an administration official, told senior staffers "not to come back to the next day's meeting if they hadn't read the article"?

Here's Brownstein's opening line in the November 21, 2009 piece, entitled "A Milestone in the Health Care Journey":

When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier.

After wading through 2,600 “laborious” pages, Brownstein wrote that Gruber was elated the Reid bill included everything he thought of doing in "bending the cost curve."

At the same time, Talking Points Memo writer Christina Bellatoni, like Politico's Allen, noted that Obama considered the Brownstein article such a stellar summary of cost controls that his enforcer Emanuel threatened to ostracize staff members if they didn't read it. 

Days later, on November 28, 2009, Politico's Mike Allen followed up with another post, titled “MIT analysis backs Obama.”

Allen wrote that it was Gruber's "microsimulation analysis” that gave the Democrats ammunition against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's assertion that the bill would mean “higher premiums, higher taxes, and massive cuts to Medicare."  Gruber's report concluded just the opposite, that the bill would ensure that Americans would pay less out-of-pocket costs for better coverage.

Six years later, the results are in, and now we know from Gruber's own admission he found a way to game the CBO numbers in order to get Obama's signature law passed.  Consequently, Obama’s demand that senior staff get up to speed using Brownstein's November 21 health care primer makes perfect sense.  As the Senate began debating the health reform bill, Gruber's figures were front and center.  Obama and his nest of progressive loyalists had too much at stake to risk a White House staffer not getting the MIT professor’s lies straight.

Conclusion?  Obama is in this massive trillion-dollar fraud up to his dead, cold eyeballs.

Read more Evans at exzoom.net.

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