THE BERNIE MADOFF OF POLITICS: Who Sabotaged Healthcare.gov?

The new meme circulating among the extreme, distant, off-the-horizon, far left Democrat and media (but I repeat myself) complex is that Republicans somehow "sabotaged" the rollout of Obamacare.

Never mind that the GOP was excluded from proposing even a single word, a single letter, to Obamacare's thousands of pages. Never mind that Republicans have had literally no involvement with its implementation (or lack of implementation, more properly). Republicans have had zero -- repeat, zero -- influence on HHS, Obamacare, CMS, or any of the other alphabet soup and witch's brew of agencies working on the law.

As James Taranto reveals, the Obama administration's naked fear and rank incompetence led to the ongoing clusterbungle no matter what the kooks on the left may try and claim.

The real deal?

The White House sabotaged Healthcare.gov itself through fear and incompetence:

First, the White House moved control of the project away from HHS.

In 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services moved "the on-the-ground work of carrying out" from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's office to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS. "The move had a political rationale," Goldstein and Eilperin report. "Tucked within a large bureaucracy, some administration officials believed, the new Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight would be better insulated from the efforts of House Republicans, who were looking for ways to undermine the law..."

...As a result, "the work of designing the federal health exchange--and of helping states that wanted to build their own--became fragmented." Nobody was in charge of directing the program.

Second, the White House insisted on utter secrecy for its planning efforts.

In the spring of 2011, CMS staffers "struggled . . . to persuade White House officials for permission to publish diagrams known as 'concepts of operation,' " which would have shown what a federal exchange would "look like." The White House balked for fear that "Republicans might reprise a tactic from the 1990s of then-Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who mockingly brandished intricate charts created by a task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton." Instead, the White House ordered CMS "to praise early work on those state exchanges that matched the hidden federal thinking."

Third, the White House intentionally delayed issuing controversial rules until after the 2012 election.

"Meanwhile, the White House also slowed down important regulations that had been drafted within CMS months earlier, appearing to wait until just after Obama's reelection," Goldstein and Eilperin report. Rules governing mandated benefits and calculations of premiums weren't proposed until Thanksgiving and didn't become final until February. A former Medicare chief actuary describes the delay as "a singularly bad decision" taken "for short-term political gain."

Taranto concludes with a rapier-like coup de grace:

The story Goldstein and Eilperin tell is one not of GOP sabotage but of Obama administration self-sabotage. The geniuses who were sure they were capable of running the entire medical industry were so unnerved by the prospect of political opposition that at every stage of the way they undermined the president's own signature "achievement."

This is in part a story of political incompetence and hubris. Obama and his allies in Congress were unable to win a single Republican vote--and it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that a monstrously complicated law enacted by a slender partisan minority might prove especially difficult to implement. As Obama himself admitted yesterday in a rare truthful statement: "Now, let's face it, a lot of us didn't realize that passing the law was the easy part."

...We should note that this entire discussion has dealt only with the incompetent technical execution of ObamaCare, what we call Phase 1 of the disaster. Phases 2 and 3, respectively, are the exposure that ObamaCare is a massive consumer fraud and the economic inviability of the entire scheme.

The exposure of ObamaCare as a massive consumer fraud--and of Obama as the Bernie Madoff of politics--is well under way.

I like that phrase. Obama really is the Bernie Madoff of politics.

And every day that passes makes that simple analogy more apt.