{"id":11309,"date":"2014-01-21T13:21:12","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T21:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=11309"},"modified":"2014-10-05T11:12:46","modified_gmt":"2014-10-05T18:12:46","slug":"so-fking-what-the-obamacare-website-contractor-scandal-delusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=11309","title":{"rendered":"So F**king What? The ObamaCare Website Contractor Scandal Delusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know that things are getting bad for conservative wingnuts when they resort to complaining about President Obama for doing what they previously called for him to do.<\/p>\n

Last October the ObamaCare website launched with an historic thud. It barely functioned and was widely deemed to be an embarrassing failure for Obama and CGI Federal, the firm that developed the site. Right-wingers from across the land were sent into a frothing ecstasy as they extended the website’s problems to all of ObamaCare and everything else the President did. One of their most often heard demands was that “heads must roll.”<\/em><\/p>\n

So you might think that they would have been happy to learn that Obama had fired CGI for the website fiasco. They could have spun it as capitulation to their demands and a victory for their side. But if you thought that, you are not very familiar with their unique brand of psychosis and inbred hostility.<\/p>\n

So instead, an article<\/a> popped up today on the Daily Caller website, a disreputable operation run by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The author is Patrick Howley, whose resume includes an attempt to infiltrate Occupy Wall Street groups to incite violence<\/a> that he would then blame on the Occupy movement (he failed). The article was then picked up by Fox News for posting on their lie-riddled, hate site, Fox Nation.<\/p>\n

\"Fox<\/a>
\n

For More Fox Nation Lies, Read Fox Nation vs. Reality<\/a>, available at Amazon.<\/center><\/p>\n

Howley’s article is a monumentally silly effort to invent a scandal where none exists. The shocking revelation he exposed is that the firm hired to replace CGI had once employed someone who had also been employed by the Obama campaign in 2012. Now try to follow this, because it’s even stupider than it sounds. Rayid Ghani had first worked for Accenture where he did research on consumer behavior. Later he was recruited by Obama’s campaign to work on voter tracking. Today he does not work for either Obama or Accenture, but Accenture has been hired to do continued maintenance on the ObamaCare website. Or put another way, the Obama administration has hired a firm that no longer employs someone who is also no longer employed by Obama. Scandalous, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

Howley’s logic is painfully idiotic. He is proposing that you take everyone who has ever worked for Obama in any capacity, find out where they worked previously, and scratch them off of any lists for future employment or contracts. That would probably disqualify most of the Forbes 500 and ten or twenty million people.<\/p>\n

To make matters even more comically obtuse, last October Howley wrote an article for the Daily Caller complaining about tangential affiliations between Obama and CGI. In that piece he asserted a wholly unsupported allegation<\/a> that there was some sort of chicanery in the relationship because Michelle Obama had attended Princeton at the same time as a woman who later became a CGI executive. He made no attempt to prove that they ever met. Once again, Howley’s perverse logic suggests that any company that employs any of the thousands of people who attended the same Ivy League universities as the Obamas is exempt from government work.<\/p>\n

So to summarize, Howley alleged impropriety when Obama hired a firm where a Princeton classmate of Michelle was employed, despite showing no connection between them. However, he was not mollified when Obama fired that firm and replaced it with another firm that does not employ a man who is also not employed by Obama. Nice work, Sherlock.<\/p>\n

In addition, Howley squeezed another angle into his article that claimed that there were ongoing security threats within the ObamaCare website. He did not in any way substantiate his claim, but he did provide pretty good evidence that no such security exploits exist. He referenced the testimony of an ex-con<\/a> who was paraded before a Republican-controlled committee hearing to say that breaking into Healthcare.gov “would be a hacker\u2019s wet dream.”<\/em> That’s actually true. And the fact that it hasn’t happened speaks to the reliability of the security on the website given the desirability of hackers to break it.<\/p>\n

This is just another example of what happens when right-wing extremists have nothing of substance to say about policy or process. They scrape the bottom of the scandal barrel in a desperate search for controversy, or least distraction. It is their hope that they can either tarnish their foes with mud or keep them from bringing attention to the fact that the conservative platform consists of little more than repealing ObamaCare, cutting taxes for the rich, cutting benefits for the poor, and regulating the behavior of citizens in the privacy of their homes. That platform, along with alienating women and minorities, is not going to serve them particularly well in 2014, 2016, or beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know that things are getting bad for conservative wingnuts when they resort to complaining about President Obama for doing what they previously called for him to do. Last October the ObamaCare website launched with an historic thud. It barely functioned and was widely deemed to be an embarrassing failure for Obama and CGI Federal, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11310,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"So F**king What? The ObamaCare Website Contractor Scandal Delusion","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[785,242,1066,1078,25],"class_list":["post-11309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-daily-caller","tag-michelle-obama","tag-obamacare","tag-patrick-howley","tag-tucker-carlson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Ijg-2Wp","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11202,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=11202","url_meta":{"origin":11309,"position":0},"title":"Sarah Palin’s Alien Love Child Is A Distraction From ObamaCare By The White House","author":"Mark NC","date":"1\/7\/2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The troubled rollout of the website for the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) has been a persistent irritation for the Obama administration. 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