Here's a sneaky piece of rhetoric from President Obama yesterday:
“So after I signed the bill, I looked around,” Mr. Obama said. “I looked up in the sky to see if asteroids were coming. I looked at the ground to see if cracks had opened up in the earth. But you know what? It turned out to be a pretty nice day. Birds were still chirping. Folks were strolling down the street. Nobody had lost their doctor. Nobody had pulled the plug on Granny. Nobody was being dragged away and forced into some government-run health care.”
Mr. Obama laughed as he continued his sarcasm, noting that headlines since the program passed have described continuing division in the polls. “Well, yeah,” he said in mocking tone. “It’s just happened last week. It’s only been a week.”
Egged on by an appreciative crowd, Mr. Obama ad-libbed more: “Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm, had planted some seeds and came out the next day and looked, ‘Nothing’s happened! There’s no crop! We’re going to starve! Oh no! It’s a disaster!’
“It’s been a week, folks,” he said. “So before we find out if people like health care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place.”
Obviously, conservatives have made a lot of hysterical predictions about the effects of health care reform. But the fact that those predictions have failed to come true within a week of the bill's passage, before any of it has taken effect, hardly disproves those predictions.
Meanwhile, Obama has his own prediction -- that, once in effect, the Affordable Care Act will become popular. I agree. But now he's mocking the press for saying that prediction has failed to come true within a week. In other words, he's mocking the press for doing the same thing he's doing to conservatives in the previous paragraph.