Barack “Misinformation” Obama’s Mathematical Meeting

Originally posted at The Blacksphere

It was already common knowledge that the President, after visiting “57 states with one left to go,” not counting Hawaii and Alaska, was no whiz kid when it comes to geography.

Either that, or while campaigning in Oregon he was still occasionally riding the Choom wagon.

Since then, the president has made what some would consider even more glaring howlers. Take for instance the time in Kansas City, Missouri, when, via satellite, “global citizen” Barack Obama said “I’m …with the Girardo family here in St. Louis.”

And then there was that time he introduced Navy corpsman Christian Brossard as a “corpse-man,” and pointed out that the U.S. built the “Intercontinental Railroad.”

Despite priding himself on being the king of rhetorical communication, prior to the enactment of his signature legislation, Obama promised that healthcare reform would bring “greater competition, choice, savings and inefficiencies to our health care system.”

Well, he certainly has delivered on the “inefficiencies” part.

Now, in addition to geography and vocabulary, it looks like arithmetic may also pose a challenge to the president.

It started when Obama mistook 12 people killed by a Kansas tornado for 10,000. That time he was off by 9,988.

More recently, while displaying his mathematical prowess, the president made an even worse mathematical booboo. This time he was off by about 99,900,000 when he mistook 100,000 for “more than 100 million Americans” having effectively enrolled in a health insurance plan via the Affordable Care Act.

The gaffe was allegedly made while talking to 200K Organizing For Action zombies, all of whom were, along with the NSA of course, enthusiastically listening to President Obama pontificate by way of a conference call.

According to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, the administration is “in a moment of time… where a lot of focus, understandably, is being directed toward the problems with the websites and other issues.”

During the one-way chat, the president attempted to address the “problems with the website,” which he said “have created and fed a lot of this misinformation.” Then he proceeded to do what he does best, misinform and make matters worse.

In order to give the troops in the “trenches” some valid data to present to the gullible, Obama clarified that “in the first month alone…100 million Americans already successfully enroll[ed] in the new insurance plans.”

The president was obviously mixed up when he told the 200,000 OFA members on the phone – who were actually 100,000 more than actually signed up for Obamacare – that almost 1/3 of the U.S. population had already braved and conquered the temperamental website.

That didn’t stop him. Bragging about the exemplary administrative skills that helped bring about this 100-million-enrollee success, Mr. Obama said, “You’ve got a million Americans who’ve completed an application for themselves or their families. And that represents about a million-and-a-half people.”

Like Clinton’s “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” for Obama, it depends on the meaning of the word ‘counts’ that determines what counts. That’s why for 14 minutes the president was able to showcase his mathematical prowess by throwing around Medicare and Medicaid “security of healthcare” statistics.

It’s sort of like Mr. Obama’s Kansas tornado fatality calculation, where he included in his count the 9,988 Kansans who could have died. This time, he’s including those who discontinued the process after placing a policy in an online shopping cart. In addition, the President also counted a million Americans who completed an application but “have not yet selected a plan.”

After all, with liberals it’s always the thought that counts. And like the president said, this “isn’t a one-day sale,” it’s a six-month lollapalooza.

But what Obama forgot to mention were the five million “folks” that already had health insurance who were summarily tossed off of perfectly adequate and affordable health insurance policies.

Nonetheless, according to the HHS, as of mid-November 106,185 uninsured Americans had climbed aboard the impending Obamacare “train wreck.” So if that 106,185 number is correct, the president is doing better than first thought and is only off the mark by 99,893,815 Obamacare enrollees.

In all fairness, historian Michael Beschloss truly does believe that Obama is “probably the smartest guy ever to become President.” With that in mind, America should take into consideration that some people still insist that Albert Einstein was so brilliant he had difficulty comprehending basic addition and subtraction.

As the “misinformation” conference call wound down, unfortunately, none of the 200K OFA conference callers were able to broach other subjects. Short on time, Obama didn’t get to explain what ultimately did happen to corpse-man Brossard, whether he ever took a transcontinental train trip to the 58th state on the Intercontinental Railroad.

Or whether or not that 100-million figure is part of the “greater inefficiencies” he still seeks to bring to healthcare reform.