Obama speaks, I Tweet

By Anthony Bialy

I endured it. I knew President Obama’s health care press conference would make my blood boil, teeth grind, stomach turn, and all sorts of other body parts contract with rage. Unfortunately, all those physical responses are bad for my health. But then again, so is his scheme.

So, how to cope? I perversely found a healthful technique with a sedentary activity. Namely, I logged onto Twitter so I could instantly make fun of our leader’s ridiculousness in 140-character cathartic bursts. He gave us plenty of material, and I only stopped typing when I zoned out in a sanity-preserving subconscious move. Below are my instantaneous commentaries. Selections from the transcription of Obama’s remarks stand in regular type; my replies are in Italics.

“It’s an economy that simply wasn’t ready to compete in the 21st century.”

Remedy: 20th-century style socialist meddling.

This is not just about the 47 million Americans who don’t have any health insurance at all.

First mention of “47 million Americans” without health insurance. Everyone do a shot.

I’ve also pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our deficit over the next decade, and I mean it. In the past eight years, we saw the enactment of two tax cuts — primarily for the wealthiest Americans — and a Medicare prescription program, none of which were paid for. That’s partly why I inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.

Blame the deficit on the last guy. How novel.

We also want to create an independent group of doctors and medical experts who are empowered to eliminate waste and inefficiency in Medicare on an annual basis, a proposal that could save even more money and ensure long-term financial health for Medicare.

“Eliminating waste and inefficiency”= old, sick people better run for it.

I never, ever thought I’d say this. But I’d prefer to be watching “So You Think You Can Dance.”

I continue to think my idea is the best one.

I suppose there’s something noble about believing in yourself and standing alone.

I’m rushed because I get letters every day from families that are being clobbered by health care costs. And they ask me, “Can you help?”

So I’ve got a middle-aged couple that will write me and they say, “Our daughter just found out she’s got leukemia and, if I don’t do something soon, we just either are going to go bankrupt or we’re not going to be able to provide our daughter with the care that she needs.”

And in a country like ours, that’s not right. So that’s part of my rush.

“Pass the health care bill now or the leukemia girl dies!” I’m glad he’s not being shameless.

You know, if you’ve got somebody out there saying not that — you know, let’s get the best bill possible, but instead says, you know, let’s try to beat this so we can gain political advantage, well, that’s not, you know, I think, what the American people expect.

Sure, if he means defeating inefficient, ridiculously expensive government-controlled health care leads to “political advantage.”

Then we had to pass a budget by law, and our budget had a 10-year projection. And I just want everybody to be clear about this. If we had done nothing, if you had the same, old budget as opposed to the changes we made in our budget, you’d have a $9.3 trillion deficit over the next 10 years. Because of the changes we’ve made, it’s going to be $7.1 trillion.

Barack Obama: deficit hawk!

So the reason I point this out is to say that the debt and the deficit are deep concerns of mine. I am very worried about federal spending.

I hope he doesn’t really believe himself here.

We were on the verge of a complete financial meltdown. And the reason was because Wall Street took extraordinary risks with other people’s money. They were peddling loans that they knew could never be paid back.

Obama: moving risky financial decisions from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.

But having a public plan out there that also shows that maybe if you take some of the profit motive out, maybe if you are reducing some of the administrative costs, that you can get an even better deal, that’s going to incentivize the private sector to do even better. And that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing.

Yeah, taking out the profit motive is always a great incentive.

Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, “You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.”

Now, that may be the right thing to do, but I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change — maybe they have allergies. Maybe they have something else that would make a difference.

Obama: problem is evil doctors who perform unnecessary surgery for profit. Lousy tonsil-stealers.

I didn’t play a press conference drinking game. But if I had, I still wouldn’t be drunk enough.

The entire hour made my ears and brain sad. But typing and posting helped quite a bit. The only better option would have been to not watch at all, which I might try the next time Obama scuttles prime time. But, approaching it from a different outlook, I’d then miss a stand-up routine funnier than Carrot Top and that puppet guy combined, even if it was unintentionally so. What a dilemma!

Either way, I was thankful for the alleviating opportunity to both tweet and read tweets. In that regard, I’d like to offer eternal thanks to @dalhalla, @mkhammer, @Heritage, @JoeyBiden, and Smart Girl Politics’ own @pinkelephantpun for simultaneously live-blogging about the president’s brutal words. You kept @AnthonyBialy sane.

Each Twitterer helped me through a very difficult time in my life, namely that hour I spent listening to all that class warfare/commie healthcare dreck. All of you should be rewarded, specifically by never having to go on the public plan.

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