LOL. So, basically, every policy ever by anyone has been a failure. Because no policy has ever been perfect.
Keep fucking that chicken, adaher.
And, lo, it came to pass that a disembodied hand appeared and wrote on the palace wall the words, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”. Which means, in the ancient tongue “It’s your ass now, motherfucker!” Belshazzar did not know the ancient language but was sorely perflexed, and called upon adaher, the Wise, to interpret the words.
“Forsooth” saith adaher the Wise "the words, oh King of Kings, say ‘Verily, thou art the tits, Belshazzar. And the Lord of Hosts totally loves your ass, ain’t nothing but blue skies and sunshine ahead!’ "
Policies should be judged on the promises used to sell them. When you buy a car, do you not expect it to perform as advertised? If your promised great fuel efficiency, great reliability, and second to none safety, your going to call the car a good purchase just because it runs?
Ah, no. It may be a consideration in judging the character of the policy maker, but the policy is good or it isn’t. As in your woefully misplaced example, even if invading Iraq were a fiscally sound investment, gotten at a substantial discount at Death 'R Us, it would still have been one of the most disastrous policies in American history.
You analysis is worse than amoral, it is stupid as well. Being pissed at GeeDubya because he was wrong about the potential for recouping our expenses is like criticizing Jeffrey Dahmer for poor hygiene and health code violations.
No. Policies are judged by how they affect people and the nation. Does anyone remember what the promises were for social security? Medicare? The GI Bill? What matters is how people’s lives are changed.
The ends justify the means.
No, but whether a policy is a success or not depends on how it affects people. The “means” is a different issue.
You say “no” but your previous post says “yes”.
A more accurate term might be “sausage factory”.
Incorrect. Your reading comprehension needs work. I’d be happy to provide assistance – could you parse the words that I wrote that you think means “the ends justify the means”?
I’ll concede that you’re partly right, but you’re partly wrong too. This law was a highly contentious law that a small majority of the public wasn’t buying. The only thing that made it politically viable at all was the promise that no one would be hurt by it. If the President had told the truth from the beginning, the law would never have passed.
The way the public will judge a law, especially when the promises are young enough to be remembered, is by what the President said it would do. It’s not doing it. It’s actually doing the opposite.
I contest the factual accuracy of this statement, but I’ll accept the philosophical point. Feel free to judge the actions and statements the President made in the leadup to passing the law. It’s perfectly fine to criticize such statements and actions. I don’t believe such criticism has any bearing on the law now, but it certainly may have relevance towards judging those who passed the law.
Wrong, and very obviously wrong! How does the public judge Social Security, or Medicare, or the GI Bill? I doubt even 1% of the public even has the slightest idea of what promises were made! Perhaps in the immediate years after those bills, they were judged alongside the statements and actions of the lawmakers who passed it. But after a few years, much less decades of the law in effect? Then the law is judged by what it does.
This isn’t hard. Judge the President, and the legislators, and judge statements and actions. But judge the law based on what the law does. The ACA could be a wild success (though it’s far too early to tell), but if it was passed through immoral acts (which I don’t believe that it was), then its passage was immoral.
And even if its passage was immoral, that doesn’t make the law immoral. Twisting arms, giving bribes, and threatening violence to force state legislators to outlaw pedophilia? Those are immoral things to do. But the resulting law that outlaws pedophilia? Still a good law. The ends didn’t justify the means, but we shouldn’t necessarily toss out the “ends” once the “means” have been done.
From a politics perspective, a law is going to be judged by what the public was told to expect from it, at least as long as the public remembers. Sure, 20 years from now it might not matter. No one remembers that Medicare was sold based on rosy cost estimates or that SS was sold on a low introductory tax rate that everyone who could do simple math would know wasn’t going to last. But those problems appeared way down the road, and by then the public liked Medicare and Social Security. ACA is facing the same problem the Catastrophic Care act of 1987 faces: the costs are immediate. Remember what happened to the latter law? First entitlement ever repealed, and nearly unanimously.
What I said in the statement you are responding to is that as long as the promises are recent enough to be remembered, the law will be judged based on them. There’s a reason the law hasn’t become more popular despite 12 million newly insured.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/obama_and_democrats_health_care_plan-1130.html
The people that have health insurance outnumber those who don’t by a huge margin. It’s an even wider margin when you account for the fact that people with health insurance probably vote in much larger numbers. The law will primarily be judged by people who already have health insurance and how the law is affecting them. and they were promised it wouldn’t affect them in the slightest except to make their insurance better.
Anybody want to cite the numbers of people who are “against/oppose” ACA because it doesn’t go far enough? I would, but its like trying to batter down a brick wall with a Nerf bat.
What I see then is that most agree that overall that promise is still there.
And as CNN noted, there is the issue that unpopularity does not equal support for repeal, far from it, what it is found is that the way to go forward for many is not to repeal it but to modify it.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/31/five-things-polling-tells-us-about-obamacare/
“It’s Nerf or Nothing!”…
I mean, there it is, it was nothing really. 
The ACA has not been repealed, and it’s not likely to be repealed before 2017. The effects of it are only starting. The public is not clamoring for its repeal, despite the right-wing infotainment drumbeat. In fact, a majority opposes repealing the ACA.
In light of these facts, it’s just silly and pointless to declare failure (or success) now. I still support the law because, based on the statistics as I understand them, it is helping far, far more people than it is hurting.
Your insistence on calling it a failure is purely sour grapes (as you’ve pretty much admitted), and has nothing to do with what the law actually does.
A majority opposes repeal. There’s no point in judging the law now, because it’s barely taken effect. Does anyone remember what the pundits (or the equivalent) said about Medicare during the year after it took affect? Would anyone care even if they did remember?
For the vast majority of Americans, that promise is valid (from the statistics as I understand them), for their individual circumstances. If you’re right, then those promises are a net positive for the vast majority of Americans.
But I don’t think you’re right. I think most of the public, who opposes repealing the law, actually wants to wait a few years and see how it really affects health care in the USA. That seems like a reasonable outlook. Yours is unreasonable.
Isn’t there something we can do, given all of our influence and power, to see adaher appointed Supreme Decider of Republican Party policy?
Hey, I could have done that! But I’m busy discussing the perfection of Daenerys Targaryen’s butt with Vinny and Bricker! Priorities, man, priorities!
He has my vote!
The latest votes and pronouncements made by the current Deciders shows that **adaher ** is not needed by them. His powers of disturbing the time continuum and then changing the future and the past to the opposite of what he pronounces are needed here. 
