Duelling Videos - The White House Releases Rebuttal, sort of...

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A few days ago I posted a link to a video of Barack Obama expressing his real goal in health care reform - the elimination of private health insurance companies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-bY92mcOdk The White House has seen this video too, and has countered it with one of their own. In this clip Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, tells us that the video I linked to the other day and which showed up on Breitbart and Drudge was a phony. She states that the makers of the film just took bits and pieces of statements and "cobbled them together" to make it look like the president was saying something other than what he really said about health care reform. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0XCl6OHgiM Naturally, I watched this new clip with interest. I was waiting for Linda to show me the parts of Obama's statements that the other film had edited out - the parts where it shows clearly that he didn't mean it when he said “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be, potentially, some transition process: I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out.” But, she never did. She couldn't, because that is what he said and he didn't qualify it or take it back. It wasn't pieced together from unrelated sentences, it was what he said. What she does show us are a few clips of him from last month, telling people that nothing will change with their health insurance. But even in those approved clips, there are misstatements about options, glossing over of choices and the omission of facts, as well as an interesting comment about "disciplining" the insurance companies. They've been naughty, now they will be punished, I guess. There is nothing here to claim that Obama never said what he said, or that his advisers, Barney Frank and the rest of the people featured in the first clip didn't mean it when they said that the goal of health care reform was a single-payer system. As the White House reminds us in their post on this video "facts are stubborn things". http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/