During his MSNBC show All In on Monday night, Chris Hayes unleashed a nine-minute monologue in light of the Jonathan Gruber videos to defend what he saw as an assault on ObamaCare by Republicans and went as far as comparing ObamaCare’s passage to that of the Rosetta space probe that landed on a comet on November 12.
Hayes hailed what transpired in 2009 and 2010 as “a remarkable and improbable legislative success story, possible one of the greatest of our time” and “about as likely as landing a tiny rover on moving comet, hurdling through space hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth.” [MP3 audio here; Video below]
In working to set up the supposed success and triumph of ObamaCare as if it were this probe, Hayes admitted that “the legislative process” to pass the law “was messy and, often, ugly” that he wondered if it would work at all.
He said that ObamaCare “had grown so baroque, so impenetrable and so complex,” he feared “that when the time came to turn the thing on, it would all collapse before everyone's eyes.” In Hayes’s opinion, that did not turn out to be the case as ObamaCare continues to flourish for the good of the country and the American people.
From there, Hayes set up a straw man of sorts when it came to portraying Republican ambitions on ObamaCare as wanting to repeal it and then do nothing else besides going up to Americans who had already enrolled in ObamaCare and “rip their health department insurance up in front of them and return them to the tyranny of fear under which they lived for the Act’s passage.”
Just prior, he ranted that United States was now a country where millions have:
[B]een relieved of the uncertainty and cruelty of the system that, in the richest country on Earth, throws people to the wolves to fend for themselves when they suddenly get cancer and don’t have the good fortune of being employed.
To polish his stereotype of Republicans as heartless when it came to the lives of Americans, Hayes attempted to incorporate the uncovering of the Gruber videos as all part of the GOP’s plan:
[N]ow, armed with some tapes of an M.I.T. Professor saying some stupid things and potentially sympathetic Supreme Court Justices, conservatives are looking to destroy all of it. To blow it all up. To grind it into dust and raise the Affordable Care Act to the ground based on no principle other than their implacable ideological opposition to the project of providing health insurance partially through the government.
MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes
November 17, 2014
8:07 p.m. Eastern[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: The ObamaCare Wars]
CHRIS HAYES: In fact, if you take all those different pieces of law and put them together, they add to a remarkable and improbable legislative success story, possible one of the greatest of our time. It’s a legislative success story about as likely as landing a tiny rover on moving comet, hurdling through space hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth and it's all the more remarkable because the criticism of the legislative process that brought us to Obamacare is not off base. It was messy and, often, ugly and I covered the creation of the Affordable Care Act back when Jonathan Gruber was consulting on Capitol Hill and I thought I was witnessing the construction of a Rube Goldberg machine to deliver health care that, in order to avoid political pitfalls, had grown so baroque, so impenetrable and so complex, that when the time came to turn the thing on, it would all collapse before everyone's eyes and a year ago, when the health care exchanges did turn on for the first time and it initially looked like it would implode, I was worried. Maybe the whole thing was too complex. Maybe the critics were right and maybe as Charles Krauthammer said, it showed that liberalism didn't doesn't work.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER [ON 11/12/13]: We have not just ObamaCare unraveling. Not just the Obama administration unraveling. Not just the Democratic majority of the Senate, but we could be looking at the collapse of American liberalism. ObamaCare is the big thing for them.
HAYES: I will say this to you, Charles. If two months of website failure show that liberalism didn't work, then a year later, all the evidence suggests the opposite that liberalism does, in fact, work because what has happened in the past year is that more people got access to health care that's affordable and decent. They’ve been relieved of the uncertainty and cruelty of the system that, in the richest country on Earth, throws people to the wolves to fend for themselves when they suddenly get cancer and don’t have the good fortune of being employed and now, armed with some tapes of an M.I.T. Professor saying some stupid things and potentially sympathetic Supreme Court Justices, conservatives are looking to destroy all of it. To blow it all up. To grind it into dust and raise the Affordable Care Act to the ground based on no principle other than their implacable ideological opposition to the project of providing health insurance partially through the government. To metaphorically show up the doors of millions of Americans and knock on it and enter into their houses and rip their health department insurance up in front of them and return them to the tyranny of fear under which they lived for the Act’s passage and that is where we stand and those are the stakes.
