As horrible as Kathleen Sebelius has been as this nation’s health and human services secretary, she has been exactly who President Barack Obama has wanted her to be.
This was no rogue incompetent tinkering with America’s health care. This was one of Obama’s chief lieutenants, one who was doing his bidding every step of that treacherous road they traveled together.
Don’t get me wrong; Sebelius was inexcusably bad — arrogant, defiant, uncompassionate, dogmatic and unrepentant. Obama cashiered her only because it was time to deflect blame from himself and change the channel.
There is nothing incompatible between assigning major blame to Sebelius for all aspects of Obamacare and also squarely placing the primary blame on Obama for all of it. There is plenty of failure to go around, and they all own it.
It’s kind of like United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. She doesn’t get a pass for her role in spreading the unconscionable lie that the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was caused by a video just because her sinister superiors, all the way up to Hillary Clinton and Obama, ordered her to do it. They are all in it together, duping the American people with malice aforethought — with zero accountability and no apology. Ever.
But unlike that of Rice, Sebelius’ role wasn’t limited to a mere multiple-time major-media drive-by where she did the administration’s dirty work.
Sebelius was not just a subordinate mouthpiece. She oversaw the genesis of the oppressive tangle of regulations for implementing Obamacare, which, among other things, have run roughshod over Americans’ conscious rights and religious freedoms.
This woman has been shameless and improperly political in a position that is supposed to involve anything but partisan politics. In 2013, she admitted she had made telephone calls to three separate companies that her department is responsible for regulating and urged them to help promote Obamacare. She asked Johnson & Johnson, Ascension Health and Kaiser Permanente to support the work of Enroll America, a nonprofit led by formed Obama administration officials that was working with the White House to publicize Obamacare and help uninsured people sign up for coverage.