Scott Ott's Examiner Scrappleface: Obama Googles 'Van Jones,' 'public option,' learns both are socialist
By: Scott Ott
Examiner Columnist
September 8, 2009
News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
Just a day after White House "green jobs czar" Van Jones resigned amid controversy over his radical views, the Obama administration said it had discovered a new vetting tool called "Google" that also revealed that the president's "public option" health insurance proposal may be socialist as well.
"You just type a few words into this rectangle," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, "Click a button and information suddenly appears on your computer screen. When we did that, we were shocked to learn that Van was a socialist, and that the keystone of the president's health reform plan probably is too."
The president will reportedly reconsider his commitment to the public option before addressing a joint session of Congress later this week.
"It turns out that socialism is a political theory advocating state ownership of industry," said Mr. Gibbs. "And no matter how you spin it, having the government run a health insurance plan that competes with private firms constitutes state ownership of industry. If we keep going down this slippery slope, the subsidized public option will drive private companies out of business, making the government corporation the dominant provider."
The spokesman said such a scenario would undercut the president's desire to improve American health care through "choice and competition."
"When the state intervenes in the market," Mr. Gibbs said, "The incentive for competition decreases because private firms have a much higher cost structure, and must even pay taxes to support their government-run competitor. If President Obama had known about this Google thing nine months ago, we could have saved ourselves a lot of heartache."
The president reportedly likes the Google concept so much, that he's asked his closest advisers to draft a plan to create "an official presidential version of Google that would give folks a low cost option for all their information needs."
Examiner Columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com
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