Imagine the governor of a large state shutting down two lanes of the busiest bridge in the country for four days, holding up hundreds of thousands of drivers and causing delays, confusion and lost productivity.
Now imagine the President of the United States holding up millions of online shoppers for three months, causing frustration, anger and chaos, not to mention lost health insurance coverage and continuity of care. Which do you think liberals would be livid about, and which do you think they would dismiss as hardly worth mentioning?
Despite the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge in the Bridgegate scandal last September, traffic flowed faster into Manhattan than it did to the troubled HealthCare.gov site in its first few months of operation. The website’s time-wasting woes included pages taking minutes to load, repeated crashes, incorrect subsidies calculated and multiple accounts being created for the same person.
The federal and state exchange sites continue to reveal comical new mishaps on a weekly basis. The latest thigh-slapper — at least for those unaffected — is Maryland’s site directing callers to a pottery store in Seattle. Demonstrating the rapid-fire, can-do attitude of government workers everywhere, Maryland officials didn’t simply change the number. “A state spokeswoman said Saturday that she had no update on efforts to fix the problem,” according to the Baltimore Sun. A problem, you’ll note, that Maryland discovered on Friday, but that has been present since Oct. 1, 2013.
Let’s not forget the countless hours that will be wasted after hackers inevitably penetrate the tissue-thin HealthCare.gov security protocols and access hundreds of thousands of Obamacare subscribers’ personal information.
Or the time insurance companies will waste sorting out tens of thousands of erroneous transmissions resulting from the site’s pathetically high error rate, including resolving such basic details as applicants’ gender.
Or the time consumers have already wasted navigating the hundreds of fake websites mirroring the federal and state exchanges, a result of the government’s failure to take the standard precaution of purchasing similar domain names so it could redirect misguided visitors.
It’s laughable that the left complains about the time the poor citizenry of Fort Lee lost during the traffic snafu. These are the same people who make us waste an average of 22 hours a year preparing our taxes instead of considering a flat tax; who cost business owners hundreds of hours a year complying with unnecessary regulations; who force us to wait in protracted lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Post Office instead of letting us privatize these services. These are people who pat themselves on the backs for a delivering a government service that manages to be “not a third-world experience.”
Liberals don’t care about your time, your property or your quality of life. They care about getting and maintaining power, so that they can dispense with the above commodities as they see fit.
The Left’s raison d’être is closing lanes in every area of our lives. At least Gov. Chris Christie’s aides stopped their shenanigans after four days.
