Copyright 2013 John T. Reed
A Google search for the words "double down" + Democrat gets 395,000 hits. They seem to have a Hitler Big Lie approach to their screw-ups. The Big Lie approach was to tell lies so huge that the public would believe them on the logic that no one would ever tell such a big lie so it must be true. Just deny them ferociously and the public will conclude it must not have been a screw-up after all.
Obama recently has taken to using a common tactic of screw-ups. Claiming that they are not stupid enough to have made the mistake they made.
The fact that Obama did make his various idiotic statements and stupid decisions about Obamacare is conclusive proof that he is stupid enough. More to the point, it is not his IQ that is the problem. It is his total lack of experience at managing anything.
I have likened him to a non-pilot who took over the controls of a Boeing 747 then accused all who said he was unqualified to fly it of racism. After which the critics go silent and the plane crashes, because he, indeed, had no training or experience at flying it and you need training and experience to pilot a 747.
Let me make sure readers know the definition of “doubling down.” Doubling down is a gambling strategy. It says simply that eventually you will win. Actually, there is no mathematical law that says that although the Law of Large Numbers does say that the greater the number of events, the closer the actual results will come to the expected results.
For example, the probability of heads coming up in a coin flip is 50%. But if you flip a coin four times, it could come up HHHH, TTTT, HTTT, HHTT, HHHT (I’m ignoring sequence.)
As you can see, only one of those five possible actual results matches the expected result of 50% heads. But if you flip the coin 10,000 times, the incidence of heads will likely be close to 50%—the Law of Large Numbers.
So the theory behind doubling down is that by betting again and again you will probably come close to the expected incidence of winning—50% in the coin flip case. Actually, that theory is correct.
Say you bet $1 double or nothing on the first day and lose. Doubling down means on the second day you bet $2 to make sure you come out ahead recouping your first day loss plus making a profit overall. If you lose the second day, too, doubling down means you must bet $4 on the third day, and so on.
The Law of Large Numbers is correct. But the problem is few can afford the large number of doubling bets. Starting with $1, you have to bet $1,000,000 on the 23rd day.
1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024
2048
4096
8192
16384
32768
65,536
131072
262,144
524,288
1,048,576
The Democrats are not literally doubling down. There are no odds in public policy. But they are engaging in a super risky and probably suicidal approach, which is what literal doubling down is within gambling.
Most likely, the Obamacare web site will continue to not function as well as produce all sorts of scandal stories about identify theft and fake web sites that defraud users. Obama and the Democrats promised it would be squared away by the end of November. They have since been backpedaling away from that. This is the sequence of lies made famous by the boy who cried wolf. Because they promised it would work on October 1st then December 1st and who knows what the next cry will be, Obama and the Democrats will be pounded by media condemnation and news stories showing it still does not work as the 2014 elections draw closer.
Then there is the “you can keep your plan and doctor” barefaced “knew he was going to get caught but said it anyway” lie. Obama probably figured the lie would get him reelected then getting caught would not matter because 2012 was famously his “last election.”
Emphasis on the word ‘his.”
2012 was not the Democrats’ last election, but many of them are starting to worry it may have been the last one they win for a while.
Obama made a dishonest promise about keeping your plan/doctor, then recently “fixed” it by promising not to enforce the “law of the land” so that now, really, this time you can keep your old plan and doctor. In other words, after making the most-ill-advised promise since George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Obama has reissued the same promise!
It will not be kept this time either. Every week will bring news of additional cancellations and breathtaking premium increases right through the 2014 elections. During that time, they will spread to the employer-paid plans which are currently quiet because of Obama’s unconstitutional postponement of the employer mandate by one year.
Obama thinks he can lawyer it when problems continue by parsing words in his latest version of the promise that put the blame for not reissuing the old plans and the old rates on the insurance companies. But the public knows the companies were not doing all this craziness before Obamacare.
They have been saying only 5% or so of Americans are affected by the individual policy mandate and cancellations. When it spreads to the employer-mandated plans, we will be talking about 50 to 100 million Americans. And there is a clause in the Obamacare Act that encourages cancellations a certain number of days before the deadline. The law’s deadline is after the 2014 election. But the clause creating an incentive to cancel before that has a deadline of 10/1/14—five weeks before the 2014 election!
I would not be surprised if some Democrats try to switch to Republican in red districts because there is probably no other way for them to be re-elected during this never-ending scandal of broken promises, lies, and destruction of the health care system of the U.S. before the eyes of the American people.
Double-Down Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chair of the Double-Down Democratic National Committee, had this exchange on CNN on 11/14/13:
“You’re darn right that our candidates are going to run on the advantage that Obamacare will be going into the 2014 election. The choice will be very clear,” she said.
“What I hear you saying is, ‘Bring it on, Karl Rove,’” a CNN host joked.
“Darn right. Darn right,” Mrs. Wasserman Schultz responded. “I’m ready. We’ll be ready.”
I predict Double-Down Debbie will not be the chair of the Democrat National Committee after the 2014 election as a result of a worse-than-2010 “shellacking.”
Former Democrat Speaker of the House and current Minority Leader of the House Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would “stand tall” for Obamacare in the 2014 election. That now appears likely to result in her being neither Speaker nor Minority Leader after the 2014 election.
On 11/13/13, Double-Down Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said
that he is “very comfortable” that the administration will solve Obamacare’s problems.
There is now a good chance that the Democrats will lose their Senate 54-45 majority in the 2014 election. If so, I predict Double-Down Harry will no longer be Majority, or even Minority, Leader of the Senate.
But wait, it gets worse for the Democrats. They are politicians, not doctors. To the Democrats, Obamacare is all just a big abstract symbol and a new freebie with which to buy votes to cement themselves into power forever. They are blissfully unaware and unconcerned about the fact that underneath all the hullabaloo about the web site and cancellations are actual sick and injured people. We have already started to read stories about cancer patients losing their plan or doctor. We will inevitably soon read stories about people dying, including by suicide, because of Obamacare related screw-ups and gaps in coverage and confusion. These will become a crescendo, possibly before the 2014 election.
It is possible that the actual end result of this Democrat wet dream of a power grab—enacting Obamacare—will have a near opposite effect, namely, getting not only the government but also employers out of health care altogether, allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines, and ending up with a system like we used to have 40 years ago: you pay for routine medical care fully out of your own pocket, including by mortgaging your house if necessary, and you have relatively low-cost, high-deductible, major medical policies for catastrophic care expenses.
In other words, the Democrats’ hyperpartisan overreach with Obamacare, and their predictably ham-fisted execution of the law after they got it enacted, could result in the realization of the health care wet dream of capitalist free marketeers, not to mention the Democrats, who rode so high in the so recent “government shutdown,” being driven out of Washington, DC power into the political wilderness of K Street lefty lobbying jobs.
Politicians are not good at admitting they screwed up. Everything is their opponent’s fault. But they often tend to overestimate their ability to get away with blaming their opponent. This appears to be such a case. Obamacare is such a total disaster and so unfix-able in the time remaining before the 2014 election that refusing to admit their screw-up could have catastrophic election results for Democrats next year.
Even the Democrats who are up for re-election in 2014 and who are now panicking and signing onto Republican bills are probably toast because they own Obamacare and their efforts to ameliorate its effects, absent cooperation from the White House and Democrat House and Senate leaders, will accomplish zilch to save their re-election hopes. Even Obama agreeing to repeal Obamacare would probably not save them at this point.
They are doubling down because they are in so much trouble with Obamacare that telling even bigger lies about it seems to their warped politician minds to be a better choice than killing it.
More evidence of the superiority of my phone book Congress and binding national referendums.
John T. Reed