Ron Fournier at National Journal – a self-professed ObamaCare supporter who is still struggling mightily to pretend the disastrous health-care law was something more than a monumental act of fraud against the American people – nevertheless says all these tapes of ObamaCare architect Jon Gruber gleefully admitting lie after lie are starting to wear him down:

“Those comments have struck a nerve on the right,” wrote Jose A. DelReal (emphasis added), “with some of the law’s critics pointing to Gruber’s comments as evidence that the administration intentionally deceived the American public on the costs of the programs.”

My first reaction was, “No! No! Not just on the right!” I strongly support bipartisan efforts to expand the availability of health coverage to the working poor, and bending the cost curve that threatens federal budgets for years to come. While I think President Obama and congressional Democrats helped contribute to the 2009 standoff over what became the Affordable Care Act, I’ve openly rooted for Obamacare’s success. I’ve denounced the knee-jerk opposition from the GOP, a party that once embraced key elements of Obamacare. My ideology is amorphous; I am not “on the right.”

All of that, and yet: Gruber’s remarks struck a nerve with me.

Appearing on an academic panel a year ago, this key Obamacare adviser argued that the law never would have passed if the administration had been honest about the fact that the so-called penalty for noncompliance with the mandate was actually a tax.

“And, basically, call it ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass,” Gruber said.

He called you stupid. He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and poor; white and brown; men and women.

Yes he did, Mr. Fournier, and so did Barack Obama, and so did every last miserable Democrat who perpetrated this crime against their country.  And you know what?  They knew they were lying.  They savagely attacked the people who were telling the truth.  Nothing Jon Gruber has been caught admitting to is news.  ObamaCare’s critics warned about all of this – the cheesy games played with CBO scoring, false promises, and a destructive hidden agenda that will climax with a push for single-payer socialized medicine after the planned and anticipated failure of the Affordable Care Act – since before Obama entered the White House.  There isn’t much difference between the truth Gruber disclosed, and the assertions to be found on countless conservative white papers and blog posts from 2009.  The important revelation is that Gruber and the rest of the ObamaCare con artists were clearly aware of those criticisms and knew them to be both factually valid and politically devastating, to such an extent that they knew ObamaCare couldn’t even get past a Congress completely under Democrat control unless the chilly midnight of its passage came after a blizzard of lies.

Welcome to the party, Ron; too bad you had to wait for long-suppressed videos to surface, instead of accepting invitations from the ObamaCare critics who knew what they were talking about six years ago.  I’d make a quip about how it’s “better late than never,” but you know what?  It isn’t.  The amount of money wasted and human suffering caused by ObamaCare – in everything from lost access to doctors and medicine, and full-time jobs pulverized by this stupid law, through the incalculable value of the time wasted by millions of people forced to grapple with the craptastic website Obama blew two billion of our dollars on – makes the failure of the media to investigate this scam more thoroughly, and shut it down before the Affordable Care Act’s ugly birth in a mass of kickbacks, carve-outs, and payoffs, unforgivable.

There’s no reason we should have waited until 2014 for conservative activists to unearth these videos, and as Fournier notes, mainstream media organs are still trying to spin them away with blather about “context.”  Never have the American people been more severely injured by the lack of a solid, reasonably non-partisan investigative media.

In case you haven’t seen the videos yet, both the old and new clips were rolled by an incandescent Megyn Kelly at Fox News, along with some high-quality snark about Gruber trying to weasel out of this on a “little-watched” MSNBC show.  The new clip falls like a nuclear bomb on the heads of every desperate ObamaCare apologist who tried claiming Gruber “misspoke” or was “taken out of context” in the first instance.  Both videos date from 2013, but they are from different events.  By the way, the University of Pennsylvania tried to yank the first clip off the Internet after it was discovered, which only succeeded in making them look foolish, since the Internet never forgets.

Rarely has there been a better example of the tyranny of lies.  This wasn’t just a matter of a few little campaign promises by Obama, inflated with the sweet-smelling but toxic fumes of Hopenchange mysticism.  It was a deliberate campaign to misinform the American people for the purpose of imposing an authoritarian scheme upon them, ostensibly for their own good.  Gruber makes it clear this was done because the bill, presented honestly, would never have been accepted by the people who are now sternly lectured that it’s the “settled law of the land” and can never be repealed.  He’s crowing about the subversion of representative self-government to force Americans into submitting to a regime they would not have accepted voluntarily.  In what universe is that not tyrannical?

Fraud is a form of compulsion.  False choices are not free choices.  If you promise someone bountiful goods in exchange for their signature on a contract, and then fail to deliver the goods, they did not make a “free choice” that turned out badly.  You robbed them, as surely as if you stuck a gun in the poor sap’s back and took his wallet.  That is why we empower the government to prosecute fraud.  Robbery and fraud do not become acceptable because the perpetrators say they are acting in the best long-term interests of the victims.  We also should not tolerate robbery and fraud because the perpetrators won a few elections.  Actually, we should tolerate it less, by giving politicians fewer opportunities to shake us down.  You’ll have a lot more success getting out of a broken contract and suing even the biggest phony private enterprise than you will at escaping from a law protected by armored funding mechanisms, Big Government inertia, and a core of dependent supporters who don’t really care if everyone else is angry about getting hoodwinked.

It would be a great day for America if the crash and burn of ObamaCare ushered in a new era of reduced tolerance for every form of “benevolent tyranny.”  It would be wonderful if we stripped the tools of deception – including deficit spending, hidden taxes, unfunded mandates, and budgetary games – from a Ruling Class that clearly cannot be trusted with them.  Repeal of the fraudulent Affordable Care Act should be the beginning of a crusade.  Nothing can justify the time and money wasted on ObamaCare, but if America emerges from this Presidency with a reduced tolerance for control and deception from arrogant elites, at least something worthwhile will have been gained.

Update: And now there’s a third Gruber clip, in which he congratulates his fellow ObamaCare con artists for “a very clever basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.”

Time to wake up, throw out your tattered Obama pom-poms, and start doing your damn jobs by covering this story, mainstream media reporters.  You’ll be shoved aside and replaced by Fox News and its descendants if you keep making the suppression of news that hurts Obama your top priority.  We don’t need a media establishment to hide stories from us, because they think the truth would be too confusing.

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom wants the Republican Congress to send the White House an ObamaCare repeal bill every week, and each time Obama vetoes it, “the leadership from both Houses should call press conferences highlighting Obama’s obstructionism in service to a law one of its architects boasted only passed thanks to the stupidity of American voters and a concerted effort by those who drafted it to keep it confusing and to make its redistributive attributes as non-transparent as they could.”  I suggest naming the repeal bills after Gruber, too.