So that Obamacare success story

was one more pile of crap.
But in an exclusive phone interview this morning with Reason, Chad's father Bill contradicted virtually every major detail of the story the media can't get enough of. What's more, some of the details that Chad has released are also at odds with published rate schedules and how Obamacare officials say the enrollment system works.
Is there any truth in ANYTHING these people tell us?


Some interesting stuff from an interview with Rumsfeld:
Colin Powell seems not to feel the same sense of obligation. For the Rice profile, I also got to spend a little time with Powell and while I’m not saying he polishes a shiny statue of Colin Powell that he keeps by his bedside every morning, he has jealously guarded his good name, sometimes at the expense of the men he served with – an experience that he seems to feel besmirched by. So he is not necessarily the most interesting or reliable source about what actually happened, either.
...
I had to see this for myself, partly as a reporter and partly for my psychological well-being, so I went down to Washington, for maybe 3 weeks, and attended maybe 5 or 6 of his briefings at the Pentagon. I then wrote a piece for Harpers that focused on one particular briefing, in which Rumsfeld explained to the press corps the nature of conflict, which he said in its scope, intensity and duration would be analogous to the Cold War. As someone who was secretary of defense during the heart of the Cold War, this was obviously something he had thought through. This statement led the nightly news in Germany, but no American news outlet picked it up. This struck me as dangerous—we were warned that this is what policymakers had in mind. If the popular meme became that the president lied us into war, like with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led us into Vietnam, the reality is that I saw an outspoken cabinet official who was quite specific and blunt in his description of what was coming.
...
And yet Rumsfeld says in your interview that unlike the Cold War, the administration didn’t have a very clear idea of the intellectual underpinnings of the war. “The White House,” he says, “was very nervous about even talking about religion, for fear of being seen as being against a particular religion. And yet if you don’t pin the tail on the donkey and say that the enemy is radical Islam and Islamism and people who go out and kill innocent men, women and children to try to impose their views on others, and who are fundamentally opposed to the nation-state—we weren’t willing to say that. I was. But as an administration we weren’t.” So why didn’t the administration’s strategy match Rumsfeld’s clarity? 

I think the process that Rumsfeld described – of decision-making by a camarilla, meaning by the President and a tight inner circle of trusted aides, while the heads of major departments like State and Defense are largely kept in the dark – has clearly persisted through the Obama administration. The policy results in both cases seem to be only half-baked.