Snowjobs

An attempt to deceive or persuade on the basis of the merits of something or someone.

Definition, Snowjob

Today Mother Nature dropped 2 feet of snow and the temperature fell below 20 in Connecticut, where I live.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Global warming was going to overheat the planet. I must be naïve or stupid. I associate warming with heat and sweat, not with cold and snow.

Snowjobs

• President Obama signed an agreement with China for the U.S. to cut our carbon emissions right away while China only agreed to do its part by 2020. That sounds to me like China did a snowjob on Obama, while Obama was doing a snowjob on the American public. The public is responding with a collective yawn (Ed Rodgers, “The Planet in Peril, Yawn,” Washington Post, January 22, 2014).

• Then there’s the social media snowjob. By connecting everybody with everybody, social media will purportedly empower individuals. Instead it seems to be empowering terrorists and throwing roadblocks in the paths of brick and mortar businesses.

In health care, social media, it is said, will provide consumers with the information they need to shop for the best care, challenge physician and hospitals bills, collaborate with each other to improve health, manage and improve quality through complex algorithms mimicking clinical judgment, and bring out equitable health reform.

This may be partially so, but it also a snowjob. As Andrew Keen explains in his new book The Internet Is Not the Answer, the social media is also destroying our economy, our culture, and our values through technology overuse and creation of false, loose communities who collectively know not what they are about.

• Finally there are the snowjobs being anticipated in advance of the June Supreme Court decision on whether ObamaCare can subsidize federal exchange health plan recipients.

Obama’s lawyers are preparing a brief offering a “full-throated” defense of the Law challenging the “ strained credulity” of the political opposition, which, it claims “ does not respect the rule of the law. Its case “ rests on an acontextual misreading of a single phrse in two subclauses, ( “Obama Administration Offers Supreme Court Robust Defense of Health Law,” Kaiser Health News, January 23, 2014).

Republicans, who profess to be optimistic the Court will rule in favor of denying subsidies, are adamant. If the Court rules as they think it will and Plan A, repealing ObamaCare failes, they will go to Plan B, which will consist of an alternative to ObamaCare. Their alternative will gut ObamaCare of the individual and employer mandates. Three GOP senators, Lamar Alexander (Tennessee), Orrin Hatch (Utah), and John Barbasso (Wyoming), are now formulating Plan B. B's details of which are not yet known. But says Orin Hatch, never mind “The courts are likely to decide against ObamaCare. The language is totally unambiguous. I don’t see how they can ignore the unambiguous language that is clear-cut.” (Alexander Bolton, “Senate GOP Plots Plan B for ObamaCare,” The Hill, January 27, 2014).
No one knows, of course, whether Plan A, Plan B, or Plan C (ObamaCare stays intact) will prevail.

Meanwhile the political tensions and drama rise, the snowjobs grow to greater heights, and the anticipations build. As Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) cogently noted, “What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens.”