No this is not a pun, it’s an idiom.  But when President Obama, in a very early career of ‘community organizing’ that took him all the way to the White House, with groups like ACORN, begins to attack with words such as ‘Astro Turf’ for Grass Roots freedom of speech and ‘Mob’ for citizens and ‘Town Brawls’ for public expression of his Health Care Reform, he is the Pot Calling The Kettle Black.

Obama, the ultimate teleprompter communicator, wordsmith and charmer uses sound bites to deliver messages he wants to sell as well as messages he wants to deliver to attack.

He is more comfortable on the offensive than the defensive.

Interestingly enough he is now on the defensive and only has himself to blame.

Health care reform was to have  been his signature legislation in his first term.  Instead of moving slowly with a sound piece of legislation to fix what is wrong with the system – developed by his cadre of Czars and carefully researched with citizen focus groups across the country – he selected to loosely float, or lob some terms to the American public through teleprompter rhetoric and then hit the ball to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, his Democratic leaders in the Senate and House, to create a bill.  He put a deadline on the bill and wanted it passed before congress recessed in August.  Because, as he said, nothing gets done in Washington unless you set deadlines.

Now the ball is in the Reid/Pelosi court with multiple bills and thousands of words that everyone is trying to define and the Democrats trying to explain away.  It was his biggest unforced error of his first six months in office.

The terms he lobbed at the American people were incendiary and dealt directly with their own well being and life.

It began with the word ‘socialism’ because of health care proposals that were similar to those in Canada and the United Kingdom.

‘Health care for all’ was another term implying coverage for everyone whether they wanted it or not, or whether they were legal citizens or not.

‘Single payer option’ was another term floated, it meant Medicare for all.  A government run health care insurance program. But then the word ‘sacrifice’ crept into the vernacular quickly followed by ‘rationing’ of medical procedures.  For after all how are you going to cut costs and pay for this new system with out curbing medical care and relying on computerized services that shows what has worked in the past and what hasn’t?

Then ‘age’ crept into the picture of these loosely used words and something called ‘end-of-life’ discussions with doctors.  For after all, most of the health care costs come during the last three months of life.  It began to sound like an elderly cleansing program through euthanasia.

While we didn’t have anything factual to deal with there were a lot of inflammatory words to react to.

And that we can put at Obama’s doorstep.  At one point even he suggested that doctors were giving tonsillectomy’s to treat sore throats and that too many tests were being prescribed because doctors were concerned with liability.  Yet, no one has yet talked about tort reform – so do we really think the liability issue will go away?

Obama touts a deal with the drug industry while using the insurance industry as the scapegoat.  He says the drug industry would contribute $80 billion over 10 years to the cost of the health care overhaul.  But no one has revealed the details of this deal.  The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, better known as PhRMA, are scheduled to meet next week to be assured of a cap on this deal, that’s because there are greedy Dems that want more, while they also discuss another $150 million in expenses on television commercials supporting President Obama’s health care overhaul.

Now having spent 19 years in a major drug company heading up a public relations department and another 25 years as a consultant to numerous drug companies dealing with issue and crisis management, this is not an industry used to giving away the store.  They stand to gain millions of new customers from the expansion of health care coverage.

But we have no more details about this deal than we have about Obama’s health care overhaul – yet he is beginning to behave a bit testy about the public’s outrage, calling it ‘manufactured.’  Is it any more ‘manufactured’ than ‘community organizing’ , or ACORN,  a questionable group he once represented, being investigated for voter fraud, but being allowed to participate in an upcoming census, and supported financially by this Administration?

The people need some answers to the questions being raised and this White House needs to step back and reevaluate its own ‘ manufacturing’ of the citizen’s outrage.