She Would Have Turned 60 Today

I wrote this in 2010, but have not published it until today, February 28, 2020. I wrote the headline today, but I have not otherwise updated time references.

Twenty-seven years ago, on October 16, 1983, a deeply troubled young woman let go of her last hold on life, and tumbled off the Golden Gate Bridge. Her name was Julie Ann Petersen, and with her suicide I became an only child. She was 23, so she’s been gone now longer than we had her.

Julie was gay. Julie was a musician. All of this comes to mind of course because another young gay musician recently chose to jump off the side of a bridge rather than face what was on the other side.

When I first heard about Tyler Clementi, who killed himself after his roommate allegedly videostreamed over the Internet his sexual encounter with another man, I tried to stay away from the coverage of the story. There was no way to escape glimpses of website headlines and snippets on the radio, but with limited data input, my brain processed the news incompletely — it was several days before I learned the critical detail that the suicide involved a bridge. To the extent I allowed myself to think about it, I assumed Tyler had been ‘outed’ while still conflicted about his sexuality, and that he couldn’t bear living in a world that knew his secret. In fact, he was out to his family and the people who knew him best.

Julie’s story was different — she had been out and proud for several years. Society was much less accepting in the early 1980s, so Julie moved from our home in Albuquerque to San Francisco. She cropped her hair short, and traveled to lesbian-friendly women’s music festivals.

She died four years before the introduction of Prozac, the first of a new class of antidepressants. Almost by definition, someone who commits suicide is either depressed or panicked. She had attempted suicide several times, starting in high school. Her mental health and her sexual identity of course were intertwined — how could they not be? But Julie did not kill herself because of a fear of being outed.

My sister’s final surrender came five weeks after I married my first wife. Money was tight all around, and Julie had not made the cross-country trip for our small civil wedding ceremony in New Jersey. She never met my first wife (or her two future nephews). She never met my current wife, who has always wanted a sister.

Many of the details have faded over the years, but I clearly remember sitting on the sofa next to my recent bride while a staff member from a mental facility in San Francisco explained over the phone that my sister was dead. I remember the hissing sound of my then-wife’s sharp intake of breath after I ended the call and told her the news.

That gasp touched off a futile effort — which continues today, a quarter-century later — to figure out how to disclose this information without sucking all the oxygen out of the conversation. Even after all these years, I have yet to find a nonchalant way to tell someone that my sister jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Whenever a casual conversation turns to the subject of someone’s siblings, I start to tense up, hoping to avoid the question, “What about you, Kirk — do you have any brothers or sisters?”

Here are some of the gambits I’ve tried in response to that question:

  • “No.” It’s defensibly accurate, but it feels like a lie. It feels like dishonoring my sister.
  • “One sister.” The clipped response dodges the issue of whether I “have” or “had” a sister, while acknowledging that I was not raised as an only child. It draws a variety of follow-ups, depending on the context: “Where does she live now?” “Do you see each other much?” “What does she do?”
  • “I had a sister, but she died many years ago.” This phrasing is an attempt to signal that her death is not a raw wound, while avoiding the most inflammatory detail. But more often than not, the response is, “I’m so sorry — how did she die?”

The less I disclose initially, the more the mood shifts when the full details emerge. I’d be more than happy to get back to talking about whatever was the previous topic — backyard barbecues, or family reunions, or (someone else’s) nieces and nephews. But the suicide of a close family member seems to trump any other subject, and the Golden Gate just gives it iconic power.

In trying to process the information, people want to ask questions, and sometimes they do. Depending on the circumstances, I generally answer as blandly as I can — it seems less disruptive than saying ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’ (Nobody yet has asked the question that echoes faintly in the back of my mind: ‘Why couldn’t you save her?”)

People feel bad for bringing up the subject, so I’ve struggled to find the right level of unconcern in what I say once the news is out. I always emphasize how long ago it was, but that pales beside the fact that the suicide is less than a minute old to my listeners.

I don’t want my conversation partners to think they need to comfort me, but I don’t want to seem flip or cavalier. I love (loved?) my sister, I mourn her passing and I pray that she is at peace. My gay rights advocacy is in part a tribute to her.

But part of me is big-time pissed off at her.

I’ve come to believe that under most circumstances, there is nothing noble or romantic or in any way valid or acceptable about suicide. Suicide is an abomination, a defilement of God’s temple. A person who commits suicide is not a victim — he or she is a perpetrator. The victims stay behind and cope with the guilt and the grief.

When I decided I needed to write about this to process my feelings, I did some research to try to understand the irrevocable choice Tyler Clementi made. I eventually found my way to Just Us Boys, a combination porn site and gay-male support forum where Tyler sought advice about how to deal with his roommate’s actions. Here’s Tyler’s initial post, under the screen name cit2mo:

college roommate spying…

so the other night i had a guy over. I had talked to my roommate that afternoon and he had said it would be fine w/him. I checked his twitter today. he tweeted that I was using the room (which is obnoxious enough), AND that he went into somebody else’s room and remotely turned on his webcam and saw me making out with a guy. given the angle of the webcam I can be confident that that was all he could have seen.

so my question is what next?

I could just be more careful next time…make sure to turn the cam away…
buttt…
I’m kinda pissed at him (rightfully so I think, no?)
and idk…if I could…it would be nice to get him in trouble
but idk if I have enough to get him in trouble, i mean…he never saw anything pornographic…he never recorded anything…

I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate, probably with me moving out…and i’d probably just end up with somebody worse than him….I mean aside from being an asshole from time to time, he’s a pretty decent roommate…

the other thing is I that don’t wanna report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting pissed at me…

Julie died not just before the advent of modern antidepressants, but also before the era of the Internet. That fact has saved me from the exercise of combing through Julie’s online presence, looking for answers.

I imagine Tyler’s parents examining the post above, and the handful of additional posts cit2mo made before the thread devolved into speculation (followed by certainty) that the person posting is the Rutgers student in the news. They would look in vain for any hint of suicidal ideation (“Could we have saved him?”). They would see instead anger, remarkably understated (“Should his tendency to suppress emotion have been a clue?”), paired with a problem-solving approach to responding to the roommate’s violation.

What the roommate did was wrong, but I’m appalled by the blood-lust behind some of the commentary about him. This isn’t a hate crime. There’s no overt gay-bashing in the roommate’s Twitter feed, nothing more inflammatory than the statement “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

The roommate isn’t a monster, he’s a jerk. His reckless prank could just as easily have targeted a heterosexual roommate. The story became a tragedy only because Tyler Clementi raised the stakes in the most dramatic way possible. The roommate is charged, properly, with invasion of privacy, as is a female student who seems like a bystander. Some people are outraged that the maximum penalty is five years in prison. I favor a plea bargain and probation. [The female student was sentenced to community service in a plea agreement. The roommate ultimately pleaded guilty to attempted invasion of privacy, a felony. He served 20 days of a 30-day sentence.]

I mourn for Tyler Clementi, even as a part of me judges him. (Fairly or otherwise, I’m mad at him, too.) I mourn without reservation for his family, whose pain will diminish but may linger for the rest of their lives. I applaud the It Gets Better Project, which features gay adults urging tormented gay teens to realize that they can have love and happiness in their future. I hope it will dissuade some young people from adopting a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Rest in peace, Tyler. Rest in peace, Julie. I’ll keep trying to understand.

Dictionaries: A Modern-Day Morality Play

3 DictionariesYears ago, before anyone outside the military-industrial-academic complex had ever heard of the Internet, I read an item about dictionaries in, I think, the New Yorker.

The author had been scandalized to find a brand-new, current dictionary in a trash bin, and was wondering why someone would throw it out.  Maybe they already had a dictionary, she thought, but “one dictionary per room sounds about right to me.” I agreed.

In high school in the 70s, a teacher angrily scolded my class when nobody could define a particular word in the literary passage we all had read as homework. “If you don’t look up the words you don’t know, you don’t deserve the beauty of literature,” she said. I’m not sure about her exact quote, but four decades later I still feel the lash in her voice. I developed a habit of reading with a paperback dictionary in one hand, thumbing through it as needed.

Now it’s 2015, well into the Kindle era, and I can’t remember the last time I purchased a physical book — or opened a printed dictionary. Depending on the device, looking up a word is as simple as right-clicking or touching a screen.

In a continuing effort to declutter our lives and our bookcases this weekend, I came across three collegiate-sized red dictionaries. (Why were they always red?) The newest was published in 2001, the oldest in 1976. That one has a circular water stain on the cover, the residue of a thoughtless roommate who used it as a coaster. That water stain has accompanied me through at least 10 moves over nearly 40 years.

Which is more scandalous or silly: the fact that I’m throwing two dictionaries away, or that I’m saving one?

Seeking More Muslim Heroes

Ahmed MerabetAhmed Merabet, 42, the final victim of the terrorist attack on a French magazine, was a  police officer and a Muslim. That last attribute led to #JeSuisAhmed going viral on Twitter, apparently sparked by this tweet:

It’s a powerful statement, but the reality is a little more complicated.  Merabet undoubtedly died unaware of the irony. It’s not clear from news accounts whether he came upon the scene by happenstance, or if he was responding to an initial police bulletin — but in either event he was not defending free speech or Charlie Hebdo. He was defending his city.

But that makes him no less of a hero, and no less of a beacon of hope in the face of yet another Islamist atrocity.  Unlike the thugs who killed him, Merabet had assimilated into French society, while retaining his Muslim identity. He’d been a cop for eight years, and had just qualified for promotion to detective. The picture by which he’s become known is a selfie, apparently taken in a bathroom, showing a man with kind eyes and a broad smile.

Islam needs more heroes, and they need to be celebrated when they emerge. An Islamic hero in this context is someone who pushes back against Islamic extremism, sometimes at great risk to his or her life.

I’ve written many times about M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and former U.S. Navy officer who heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, which is dedicated to making Islam co-exist with modern American culture.

Another hero is Ayaan Hirsi Ali — Muslim by birth, now atheist by choice (which itself is grounds for death under sharia, the barbaric legal and social code spawned in Seventh Century Arabia). Ali has been accompanied by armed guards ever since the murder of Theo Van Gogh, who was working with Ali on a film critical of Islam.  Despite the personal threat, Ali never hesitates to speak out against the jihadis, including those who perpetrated the Paris massacre.

Can a dictator who took power in a military coup be a Muslim hero?  Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is trying. Just days before the Paris shootings, Sisi declared that Islam needs “a religious revolution,” that Islam “is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.” He’s been preaching along similar lines for more than a year.  Brave words for a man with a predecessor — Anwar Sadat — who was machine-gunned by Islamists for making peace with Israel.

Anybody care to nominate additional Muslim heroes?

Brush With Greatness: Fouad Ajami, 1945-2014

Fouad AjamiMy favorite professor passed away this week.

Fouad Ajami — Iranian by heritage, Lebanese by birth, American by choice — was an assistant professor of politics at Princeton in the late 1970s, and I took his International Relations course freshman year. He didn’t get tenure there — bad call, Princeton — and left in 1980 to become director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins, where he thrived for 30 years.

He was a bit of an imp at Princeton, and I mean that in a nice way.  You can see it in his picture — I remember the same grin, framed in a darker beard.  When I was casting about for a major after realizing that I wasn’t cut out for [shudder] physics, my enjoyment of his course was part of why I chose Politics.  I wish I could say I remembered some profound insight he shared that shaped my political development, but I can’t. I probably got a B in the course, because that’s how I rolled.  In classes I liked.

Here’s what I remember: he quoted Lyndon Johnson’s characterization of Vietnam as “a raggedy-assed, third-rate country,” and said some American leaders dismissed a wide variety of countries in that way.  As he made his pedagogical point, he just seemed delighted by the fact that he was saying a bad word in front of a classroom at a prestigious school and he could get away with it because we were nominal adults.  He grinned that grin.

He became my favorite professor retroactively three decades later, when I discovered that my emerging world view was finding eloquent expression in his commentary in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. I blogged about him here and here and here. Since no one ever follows links on my blog (prove me wrong, I double-dare you), I’ll quote a passage from September 11, 2009, in which he championed the decision to go to war in Iraq:

Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot in Baghdad had drawn the short straw. He had been brazen and defiant at a time of genuine American concern, and a lesson was made of him.

Professor Ajami never wavered in his belief that America made the right choice by overthrowing Saddam Hussein.  I wholeheartedly share that viewpoint. Despite the years of mismanagement of the war, the world is a better place today because of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I expect that will continue to be true despite the feckless blunderings of our current commander in chief.

In 2011, Ajami retired from Johns Hopkins and decamped to Stanford, where he was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His colleagues there have performed the invaluable service of compiling a page of links to his “best and recent articles,” the last of which was published in the Wall Street Journal on June 16, less than two weeks before he succumbed to cancer at the age of 68.  It was vintage Ajami, headlined “The Men Who Sealed Iraq’s Disaster With a Handshake.” In case you have any doubt, the men in question are Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

 (This post is the fourth installment in my Brush with Greatness series.)

A Personal Message of Joy, to Several Constituencies

December 21, 2013: Last day on the job

Maplewood peeps: Look for me no more behind the deli counter at Kings. After 12 months of a second stint of slicing meat and washing dishes, I’ve replaced my income there with a part-time job that involves a desk.

Princeton peeps: When they told us “there’s no limit to what you can do with a Princeton degree,” did you realize they meant no limit in either direction? 🙂 Kidding aside, in this economy I’ve been thankful for the income, and for the expansion of my paradigm of service.

Episcopeeps: I’m delighted to announce that I am again becoming a professional Episcopalian.  In January I start work as part-time Director of Communications at Christ Church Ridgewood, serving a community of faith through newsletters, bulletins, social media and more.

December 2009: An earlier stint at Kings (with a cooler hat) led to a longer post

Communications peeps: As I mentioned, my new job is a part-time gig, so I remain very interested in freelance writing and editing opportunities.  Let me know if I can help your organization meet your communications needs.

As we prepare to ring in the New Year, I’m grateful for the precious gift of Today and excited by the prospect of Tomorrow. I’m grateful to Fr. Greg Lisby, and look forward to serving God and the people of Christ Church. Always and forever, I’m grateful for my beautiful wife Nina Nicholson, the Web Goddess, who never ceases to love and inspire me.

To all my peeps, and all who read these words: May the spirit of Christmas continue in your life as Epiphany approaches, and may you find joy and prosperity in the New Year.

(Photos by the Web Goddess, of course)

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Marriage Equality: 33 States to Go …

I’m thrilled that my home state of New Mexico is the latest to recognize the right of marriage equality for same-sex couples.  ¡Arriba!

(The snippet above started as a simple Facebook post, but FB insisted on running the graphic full size and then cropped out the New Mexification of the logo.  Posting on my blog and linking to the post from FB is a kludgy way of displaying the graphic as a thumbnail  in Facebook.  If you’re here from Facebook and were expecting a more substantive post, there are 25 previous posts to choose from, ranging in tone from defensive to angry to jubilant.)

Those Who Use Mandela’s Death to Demonize the Right Would Do Well to Follow His Example

Why can Americans not come together to celebrate the life of a great man without using his death as a domestic cudgel?

Mandela, voting in 1994

If you Google “conservatives and Mandela” and look no further than the headlines, you’ll get the impression that the forces of the Right are secretly celebrating the great man’s death, rather than his life.  Some samples:

The last headline echoes a recurring theme: Newt Gingrich, who is in the news for stalwartly supporting Mandela both now and during Apartheid, is portrayed as a lone voice in the GOP fever swamps.  So who are these “hard-line conservatives” talking trash about Mandela?

Well… um… they’re Facebook commenters. If you look for a conservative or Republican of substance* who has criticized Mandela since his death, you’ll find them far more scarce than the headlines that imply they are everywhere.

Here’s the closest I can find: The Salon article cited above reports that

Bill O’Reilly’s head almost exploded since Mandela’s story doesn’t conform exactly to politics as he usually understands them:

“He was a communist, this man. He was a communist, all right? But he was a great man! What he did for his people was stunning!… He was a great man! But he was a communist!”

Ha! O’Reilly, that lying liar, called Nelson Mandela a communist! OK, he was also “a great man” who did “stunning” things for his people, but he was a commie!

Mandela, on a 1988 Soviet stamp

I’m not a big fan of Bill O’Reilly, but in this case he’s right on both counts.  Mandela may or may not formally have been a member of the South African Communist Party, but his African National Congress (ANC) was closely allied with the Communists throughout the Apartheid era — and to this day, in fact. Fortunately, Communism no longer has a lot of traction around the world.

The other label that gets thrown at Mandela is that he was a “terrorist” in the years before his imprisonment — and that also is accurate, or at least defensible. But despite the misnamed “Global War on Terrorism,” terrorism is not an enemy, it is a tactic. The Boston Tea Party was a famous, although not deadly, act of terrorism.

Gingrich — a historian and a far more thoughtful man than the Left would have you believe — pushed back strongly at the yahoos who vented their bile on his Facebook page.  His response is well worth reading in full; here are excerpts:

Mandela was faced with a vicious apartheid regime that eliminated all rights for blacks and gave them no hope for the future. This was a regime which used secret police, prisons and military force to crush all efforts at seeking freedom by blacks.

What would you have done faced with that crushing government?

What would you do here in America if you had that kind of oppression? …

As Americans we celebrate the farmers at Lexington and Concord who used force to oppose British tyranny. We praise George Washington for spending eight years in the field fighting the British Army’s dictatorial assault on our freedom. …

I would ask of [Mandela’s] critics: where were some of these conservatives as allies against tyranny? Where were the masses of conservatives opposing Apartheid? In a desperate struggle against an overpowering government, you accept the allies you have just as Washington was grateful for a French monarchy helping him defeat the British.

Look, there’s no question that in the 1980s and beyond, conservatives picked the wrong horse when they favored the Apartheid regime over Nelson Mandela.  But South Africa was not the only tyranny America embraced during the Cold War, when Communism was still a potent threat.  Conservatives (with notable exceptions such as Gingrich) opposed Mandela because he had embraced violence, and was seen as a threat to an African bulwark against Communism.

in 1980s, conservatives didn’t have the benefit of evaluating Mandela on his post-imprisonment life.  Whatever sins Mandela may have committed before prison were more than balanced by his consistent devotion to healing and reconciliation afterward.  This is a man who seated his warden in a place of honor at his inauguration, who declined to nationalize the economy, who stepped down after one term when he could easily have become a president-for-life.

Gingrich is not the only conservative to draw fire for praising Mandela. Ted Cruz also was savaged on Facebook after praising Mandela.  Now four American presidents — two Democrats and two Republicans — have honored Mandela at his memorial service in South Africa, a fitting symbol of Mandela’s commitment to reconciliation.

Still, the taunting from the Left continues. Paul Waldman, writing in The American Prospect:

Most conservatives were wrong about Nelson Mandela and apartheid, just as they were wrong on essentially every question touching on race in our own history. It would be great to hear one of the people who were around then say, “I was wrong,” and explore what they’ve learned from that. But that may be too much to ask.

Seek and ye shall find.  Deroy Murdock in National Review (emphasis in original):

Like many other anti-Communists and Cold Warriors, I feared that releasing Nelson Mandela from jail, especially amid the collapse of South Africa’s apartheid government, would create a Cuba on the Cape of Good Hope at best and an African Cambodia at worst. …

The example of the Ayatollah Khomeini also was fresh in our minds. He went swiftly from exile in Paris to edicts in Tehran and quickly turned Iran into a vicious and bloodthirsty dictatorship at the vanguard of militant Islam.

Nelson Mandela was just another Fidel Castro or a Pol Pot, itching to slip from behind bars, savage his country, and surf atop the bones of his victims.

WRONG!

Far, far, far from any of that, Nelson Mandela turned out to be one of the 20th Century’s great moral leaders, right up there with Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also was a statesman of considerable weight. If not as significant on the global stage as FDR, Winston Churchill, and Ronald Reagan, he approaches Margaret Thatcher as a national leader with major international reach.

Requiescat in pace, Tata Mandela, and thank you.

(Photos from Wikipedia)

* It could be argued, I suppose, that someone with the title of Associate Editor of the conservative site PJ Media is “a conservative of substance”. His memorial post was headlined: “Communist Icon Nelson Mandela Dead at 95“. But Dave Swindle is not exactly a household name.

 

Giving Thanks for Our Country and Those Who Defend It

On Thanksgiving, as on every day, I give thanks for the men and women of the United States armed forces — especially one sailor very dear to my heart, who has been away from his family since April.  From The Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty God, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad.  Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Stay safe, Son, as you return from your final deployment and rejoin your bride and stepson.

The Biggest Loser This Week Isn’t Obama — It’s the Health Insurance Industry

Obama health care news conferenceThe President’s administrative decision to ignore another section of the Obamacare legislation for a year does not redeem his promise that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it,” but it’s a significant step in that direction.  It may slow the stampede of Democratic legislators seeking to distance themselves from the President, but it won’t eliminate it.  Yesterday 39 House Democrats voted for a Republican bill that would go slightly farther than the President did yesterday.  Politico reports:

It’s a significant show of disloyalty to the White House, but House Democrats had expected the defections to be far higher before the Obama administration said Thursday that it would pursue an administrative fix to the cancellation problem.

While Obama may have bought himself a little time, let’s pause for a moment to consider the plight of the health insurance industry.  No, really. The Obamafix hurts the insurance companies in three ways.

1. It worsens the problem of adverse selection.  The people who opt for their old plans will disproportionately be those who would have to pay more for coverage under Obamacare.  The whole financial structure of the law is based on convincing young, healthy people to overpay for insurance they don’t need, thereby subsidizing older, sicker people who cost the insurance companies a lot of money.  That’s why there’s an individual mandate to purchase insurance in the first place.

2. It creates crisis conditions for the industry.  Crises cost money, and could lead to bad decisions.  As insurance consultant Bob Laszewski writes (h/t: Megan McArdle):

The Obama administration may not be ready for Obamacare but the insurance industry is. The health insurance companies spent the last many months rolling their old policies off the books and replacing them with the 2014 Obamacare compliant products––Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.

Cancellation letters have been sent. Their computer systems took months to program in order to be able to send the letters out and set up the terminations on their systems. Even post-Obamacare, the states regulate the insurance market. The old products are no longer filed for sale and rates are not approved. I suppose it might be possible to get insurance commissioners to waive their requirements but even if they did how could the insurance industry reprogram systems in less than a month that took months to program in the first place, contact the millions impacted, explain their new options (they could still try to get one of the new policies with a subsidy), and get their approval?

Plus, there will be increased ongoing costs for administering both sets of plans throughout 2014.

3. It sets the insurance companies up as the villains. Insurance companies have to decide very quickly whether to play along with Obama’s desperate gambit.  Playing along is very much not in their financial interest in the short term… but how much latitude do they have to make a prudent business decision and stand by the cancellations?   Remember, this is the president who, in the auto industry crisis, summarily fired the head of GM, forced Chrysler to begin selling itself to Fiat, and summoned the auto executives to the White House to tell them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

The president’s action is going to cost the health insurers a lot of money, and the only way for them to recoup that money will be by raising premiums in future years. Yes, I know that many consider Obamacare to be a giveaway to the health insurers, by forcing everyone to buy their products.  But I don’t think the industry is particularly grateful for Obamacare this week.

Meanwhile, whitehouse.gov still says ” If you like your plan you can keep it and you don’t have to change a thing due to the health care law” — now a full week after Politico pointed out that the falsehood is still there.  The phrase has been indefensible for longer than a week, of course, but I count the Politico story as the event that destroyed the fig leaf of a possible excuse that it’s just old website content that hasn’t been updated.

You know you’re in trouble when utter incompetence is your only defense against a charge of lying.

(Photo of Obama news conference from whitehouse.gov)

White House Can’t Solve a Small Website Problem — How Will They Do With the Big Ones?

There are countless ideas floating around for fixing the Obamacare mess — and there are legions of partisans on both sides gearing up for a street fight over whatever approach may be taken.  In a post titled “Hope Is All Obamacare Has Left,” the indispensable Megan McArdle convincingly argues that none of the ideas will work.

What a mess.  But one thing is clear — the time to say “if you like your health plan, you can keep it” has passed.  A few diehards may still be trying to justify the use of that statement in the past, but surely all can agree that the phrase is poison and the White House should not keep saying it.

On Saturday, Nov. 9, weeks after the controversy erupted, Politico posted an article reporting that parts of the healthcare section of whitehouse.gov had been updated.  However:

“If you like your plan you can keep it and you don’t have to change a thing due to the health care law,” the website still reads.

I saw the Politico article on the 10th, I believe, and I kind of shrugged.  I’ve been responsible for website content, and I know how easy it is for outdated text to live on longer than it should.  I was curious to see how the White House had updated the passage based on the Politico article, so I clicked through to whitehouse.gov.

Unbelievable.  The language was still there.  If you click on the tiny screenshot at right, you’ll get a version you can read.

And to spare you any further dramatic buildup, as I write this on the afternoon of Nov. 13, four days to the hour after the Politico story was posted, the official White House website still says “if you like your plan you can keep it.”

The mind reels.

(The unrelated whitehouse.gov photo of the president’s reflection seems metaphorical, somehow.)