HHS Begs A-Team to Take Pity on Their Fools

The contretemps over the Affordable Care Act reminds us again of the degree to which the hothouse flowers of the American executive branch are simply unable to speak or even string together words that have some meaning or connection to the topic being discussed.

Take Kathleen Sebelius–please. The former Kansas governor and current secretary of health and human services long ago cornered the market on the soporific word cloud, but her performance this week somehow rose to new levels of emptiness.

In an interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta–who is no one’s definition of a hard-hitting journalist–Sebelius poured out a series of rhetorical gestures that not only had no meaning, but also traveled into the netherworld of anti-meaning. With the federal health care exchange website crashing and freezing, the U.S. department of human and health services has called for a “tech surge” from an “A-Team” that will involve “all hands on deck.” Presumably, a second A-Team worked around the clock to find clichés to feed the animatronic device that runs the federal health department.

The “surge” language that now plagues American political discourse is a particularly bizarre rhetorical trope, since it references the war in Iraq. Now that’s an image that inspires confidence, yes? And the surge, by the way, was a plan to salvage a metastasizing disaster by sponsoring Sunni militias to join the Iraqi government forces and stop fighting the United States. That’s exactly what’s happening with health insurance reform. Clearly.

Somehow Sebelius managed to pull off a look of surprise when Gupta offered a completely obvious response to her announcement that the federal government was asking contractors to put their A-Teams on the surge project. Sebelius, why didn’t your contractors already have their A-Teams working on the thing? Why did you wait to ask for their best employees now, three weeks after implementation?

People who use words to mean something and to communicate a certain reality don’t get blindsided by the obvious question. People who try to weave their own alternate reality on cable television, however, do.

The sad truth is that senior figures in the American executive branch have become dangerously isolated from the benefits of necessary criticism and aggressive critique. Instead, senior officials simply parrot the empty garbage that their staffers hand them on index cards; in doing so, they have apparently lost the ability to even notice or comprehend what they’re reciting.

What the administration actually needs is some form of prime minister’s questions, and the culture those imply.