Fact-checking the ( )bama health care pep rally, Part I

It’s a shame when we, as a nation, are forced to dispel the lies of our sitting President. But, here goes:

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Any doubts that President Barack Obama’s “townhall” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday was a complete farce were dispelled early on when the hand picked crowd broke out in a chant of: “Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!” at the close of his opening remarks. Recognizing his campaign’s signature slogan, the President responded: “Thank you. I remember that.” Comforted knowing he was surrounded by a room full of die-hard supporters, President Obama then want on to make a number of misleading and outright false statements about the health care legislation still working it’s way through Congress. Here are just seven:

“I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter.” This is directly contradicted by candidate Barack Obama’s own website which quotes Obama at a rally in Ames, Iowa form 2008: “If I were designing a system from scratch I would probably set up a single-payer system. … So what I believe is we should set up a series of choices….Over time it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system.” So there you have in one paragraph the true purpose of Obama’s public option: a vehicle to slowly transition all Americans out of private coverage and into a government-run single payer health care system. This Trojan Horse view of the public option has been reaffirmed by Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.