Pundits' New Favorite Comparison: Obamacare And Iraq

There's a new trend in pundit-land: comparing Obamacare to the Iraq War or some other disaster.

Here's the standard pitch: the Obama administration has botched the rollout of the health care law just as badly as President Bush botched the handling of Iraq. On its face, it's a nice, bipartisan-bashing political analogy.

National Journal's Ron Fournier went all in on the comparison on Wednesday's "Morning Joe."

Here's the transcript as laid out by Talking Points Memo:

"Just like Katrina, when the big problem President Bush had was diminishing the significance of what was happening, saying 'Hey, way to go, Brownie,'--you had the president yesterday talking about glitches and kinks. This is bigger than glitches and kinks," Fournier said on MSNBC, as quoted by Mediate. "The one difference was Katrina was a storm, the health care law was Obama's creation."

Fourinier then added, "Maybe the Iraq War is a better analogy."

Maybe? But maybe not! There's another big "difference" between the missteps in Katrina and Iraq and the ones that Obama has made with health care: all that death.

Katrina was indeed a storm. It also killed lots and lots of people and permanently altered a major American city. The bloodshed from Iraq is still going on. Healthcare.gov has been pretty awful, but it hasn't caused anyone's death, at least so far.

So maybe when they're thinking of ways to criticize Obama, pundits can come up with examples of political disasters that didn't involve massive losses of life. Nobody would ever have a problem with someone saying, for instance, "This is as disastrous as President Bush's handling of the Harriet Miers confirmation!"