So, were they lying, or merely clueless?
On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough disclosed that in off-the-record briefings prior to the rollout of the Obamacare website, Obama administration officials were "extraordinarily confident" of success. They displayed a site that Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said looked "great," "very user friendly" and "very simple." View the video after the jump.
So which is it? Were the White House officials: a. lying, or b. did they not know what a disaster was brewing? I'd almost be tempted to go with 'b,' since it would have been colossally stupid and counterproductive to build expections for this wreck of a rollout. Then again, this is the same Obama administration that sent out Susan Rice to tell the world that an obscure, fourth-rate video was to blame for the murder of four Americans in Benghazi.
CHUCK TODD: A lot of us reporters were given various briefings. I guess some of these people were whistling past the graveyard that were doing these presentations to us in various ways. I think some of the folks around the table there got some of these presentations. It seemed that, they made it seem --
JOE SCARBOROUGH: They made it look real pretty, and user-friendly.
TODD: That's right. They made it seem that they knew all the potential problems that they were going face whether it was traffic or all this.
SCARBOROUGH: Chuck, and Mika will tell you, a lot of it was off the record, but Mika will tell you that I, for five minutes, very politely, said you do understand, you do understand that everybody is going to expect some glitches. But you all are ready? You have done everything you need to do to be ready because if you screw up this launch it's going to be a horrible, horrible story for you for a long time. Chuck, Mika, we were pretty blunt weren't we and they were 100% a-okay, right?
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I thought it looked great.
SCARBOROUGH: Looked pretty. Very user friendly. Very simple.
BRZEZINSKI: I think if they can fix it it will be a great.
SCARBOROUGH: But it's not like there weren't other people like me telling them as they were talking and asked questions and they were saying, you know, you either get this thing up and running pretty quickly or it's going to be a political mess for you. They were extraordinarily confident that it would be working.
