At the G20 meeting in Brisbane, Australia, Barack Obama was finally asked a question about Obamacare guru Jonathan Gruber’s rather gleeful comments detailing how Congress, the CBO, and the American people on how Obamacare was intended to function (short story, it is performing exactly as planned):

ED HENRY, FOX NEWS: At your Burma townhall a couple of days ago, you tried to inspire young leaders by saying, “governments need to be held accountable, need to be responsive to the people.” I wonder how you square that with your former adviser, Jonathan Gruber claiming you were not transparent about the health law because in his words the American people, the voters are stupid. Did you mislead Americans about the taxes, about keeping your plan in order to get the bill passed?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: No, I did not. I just heard about this. I get well-briefed before I come out here. The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters, is no reflection on the actual process that was run. We had a year-long debate, Ed. I mean, go back and look at your stories. The one thing we can’t is that we did not have a lengthy debate about health care in the United States of America. Or that it was not adequately covered. I would just advise — every press outlet here, go back and pull up every clip, every story, and I think it will — it’s fair to say there was not a provision in the health care law that was not extensively debated and was fully transparent. Now, there were folks who disagreed with some of the various positions. It was a tough debate.

Though it is hilarious to see how Obama continues to use the Sergeant Schutlz excuse of being uninformed about everything in his administration:

A transcript is provided courtesy of HotAir:

The problem is it’s a political nightmare, and people say ‘no, you can’t tax my benefits’…so what we did a lot in that room was think a lot about well how could we make this work? … And [Obama] is really a realistic guy. He was like, ‘look, I can’t just do this.’ He said ‘it’s just not going to happen politically. The bill will not pass. How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ And we talked about it. He was just very interested in that topic.

This establishes that Obama was acquainted with Gruber and while he trots out the non sequitur about Gruber not being on his staff, he ignores the fact that Gruber was paid some hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in order to, to use the phrase made so popular by climate alarmists, “hide the decline.” He also substitutes a truthful statement, that there was a lot of debate in the press on health care, for how Obamacare was actually constructed, thereby telling two huge lies in the space of a single breath. Nancy Peolsi gave the game away when she said, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” This is exactly how Gruber and the Administration were operating. It was obvious then and it is more obvious now.