What is it? Twice a day? Nah. Twice a year? Nah. Twice a term? We can only hope.

In the president’s own words, from the New York Times transcript, health insurance is complicated. Who knew?

One thing that we’ve discovered, though, that I think is — is worth noting, a lot of focus has been on the website and the technology, and that’s partly because that’s how we initially identified it; you know, these are glitches. What we’re discovering is that part of the problem has been technology, hardware and software, and that’s being upgraded. But even if we get the — the hardware and software working exactly the way it’s supposed to with relatively minor glitches, what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy. And another mistake that we made, I think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing insurance online and shopping for a lot of options with a lot of costs and lot of different benefits and plans and — and somehow expecting that that would be very smooth, and then they’ve also got to try to apply for tax credits on the website.

Just discovering NOW? uh, okay. If you say so. And who was it who thought that the best way to reach to reach the chronically uninsured was to give them a laptop app they could access between managing their online stock portfolios and competing in multi-dimensional Star Wars chess tournaments? Rahm and Ezekiel figured they’d be intrigued by the challenge of fighting through the world’s most impenetrable software to inure themselves against the medical bills associated with drive-by shootings?

And everybody knew that the Feds don’t do information technology well. Didn’t they? Well, apparently the president knew. Just not the MSM.

What is true is that, as I said before, our IT systems, how we purchase technology in the federal government is cumbersome, complicated and outdated. And so this isn’t a situation where — on my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out there, let’s get them around a table, let’s figure out what we’re doing and we’re just going to continue to improve it and refine it and work on our goals.

If you’re doing it at the federal government level, you know, you’re going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the other and there’s all kinds of law involved. And it makes it more difficult — it’s part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs are overbudget, behind schedule.

And one of the — you know, when I do some Monday morning quarterbacking on myself, one of the things that I do recognize is since I know that the federal government has not been good at this stuff in the past, two years ago as we were thinking about this, you know, we might have done more to make sure that we were breaking the mold on how we were going to be setting this up. But that doesn’t help us now. We got to move forward.

Thank you, Mr. President. For two campaign ads that will be replayed verbatim in dozens of 2014 congressional races.

Tick tick tick.

P.S. Sorry. Burr in the saddle time. Thing I couldn’t get out from under. Forty pages of specs. Forty? For a site like Healthcare.gov, the specs should have been more like 240 pages or twice that. Security considerations alone should have racked up the requirements. In IT, efficiency is about knowing what you need to do before you do it. It’s not like passing a bill in congress that promises everything to everybody and gives the control for making it work to 240 different new agencies. It’s not done by Foghorn Leghorn legalese. It’s done by professionals.