Liberals have two choices at this point on how to handle the endless flaming bags of sh*t being left on their doorstep by Gruber. One is the White House route, i.e. polite distancing despite the plain, painful fact that ol’ Grubes is only guilty of stating what all progressive mandarins believe.

The White House sought Wednesday to distance itself from Gruber and his comments.

“The Affordable Care Act was publicly debated over the course of 14 months, with dozens of Congressional hearings, and countless town halls, speeches, and debates,” White House spokeswoman Jessica Santillo said in a statement. “The tax credits in the law that help millions of middle class Americans afford coverage were no secret, and in fact were central to the legislation. Not only do we disagree with [Gruber’s] comments, they’re simply not true.”

The other is the Pelosi route, most recently taken by Angus King, in denying that you even know who Gruber is. I prefer this one because it’s a more egregious lie than the White House option, and egregious lies are what ObamaCare is all about. If liberals can write Lee Harvey Oswald out of the Kennedy assassination to serve their interests, writing Jon Gruber out of the ObamaCare saga is no big trick.

Pelosi on Gruber: "I don't know who he is. He didn't help write our bill."

— Sean Sullivan (@WaPoSean) November 13, 2014

There simply must be a photo of her and Gruber circa 2010 cackling over the impending passage of O-Care, possibly with Pelosi waving around that giant gavel she used in the House to spike the football the day the bill passed. I’ll leave it to one of you guys to find that. In the meantime, conservatives are amusing themselves this afternoon on Twitter by exchanging other evidence that she knows damn well who Gruber is. Here’s something from 2009 posted on her own website:

That’s not the only reference to him on her site, per Twitter pal FirstTeamTommy. And of course there are references to him on the White House site website too. How could there not be? He’s been the go-to guy on giant health-care boondoggles at the state level, including Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts, for years. Naturally the Democrats would turn to him in 2009 to help craft a new mega-boondoggle for the whole country. Skim this NYT piece from 2012, via John McCormack, to see why he’s often referred to as the “architect” of ObamaCare.

Mr. Gruber has spent decades modeling the intricacies of the health care ecosystem, which involves making predictions about how new laws will play out based on past experience and economic theory. It is his research that convinced the Obama administration that health care reform could not work without requiring everyone to buy insurance…

After Mr. Gruber helped the administration put together the basic principles of the proposal, the White House lent him to Capitol Hill to help Congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation..

Even though he was brought in by the White House, Congressional staff members from both parties trusted him because he was seen as an econometric wonk, not a political agent…

“Yes, I want the public to be informed by an objective expert,” he says. “But the thing is, I know more about this law than any other economist.”

He was on the Hill working with House Democrats to write the bill and Pelosi’s only first hearing about him now, huh? The analogy’s imperfect since Gruber wasn’t formally a government employee, but that strikes me as roughly as far-fetched as Bush saying circa 2007 that he’d never heard of Paul Wolfowitz.

Update: Annnnnnd here we go. Via Conn Carroll, November 5, 2009. Watch to the end.