President Obama’s out-of-nowhere-save-political-desperation announcement this week that he — emphasis on the he — intends to ‘allow‘ insurers to temporarily extend policies that have recently been canceled because they do not meet the coverage standards established by his signature legislative achievement. It’s an almost absurdly unworkable “fix” designed purely to enable the White House to be able to shift some of the blame for cancelled plans onto the insurance companies themselves, prompting a lot of people to wonder… is the president and his administration just making all of this up at will as they along?

Because that’s certainly what it looks like. Apparently, the White House is finally cottoning on to their steadily worsening image as a harebrained, unscrupulous, wildly political, say-anything talking-points machine, so no worries — they’re going to look into it. The WSJ reports:

The White House has begun a quiet self-assessment in the wake of the troubled health-law launch, recognizing that administration officials missed warning signs and put too much trust in their management practices in implementing a program that is the centerpiece of President Barack Obama‘s domestic legacy.

White House officials want to learn how the rollout flopped, despite what they believed had been sufficient planning, preparation and attention to the issue. Although not a full-bore “forensic” inquiry into what went wrong, the administration aims to organize itself so that “going forward, we don’t have these problems,” a senior White House official said in an interview. …

More details about managerial shortcomings emerged Friday, when a House committee released emails showing that staff who were working on the HealthCare.gov website worried the project was off track months before the Oct. 1 launch.

A self-assessment, thank goodness! My confidence is practically restored already!

…Alright, yes, that was sarcasm, but I’m sure there are plenty of “folks” — to borrow one of the president’s favored terms — for whom that could be true, and the White House’s ridiculously botched healthcare rollout isn’t doing progressivism any favors.