If they’re able and willing to release the website’s traffic data, as Carney does here, why can’t they can’t release the number of people who managed to complete the application process successfully? Any website that requires users to register has a way of counting the number of registrants. Carney doesn’t even deny that they have the number; he just says that they’ll release the data monthly like other agencies do, as if there’s no special public interest in the first-day enrollment numbers for ObamaCare. Show of hands: If the site was working like a dream and 500,000 people had signed up successfully in the first 24 hours, who thinks President Bashful would insist on sitting on those numbers for a month?

By the way, per this morning’s post about the real causes of the Healthcare.gov glitchapalooza, O’s team continues to lie their collective ass off in claiming that it’s all due to heavy traffic, not freakishly amateurish coding:

The Obama administration is not planning on releasing enrollment numbers on Obamacare until November, senior administration officials said Monday, as they continued to insist that delays with the healthcare.gov website were entirely the result of high volume…

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, “Information technology experts who examined the healthcare.gov website at the request of The Wall Street Journal said the site appeared to be built on a sloppy software foundation. Such a hastily constructed website may not have been able to withstand the online demand last week, they said. Engineers at Web-hosting company Media Temple Inc. found a glut of stray software code that served no purpose they could identify. They also said basic Web-efficiency techniques weren’t used, such as saving parts of the website that change infrequently so they can be loaded more quickly. Those factors clog the website’s plumbing, Media Temple said.”

But the senior administration official rejected suggestions from internet technology experts that the website is poorly designed and flawed.

“Volume is the problem,” the official said.

Watch the second clip below, via RCP, and you’ll find Carney kinda sorta repeating this lie himself, insisting that their “top issue” when it comes to the glitches is high volume. In the unlikely event that Carney and the White House actually believe that, it’s good news for O-Care’s opponents: If they’re not aggressively addressing the coding issues on the assumption that more servers will straighten most of this out, the rollout failures will crawl on for months. In the meantime, the solution is — wait for it — “waiting rooms”:

“CMS has put up a gate at the front end of the system that places visitors in a waiting room and lets them in at a particular pace so that the surge in volume does not cause the problems that it caused in the past,” Carney said during Monday’s White House press briefing.

Charlie Spiering describes that, not inaptly, as “rationing” online users. Exit question via a Twitter buddy: Why doesn’t Carney revive ye olde “created or saved” metric for this? Eight million people viewed or enrolled on the ObamaCare website!