RUSH: On Friday I thought I’d have a little fun with something just to see what would happen. I don’t know that we’ve learned anything substantively, but we might have an indication. By the way, phone number if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882.

Now, let’s go back. During the Ted Cruz and Mike Lee effort to defund or delay or repeal Obamacare, the Republican establishment was at odds with Senator Cruz, if you’ll recall. They said, “Look, this thing is gonna implode. All we gotta do is stand aside and get out of the way. It can’t possibly work. It’s too convoluted. It’s too complex. It’s too big, and it’s being run by the government. There’s just no way it can work. We don’t have to do anything. Just stand aside.” They threw out the old adage that when your enemy is committing suicide you stand out of the way and let it happen. There’s a variation of that on talk radio. When you have a caller that’s a fun idiot, stand out of the way and let it happen. You know, don’t offer any assistance ’cause you don’t need to.
I detected a change in the establishment’s view of Obamacare in the middle of last week when all of these cancellations started happening and Obama had to go out there and apologize. He didn’t really. We dealt with that. He apologized that you feel the way you feel. He apologized, but he’s not changing anything. Well, he might not. He might get an opportunity to play Santa Claus, but I’ll get to that in a second. So I thought what I would do is take a position on Friday that agreed with a two- or three-week-old establishment Republican theory, ’cause there was talk about the Republicans agreeing to delaying the individual mandate now that it’s such a mess and they can’t possibly get this website fixed by the end of the year.

There was talk in establishment Republican circles, “Well, you know, let’s just delay the individual mandate,” because somebody said that’s the guts of Obamacare. If you delay the individual mandate you’re stripping the guts out of it. But you’re not if you’re just delaying it. And, if you’re delaying it in the midst of this nightmare, I mean, this is exactly what they said they wanted to happen, right? Get out of the way, Obama’s committing political suicide; the Democrats are committing suicide. This thing doesn’t work. People are losing their doctors, they’re losing their insurance.

They are learning Obama lied to ’em and then all of a sudden the Republicans start talking about how, “Let’s agree maybe we need to delay this,” which would only help the Democrats. It would solve their problem, delaying the individual mandate now, after all of this disaster has struck. So I thought that I would assume the position of the establishment, albeit three weeks ago. So on Friday — it’s audio sound bite number one — this is what I said right here on the EIB Network.

RUSH ARCHIVE: It would be a gross error to delay the individual mandate. I think what the Republican Party said, “Don’t do anything, Ted. Leave it alone. It’s gonna implode!” All right, fine. Do not let them delay this mandate. Do not go along with that. You make everybody live with this debacle.

RUSH: Exactly. It’s a Democrat debacle. It’s now starting to implode. The establishment said, “Ted, don’t do anything, it’s gonna implode. Let’s just sit back and watch it.” It starts to implode and then there’s talk about delaying the mandate. So I thought I would agree with the establishment, just see what happened. And I didn’t hear anything over the weekend ’cause I didn’t turn on the news. I never do on the weekend short of a nuclear detonation somewhere. I just don’t. I don’t learn anything from it anymore. I start prep on Sunday night. But Cookie told me that this is creating a lot of buzz out there, because this position I took happens to agree with the establishment.

Well, I don’t know about the buzz. I’ll trust her. If she says there’s buzz out there, the pundit class buzzing about it, then they are. So this morning on the Fox News Channel, Martha MacCallum brought in Jonah Goldberg, who oftentimes will tell you what the establishment thinks. He’s at National Review. And Martha MacCallum played that sound bite for Jonah and said, “What do you think, Jonah?”

GOLDBERG: At the national level I’m very sympathetic to that, but it’s also very difficult to ask a lot of congressmen and senators who didn’t vote for this bill to tell their constituents, “Well, you just gotta suck it up. This thing is overturning your life. It is costing you an enormous amount of money. It’s sending year family into chaos. You’re not gonna have health insurance, and we Republicans need to teach the American people a lesson about how bad Obama is, so we’re not gonna do anything.” That’s a hard political message for Republicans to sell. Ted Cruz had said during the shutdown that he thought it would be immoral and outrageous to punish the American people just to show how bad Obamacare is.

RUSH: All right, now, it’s not a real big deal here, but I just wanted to do a little test. I want to see what the establishment would do if I adopted the position of the establishment, and I don’t know how representative of the establishment Jonah is, but here it appears from this comment that there’s no taste now for letting it implode because letting it implode would hurt people. Well, what’s different today than a month ago?

If it was gonna implode a month ago, and it started imploding, why a month ago was it okay for it to implode — and, by definition, cause pain and suffering — but now we can’t let that pain happen because we can’t make the American people pay the price for learning how bad Obamacare is? So why were they ever in favor of this? I mean, is the establishment changing their opinion because I’ve agreed with them and they don’t want me on their side?

Is it that they never had any stomach for letting it implode in the first place? It was just something to say to oppose Ted Cruz? But nevertheless — and, again, don’t anybody out there start sending Jonah Goldberg e-mail. I don’t know, I’m not suggesting that Jonah is a card-carrying member of the Republican establishment, although National Review, in many instances, does adopt the GOP line on things.

They’re not, as often as they used to be, conservative first. “The GOP establishment first” sometimes defines them. It depends on the issue. But I just had a little trick to play, just to see what would happen, and it is an interesting concept, is it not? I mean, here we are in the middle of it imploding. Obama’s embarrassed. He had to go out and apologize. Look at the approval numbers. Two different polls now have Obama at 41%; a third poll has him at 37%.

The Pew Center for the People in the Press — they bury their lede here, in a sense, because this is the worst approval rating Obama’s ever had in their poll. By the way, this is another thing they bury. Obama at 41% is exactly where George W. Bush was at this point in time in his second term, and they don’t talk about that. They don’t mention that. The Drive-Bys were shouting from the rooftops every time Bush lost a single point.

We’ve played for you that sound bite, one of our all-time Top Ten favorites of Wolf Blitzer telling the CNN audience for three straight hours multiple times an hour that Bush’s number had fallen to 36%. So Obama now… Here’s the way the Pew Center writes this. “President Barack Obama has had a difficult year since his reelection victory, a new Pew Research Center poll finds. His overall job rating stands at 41%, down 14 points since last December. A majority (53%) now disapproves of the way he is handling his job as president.

“The latest national poll by the Pew Research Center, conducted Oct. 30-Nov. 6 among 2,003 adults, finds that ObamaÂ’s second-term job ratings have followed a similar downward trajectory as those of his predecessor, George W. Bush. A year after his reelection, 36% approved of BushÂ’s job performance…” You know, it’s funny, it’s not being talked about the same way, though. Yeah, Obama’s approval number in the 41%. Next story.

Obama approval rate down to 41%. Obama’s got big plans to save health care. That’s the next story. I mean, they’re not hyping it. They are reporting it, but they’re not pounding it like they did Bush’s number, and it’s not just the Pew Center for People in the Press. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds the identical number. “Forty-one percent of Americans view Obama in a positive light, in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 45% holding a negative impression of him.

“That marked Obama’s all-time low as president in their poll, the first time more people saw him negatively than positively.” I didn’t read it for enough to know if the personal likability number’s up high. I wouldn’t be surprised if their poll shows that he’s personally likable. I mean, that’s the trick here. Anyway so you got two polls that Obama is at 41%, and they’re reported it, and they’re plummeting and they’re falling.

The numbers are going fast, and it’s the Gallup Poll had him at 37% last week. It’s kind of a ho-hummer, and it’s all because of Obamacare. By the way, folks, do you know that last week we had a bunch of Democrat senators troupe up there to meet Obama at the White House? Remember that meeting? It wasn’t because Chris Christie won and they’re worried about that. It had nothing to do with that, folks. Nothing whatsoever.

It had to do with Obamacare and Virginia and how they thought they were gonna be winning that in a landslide. So we’re back to what opened the hour. What should the GOP do? What do you want? Obamacare’s imploding. It is hurting people. Here’s the thing about this I would say Jonah Goldberg. “It doesn’t matter. Everybody’s gonna get hurt by this if it is fully implemented as it is now — the law of the land.

“If it stays that way, everybody’s gonna get hurt by this — or the vast majority, not just eight or nine million, and not just 15%. Everybody is gonna be negatively impacted by this.” But I’m just struck here, because three weeks/a month ago, when Ted Cruz was out there trying to marshal support for defunding this thing or delaying it, the establishment said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no! Don’t do anything. It’s gonna implode.

“This thing is horrible. Just get out of the way and let it happen.” Now that it is imploding, it appears that there’s not the stomach for letting that happen, because the establishment thinks, “Well, it’s not a good lesson to the American people to have to suffer and be in great pain just to learn how bad Obamacare is.” Why not, if they voted for it? We can’t protect ’em from being in pain anyway! That’s the whole point: The government can’t do that. Government doesn’t care. Government coerces.

I gotta take a break. I could get on that riff again and take the next 25 minutes.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Frank in Haymarket, Virginia. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hello, thank you for allowing my call. First thing, I’d like to give out major kudos to whoever came up with your on hold satire. It’s fantastic.

RUSH: I’m glad you like it.

CALLER: It’s really funny.

RUSH: As usual, it was my idea.

CALLER: Hilarious. Okay, as far as your original question. What the Republicans need to do is don’t delay it, defund it. Go in, publicize it, “Hey, this is the 35th, 42nd time we’re looking to defund it.” Because by delaying it, you are helping out the Democratic Party, but more importantly, you’re validating that a sitting president has the right to change and modify any law to suit his or her needs, irregardless of what that law says, and that’s not right.

RUSH: Well, I agree with you.

CALLER: I mean, it’s totally nuts. Additionally, you know, these donors — okay, we need to find out who they are, and we need to go and either boycott their product or service or, you know, protest them, let them know how we feel. This is nuts. The Mike Cruz and the Ted Lees, they’re the ones who were standing up and saying, “Hey, enough is enough, and I’m gonna be here, I’m gonna do what I promised to do, and I’m gonna follow through on it, for the betterment of the nation, not the betterment of myself or my party.” Stop this nonsense of it’s all about the power —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: — getting it and keeping it.

RUSH: I appreciate the call, Frank. Frank’s reacting to the first hour of the program. He’s been on hold since then. People have been waiting a long time, they always do, to be on this show, and I appreciate it. But he’s bouncing off the fact that three weeks ago, a month ago, the Republicans, in opposition to Cruz, as Frank just said, in opposition to Cruz, said, “No, no, no, no, don’t do anything, Ted. And Lee, don’t do anything. Just let this thing implode, it’s gonna implode.” Okay, now it’s imploding, and I said Friday, let’s let it implode. I thought I would agree with the establishment and see what happened.

The establishment’s now saying, “No, no, no, no, we can’t let this go on. This is hurting people. We need to delay the mandate.” I just wanted to illustrate that they’re out there saying this and saying that, but when it actually happens it turns out they don’t support what they claim to. As to the donors, he’s bouncing off the fact that Republican donors are targeting Tea Party members of Congress that supported the government shutdown for defeat, and that’s what he means. He wants to know who these donors are, have them identified so that they can be boycotted and so forth. That’s from the first hour. That’s why I’m recapping for you.