RUSH: Joe Klein at TIME Magazine: “What Happened to All the Moderate Republicans?” And he praises this wunderkind writer at the Washington Post Ezra Klein. And why aren’t there moderate Republicans anymore? This is sort of a takeoff on Pelosi the other day saying why can’t we get back to the day when elections didn’t matter that much? There wasn’t any difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. It didn’t really matter who won. What she really meant by that, why can’t we get back to the days when Republicans were steady losers and they didn’t care? And they point out that Obama, Joe Klein says Obama’s really a moderate Republican from the 1990s. If you look at Obama’s policies he’s exactly like George W. Bush in the early 1990s. It says here that the “individual mandate universal health care plan was originally a Republican idea (the first version I saw in the early 1990s was Stuart Butler’s Heritage Foundation plan).” This is what they claim here at TIME Magazine. Obama favored that.
“Obama favored a cap-and-trade plan to limit carbon emissions; the first Bush Administration passed a (very successful) cap-and-trade plan for acid rain emissions.” So they’re going on and on, there’s no difference, those old Republicans in the nineties were good old moderate Republicans. What they were were RINOs. And of course Klein and his buddies would like to revisit those days. But then you get to the meat and potatoes of the piece. “How did the Republicans go so far astray? Why did it work, from time to time, electorally? Why weren’t the Democrats more effective in stopping them? Why didn’t the society’s major conservative economic stakeholders (outside the uber-reactionary Oil Patch) renounce the sideshow and demand a more reasonable brand of conservatism?” like we had from Bush 41 in the early nineties Republicans. “Two words immediately come to mind: Fox News. And two more words: Rush Limbaugh.” So the piece here at TIME Magazine by Joe Klein is all about how basically Roger Ailes and I have destroyed the Republican Party, the grand old days of moderate Republicans like Bush 41, the RINOs. And, gee, why can’t we revisit, why can’t we go back to those good old days? What happened to all the moderate Republicans? Joe, let me tell you something. The objective here is to make them an extinct species, and we are on the way.
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RUSH: By the way, the TIME Magazine article cites the Heritage Foundation as supporting an individual mandate. The Heritage Foundation (and I know these people) have been begging the news media to quit lying about them and mandatory health insurance for I don’t know how long. This is one of those that’s in the NexisLexis database and they can’t get it out of there, but the Heritage Foundation, they’ve never signed onto this unconstitutional individual mandate. It’s never been part of the Heritage Foundation health care solution, but it continues to be included in smear pieces.
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