RUSH: Boy, this is fascinating. There are so many elements here and we are once again learning that conventional wisdom is BS. Let’s start with one thing, and that is all last week we heard, ‘The Democrats can pass this if they want to, why wait for the Republicans?’ Obviously that wasn’t true. There’s another thing that’s a factor in this House vote today. It has failed. However, they suspended the vote, and Nancy Pelosi, she needs to get 11 Democrats to change their minds. Can you imagine the arm twisting in the speaker’s office going on as we speak? A significant number of Democrats voted against this, which tells me a whole lot of things. One of the things it tells me is that they are nervous about being reelected. They are scared to death, these Democrats are, about being reelected. If that were a slam dunk, this would be a no-brainer today. The Democrats would have passed this without any necessary Republican votes. But they’re in there being offered all kinds of things to switch their votes, and if they do, if 11 of these Democrats do change their minds after the arm twisting of Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and whoever else, everybody’s going to know who they are. (laughing) Remember Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who changed her vote at the last minute to pass Clinton’s tax increase back in 1993? It was the end of her career. She was from Philadelphia.
There’s something else going on here, ladies and gentlemen, that has a lot of members of the House of Representatives up in arms, and here is what it is. We’ve been told for a week this is a crisis, this is Armageddon. It failed. They failed to twist the arms. It’s histoire. They failed to twist the arms. Here’s another factor. This is crucial. All last week, the focus was on who? The House, particularly House Republicans. All last week, we were told that the people responsible for this needed to turn around and be bipartisan and help solve this. It’s a crisis. It’s Armageddon. It’s the Great Depression 2. And then, members of the House were told that this is important, it’s crucial. Members of the House were told the Senate’s going to vote Wednesday or Thursday, and members of the House said, ‘What? If there’s such a crisis and they’re going to wait ’til Wednesday or Thursday, what for?’ And they quickly figured out that senators would be able to better read the public after the vote to figure out how best to vote to protect themselves. So there was deep resentment in the House of Representatives over the fact that the Senate got to wait a couple days after they voted because their necks were in the noose in the House while the Senate got to sit around and wait and see what was going to happen and hear from constituents.
There goes the Dow, down 603.49 since the thing has failed. This is a monumental day. There is so much to learn in what happened here today. You had the president behind this. You had Democrats pushing this. You had the Treasury Secretary pushing this. You had Obama pushing this. So what this tells me is that out there in the country, all of this bitter clinger stuff that Obama talked about, there are a lot of Democrats who are not happy with this particular bailout, which means they are conservative Democrats, they are not happy with the Obama campaign. This tells me that the Democrats easily holding the House and Senate is not a slam dunk. This tells me that a lot of Democrats in the House really fear not being reelected, and you see how those Democrats voted. So, folks, once again, the lesson is ignore the conventional wisdom and the onslaught, the tsunami of Drive-By Media coverage in all of this. I was watching television on Saturday night. I went to Lincoln, Nebraska, for Virginia Tech-Nebraska, and we were flying home. We got wheels up about midnight, Eastern time. So I turn on Fox, and we happened to get on the plane just as all the Democrats came out with Paulson, had big smiles on their faces, announcing that they’ve got a deal, going to be working all night putting it to paper. And I said, I hope somebody publishes a still shot of this picture. And, lo and behold, the New York Times did.
The New York Times put a still shot of the thieves, the very people responsible for this: Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, Pelosi, Reid, just smiling bigger than anything. And then after it was on the Times website for a while they took it down and replaced it with a more serious photo of the same people, ’cause they realized that essentially this was a series of Colonel Sanders here smiling after slaughtering the chickens. One other thing, folks. Bear with me on this now. The Democrats claim to be the party of the little guy, and yet every one of their fixes for problems facing the little guy hurts the little guy even more. For example, the Democrats want to raise tax on business. The Democrats want to raise taxes on small business. The Democrats say it’s not fair. So they go out and they raise taxes on business, and then what happens? The little guy, who is not supposed to benefit from taxes being raised and it’s not going to amount to anything in his back pocket, the little guy is supposed to feel good that the rich are being punished. The little guy is supposed to feel solidly happy that his boss, who he hates, is being made to pay the piper. The reality is that the boss’ tax going up causes him to have to lay off some people.
The little guy gets creamed every time the Democrats come up with a plan. Their plan to fix discrimination destroyed the black family, poverty, all these things exacerbated, their affirmative action programs created more anger and more dissatisfaction among people, the people on Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, they’re not happy. The beneficiaries of big, massive government entitlements are miserable, angry, all the time. They’re not happy because the government cannot provide prosperity. The government cannot provide happiness. The government cannot ensure the economic well-being of the American people. The government can’t, the Treasury Secretary can’t. So here comes this bailout which is said to do what? It’s said to protect people in their affordable housing and yet we learn in the details of the plan that even more people would be foreclosed on. So the very plan the Democrats devise would again hurt their own constituents, it would hurt the people they set out to help.
All these programs from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society onward, include Social Security in there from FDR, and then go through and track who in this country is angriest, who is unhappiest, who is most miserable and you’ll find out it’s the very people who bought the lies and promises of Democrats who said this program is going to make you happy, this program is going to fix it, this program is going to get you a house, this program is going to get you this, this program is going to get you health care, this program is going to get you retirement, this program is going to get you this, and they all fail. They fail to live up to their promises. Okay, where’s the Dow down, 481, so it’s trickling back from where it was. I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to say it anyway. Screw the market! Don’t say it? Okay, I’ll take that back, not screw the market, but let me tell you something. When the government fails to pass a socialism bill and the market goes south, let it go south. I don’t want to pass a socialism bill just to protect the stock market. And besides that, a socialism bill was on the verge of being voted on, the stock market was still down 298, 275 points. The day the stock market is totally dictated by how much socialism the federal government’s going to get involved in is the day I don’t care what the market does. You shouldn’t either.
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RUSH: I’ll tell you how stupid Nancy Pelosi is. Nancy Pelosi is out blaming the Republicans for this failure — and so is the media, which is expected. Can you imagine the chaos in their cloakrooms? This was a slam dunk, they thought. Look at that: ‘Barney Frank to assess economic reaction before deciding next step on the bailout.’ Here’s how stupid Nancy Pelosi is. She is out there pointing fingers of blame at the people she’s going to need to make something pass. She is out there insulting the Republicans. This whole thing’s a Democrat scandal. The fact that the members of the House of Representatives voted this down by a pretty sizable margin (I guess, in a big sense, it was close). But I guarantee you, this sends messages all over the world: Obama couldn’t get it done. Where was the community organizer making all this happen? This is supposed to get done. He didn’t want any part of it. In fact, statement today was he was very ‘tepid’ in his support of this. But the truth of the matter is, unanimous instance is the worst Speaker of the House in my lifetime. Harry Reid is the worst Senate Majority Leader. These people are incompetent. She can point fingers of blame at Republicans all day, but she couldn’t arm twist her own people. She couldn’t get 11 Democrats at the 11th hour to change their mind. Her failure is our success. She’s dumb on so many levels. But I think what’s governing these people right now is rage and anger over their failure to get this done.
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RUSH: The so-called bailout in the House has now officially failed. Republicans have approached the microphones and are explaining what went wrong. I’ll tell you something that went wrong. The Republicans were ready to vote for this damn thing and the Democrats got greedy and toward the end of the actual negotiating process, when they started to write this, they left the Republicans out of the room. They didn’t invite them and then Pelosi accused them of being unpatriotic for not showing up. Pelosi is an idiot, folks. She is a genuine partisan idiot. I’m being told that CNBC every two minutes is dumping on the Republicans here. The fact of the matter is Nancy Pelosi could not corral her own caucus. She couldn’t get her own caucus to vote for this, despite stacking the deck. The Republicans were ready to play ball on this, apparently. But then they were shut out of the actual negotiations, Pelosi goes out and calls them unpatriotic for not showing up, they said, ‘Wait a minute! You didn’t even invite us. We didn’t know where the meeting was.’
Now she’s blaming Republicans today. But there’s more to this than all of that. There is far more to this than all of that, and it has presidential election implications.
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RUSH: Here’s a brief review, a summary of what Republicans came out and said. This is John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Roy Blunt, and they came out and they made it clear that part of the problem today in getting this vote passed was Nancy Pelosi’s partisan speech. All three said the same thing, that Pelosi poisoned the House with a pre-vote partisan speech, or a pre-debate partisan speech. I’m not sure when this happened, ’cause I didn’t have C-SPAN on. So all three said when she gave her partisan speech in the House, you could see in the faces of some members that their votes changed. They were just outraged. So when they’re telling the Drive-Bys this, the Drive-Bys say, ‘Well, isn’t it partisan of you to bring up Pelosi’s speech?’ (laughing) Isn’t it partisan of you to bring up Pelosi’s speech! Here’s another thought. I wish I had…
(static) Did you guys hear anything or was that static in my jack? All right, sometimes I think that’s my cochlear implant jack, you know, not being totally connected, but that means the audience heard that, too? We have no idea what it was, folks. Well, we don’t care what it is. The engineer knows what it is. I don’t care. I don’t have time to find out what it is. Wish I had the ear of people on Wall Street, because the fact that we are not speeding into this ought to give them confidence. Now, this is important. It ought to give people on Wall Street — investors and everybody else, the public — more confidence that the problem is being thought through carefully and not haphazardly, recklessly, hastily. The markets ought to be encouraged here. If the bill is eventually passed it will definitely be better for the nation. Well, who knows if that’s going to be the case, because you’ve still got the same thieves on the next one that wrote this one, Barney Frank and the rest. What mistake did Nancy Pelosi make, folks? What did she make? She didn’t back up her votes. She did not ensure that she had her votes before she went out there and turned into the Wicked Witch of the House.