RUSH: I mentioned this story right before the break. It’s a Reuters story: ”Resistance Grows to Obama’s Bigger Government’ — A public furor over big bonuses paid by firms bailed out with US taxpayer money is fueling resistance to President Barack Obama’s ambitious plans to extend government intervention in the US private sector.’ I want to read that to you again, and I want to ask you if this makes any sense to you, because I saw the headline, ‘Resistance Grows to Obama’s Bigger Government,’ and I know that there is some objection to all this. It’s out there. In fact, let me put it this way. I got a lot of e-mails from people over the weekend, and even today. Snerdley was asking, ‘Doesn’t anybody care about the mob rule and these tours of the executive homes in Connecticut? Does anybody care, banana republic, anybody care?’ And a lot of people are saying, ‘Rush, these tea parties, they’re all over the place, and nobody’s reporting on them. The media’s ignoring these parties.’ You got 40 people on a bus tour of AIG executives, you have 1,200 people, average at a tea party, and the media is not reporting those protests.
Here’s the thing about this. Let’s create a different scenario, the purpose here is to try to keep you inspired and bucked up and not go wobbly here. Let’s go back to January 15th, basically five days before Obama was inaugurated. Let’s pretend, from January 15th through today, that there had been no significant opposition expressed in national media anywhere over what Obama was doing. Do you think that things would be a little different today than they otherwise are? And before you say, ‘But, Rush, he’s getting everything he wants,’ yes, yes, it appears so. But let me ask you to think, if there hadn’t been any expressed opposition, how much further along would they be in accomplishing their whole objective of the takeover of the private sector on Wall Street and the basic assault on capitalism? You see, it was on January 16th that I first said, ‘I hope Obama fails.’ For days afterward, I amplified it and said it again, and again, and again, and I said it on Hannity’s TV show, and I defined it, amplified it some more, and it is my contention that that statement, ‘I hope Obama fails,’ the first breath of any kind of opposition to Obama in general about his policies, if that hadn’t happened, we would be far worse off today.
His polling numbers are coming down, Zogby has him 50-50, Rasmussen has him falling. Some polls, yes, still put him at 65, but they are the outliers now, they’re not part of the average. There is opposition to what is happening, there are people now starting to raise questions about, ‘Hey, is this what we voted for?’ A lot of people are starting to say, ‘This is not what we voted for, this is not what we thought we were voting for, and this is not what we voted for.’ Now, we are talking about the president of the United States here, and we’re talking about a Congress that is run by Democrats, and so the likelihood of stopping in its tracks any of this is doubtful, actually stopping it, but raising doubts about it and causing questions to be asked is precisely the kind of thing that takes Obama off his game and makes him rely even more on the teleprompter. Imagine if two months had gone by, 60 days with no opposition whatsoever. If there had been nothing but fawning adulation, which is what we would have gotten had nobody spoke up, and the Republicans weren’t going to speak up, and noted Republican leaders made it plain, they wanted him to succeed, they wanted to work with the guy, they went the opposite direction.
Nobody was willing to call attention to the absolute danger to this nation posed by this administration. Nobody in elected Republican Party politics was willing to. In fact, they said, ‘We can’t, his numbers are too high, his presidency is too historical, all we can do is go after Pelosi and Reid.’ Nobody cares when you go after Pelosi and Reid. Pelosi and Reid aren’t that popular anyway, and nobody knows who they are. Nancy Pelosi sold 6,000 copies of her book or some such thing. Nobody knows who she is. She’s delusional in her own mind, she thinks everybody knows who she is. Nobody knows who she is. They know Obama, and our party, the Republican Party, was afraid to tie any of these policies to Obama. But now they’re starting to. There’s a little-bitty story here, two paragraphs, little Reuters story: ‘US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s request for government authority to wind down failing non-bank financial firms is an unprecedented power grab,’ says House Minority Leader John Boehner. I can tell you a month ago Boehner wasn’t willing to say anything like this.
You call this a power grab? I mean, that’s fighting words, to call this a power grab? But now more and more people are starting to do this, and more and more people are starting to have questions. I mentioned that the New York Times — and please don’t get mad at me for citing them. I’m not using the New York Times as any kind of validation. Do not misunderstand. I’m just saying when you have a lead editorial and three columns on Sunday that are really tough on Obama, mainly his style, but somewhat on substance, what you know is that this ain’t the way they thought it was going to be. This isn’t smooth sailing, and he’s not the guy they thought he was. He’s not the suave, smooth talker. This guy makes gaffe after gaffe after gaffe. There are people who are starting to say, ‘Hey look, pal, stop whining about what you inherited. You are long over and you are way beyond what you inherited with what you’ve done here.’ And besides, President Obama, didn’t you ask for the job? You asked for the job then you take what the job gives you. He’s up there whining and moaning, ‘I never thought this would be what I would have to deal with when we took over,’ and I predicted this. I said before this guy’s even inaugurated they’re going to get up there and they’re going to say Bush was not honest with us, they didn’t tell us what all was going on, Afghanistan or Iraq or the economy, we had no idea how bad it was, we gotta do X, Y, and Z as a result of that.
My point is that the criticism and the objections are having an impact. But you have to be realistic in expectations. We can’t stop any of this and Obama is not about having his mind changed. If he sees there’s more opposition, he’s just going to change tactics to get what he wants, and we know what his tactics are going to be. The tactics are going to be another press conference, another appearance on Leno, go straight to the Obamabots who are responsible for his approval numbers, which are falling again, his approval numbers are falling. You don’t see big polls about his wild, over-the-top approval numbers anymore. You don’t see any polls, really, about it. You see polls on me. You see polls on Obama compared to me, but you don’t see Obama compared to Obama from six months ago to two months ago to today, other than Zogby and Rasmussen. But the networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, Wall Street Journal, all these coordinated polls, New York Times, they’re not showing you this data, just like they’re not showing you and talking about the tea parties that are taking place all over the country. But the fact is all these things are working; they are having an impact; they are providing obstacles.
We’re throwing boulders in the road, and that’s what we can do. All we can do is throw boulders in the road and obstacles and try to slow this down. And, believe me, there probably is more outrage over these bus tours of AIG executives out there than you know, and there probably is a lot more outrage at a 90% confiscatory retroactive tax rate on a select few people. It’s unconstitutional. There’s probably a lot more outrage than you know. The Drive-By Media is just not going to find it, on purpose. And if it happened to walk into their front yards or into their offices, they wouldn’t report it anyway, they would characterize it as fringe and people listening to Limbaugh and conservative talk radio and so forth. But, ladies and gentlemen, the power to seize the banking industry and all financial institutions is legalized blackmail, it’s de facto nationalization of the economy, and it’s all built on this phony rage against AIG employment retention contracts. And that was necessary, all the phony outrage was necessary for future power grabs.
All of this chaos, all of the effort to talk down the US economy to create chaos is necessary for future power grabs. It’s been in the works for some time. Treasury and the Congress work together to protect the retention contracts. They sanctioned those contracts. Yet now they’re angered and shocked and outraged those contracts were paid as promised. It makes sense if the endgame is chaos after chaos after chaos to take over more and more of the private sector, and they are openly admitting this at the Washington Post and the New York Times, that this is what they want to do, stories yesterday and Sunday. And let’s not forget that Obama wants to control the pay, the compensation of all bank and nonbank executives, too. Why would a leftist authoritarian want that power? Well, if you control executive compensation, you can then start controlling any other kind of compensation, and if you control that you have the right to take over the economy’s central nervous system, do you not? That’s what people earn in the private sector.
So how easy would it be for the president or Geithner to threaten any of the country’s financial institutions? Barney Frank’s already doing it today. In an AIG hearing, he’s talking about we had regulations, federal laws, to tie compensation to performance. So what we have here is Barney Frank blackmailing while having a hearing with Geithner and Bernanke on AIG, Barney Frank and the Obama administration are blackmailing the rest of the financial industry. This could happen to you. You could be next if you don’t play ball with us. A polite way to say ‘blackmail’ is ‘leverage.’ Regardless, this is de facto nationalization of the entire economy. Remember, we have to return the wealth of the nation to its rightful owners, and in Obama’s world that’s the poor and the middle class who are only poor and middle class because all the spoils are being stolen from them by evil, greedy thieves. So you destroy the private sector, and you do it with a mob demanding that you do so, as in going after AIG executives. This is how it starts, gin up the populist mob to support a takeover of the private sector.
What this will then in turn create is political donations from all of the targeted companies, ransom, in other words. Obama is basically asking for ransom from financial institutions. Pay me, or I’ll take you over. Donate to me and my party or I’ll take you over, the old protection racket. Now, in most instances, something as dramatic and overwhelming as this would be a tipping point. People ask me, ‘Have they overreached?’ Oh, yeah they overreached a long time ago. Normally this would be a tipping point. If America were what it was when you and I were growing up, the protests would not be in Connecticut. They’d be in Washington, DC. They’d be in front of the White House. You talk about the Patriot Act and the invasions of privacy in the Bush administration. It’s nothing compared to what’s happening now. The Drive-Bys would be leading the charge, encouraging the protesters to march in front of the White House. But now, give you a sample sound bite. It is Chuck Todd on the Today Show defending Obama on 60 Minutes last night. 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft, he was laughing, Obama laughing at the economic misery. Said, ‘Well, sometimes you use gallows humor to get through the day,’ ha-ha-ha-ha. Kroft said, ‘This is crazy, you’re laughing about real pain, money problems. Are you punch drunk?’ This is how Chuck Todd described Obama last night.
TODD: You know, this has been a problem for President Obama when he was candidate Obama, this criticism that sometimes he doesn’t seem to show that he feels the pain of what’s going on in America, you know, whether it was that criticism of what happened when he described folks in Pennsylvania about clinging to their guns and religion, so sometimes he gets a little sort of Zen-like and above it all, and I think that’s where this tone comes from. He also was traveling a lot last week, and as Steve Kroft said, he may have been a little punch drunk and just a little tired.
RUSH: You talk about twisting yourself into a pretzel. What Steve Kroft called punch drunk, Chuck Todd sees as Zen-like. You know, he’s traveling, yeah, it’s really hard, yeah, he got into this problem with the bitter clinger comment. Now, in the old days, the Chuck Todds of the world would have been outraged. Now they feel the need to defend it because they’re invested in him. That’s why you ought to read the British press. The British press is not invested in Obama like the American media is. They’re invested in him, he’s too big to fail, they’re invested in his election, the historical nature of it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is just one example, but in the America you and I know, there would be mobs of protests in Washington on Capitol Hill and at the White House over what’s happening, and the Drive-Bys would be out there with cameras and microphones encouraging these people. Not today.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RSUH: Stu in Palmdale, California. I’ve flown over Palmdale I can’t tell you how many times when departing Van Nuys or Burbank. How are you, sir? Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: It’s an honor, sir. Thank you. Listening to the news this morning on the radio, I don’t know which of the hyenas it was as far as AIG people getting their bonuses was, it kind of instilled in me a mixture of fear and anger. I came to you as one of the enlightened ones on which way I should go on this. You made the comment that — and of course full well knowing the threats that have been made against AIG bonus recipients that they should return their bonuses because should the list of bonus recipients ever become public, those who return the bonuses would not be on that list, kind of like saying, ‘Okay, give the money back, we’re not going to make sure the mad mob comes and burns your house down.’
RUSH: Well, look, this whole sordid episode, you’re right, buddy, I can’t tell how livid it makes me because none of it’s real! All of it is based on lies, all of it’s based on fabrication. Everybody knew those bonuses were going to be paid. They were taken out of the stimulus bill by some Democrats who got mad at them and then somebody put ’em back in. Chris Dodd will not tell us who, but it had to be Rahm Emanuel or Obama. They are Obama bonuses, forget Rahm Emanuel, it’s Obama that wanted them in there, and once the bonuses were exempt from any limitation, then we got this dog-and-pony show last week where everybody acted like, ‘Oh, we didn’t know this.’ You voted for it, you idiots, read the bill next time, you voted for it! And now you’re holding these people up to public ridicule? You slap ’em with a 90% retroactive tax rate, and then you have protests, you encourage protests in front of their homes forcing them to hire security and get their families and kids out of the neighborhood because who knows who’s coming to do what? And then all of a sudden, you know what, Andrew Cuomo says, ‘We want the names, we, government, want the names of these people.’ And Barney Frank says, ‘I’ll give you the names.’ ‘We want you to keep the names quiet.’ ‘I can’t guarantee that.’
So these people say, ‘Hell with it, take the money. I’m giving the money back.’ So rather than a 90% tax, the government secured a 100% tax, and they have used the fear and the power of a government which shredded the Constitution in the process, if it can happen once, and if these people prove and demonstrate to themselves how easy it is to frighten and scare people into giving money back or changing behavior or whatever, it’s just the beginning. It’s hard to argue, if you’re an AIG executive, and the whole country is being told that you need to be dealt with, and the Obama buddies are conducting tours of your home with a bunch of angry, rebellious protesters, what would you do? You give the money back. Government wins. I refuse to believe this is what most people thought they were voting for.