Opening Monologue: Still Steaming

RUSH: I feel bad about this. I do. I feel bad about it. mean I felt good about it at the time and I felt good about it for a couple months after. I feel bad about it now. Well, no, who else but me is responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s plunge? Realize, folks, if I had not made such a big deal out of her avoiding the issue of driver’s licenses for illegal aliens in New York, I mean that’s what this tailspin began. You know it and I know it. And now we don’t want her out of this race. As I said yesterday, we want her in this race for as long as possible to keep the chaos going in the Democrat Party. Anyway, greetings, great to have you with us. Rush Limbaugh and another episode of the EIB Network’s Rush Limbaugh program. We come to you today from the subterranean depths of the EIB Southern Command. Telephone number if you’d like to be on the program is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

Have you heard what has happened to Dr. Robert Jarvik? Dr. Robert Jarvik invented the artificial heart. Now, I used to live in New York in an apartment building where Dr. Jarvik lives. I don’t know if he still lives there or not. Nice-as-hell-guy. His wife is Marilyn vos Savant, the genuine smartest woman in the world, the highest IQ in recorded history. She had, I don’t know if she still does, a column in Parade magazine or one of those things that people send in genius questions, and she would answer them. I’d run into them in the lobby now and then. Anyway, for those of you who take Lipitor, he’s been the spokesman for Lipitor on television. All of a sudden Pfizer, the manufacturer, has decided to yank Dr. Robert Jarvik from its television commercials. ‘Pfizer took the doctor and inventor of the artificial heart off the mound as pitchman for the world’s best- selling medication, after his credentials — in medicine and in his own exercise regimen — came under fire. In the ads, which began their heavy rotation on TV and in print in 2006, Dr. Robert Jarvik touts the benefits of Pfizer’s cholesterol-lowering drug. As of Monday, Jarvik’s photo still appeared on Pfizer’s Web site advertising the drug. But House Democrats said the ads could be misleading to consumers because Jarvik appeared to be giving medical advice, even though he is not licensed to practice medicine. While Jarvik holds a medical degree, he did not complete the certification requirements to practice medicine. Democratic Reps. John Dingell and Bart Stupak said Monday the company made the right decision. ‘When consumers see and hear a doctor endorsing a medication, they expect the doctor is a credible individual with requisite knowledge of the drug,’ Stupak said.’

Now, you might be asking yourself, ‘Rush, with the big Democrat debate tonight and Hillary Clinton –‘ who, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, she’s looking more and more like a women’s basketball coach every day. This is not good. Shouting and screaming out there and pointing at everybody else as though they’re to blame. At any rate, you may be wondering with all that going on, why am I bringing up Dr. Robert Jarvik and this Lipitor commercial? Because two Democrats in the House say he’s not qualified, he’s not a doctor. He can’t be giving advice. What the hell do they do every day? Democrats in this country claim to know how to run the oil business. They know how to run Wal-Mart. They claim to know how to run the health care business overall. The Democrats in this country claim to know everything that’s wrong with everything in the private sector and with capitalism, and they think they can do it better. I will stack Dr. Jarvik’s credentials up against anybody when it comes to describing this drug and what it does to anybody in Congress. Misleading? All right, if we’re going to go there, then everything that comes out of a Democrat’s mouth about what’s wrong with this country and how to fix it is misleading, because everything they want to do has been shown to fail, as in socialism, as in madcap liberalism.

I’m not saying this because I know Jarvik — and I haven’t seen him in decades, haven’t seen him in years, but I saw the story, said, ‘Well, what in the name of Sam Hill?’ (interruption) Well, I don’t know who they’re going to get to recommend it. You can’t go into the doctor’s office and say, ‘Hey, I saw this Jarvik guy on TV and he said I need this.’ ‘Oh, Jarvik, fine, here’s your script.’ Your own doctor has to give you the stuff in the first place. Your own doctor has to prescribe it. It’s a cholesterol medicine, right? And, of course, the side effects of cholesterol medicine happen to be the liver and that’s why it’s prescription and they have to be very careful. Ted Kennedy would be good for it. His liver is already damaged. I mean, Ted Kennedy advising us on anything. He’s the guy that invented HMOs and now he wants to put ’em out of business. It’s just a little bugaboo of mine, folks.

Here’s another story from the Associated Press. You remember yesterday’s opening monologue. I was on a tear. I was livid about a number of things but primarily among them is the fact that Republicans, for way too long, have just been accepting the premise of Democrat agenda items and then trying to massage these premises and make them look like they’re more Republican. But if the Democrats come out and say, ‘We need universal health care,’ the Republicans don’t say, ‘No, we don’t, what we need to do is come up with a way to make it more price conscious relative to people’s ability to pay in the private sector.’ No, we come out with our own plan to get everybody insured to show that we care. When it comes to CAFE standards in automobiles, Democrats say we all gotta start driving junk. Republicans say, ‘Well, okay, we’ll start driving junk,’ but 15 years later the Democrats want us to start — they never challenge the premise of anything. Of the three areas of the private sector I talked about yesterday that are out of control: price of food, biofuels and all that, energy, and medicine. And, lo and behold, the AP: ‘Inflation at the wholesale level soared in January by the fastest pace in 16 years,’ pushed by what? Rising costs for food; rising costs for energy; rising costs for medicine.

‘The Labor Department said Tuesday that wholesale prices rose 1 percent last month, more than double the 0.4 percent increase that economists had been expecting. The worse-than-expected performance was certain to capture attention at the Federal Reserve, which has chosen to combat a threatened recession by aggressively cutting interest rates,’ and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, rising prices, who’s been in charge of fixing these areas of our culture and our economy? A bunch of bureaucrats, both parties. Democrats get most of the blame here because they’re the ones behind biofuels which is causing food prices to rise. Energy, Democrats again, not allowing us to go find our own sources, increasing the world’s supply, bringing the price down. And, of course, medicine. You all know the story, what’s going on with medicine. In fact, get this, there’s a companion story. ‘By 2017 –‘ that’s only nine years from now. ‘By 2017 total health care spending will double to more than $4 trillion a year.’ Folks, the whole federal budget this year is, what, three trillion, $3.1? In eight years, health care spending alone will be $4 trillion. ‘It will account for one of every $5 the nation spends. Health is projected to consume an expanding share of the economy, which means that policy makers, insurers, and the public will face increasingly difficult decisions about the way the health care is delivered and paid for, said a bunch of economists.’ Hell’s bells.

Same thing headed down the road with Social Security and Medicare and any number of other things that are entitlement in nature. Do you think at some point we might want to look at how to reduce costs rather than factor who’s going to pay for all of this and how? Is the idea here that we’re going to, okay, $4 trillion every year by 2017. Cool! Fine. Let’s figure out who’s going to pay the bill for it, let’s figure out who’s not going to get covered when their insurance — because this is unaffordable. You think it might be wise to start looking at reducing costs, nine years? That’s going to go by like that. And, by the way, it’s not just going to jump up to four trillion overnight. It’s going to be a gradual increase to get there. I don’t hear anybody talking about health care talk about reducing costs. I hear about getting everybody covered and I hear if you choose not to get insurance, Hillary or Obama is going to garnish your wages and make sure that you get covered, otherwise universal health coverage doesn’t work. If you are a young buck, a young stud, you’re single, 26, 27 years old, you don’t want to buy health insurance, they’re going to make you. You have to spend money you don’t want to spend, after you’ve gone out and spent money on a bunch of lightbulbs you don’t want.

By the way, a story in the Boston Globe, some woman was running around and her compact fluorescent blew up and broke, mercury all over the place. She was urged to get out of the house, not vacuum it up, that would just circulate it more in the air. They had to cut out a section of the carpet where the mercury spilled, actually cut it out and get it out of there. And these things, in 2012, are going to be mandatory if all that holds? Still steaming here, ladies and gentlemen. I’m partially steaming at what so many people in this country just sit back and accept.