RUSH: To the audio sound bites. Operation Chaos is good for Democrats. Last night on Nightline, Cynthia McFadden was talking to Hillary Clinton. ‘Joe Andrew was one of your first supporters. He feels at this point continuing to support you is tearing the party apart. Why?’
HILLARY: I’m picking up momentum every single day, and I think this has been good for the Democratic Party. We have registered millions of new voters, and what we see is such excitement and energy. Why anybody would want to short-circuit that I don’t understand, because I think it’s giving us a very firm base to go into the fall election.
RUSH: Operation Chaos! She just described what is happening out there, and there are hundreds and thousands of Republicans registering as Democrats, and of course the Drive-Bys and others want to say, well, ‘We can’t quantify that. Pollsters aren’t asking any question about it. (grumbling) ‘ Look at the numbers. Mrs. Clinton here: ‘We’ve registered millions of new voters,’ (laughter) and they’re going to reregister right back, Hillary. (laughter) ‘And what we see is such excitement and energy.’ Yeah, from a bunch of Republicans who are bored silly and depressed until Operation Chaos came along! I guarantee you that the Republican operatives in Operation Chaos are far more excited and energized than the Democrats are in all this. Just like, if the Democrats are tired of Jeremiah Wright after 30 days, can you imagine how tired they are of these two candidates after a year? ‘Why anybody would want to short-circuit this excitement,’ Hillary says, ‘I don’t understand…’ Exactly right. This is why I, Commander-in-Chief US, Operation Chaos am not calling off the operation. Next question from Cynthia McFadden on Nightline last night: ‘The numbers look like they don’t add up, and by staying in the race you could hurt Obama’s chances if he’s the nominee.’
HILLARY: This is just idle talk. You have to know how to run a campaign that’s going to win. I mean, you put my base against my opponent’s base; mine’s much broader and deeper, and I think that’s what’s going to matter. ‘When people start asking themselves, ‘Who’s our better candidate? Who can we actually put up against John McCain?’ you know, it is, ‘Who can better win?’ and I’ve won the big states. I’ve won the states that we have to anchor. Why would, uh, any of us, uh, think that it shouldn’t go to the end? We’ve got a process. The rules are it goes all the way into June.
RUSH: Yeah — and beyond, hopefully. (chuckles) Can I translate this for you? Mrs. Clinton said, ‘Put my base against my opponent’s base; mine’s much broader and deeper,’ meaning, ‘The only thing he’s getting is a few rich white liberals and the black population.’ Pure and simple. That’s what she’s saying: He’s not making inroads here into all the blue-collar worker white traditional –what we call Reagan Democrat — voters. Here’s Hillary. This is on the gas tax holiday. I find what’s happening here with the gas tax holiday and these proposals, fascinating. Mrs. Clinton in Brownsburg, Indiana, was talking about the gas tax holiday. She calls herself Goldilocks here in this bite.
HILLARY: Senator Obama said we shouldn’t do it and it’s a gimmick; and Senator McCain sys we should do it but we shouldn’t pay for it. I sometimes feel like the Goldilocks of this campaign, you know? (tepid laughter) Not too much, not too little, just right (applause) and I think (screaming over applause) we should have a gas tax holiday and pay for it! [snip] I find it, frankly, a little offensive that people who don’t have to worry about filling up their gas tank or what they buy when they go to the supermarket, think that it’s somehow illegitimate to provide relief for the millions and millions of Americans who are on the brink of losing their jobs (applause); unable to keep up with their daily expenses. So, as I say, we have to do both.
RUSH: In a way… In a way… Let’s leave the economics of this aside for just a second. In a way, she’s got a point here. All these people who don’t have to worry about the price of gas, don’t have to worry about what the food prices are in the grocery store, are the same people saying, ‘Ah, cutting the price of gasoline 18 cents a gallon, it’s not going to help anybody. It’s bad. Plus there’s in rumor that the oil companies would just raise the price of gasoline to make up for the 18 cents that would be saved by not having to pay any federal tax on it.’ The biggest problem with it is it’s simply interference in the market — and here’s the contradictory thing. This is what just amuses me. On the one hand we’ve got all these people who have asked for gasoline prices to skyrocket because they think it will make people drive less, and there will be less pollution and there will be less traffic and we’ll use less fuel and less pressure on importing oil. It will be a beautiful thing. So when we’re going to cut the price by 18 cents a gallon if we do by getting rid of the federal gas tax, ‘No, no, no! People are just going to start driving again and polluting again and global warming again.’ Yet these are the same people that are wandering around out there bemoaning the high price, the same people that are just livid as hell about the high price and want to somehow affix the blame totally to Big Oil. When anybody comes along with any proposal to reduce the price, which is what people are demanding, ‘Get it lower and get it lower now,’ they’re the same people saying, ‘Oh, you can’t do it that way! Why, we’d destroy our roads and bridges. We’d destroy jobs.’ Like the government would fall apart if it loses a penny of tax revenue.
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RUSH: Here is Obama, audio sound bite number 16, and it’s a little press conference, and this is what he said about it.
OBAMA: So now it’s the Clinton-McCain proposal to suspend the gas tax for three months. Here’s the problem. Is — not only is it worth 30 cents a day to you, but it takes money out of the federal highway fund that goes to rebuilding roads and bridges. And without that money you could have thousands of fewer jobs here in Indiana and our roads and bridges won’t be safe.
RUSH: Where do you start? Where do you start? You know, the sad thing is that there are a bunch of ignoramuses in this audience listening to this and just lapping it all up. (slurping sound) What’s wrong with saving 30 cents a day? If everybody is crying and moaning about the price of gasoline and wanting the price to come down, you gotta start somewhere, don’t you? What are we going to do, Obama, cut it two bucks? Where do you get 30 cents out of this anyway? It’s 18.4 cents a gallon. Has he somehow calculated that people use two gallons a day or less than two gallons a day? What is this? The poor roads and bridges and the poor government worker. I guaran-damn-tee you not one government worker would be fired, not one government worker would be laid off. This offends me. The idea that the government, which steals $3.1 trillion from us this year, can’t do without their federal gas tax for three months. If we allow that premise to stand, there will never be any reduction in the size of government. You know who I’m hearing is at the top of the list for Obama’s vice president? Bloomberg. I kid you not. I’m hearing it from a couple of sectors. Michael Bloomberg, Mr. anti-trans fat, the mayor of Nuevo Ork, liberal Democrat, calls himself a Republican to trade on Rudy’s coattails to get elected up there, is also climbing on board the gas tax holiday and being very critical of it. He said this to reporters yesterday about waiving the gasoline sales tax, federal tax.
BLOOMBERG: It’s about the dumbest thing I’ve heard in an awful long time from an economic point of view. I don’t understand why you think there’s any merit to it whatsoever. We’re trying to discourage people from driving, and we’re trying to end our energy dependence. You don’t do that — and incidentally we’re trying to have more money to build infrastructure. All three of those things go — fly in the face of giving everybody 30 bucks a year.
RUSH: Oh, now it’s 30 bucks a year, not 30 cents a day. Well, I’m getting confused with all these numbers. So, you know, 30 bucks a year, we can’t afford to give you 30 bucks. It’s not giving you anything, it’s letting you keep 30 bucks a year that you’ve already earned and don’t have to fork over to these people. Now, it may be that there are places — we’re trying to urge people to drive less, and I’m sure New York is one. This guy wants to tax people to drive into New York, and I’m sure, you know, all these stupid liberal-run cities building all these light rail systems. I never see anybody on it. Every time I have to go to the airport, we have to cross railroad tracks, folks, there’s no other way around it, we have to cross railroad tracks, invariably. I don’t go to the airport two hours early. You know, I leave for the airport 20 minutes before the flight leaves. Time is valuable. I have to sit there and have the little crossbars go down, here comes the ugliest looking — what do they call it, metro trail? Tri-Rail. It’s not really a light rail, it’s an actual train. That’s even worse.
The ugliest painted things, supposed to be sky blue with palm trees on them, and it looks like they picked ’em right out of the junkyard. There is nobody on them, and they go putt-putting through the interchange here at about a mile-and-a-half an hour, dinging a little bell, ding, ding, ding, ding to make sure some homeless person doesn’t walk in front of the train. Hell, you could walk in front of the train and stop it. There’s nobody on it. So, okay, we’re trying to get people to drive less. No we’re not. We’re not trying to get people to drive less. New York they might be, Los Angeles they might be, but we’re not doing that, and this business of trying to end our energy dependence, Mayor Bloomberg, please, our intelligence.
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RUSH: Anyway, Nathaniel in Dallas, I’m glad you called, sir, great to have you on the EIB Network and Open Line Friday. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. How are you, Rush?
RUSH: Good. Thank you.
CALLER: My point was basically that the Congress has been complaining about how they can’t afford to pay for this federal tax holiday for gas over the summer.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: But somehow they managed to pay all this stimulus rebate, and they had no problem finding the money for that. So my point is that every time they give out money for us if it’s somehow an economic stimulus, why can’t they let us have our own money?
RUSH: Excellent point. Excellent point. The only thing I’m thinking is this money that they are giving back in the form of the stimulus was somebody’s first.
CALLER: Right. And that was my point originally, but they told me not to mess with that, so —
RUSH: Well, you’re exactly right, they can afford to — well, see, in that case, this was an election year —
CALLER: Exactly right.
RUSH: This was bipartisanship. Did you get your letter, are you getting a check?
CALLER: Yeah, I got my deposit this morning, actually, just checked it.
RUSH: Really? Well, I got a letter telling me that I wasn’t going to get one.
CALLER: I imagine so.
RUSH: But it explained what was going to happen to people who were. And I’m thinking, if I’m your average, ignorant klutz American — you know, there are too many ignorant people, the most expensive commodity — and I get this, ‘Wow, do I love my government, why, $600 is coming to me sometime between now and August.’ It just happens to be an election year. Very insidious.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Very insidious, but it’s a great point. They could afford to give a lot of Americans 600 bucks to stimulate the economy but they’re having conniption fits over what would be $30 a year, says Mayor Bloomberg, for a gas tax holiday.