RUSH: All this talk about Obama’s cabinet, Eric Holder as Attorney General, Penny Pritzker at commerce. When you read a news account of the things Penny Pritzker’s been involved in with her bank, this woman belongs more in jail than she does — (interruption) well, ’cause she’s hip deep in this subprime mortgage business with a bank that she controlled in Chicago. I’m stuck here, I’m kind of torn because, well, this is what happens when you lose elections. When you lose elections the opponents get the name of the people they want to be in key positions. We can sit here and bellyache about it all day long, it isn’t going to change anything. We can maybe cause the Obama team to rethink some of these nominations, but even so — (interruption) yeah, Eric Holder, he had a very detailed involvement in the Marc Rich pardon. Who’s surprised? Who in the world is surprised that leftist radicals would nominate people like this to the cabinet? It’s sort of flapping your gums over spilt milk. What do we expect? In fact, the only thing about this that’s a surprise, quote, unquote, is the fact that the cabinet appointees in this whole administration is set up to be the Clinton administration third term with Obama running it.
The Democrats don’t want to be on the fence. They are hoping to slough this off to Bush, lame duck Bush. They know people are not in favor of this bailout. They don’t want their fingerprints on it, Democrats in Congress. They’re either going to wait for Obama to have his fingerprints on it, or they’re going to try to get Bush to do something, because we’re in such a state of emergency. Now, Mitt Romney had a New York Times op-ed, and basically he says, ‘Let ’em go under, let ’em do Chapter 11 and let ’em reorganize and all this. This is the only way this is going to get fixed.’ And that’s the argument, do you bail ’em out and let ’em continue to go and so forth. And, really, ladies and gentlemen, the stock market’s plunging. Barack Obama could solve a lot of this with one tiny little paragraph. He could fix a lot of this just by saying that he is going to postpone any tax increase whatsoever. If Obama wanted to stop this right now, he could. He could say this: ‘Given current economic conditions, my administration will not seek nor will I sign legislation that raises taxes for the foreseeable future. Further, I will ask Congress to cut corporate and capital gains taxes in the first 30 days of my taking office.’ Markets would soar, the recovery would begin, and hell might freeze over. That’s how unlikely it is to happen. If he would do something like that, but why doesn’t he do it?
The question then becomes, why is Obama absent here? Well, you might be saying, ‘Rush, he’s not president yet.’ Don’t give me that. He’s the president-elect. Bush is the definition of a lame duck. Obama is the guy everybody’s looking to. He had the campaign that was based on unity. He had the campaign that was based on preventing all this stuff, or looked at another way he had the campaign that promised to fix all this, to make sure there would not be suffering, to make sure there would not be any misery. He was going to run a campaign and an administration that was going to see to it that everybody felt love for everybody else, that there wasn’t going to be any animosity, there wasn’t going to be any anxiety. We were going to have a genuine utopia out there. You know me, I’m a free market kind of guy, and I want the market to work. But the fact is, Barack Obama won, and he is my president. He’s your president, too. He campaigned on change and saying he could unify people. He said he even could unify the world. He said he would sit down with Iran with no preconditions.
By the way, the news today is that they finally now have enough ammo for one nuclear bomb. One nuclear bomb is all it takes going off somewhere. Now, the Israelis have an important decision to make here. If the Israelis wait until Obama is inaugurated to do something about the Iranian nuclear program, they know that they’re not going to have any support from the United States of America in the form of the Obama administration. If they take action now against the Iranian nuclear sites, they have a much better chance of being supported by the current administration in the action that they take. This is serious stuff and we have known this kind of thing was coming. The Iranians have made no bones about where they’re headed with this. They basically told the world where to get off, and the world didn’t do anything about it. The world didn’t have the guts to do anything about it, including us. So, here we are. He said he’s going to sit down with Iran, no preconditions.
Why doesn’t he sit down with the auto companies? Why doesn’t he sit down with their executives, the unions, the workers, the retirees, all the suppliers? Why doesn’t he sit down, why doesn’t he have a meeting right now? He’s Barack Obama. He’s the president-elect. He’s The Messiah. He’s the guy that’s going to fix everything. Why doesn’t he have a big showboat meeting right now, bring these people together and unify them and tell them how it’s going to be when he takes office, tell them what his plan is at least, tell us what his plan is? All this stuff is frittering away right before our eyes, oil price below 50 for a time today. In a way, this is of course good for people and their gasoline prices and so forth. I even heard today some wizard of smart in economics, say, ‘This could actually help the Christmas season.’ We just had, what, a record number of jobless figures today, 516 or whatever it was, to have some wizard of smart saying, ‘Well, yeah, the gas price, that could lead to people having more disposable income and maybe going out and buying more presents, going to more movies.’ This is where we’re at. They’re hoping here that because the gasoline prices plummet, that people will have a little bit more impetus to go spend money.
I don’t think so. I think they’re going to be very guarded with this because they know the price can jack right back up at a moment’s notice just like it did first time around. There’s so much instability, nobody knows what’s happening next. There’s so much volatility nobody can make any plans, including consumers. The markets can’t make any plans; the banks can’t make any plans because nobody knows what the policy is going to be. Where’s Obama? This auto bailout business, we’re being told it’s devastating, going to have ripple effect throughout the US economy and where’s Obama? Bring ’em all in, sit ’em down, make ’em understand, tell ’em how it’s going to be, offer the fix. He said he was for change. This would be a great example of change, of how government’s going to work under him. He could do it in another stadium. He could do a major town hall, some sort of gathering like that. He said that he and his followers agree he’s got all the answers.
The people that voted for Obama, I guarantee you, think he’s got all the answers, and I guarantee you this, they’re puzzled as to why he hasn’t done anything. Where is Obama? I mean, he could have a big meeting like the pope does. He could do anything here to show off the same personality and charisma that he exhibited during the campaign. Well, let me answer all this after the break. Of course, I ask these questions rhetorically because Obama is going to remain out of sight on all of this stuff and not have it his problem until it’s his problem. In the meantime there’s a part of me that thinks the worse it gets, the greater opportunity he will have to enact the kind of agenda he actually wants to enact.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, so where is Obama? He’s not acting like Abraham Lincoln, that’s for damn sure. He’s acting like James Buchanan who was slurking away somewhere. Nobody knows where he is because he has no idea what to do. But he does have a plan; and it was articulated Tuesday night in Washington, DC, at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO council. The chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, spoke, and here is a portion of Emanuel’s remarks.
EMANUEL: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems — be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area — things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.
RUSH: Do you need me to translate this for you, folks, or is this clear enough? We love this crisis! This crisis finally is going to give us a chance to socialize as much of this economy as we can! The effort to get health care nationalized and all these other things that he mentioned were just too long term, too many obstacles in the way. But now this crisis, with people demanding fixes to everything; why, this is going to make it easy for us to radicalize the US economy and the United States government. ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.’ (laughing) What an opportunity! The crisis is an opportunity, is what he’s saying. We have got the Obama team telling you that this crisis is an opportunity — for them. It is an opportunity for them. So they think your panic and your crisis mentality will make you stand aside while they radicalize, nationalize as much of the economy as they possibly can.
So that’s where Obama is. This is the answer to the question. Obama is standing on the sideline, and he and Rahm Emanuel are smiling as things get worse each and every day because in their line of thinking, it enables them to radicalize and move their agenda easier and easier with each passing day. The more of this stuff that gets fixed and dealt with then, by Rahm Emanuel’s own words, the opportunity lessens, and we’ve got more long-term problems to overcome. What is happening here, ladies and gentlemen, is the complete abandonment of capitalism. What you see and hear out of congressional Democrats is a complete abandonment of capitalism. Obama will say and do no differently when he is inaugurated. There will be a frenzy of bureaucratic creations. This first hundred days of his is going to be a doozy. I’m warning you now: You haven’t seen anything like this.
And Rahm Emanuel, veritably promises it in his comment Tuesday night in Washington, DC. Obama is gonna name ‘czars’ to head this effort or that effort, legislation passed further regulating the economy, more propaganda about how terrible the free market is, more attacks on corporate executives wrapped in class warfare. FDR did this and Obama’s out there saying he wants to experiment with things just like FDR did. He wants to go out there and say, ‘Well, we gonna experiment, see if this works, if that doesn’t work. We just want to experiment.’ That’s what FDR did. But FDR did it the same way Obama is planning to do it. He did it with an air of confidence; he did it with an air of all-knowing confidence which meant everybody went along with it because it sounded like Obama knew what he was talking about, when he has no clue.
By his own admission, he’s gonna ‘experiment.’ By experiment, let me define experiment. Radicalize as much of this country as he can. You can see it all coming now. All of this is going to be blamed on Bush. All of this is going to be blamed on capitalism, on free markets. They’ll call it lack of regulation. They’ll call it lack of oversight of all these rich people. ‘The rich people — CEOs, Wall Street people, all these people — they were allowed to run around and screw it up and make the country their piggy bank. Well, those times have changed,’ Obama is going to say, and the people will stand up and cheer. You have to understand, you have to remember here that Obama’s context for analyzing all social and economic matters is socialist. Not once has there been a suggestion about cutting taxes or keep the Bush tax cuts, even. This would do more to spur the stock market and consumer buying than anything anybody could do, and he will not do it for that reason.