Schumer and the October Surprise

RUSH: This is John in Crofton, Maryland Are you anywhere near this broken water main?

CALLER: No. I’m in Anne Arundel County, which is the county that Annapolis, the capital, is in.

RUSH: Ah.

CALLER: That’s west of here, and it’s Montgomery County. That’s where Bethesda is, and it’s one of the most liberal places in the world, and they’re running a deficit already. So their county executive, Ike Leggett (who is black, by the way, and a Democrat) I guess is going to apply for a bailout to get the federal government to pay for this, since he’s already in deficit.

RUSH: Why not? Why not? I mean, he’s done a great service for Obama here with the water main break.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: This will speed up Obama’s own infrastructure repair program. MSNBC is all over this now. They’re reporting that the water main was built in 1966, as though that’s a sure sign it shoulda broken today. If it’s from 1966, it’s a water main still in its infancy. New York is using water mains that were built two centuries ago, in the 1800s.

CALLER: Well, I think Washington —

RUSH: They’re still functioning. Not for long, maybe, but they’re still functioning.

CALLER: I think Washington, DC, even Georgetown has a lot of water main breaks, and they’re over a hundred years old, so 1966 should still be under warranty.

RUSH: (chuckles)

CALLER: The reason I called is I think I heard you talk something about Senator Schumer yesterday saying that after he blew the whistle on IndyMac Bank out in California that failed like within days after some letter leaked out that Schumer originated, saying that the bank was in trouble; and then you kind of indicated that this was probably planned by the Democrats in the election year and that it just got out of control. And I have to say that I’m on the same page. When that happened in July, I called Schumer’s office (it’s a local call for me) and I said I wanted to give him credit. I said, ‘I just heard that IndyMac Bank failed, and I want to give due credit to Senator Schumer, ’cause it’s all his fault, and please pass this on to your boss,’ and they hung up on me, of course.

RUSH: Well, naturally, because you were in on the trick.

CALLER: (chuckles) I wanted to say another thing about Schumer.

RUSH: People have forgotten, but it wasn’t long after Schumer’s letter about IndyMac ‘leaked,’ quote, unquote, that Harry Reid went on television and said, ‘A major insurance company is about to fail.’

CALLER: And that was AIG?

RUSH: He didn’t identify it.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: He didn’t identify it.

CALLER: Well, it could have been AIG.

RUSH: It could have been AIG. It could have been any number of insurance companies, because there’s a lot of them out there.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: The point is he went out and said it, and they create all this fear and panic going into an election. I think, politically, it’s probably the best, most effective (sadly, long-lasting) October Surprise in my lifetime.

CALLER: Blooey. You know, at the beginning of the year they were talking about the war in Iraq, and it seemed that the surge had taken that off the front page.

RUSH: Well, see, that was the problem. Exactly right. The war in Iraq was going too well. They needed another area for bad news, and the economy became the target.