RUSH: Folks, I am conflicted. I’m not often conflicted. I am conflicted about Obama. He had another press conference today to announce — (interruption) no, I’m being serious, I’m being serious. I’m conflicted here. Let me see if I can express this in the way I intend to. I want to say it the way I’m thinking it. He had another press conference today to announce Leon Panetta — we need the James Bond theme for that, (doing Bond impression) ‘Panetta, Leon Panetta, Bond, James Bond’ — as the CIA chief. Panetta is up there saying he will tell everything to Congress. He won’t keep any secrets. That’s not good in a spook. (laughing) Anyway, after all that, the press didn’t care about Panetta, they started peppering The Messiah with economic questions. Here’s my conflict. His economic speech yesterday literally spooked me, and it spooked me because — and this is the conflict — on one hand, I think that he is literally clueless and has no idea what he has put himself into here. I’m reminded of the big election movie starring Robert Redford called The Candidate. After they won, Redford said, ‘Okay, now what do we do?’
The other side of the conflict is I am convinced that Obama is a radical, extreme leftist who, like all radicals, is like a flower child. He has all these dreams, all of these visions of a utopia. And, of course, it’s not possible. So the conflict is, does he not really know what he’s doing, or does he know what he’s doing? ‘Cause that speech he gave yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, it spooked everybody. It spooked the Democrats on Capitol Hill, it spooked the markets. It’s like I said yesterday, inside of two months we’ve gone from a nation of people that believe we have to have some discipline in the size of our government and our spending, and now the mainstream thought is government spending as fast as we can and only government can solve the problem. None of that is true. The success of this depends on how fast we spend money, and then he had this little press conference today where he’s answering questions. I listened to this, and I don’t know if I’m sure that he knows what he’s doing. Even if he’s a committed leftist, does he know what he’s doing, does he know what he’s gotten himself into? His whole campaign was platitudes. He’s still speaking in platitudes, as though his very presence will make magic happen.
He says he’s gonna meet with Iran, even though they’re a big threat. He’s going to have clandestine meetings with Hamas. He’s gonna do all of these things that he was chided for during the campaign, for being ignorant or naive. And so is he naive, or is he devious? Is he naive or is he a wolf in sheep’s clothing? The source of the conflict is that I know liberals, I know extreme leftists, and I know that a lot of them are not grounded in reality, they are grounded in emotion and visions and dreams of utopia, and, you know, doctors, nurses, clean water, birds and the bees flying all around, sun shining every day, birds chirping. I guess it really doesn’t matter, because it does seem that he’s going to take us as far left as he can while appearing moderate. He has a new term for liberal, by the way: ‘pragmatic conservative.’ That’s how he describes himself now as a ‘pragmatic conservative,’ which will appeal to people like David Brooks at the New York Times and several of our squishy so-called conservatives in our media.
By the way, an alternative headline for this unemployment number. If the media doesn’t want to say Obama saves 93% of the jobs, they could at least do a headline that says Obama’s plans distracted by 7.2% unemployment. 7.2% unemployment, it’s an unfortunate distraction. Let’s go to some of the audio sound bites from today to try to illustrate this. This morning, from his transition headquarters, here is a portion of his opening remarks.
OBAMA: The unemployment rate is now well over 7%. In addition, we have 3.4 million people who want full time work, but are only able to get part time work. Clearly, the situation is dire. It is deteriorating, and it demands urgent and immediate action.
RUSH: We have been taking urgent and immediate action since October, the same kind of action that he is advocating now. And since we started taking this action look at what has happened, it has gotten dire. The very prescription he is offering is leading to these dire circumstances. The economy is stimulated by average Americans going about their business. The economy is grown by people engaging in commerce, working. It is not grown by what we are doing with stimuli and bailouts, as we have demonstrated over the past three months. If, ladies and gentlemen, bailouts and stimulus were the only way, as he said yesterday, government’s the only entity that can stop this and fix this, we should already be on the road to being fixed because government has done everything it can. Going to spend another trillion, fine, spend another trillion. At some point it becomes meaningless. It’s meaningless now, in terms of recovery. Its real meaning is the destructive nature of what we are doing and what he plans, and that’s what’s spooking me. What he’s going to do is literally destructive, and I don’t know that he knows it.
On the other hand, I know he’s a committed, extreme leftist, and I think maybe he does know it, and that’s the game. But I have a tough time believing that somebody would actually knowingly take such destructive steps as president of the United States. And then I look to history, and it’s been done before, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who happens to be a role model for this bunch, including Obama. So I’m conflicted here. But regardless, it doesn’t matter. Whether he knows what he’s doing or not, it ain’t good what he’s going to do, and that’s the bottom line. Compounding the problem — (interruption) Well, well, I’m getting to that in just a second. Compounding this problem, folks, I’m going to depress you. I don’t want to do this. The Senate Republicans just completed a retreat. I had a spy at the retreat. Here is what my spy sent me last night. ‘Frustrated Senate staffers say that the Senate Republican retreat that just finished was demoralizing for the best of the Republican Senators. Republican Senators were told to moderate, to not be too extreme, to not be critical of the new administration, to remember the need for Northeastern Republican survival.’ The Republican Senators were told don’t be too controversial, don’t be extreme, moderate, and remember the need for the survival of Northeastern Republicans.
There is no leadership there. Everybody’s cowed, everybody’s cowering in corners, everybody is afraid. I’m talking about, when I say everybody, elected officials on our side at the retreat. Now, we compound that with the notion that it appears the mantra from our side is we want him to succeed. No, ladies and gentlemen, this can’t succeed, is the problem. His plan cannot succeed in the objective that’s being advanced, that’s fixing the economy, getting us out of recession, preventing depression, getting people back to work, it can’t do that. It’s never been done. If it works this time it will be the first time in human history. We don’t want this to succeed, because succeed means failure, success means failure. If this works, the only way it can work is to cause more damage. And to sit around while there is a golden political opportunity here to reestablish the identity and the differences of the Republican Party to this crowd that’s now running the show in Washington, they got nothing to lose, they can’t stop anything anyway, so why be afraid to criticize it? So fear has taken over our side.
Now, back to the Obama press conference today. CBS TV reporter Chip Reid says, ‘President-elect Obama, your staff has talked about a high end of about $800 billion, something like that. They say if that’s true, and if 40% of it’s tax cuts that don’t have the bang for the buck that spending has, it’s not big enough. Paul Krugman today said that it falls far short of what they’re going to need to put America back to work. How do you respond to those points?’
OBAMA: Well, look, there are some people who, uh, have said that it’s not big enough; there are others who say it’s too big. Well, the, uh, as I said before, Democrats or Republicans, we welcome good ideas. This is not an intellectual exercise, and there’s no pride of authorship.
RUSH: Stop the tape. This is exactly what it is. It’s an intellectual exercise. It’s a presentation at law school, it is a presentation of the Harvard Business School. It’s designed to show how smart the guy is. It’s designed to show how well spoken, how open-minded. ‘Well, we could do this or we could do that, a lot of people have good ideas, we don’t care who gets the credit.’ None of this is true. He doesn’t care who gets the credit? Ha-ha-ha. That is big-time BS in a brown paper bag. Forget the ‘B’. Big time ‘S’ in a brown paper bag. He doesn’t care who gets the credit? Here, we’ll listen to it in toto now.
OBAMA: Well, look, there are some people who, uh, have said that it’s not big enough; there are others who say it’s too big. Well, the, uh, as I said before, Democrats or Republicans, we welcome good ideas. This is not an intellectual exercise, and there’s no pride of authorship.
RUSH: BS.
OBAMA: If Paul Krugman has a good idea in terms of how to spend money efficiently and effectively to jump-start the economy, then we’re going to do it. If somebody has an idea at that tax cut that is better than a tax cut we’ve proposed, we will embrace it. If you can show me that something’s gonna work, I will welcome it. If it works better than something I’ve proposed, I’ll welcome it.
RUSH: Look, trying to be respectful here. I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe a word of it. In the first place, there is no one who has an idea that will work that equals targeted spending of money to grow the federal economy. The US government is not the United States economy. They are trying to turn it into that, but it isn’t that and it will not work. Paul Krugman, I don’t care who — there is nobody that has any idea — if this were the way, the Soviet Union would have beat us in the Cold War. If this were the way, Cuba could wipe us out tomorrow. If this were the way, Mexico would not need to send half its population here. If this were the way, Kim Jong Il would be running the United Nations. If this were the way, the ChiComs wouldn’t care what’s going on in Tibet. There is a tax cut recipe that works. There are two of them. One’s the Bush tax cuts. The other is the Reagan tax cuts. And do you think either has a hell of a chance of being part of his ultimate plan of action?
Pelosi and Barney Frank are already demanding that he repeal the Bush tax cuts now, not wait ’til 2010 when they expire. Now, he’s just made himself sound here like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. (Obama impression) ‘Well, if somebody’s got a better idea than I’ve got, we’ll listen to it. If somebody’s got a better idea we’ll listen to it. We don’t care about pride of ownership or authorship.’ This is spooky. This is the voice of total inexperience. This is the voice of somebody who is genuinely clueless who yet is a committed leftist. His inconsistency, his lack of specifics, his flowery lingo that says nothing, I’m telling you, folks, it’s dangerous.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We have where you remember sound bite from President-select Obama’s press conference this morning. Chip Reid of CBS News and the president-select had this little exchange.
REID: You said earlier you’re going to hone and refine the package.
OBAMA: Mmm-hmm.
REID: Are you open to substantially increasing the size of it as it’s been described, the spending portion on Capitol Hill?
OBAMA: The — eh — eh — eh, uh, you know, I think that there are going to be a lot of different opinions out there. We’re going to take all of them in, and, uh, at the end of the day we’re going to have a package that Congress passes and I sign.
RUSH: All right, he continues to offer literally no specifics. Now, folks, I think I have a guess. I have a guess. I have a surmise at what’s really going on here. He hasn’t announced any specifics. Yesterday the Drive-By Media put out a long story, AP. They didn’t question it. They just pointed out, for all the stuff he’s saying about his stimulus plan, there are no specifics. There are no details. In this press conference today, it was more flowery, platitudinous, flower child sort of lingo, and this question and answer here with Chip Reid, ‘Well, are you gonna spend more?’ Well, we’re gonna talk to people, blah, blah, blah. What I think… This is just a wild guess. What I think is that Obama wants to move this country as far left as he can, as fast as he can. But he, while doing it, wants to be perceived as a centrist.
He’s going to let the people who write the legislation take the hit for this. He’s going to let Democrats in the House and the Senate be tagged with the ‘socialist’ label or the ‘extremist’ label or the ‘transfer of wealth’ label. He’s gonna sign it. There has to be a reason why he’s not being specific here. All during the campaign, he said he had a plan, to get us out of this. And he’s been talking about his plan, but he will not tell us what the plan is, other than: We gotta do it now, and it’s gotta be big. Well, yeah, he’s thrown some things in about infrastructure and all of that, but still, ladies and gentlemen, this is not cool, and this is also not cool. CNN — to the extent that we can believe this because CNN is running phony, doctored pictures from Hamas on its website.
By the way, they were called on that by the blog Little Green Footballs, so they pulled the phony video that Hamas staged for them off the story, but the text of the story remains the same! So we can’t trust CNN. However, they have a poll out that says 56% of the American people are for the stimulus, which tells me nothing because I don’t think the 56% have the slightest clue what it is. John Zogby has a poll out that says the majority of Americans want ‘somebody to do something.’ That’s not a good sign. In the old days of America, if you needed something done you did it yourself. I’ve even said this, and I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail from people. Frankly, it’s been quite stressing. ‘Rush, easy for you to say, ‘Go out and help yourself.’ Easy for you to say, but it’s bad out here! What are we going to do?’ I understand it’s bad. I understand unemployment numbers. I understand we’re at 7.2%.
As a man of action, I just don’t understand sitting around waiting for somebody. My whole life when I have waited for somebody else to do something, I’ve waited and I’ve waited, and even when a person I was waiting on to do something did it, it wasn’t satisfactory. I learned over the course of my life… You know, the old adage, ‘You want it done right, do it yourself,’ there’s truth in that, but it’s not just if you want it done right you do it yourself; if you want it done, you do it yourself. This notion of sitting around waiting for somebody to do something is what got us into this circumstance now. After all these years of class envy and the Democrats growing government and putting more and more people on the federal dole one way or the other, more and more people are sitting around waiting for something, in a country that was not built by people waiting on anything. By the way, the layoff numbers? Do you know how many of the 500,000 or so are media? Let’s see. It’s 28,083, and about 22,000 of them have been hired by the government so far.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Clandestine meetings with Hamas. The Obama administration is letting it out that that might happen. There are also reports today that Obama, even though he said Iran poses a great threat to the United States, that he might meet with them. Now, remember during the campaign, Obama… Look, folks, here’s the way to answer this, or the way to look at it. I think he is in so over his head that it scares me. I don’t think he has the slightest clue. I do believe he is possessed with an enormous ego and arrogance that is conflicting with his awareness that he doesn’t have the slightest clue. That’s why he’s all over the board, from day to day, answering the same questions. He doesn’t have the answers to the questions yet (certainly not so that they are programmed in his memory, that he can call them up by default) and it’s scary. Here. They’re letting it out that they’re going to talk to Iran even after he said that Iran is the greatest threat to the United States.
Remember during the campaign, he said, ‘Yeah, we’ll talk to them without preconditions. What’s wrong with talking to them?’ Well, guess what? The mullahs heard about this, and they have established preconditions before they’ll talk to Obama! ‘Iran’s Vice President Sets Two Preconditions for Talks with’ Obama. Those preconditions are: ‘[A]s long as US forces have not left the Middle East region [i.e., Iraq] and continues its support for the [Israel], talks between Iran and US is off the agenda.’ Now, that’s what the Iranians are doing. They’re putting preconditions on talks! After The Messiah goes out there in the campaign, ‘Sure, I’d talk to them. No preconditions.’ Now they’re the ones putting preconditions on the United States! (crumbles up article) This is just rank amateurism.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mike, as we go to the phones in Fort Wayne, Indiana, you’re first today on Open Line Friday. Great to have you here, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. What a great honor.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: The pressure is on. First call of the day. Hey, I just wanted to comment on Obama trillion-dollar stimulus package and it kind of baffles me why it’s called a ‘stimulus’ package. It’s a huge spending program, but yet you asked why people support it. Well, they’re thinking of their $600 stimulus checks that people got or their $1,200 checks, and I think that’s why people will support it, because it sounds like, you know, ‘The check’s in the mail.’
RUSH: That may be an element of it, I’ll grant you that. But there’s a far larger, more dangerous, depressing reason, and that is that there are people out there who just want somebody to do ‘something,’ and they really believe that spending this kind of money will bring back the economy, will take the stock market back to 13 to 15,000, will get their jobs back. Imagine where we would be with all this if the price of gasoline were still $4 a gallon. You throw that into this mix. Well, folks, the price of gas may not get up to $4 a gallon, but a whole lot of other things are going to get up there as a result of this. You talk about inflationary — or deflationary, whichever one happens here, but this happens to be inflationary when you start printing money like this. No, the sad thing is that too many people just want ‘something’ done, and they do believe there’s magic waiting to happen!
Like I’ve been saying all week, you know, the way to win elections is not to win arguments, sadly to say. If winning arguments won elections, I would be president for the past 20 years. Giving the people what they want, finding a way to say — and this is where the education of the American people is crucial. This is where getting hold of the pop culture and getting rid of the stranglehold the left has on it is important. What people think matters, and when they want something and you have the best way of telling them you’re gonna give it to them, they’ll vote for you. At least the majority will. Not every American, but a majority will. We’ve just seen it happen. We see it now in these polls. I mean, the dirty little secret here is that the people who make this country work…
Let me try this a different way. I don’t care whether it’s AIG. I don’t care whether it’s Lehman Brothers. I don’t care who it is. I don’t care if it’s the Mom and Pop Widget Company on Main Street in Oshkosh. If they’re bankrupt and losing money, that’s bad business, and they should fail. You don’t bail out failed enterprises, and you certainly don’t do it by taking money from the people who are succeeding, and that’s exactly what we are doing. We’re going to bail out failed small businesses, large businesses, failed banks, and we’re going to do it in part by taking money from people who are successful. If anybody needs to be stimulated during a recession, it is the people who are succeeding so that they can succeed more! We’re doing the exact opposite. We are rewarding bad decisions. We are rewarding failure. We’re propping up losers. It will not work.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: In Temple, California, we say hi to Trent. Great to have you here on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. This is Temple, Georgia.
RUSH: Oh. It’s this cheap call screen program and I didn’t have my glasses on, the GA looked like a CA.
CALLER: That’s okay. (laughing)
RUSH: I apologize for that. I know it’s an embarrassment to have a Georgian pretend to live in California.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: It’s okay today. It’s Friday. Look, you said you were conflicted about Obama. My wife and I have had a running debate about Obama. We’re conflicted about one thing. We agree that he is a turtle on a fence post, that he was put there by handlers, but my wife thinks that sooner or later he’s going to revolt against his handlers. I’m not so sure because I think he never expected to win the nomination, he never expected to beat Hillary in the first place. I genuinely don’t think he knows what he’s going to do. I think that’s why he’s been behaving the way he is. You’re not hearing anything coherent; you’re still not hearing any details simply because he never expected to be here in the first place.
RUSH: I have spoken to some who share your point of view on this and of course I’ve spoken to others who tried to persuade me of the turtle on a fence post analogy to this, because obviously if you see a turtle on a fence post, how the hell did it get there?
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: Somebody had to put it there, and people are asking, ‘How did Obama get there? Somebody put him there.’ I’ve speculated on that myself. I think it’s possible that early on he didn’t expect to win this year.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: I thought he bought — like everybody else bought into the notion — that this was Hillary’s coronation. But I think as time wore on, I think he wanted it so bad he could taste it. I think he had every expectation of winning this thing, and then when the Ohio and Texas primaries were over and he had to go down to the wire, don’t kid yourself, he fully wanted and fully expected to win this thing after Iowa, if not before. See, but the conflict for me is, is he really in over his head, or is all of this right now just a show to try to avoid being pegged as anything, ’cause Obama has been a show throughout the campaign. His election is a triumph of symbolism over substance. It’s not what he said, it’s how he said it. Regardless, this country’s going left faster than you’ve ever seen it go, whether he knows what he’s doing or not. There are enough people in power in enough places to take it there, and he may well be the conductor on the train. So get ready, in any event.