RUSH: This is Liz Sidoti, AP-Obama. On Friday afternoon, as you know, the president of the United States — actually it was Friday morning, but we didn’t learn about it ’til Friday afternoon. Friday morning in a meeting with House and Senate Republican leaders, President Obama basically told them to stop listening to me, that’s not how things get done in Washington. ‘We can’t let Rush Limbaugh stall the stimulus plan.’ Now, this is the great unifier. This is the man that’s going to unify everybody and usher in a new era of bipartisan and love. He’s obviously more frightened of me than he is Mitch McConnell. He is more frightened of me than he is of, say, John Boehner, which doesn’t say much about our party. I mean, to tell you the truth, folks, if the president is a little more worried about somebody on the radio than he is about somebody on Capitol Hill… I think Obama wants me to fail, there’s no question, Obama didn’t use the words, but President Obama, by telling you and elected Republicans in Washington not to listen to me because I am not how things get done in Washington, he has said that he wants me to fail. And we know how outraged the Drive-By Media got when they reported that that’s what I said about Obama’s policies.
Let’s see if there is similar outrage at the president for asking a private citizen, who is trying his best to rejuvenate our economy, to fail. Liz Sidoti, AP, this is after Obama gets into very full fledged partisan mode on Friday: ‘Barack Obama opened his presidency by breaking sharply from George W. Bush’s unpopular administration, but he mostly avoided divisive partisan and ideological stands.’ This is absurd. It is ridiculous. It’s hilarious. He is sprinting so fast to the left — folks, do you remember — things keep flying out of my fertile mind — it was just last week that I gave you an idea for a post Super Bowl office pool, because everybody loves these little football office pools during the season and after the football season ends with the Super Bowl, because nobody does an office pool on the Pro Bowl. I said, ‘Start the next office pool on how long it’s going to be before President Obama calls some radio station from Air Force One and says it’s just not fair, I have three hours on the radio every day with no truth detector and he can’t compete with it.’ Well, hell’s bells, it didn’t even take to the end of the football season, we didn’t even get our pool started. Nobody won this because we didn’t get the pool started.
Now, get this, remember last week we had a lot of fun because Obama is signing these executive orders that he’s not familiar with. He’s not familiar with the whole contents. So in the middle of reading these executive orders, in both of them he stops one time to ask Greg Craig — one we’re gonna close Guantanamo Bay — (paraphrasing) ‘What are we going to do with the prisoners down there, Greg?’ ‘Well, we’ll come up with a process.’ ‘All right, we’ll come up with a process.’ Remember that? Here’s how Liz Sidoti treats this in the Associated Press: ‘In one Oval Office ceremony, Obama went through each executive order as he signed them, reading parts of each and methodically explaining them. He even halted a few times to ask for clarification from his White House counsel. That sort of deferral to someone else in a public setting and admission of a less-than-perfect command of the facts was never Bush’s style.’
So his less than perfect command of the facts, this is a plus, this is a reason to respect The Messiah. He admitted publicly he had no clue what he was signing and so he deferred to his White House counsel, something that the idiot Bush never had the guts to do. No matter what happens, it is going to be turned into a positive. He’s too big to fail. The dirty little secret, ladies and gentlemen, with President Obama telling Republicans not to listen to me, he doesn’t need Republican votes to get what he wants. He doesn’t need them. It doesn’t matter. The Republicans haven’t been listening to me anyway so it’s sort of a moot point in terms of the practical reality of it, just another reason why Obama’s doing this. I will explain in a moment. But the fact is he doesn’t need Republican votes to get what he wants. He wants Republican votes for cover. He wants Republican votes so he can say it was bipartisan. But never forget, the Democrat definition of bipartisan is when Republicans cave and agree with Democrats. That’s bipartisan. Bipartisan is not taking some of what the Republicans want and some of what the Democrats want and combining it into a consensus piece of legislation. That’s not how bipartisanship works when Democrats are in power.
Obama is not a unifier, he is not bipartisan. And our problem is that too many in the Republican Party want to be viewed as unifiers, and they want to be viewed as bipartisan, and they are prepared to support every Big Government boneheaded agenda item that Obama throws at them. Now, my friends, I want to share with you — Byron York on Saturday morning sent me an e-mail to ask for a response. He’s the only one who did ask me for a response on this, so I whipped up something and threw it back at him via e-mail. I’ll share it here with you in a second. But something else that I’ve done, I want to take President Obama at his word. He wants a bipartisan bill. Fox just had a crawl on their screen that said ‘President Obama is seeking bipartisan support for stimulus plan.’ Well, again, what he really means is Republicans caving to liberal ideas. That’s the definition of bipartisan. But I’m going to take him at his word and I’m going to take him at something he said two weeks ago, and that is that he’s willing to listen to any idea that works.
I sat down on Sunday afternoon, there weren’t any football games on, and I decided to put together a very serious, very deliberate bipartisan proposal, stimulus plan. I will call it the Obama-Limbaugh Bipartisan Stimulus Plan, 2009. It is genuinely bipartisan. I’m going to announce it an hour from now. I’m going to announce it in the second hour of this program. It’s not a joke. I’m not being funny with it. I’m taking it very seriously. I am reaching out. He wants bipartisanship, and I’m very serious, Snerdley, I am not playing tricks. I’m not putting anybody on. It is a very serious proposal and I’m going to make it at the top of the second hour, the monologue segment of the second hour. It is as I understand the definition of words, bipartisanship, stimulus, get the economy going, I thought about it long and hard. What I have put together is, in truth, the only bipartisan proposal that is out there, and it probably will be the only bipartisan proposal that will be out there. But I’m going to make it. And then we will post it at RushLimbaugh.com for one and all to see and read and digest.
But I’m very serious. What Snerdley doesn’t believe is that I’m going to be serious about anything that has the word bipartisan in it. I know why you think that, because you have heard me say that bipartisanship is a joke, that bipartisanship equals Republicans caving, that bipartisanship means Democrats win. I’m going to define the word properly, not the way Democrats do, and I did so in the formulation of my serious, and if I might say, ingenious proposal. I would also suggest to you that I never expect anybody to pick it up and run with it, which will be too bad. Because when you hear it, you will marvel, and you will understand what true bipartisanship is. You will also understand that I love this country and my objective here is to get it back on track, economically and culturally. And you will understand that I know how to do this. You will also be frustrated when you hear this because you will know immediately that it will work. You’ll sort of slap your forehead, ‘Why didn’t anybody else think of this?’ It is that good.
A brief time-out, ladies and gentlemen. I’m not bragging. This is no hype. I don’t know, Mr. Snerdley, I can’t remember all these past 20 years, but there have been times I have seriously entered the policy arena via this radio program. However, this is the first time in my memory that I have actively entered the policy arena from behind the Golden EIB Microphone in a serious way, and it’s coming up in less than an hour. Brief time-out now, we’ll come back, and for those of you that did not have Internet access over the weekend or didn’t even know about this, I want to give you my response to Obama’s urging that the Republican Party stop listening to me, that I am not the way things get done in Washington.
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RUSH: You know, President Obama is going to give a speech. It’s too soon to do a State of the Union address. First-year presidents seldom do that. They haven’t been around long enough to actually assess the State of the Union, but he is going to address a joint session of Congress sometime in February, and it will essentially be a State of the Union address. I, ladies and gentlemen, have appointed myself as the official response for America. Not for the Republican Party. I’m sure the Republicans will have somebody respond to it, but so will I, behind here the Golden EIB Microphone. Now, folks, the president of the United States essentially said to leaders of Congress, Republican leaders of the House and Senate Friday morning in a meeting at the White House, ‘We can’t let people like Rush Limbaugh stall this. That’s how things don’t get done in this town.’
Also, during this meeting, he referred to the fact that if we don’t get this done, meaning the stimulus bill, Democrats could lose seats and he could lose reelection. Now, there were two things going on with President Obama’s suggesting that people stop listening to me. One prong of his plan, the Great Unifier’s plan, is to isolate — we talked about this Friday afternoon, by the way, incidentally — his plan is to isolate elected Republicans from their voters and supporters. He wants to make the argument about me. He wants to marginalize me. He wants me to be thought of as such an extremist that no mainstream Republican would ever associate with me. He is hoping that elected Republicans currently serving will also publicly denounce me in the process and further marginalize me, and who knows whether they will or not? Because the question we have to ask ourselves as we look at Republicans on Capitol Hill today is this: Are ideological and philosophical ties enough to keep the Republicans loyal to their voters?
Is that enough? Remember, you’ve been asking me all last week, ‘What can average citizens do?’ And I suggested we need to start lobbying them, because members of Congress and the Senate get lobbied by everybody else, and we need to start lobbying them. So are ideological and philosophical ties enough to keep the Republican Party loyal to you, who elected them? Meanwhile, this effort to foist all the blame for this mess on the private sector continues unabated, when most of the blame for this economic crisis that we’re in can be laid at the feet of the Congress and a couple of former presidents. And there’s a strategic reason why Obama and the Democrats continue to point fingers of blame at the private sector. They want you hating the private sector. They want you resenting it.
They want you suspicious. They want you embracing the notion that the goodwill and the compassion of people in government can better run this economy and your life than the market, than the private sector. Markets, by definition, do not screw up. Markets react to whatever occurs within them. And the government getting involved in markets can cause markets to go askew faster than anything. And that’s what happened in the mortgage business, with all of these former presidents and members of Congress — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac — demanding and forcing banks all over the country to make loans to people that had no prayer of qualifying, no prayer of ever paying them back. Now, to make the argument about me, folks, instead of his plan, makes sense, from his perspective. His plan, I think, is pretty much what FDR was trying to do back in the New Deal era.
This is about establishing majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule. And it would also simultaneously damage any hope of future tax cuts. If Obama’s version of the stimulus plan goes in, you can forget tax cuts. The deficits are going to be so huge and so numerous and so frequent that the argument for tax cuts in the standard manner can never be won. His plan would also see to it that a majority of American voters would not pay income taxes and therefore a minority of people who would vote for tax cuts will always lose. His stimulus plan would burden the private sector, put the public sector in permanent and firm control of the economy. I really think that his stimulus plan is political. Just like these executive orders he signed last week on Guantanamo Bay and so forth. Those were not security oriented; they were political.
His stimulus plan, likewise, is political. It is aimed at reestablishing eternal power for the Democrat Party, just as FDR did, rather than stimulating the economy. Folks, anybody with a brain knows that his stimulus plan is not how you stimulate the economy, and if he can make me a distraction, then there will be all that much less time to debate this. Remember last Friday we talked about the fact that the president went on television to personally criticize Merrill Lynch for using $1.2 million of TARP money to remodel an executive suite? I have come to learn since that the $1.2 million that Obama was upset about was not TARP money. This money was spent before this crash happened. They spent $1.2 million to redecorate an executive suite in January of 2008. John Thain, who was the then CEO. And Obama says, ‘This is not the proper use of the money. This is not how we envision this money being spent.’
But let me propose something to you. As I said Friday, ‘Didn’t Merrill Lynch have to go out and hire a contractor later, and didn’t they have to buy the new furnishings?’ All that happens in the private sector. What’s the difference in that — Merrill Lynch going out, hiring a decorator, the contractor, and buying the furniture, what’s the difference in that — and Merrill Lynch loaning that money to a decorator, contractor, goods supplier, to remodel, say, Warren Buffett’s office or anybody else’s? Either way, stimulus in the private sector occurs. But we’ve gotten to the point where the bad PR of Merrill getting a redecorated office in the process, is reason to smear it. This is capitalism. What happened with Merrill Lynch is capitalism, and it appears it’s counterintuitive. It’s hard to understand capitalism right now, which is a bad thing. The Obamas are going to redecorate the White House. By the way, they’re using the same decorator that redid the Merrill Lynch executive suite. Did you know that?
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RUSH: I want to go back to Friday and this example that I gave then and make some corrections to it that I learned over the weekend: $1.2 million was spent be by Merrill Lynch to redecorate an executive suite. Now, stick with me on this. I know right now there’s hatred for Merrill Lynch. There’s hatred for Wall Street. There’s hatred for the private sector. That has been ginned up by people like Obama and the Democrats. It’s unhealthy. Now, in a perfect world I wouldn’t even have to make this analogy, but it’s necessary now because capitalism, sort of like conservatism, has become counterintuitive. It doesn’t make sense, as it should. It’s not an automatically understandable thing. Liberalism, socialism is now apparently what’s intuitive to people. So it’s an ongoing educational project.
But here you have on Friday afternoon, we learned what was reported — and Obama got very mad at this — that Merrill Lynch had spent $1.2 million of bailout money to redecorate an executive suite. It turns out that it was not $1.2 of bailout money. It was $1.2 million from January of 2008 before the crisis even occurred. But Obama believed it was about TARP money, bailout money. So Obama goes on television and says, ‘This is not what we had on mind! This is not the way that we wanted to have this money spent!’ It’s none of his business, folks. The bottom line is the president of the United States has no business micromanaging the way private sector institutions spend their money, especially and particularly when it is not bailout money. Now, let me give you two scenarios. Merrill Lynch goes out and spends $1.2 million to redecorate an executive suite. How did this happen?
Well, they had to go hire a decorator. Then they had to go hire a contractor. Then they had to buy the new furnishings. So $1.2 million got injected into the private sector, into the hands of private citizens who are in business to redecorate, to build, and to sell stuff for a redesigned office. Anything wrong with that? ‘Well, Rush, if they’re losing money…’ It’s none of your business. If they want to run their business and it goes down the tubes, fine and dandy, but don’t say that it’s the wrong way to spend money. What’s the difference in that and Merrill Lynch lending $1.2 million to a decorating firm, a contracting firm, and a goods supplier; and then those people taking the money that they’ve borrowed, and going out and buying things necessary to redecorate somebody else’s office? In both instances, private sector stimulus takes place, and the government hasn’t spent a dime.
Frankly, this is how the economy works each and every day. But, now we have to throw in a little bad PR, because Merrill Lynch is hated and despised, and it was first reported that they used bailout money, and so using bailout money, angry people, ‘That’s my tax money! That’s our tax money! What are they doing redecorating an office?’ So bad PR wipes out and trumps the whole understanding of how the private sector functions and how stimulus actually functions. Now, the Obamas are going to redecorate the White House. Whose money is going to be spent to do that? Ours. Taxpayer money. And they’re going to hire a decorator. And do you know the decorator they hired? The guy’s name is Michael Smith. One of his most recent jobs was redesigning the Merrill Lynch executive suite that Obama was upset about last Friday. The same guy, he’s a West Coast decorator.
The Obamas have hired the same guy that poor old John Thain hired to redecorate the executive suite at Merrill Lynch. And, by the way, I have no problem with him arriving at the residence of the White House redecorating the place. It’s tradition. I have no problem with it whatsoever. And the people that are going to be doing it are also going to receive stimulus. It’s private sector. The government is putting money back into the private sector to do this. Fine and dandy, yip yip yip yip yahoo. It’s going to have far more economic impact than having a bunch of people out there building roads and bridges of which 4% of the infrastructure money is only going to get spent in the first two years, under Obama’s own plan. Look, folks, 600 private jets arrived in Washington for Obama’s inauguration.
Fine and dandy. When the auto execs fly in on theirs, it’s some sort of crime, some sort of gaffe. In both instances, the people that got off those planes for the inauguration, they wanted something from Washington. They showed up in Washington to get something from Washington, make no mistake about it. Just as the auto economics did. But the auto execs somehow because of bad PR are the bad guys and the 600 people that flew in wanting something from Washington after attending Obama’s inauguration, that’s somehow fine? So, all of this… I think this thing telling you not to listen to me is just an attempt to make me a distraction, because if I can become a distraction, there’s a whole lot less time to debate this debacle. Plus, as I said earlier, it’s an attempt to marginalize me; and Obama, believe me, is hoping that some Republicans will come out and say, ‘Yeah, the president’s right. We really can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh right now.’ He wants to shove me off to the side, and have me as the nationwide conservative extremist.
That’s what the conservative dinner was about with all these establishment Beltway types. It was about Obama choosing who conservative spokespeople are. That’s why he had those 10 or 12, whatever it was, there. So this is just more of the great unifier trying to divide and conquer his opposition in the name of bipartisanship. Fox News with a story yesterday. Headline: ‘Democrats Lower Hopes the Stimulus Package will Shore up a Battered Economy — Administration Warns the Country Could Face a Long and Painful Financial Recovery, Even with Major Government Intervention to Stimulate the Economy.’ Okay, so now the market has low expectations. Obama is out there telling everybody how bad it’s going to be after campaigning on the notion that none of this was going to be, because he was gonna fix all of this.
It would magically get better. The world would love us! Now, all of a sudden, it’s going to be bad out there. I’ll tell you something else. This guy is sprinting to the left faster than Deion Sanders could backpedal. He’s doing all this liberal stuff he said he would do. He’s doing it already. He’s announcing the closing of Guantanamo Bay, changing the whole notion of interrogations. Do you know where they want to send some of the prisoners? Colorado. Good! Let’s send ’em to Colorado. You think a US prison is going to give ’em five meals a day and prayer rugs and all this sort of stuff? This is just absurd. Left-wing governors are now being allowed to run the auto industry. He announced that today. The states are going to be in charge of emission standards.
So the government is going to run the US auto industry? He’s going to announce new CAFE standards by 2011. He’s talked about global warming. The climate’s changing. We can’t stop it. My hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, is going to get 20 inches of snow tomorrow; record cold this year all around the world; and here comes the global warming agenda which is as phony and as filled with hoax as is his stimulus plan. His stimulus plan and global warming are the same kind of hoax. Now we’ve got this international abortion advocacy. Margaret Sanger has come back to life, and Nancy Pelosi is out there saying that birth control will help the economy.
She said it yesterday on George Stephanopoulos’ show, because fewer people will consume fewer goods and create less need for benefits, and there’s going to be less pollution and all this. Well, using that theory, let’s just not have any babies anymore. Let’s get down to zero population except for the liberal leadership, and we will have a pristine planet. This is outrageous, folks. When I think of reducing budget deficits, it would never occur to me to think about eliminating people, but the liberal Democrats… Nancy Pelosi thinks budget deficits can be reduced by having fewer people. So I don’t understand, the stimulus plan, ‘We gotta do it fast. We gotta do it now,’ and at the same time they’re urging that get done lickety-split.
Obama and his team are saying, ‘Eh, you know, this could be long time, painful recovery, even with our stimulus.’ A reminder: In the monologue segment of the next hour, I have a major proposal to make, a serious bipartisan stimulus plan that would work the first moment President Obama said he was even considering it. It would work the moment he gave any indication he was seriously considering it. It would work the moment a number of Republicans stood up and said, ‘We like this idea, and we’re willing to try to get it done,’ but it would take President Obama to make this work, and I have a plan, bipartisan, where we don’t need headlines. ‘It’s going to be a long recovery, man. Even with our stimulus.’ On day one, President Obama announces he’s considering this, watch what would happen to the markets. I will explain this as I present my proposal in less than a half hour.
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RUSH: Here’s the official news: ‘US President Barack Obama will start reversing former President George W. Bush’s climate change policies on Monday by taking steps to allow states to limit greenhouse gas emissions–‘ even as they go broke, ‘–from cars and by ordering 2011 vehicle fuel efficiency standards to be set by March. An administration official said late on Sunday that Obama, who took office last week, would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider a request by California to impose its own strict limits on car emissions.’ So the states under the direction of the great unifier are now going to be running the automobile industry. There’s a story in the New York Times today about the necessity of nationalizing the banking industry. I kid you not. It has to be done, they say. Nancy Pelosi: ‘Birth Control Will Help the Economy.’ This is the Democrat Party sprinting far left as fast as they can under the cover of press coverage, calling it bipartisan and moderate and the reversal of Bush extremism and so forth.
We’ll start in Hamilton, Montana. This is Jeanine. Jeanine, thank you for calling, and welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: So anyway, this weekend I was listening to the radio, and even though I thought it wasn’t possible, I was stunned by Obama’s arrogance in calling you out, and frightened by it because I think he’s using his extreme popularity to try and silence dissent and to affect people like me, and I consider myself a moderate, not to listen to you.
RUSH: Well, I understand how you look at it that way, and I appreciate it. I think, as I said, there’s something else going on with this. I think, whether it was a smart move or not, this guy is multilevel. This could be Machiavellian on his part. He could have done this on purpose to make me the focal point because he thinks the rest of the country believes that I am some extreme nutcase and he wants to focus attention on me. It also could be that he is, as you say, worried because the only real opposition he has is coming from a guy on the radio, not elected Republicans. He needs Republicans for cover only on his stimulus package. You gotta understand, folks, he does not need Republican votes. Maybe one or two in the Senate is all he needs and he doesn’t need a single Republican in the House to get this done. Now, his definition of bipartisanship is when a bunch of Republicans cave on their own principles and agree with him and give him what he wants. That’s magical, that’s marvelous, why, that’s bipartisanship.
He wants Republican votes on this so if it blows up, both parties get blame. He doesn’t want, in 2010 or 2012, Republicans to be able to run for reelection, saying, ‘We didn’t support this boondoggle that cost you even more jobs, that raised inflation, that raised unemployment. We didn’t support this.’ He wants Republicans on board so they can’t run against this when it doesn’t work. He also wants this to pass because he wants to reenergize the Democrat Party and entrench it for, quote, unquote, eternal power, just as FDR did. But he doesn’t need Republican votes for this. The third thing that’s going on is, marginalize me, make me the focus of this, so it distracts everybody. He would love it if McConnell or Boehner would come out and echo his sentiments. Don’t forget who first got this ball rolling. It was Colin Powell last December, and Obama’s words are almost identical to Colin Powell’s. ‘The Republican Party needs to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.’ So if he’s able to marginalize me and make Republicans afraid to do anything that I would applaud, then guess what he’s achieved? He owns them. And that’s what he’s really attempting to do.
This is a political play and a lot of people I think are misunderstanding this. ‘He’s frightened of Limbaugh.’ I don’t think he’s afraid of anybody. He’s the president of the United States. This is a political play to marginalize me so that Republicans are afraid to associate with my ideas or any of us. He wants conservatism, mainstream conservatism to be thought of the way you and I think of communism. He wants it thought of as the most foreign, the most offensive, the most extreme manner of belief possible. There are no elected Republicans who are espousing conservatism today, so he’s gotta find somebody who is. I happen to be the most prominent voice, but there are many others, so he focuses on me. This is a Saul Alinsky radical rule number 13: Pick the target, me, isolate it, polarize it. It’s almost like Colin Powell. We’ll kill it, we’ll isolate it, we’ll cut its head off. That’s what’s happening here. This is a purposeful effort to get rid of conservatism as a mainstream way of thinking forever in this country, make no mistake about it.