RUSH: I want to play for you a little bit of the interview on CNBC that happened today. This is not the whole thing, and you will not hear on these two bites, any of the contentiousness from Mark Haines. It’s a shame, but go to the website and you can hear the whole thing. It’s about five minutes, around five or six minutes. Here is Haines’ question to me. He says, ‘I hear hypocrisy. You’re saying in this — in this piece, you say, uh, you know, ‘our economy doesn’t know the difference…this is about jobs now…leave politics aside,’ and yet the first thing out of your mouth is politics! About liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat!’
HAINES: (clearing throat)
RUSH ARCHIVE: How can that possibly be hypocritical?
RUSH: Erin Burnett, the acclaimed Street Sweetie then said, ‘Rush, I want to give people a chance to understand your plan.’ Now, my plan is perfectly understandable by anybody who reads it or has listened to me present it. But we must take into account here, she’s dealing with an audience to an NBC network; and as such, she wanted me to go into even more detail to explain this. She says, ‘You’re calling it the Obama-Limbaugh plan, and you took the vote that the country voted for Obama, who voted for him and who didn’t, and that’s how you broke it down, right?’
RUSH ARCHIVE: Exactly, and he gets to choose how he wants to spend it with the Democrats on Capitol Hill, and the Republicans and me get to determine the tax cuts.
BURNETT: And you’re going to cut the corporate tax rate in half, right?
RUSH ARCHIVE: Precisely, and we’ll suspend the capital gains tax to incentivize new investment for a full year and then reestablish and re-implement it at 10% — and probably some tax cuts in the area of real estate, too. That’s an area that needs to come back. See, I don’t… Obama said yesterday — I don’t know if you guys were still on the air or not, but he had a meeting at the White House with the CEOs, and he came out and he sounded like Ronald Reagan. He was talking about how it’s the people who make the country work; it’s the people out there who are going to revive the economy. And twenty days ago, he said government is the only entity — there’s your hypocrisy, Mark — that can revive this economy. Yesterday what he said is exactly right, and I totally support that when he sounds like Ronald Reagan.
RUSH: And we’ll take a brief time-out here and continue.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s the real contentious part of the CNBC interview, Squawk of the Street. It was with Erin Burnett and Mark Haines, just before 11 o’clock this morning.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Why skeptical? I’m just trying to build bridges and roads to the administration for genuine bipartisanship and cooperation and fairness. The president says that he still wants to work with Republicans.
HAINES: (snorting)
RUSH ARCHIVE: Here I am. We can work together and do what’s best for the American people.
BURNETT: And you call —
HAINES: (interrupting) I — I — I’m sorry, but, ah, wait a minute! A week after the inauguration you said you hope he fails. Are — are you now admitting that that was a stupid and mean-spirited thing to say?
RUSH ARCHIVE: No, it was an accurate thing to say. It was an honest thing to say, and it came —
HAINES: Then how is that bipartisan!
RUSH ARCHIVE: Well, if you’ll let me explain…
HAINES: (snorts) Well, so far you haven’t.
RUSH ARCHIVE: (laughing) You’re being contentious with no reason. It came after a thorough explanation of my belief that liberalism, which is what Obama represents —
HAINES: Aw jeeeeez!
RUSH ARCHIVE: — destroys the free market, destroys capitalism. I think this stimulus plan with about re-FDRing America, the New New Deal, and as a conservative I want liberalism to fail. I want the country to succeed, and that’s what I meant, and that’s what I said over and over again. You’ve gotta stop reading these left-wing liberal sites that take me out of context.
RUSH: The whole interview is up on RushLimbaugh.com, transcript and video; as well as about 20 minutes on Fox & Friends this morning, as well.