Porkulus Anger Rivals Amnesty

RUSH: Let me take you back a year-and-a-half, I think it was 2007, the summer of 2007. Do you remember when the amnesty bill was being formulated behind closed doors under cover of darkness and rammed through Congress, rammed through the Senate with no hearings, no expert testimony, no nothing? We had people running around, elected officials saying, ‘We gotta get the politics out of this, we need this bill to pass, this bill’s gotta pass now.’ And the reason that they were trying to do it that way is because they knew that once people found out what was in it, all hell would break loose, and it was nothing more than dressed up amnesty for anywhere from 12 to 20 million illegals. And do you remember the outpouring of opposition in the form of phone calls and e-mails and faxes to Capitol Hill? I’m sure you do because you were involved in the effort. And remember, now, the effort was successful. The whole thing fell flat. And the members of Congress were then reduced to trying to get incremental parts of amnesty in coming months and years, and they are still working on it.

I am told, ladies and gentlemen, by credible sources that the calls, the voter comments — e-mails, phone calls, faxes — are running pretty close in volume to what they were during the amnesty bill, during the illegal immigration. It’s just that nobody’s reporting this, at least that I’ve seen, and therefore nobody really knows the degree to which it’s happening. I’m told the calls coming in are 100 to one in opposition to the stimulus and that these calls are voluminous and that they are close, they are rivaling the volume of calls that happened during that two- to three-month period regarding the amnesty bill. It’s just not being reported now. That’s why the Bamster is out there trying to get this thing passed and trying to get people to think it’s something other than what it is, why he’s trying to get GOP cover on the bill, because the Democrats and Obama know the level of discontent in this bill. They know, they have seen the Rasmussen polling data and others, and again the Rasmussen polling data on the stimulus bill is down to 37% support, and the reason for this is simple. There has been one element of the media, the New Media, that is getting the details, the content of this stimulus bill out to people, and they’re realizing it’s just another spending bill. It’s nothing different than your average appropriations bill, except this was written 100% by Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and her office.

There was no involvement from the Republicans on this, and it has nothing to do with stimulus. It is pet liberal project after pet liberal project, designed to grow government, create dependence, and buy votes. Pure and simple. There has been no responsible analysis of this legislation from the Drive-By Media. Everybody is existing in this whole mode of ‘give him the benefit of the doubt, he’s president, he ought to get a honeymoon, we ought to let him have what he wants the first hundred days and let’s see if it works.’ But that’s not going to fly with people who learn what’s in this legislation. These people on Capitol Hill, from what I’m hearing, are getting hammered. Democrats on Capitol Hill are letting Obama know they need cover on this, and they’re letting Pelosi know they need cover on this. That is why all of the pressure on Republicans to support this. If you want to know the truth and you want to know why Obama keeps harping on the Republicans and ripping them to shreds and saying that they don’t know what’s good for the country and the same thing other Democrats are doing, is because they’re getting hammered.

The American people by ratios of 100 to one are calling Washington and saying, ‘We don’t like this. This isn’t what you say it is. We don’t want you voting for it.’ So they want Republicans on board for this thing ’cause no way they’re going to give it up. They’re not going to respond to you on this the way they responded to you on the amnesty bill or on the Dubai Ports deal. This is too important to Obama. And, by the way, you know, elections do have consequences, and right now — and I say this from the depth of my sizable beating heart — right now the primary focus of the supporters of this bill has nothing to do with the United States of America and her economy. This is 100% about the Democrat Party. These people have been fuming ever since they lost the House in 1994. They have been fuming since they lost control of the Senate intermittently from 1994 to the present. They have been fuming since Bush won the White House in 2000. They have been outraged. You know it. You have seen it. These were the people invested in defeat in the Iraq war. These are the people consumed with a bitterness, a rage and a hatred unlike anything we’ve seen in American politics since the sixties, and it happens to be the same people grown up.

This is about getting what they’ve wanted done that they saw interrupted in 1993 and the ’94 campaign with the Republicans winning the House. So this stimulus bill, if you’re listening to me in Elkhart, Indiana, you just came out of the Obama rally, I will always tell you the truth. You had a town meeting with the president today, and others of you around the country are going to have scheduled town meetings with the president later this week. I’m just telling you, this piece of legislation is about one thing and one thing only, and that’s the Democrat Party and people in power getting their little wish lists, their own bridges to nowhere, their own leftist, extremist ideological elements that exist in this bill like no building on a college campus where students religiously worship will benefit from renovations from federal funds, isn’t going to happen. The left has taken control of this bill and its objective is to just ram as much far extreme liberalism into our culture and society as quickly as possible.

This is why the Republicans need to continue to stand in total opposition to it. It is nothing more than a scheme to enrich and to empower the Democrat Party, pure and simple. This is not about our country; it’s not about our economy being revived. That’s the smoke screen, that’s the cover they are giving it. But it has nothing to do with that. All you have to know is that the biggest amount of the spending doesn’t begin until the reelection year of 2010. Here we have a job stimulus bill and 4% gets spent in the next two years. The CBO is said to be nonpartisan, the Congressional Budget Office. And the Congressional Budget Office is set up by Congress, it’s nonpartisan, and it analyzes all the legislation and the impact that the spending in legislation will have on the economy and on the country. And by the way, the notion that the Congressional Budget Office is nonpartisan is a joke as well, particularly as in cases now where the Democrats run the show.

‘President Obama’s economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday. CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing. … The budget office had previously estimated servicing the debt due to the new spending could add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of the bill — forcing the crowd-out. CBO’s basic assumption is that, in the long run, each dollar of additional debt crowds out about a third of a dollars worth of private domestic capital, CBO said in its letter. CBO said there is no crowding out in the short term, so the plan would succeed in boosting growth in 2009 and 2010,’ but in the end it would be better if we did nothing in terms of the economy. And believe me, Obama knows it, Pelosi knows it, the Democrats know it. They don’t care! This is about them and the party and political power and is about nothing else.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’m now told by reliable sources, ladies and gentlemen, the calls in opposition to the stimulus to elected officials in Washington is not just 100 to one, it’s hundreds to one in opposition, that it rivals the volume of calls against the amnesty bill a year-and-a-half ago, and it’s just not being reported. It’s the same thing, they keep repeating the technique. ‘It’s a crisis, it’s an emergency.’ Remember with the first $700 billion, ‘We may not have a country if we don’t get this passed.’ They even had a bunch of anchors on business channels roped in repeating all this. We gotta get this done. It’s just crucial, and it’s very crucial, we can’t wait, we just don’t have that luxury, and they’re telling us now. We can’t wait, we’ve got to get this trillion dollars spent. Why, Pelosi says 500 million Americans a day or a month or whatever, are losing theirs jobs.

The woman’s ignorant. So many people I’m conflicted by, but I do know now, I do know now why Pelosi and Reid had no intention of seeing to it Hillary Clinton became the Democrat nominee, ’cause they could run this guy around. They’re writing the legislation. He’s farmed it out to them. This is Pelosi’s bill that he’s out there trying to sell. He’s going for it because it’s got his name on it, and it is what he wants, it’s a bunch of leftist spending, his ACORN buddies are going to get four and a half billion dollars, it’s going to grow the government, it’s going to repair the Democrat Party, but he let Pelosi and Reid write the bill. He wouldn’t oppose them in anything they had in it. They know that they can push him around. They knew they would not be able to push Hillary around. Hillary never had a chance. The only thing that gave her a ghost’s chance was Operation Chaos.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Vicksboro, North Carolina. Chuck, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, mega dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Can I have you do me a favor? My brother just turned 70 today. He lives up in Cuba, New York. Can you say happy birthday to him, Mike?

RUSH: Happy birthday, Mike. Great to have you on the program today.

CALLER: He’s a longtime listener.

RUSH: Appreciate that.

CALLER: The reason I called, Rush, is it seems to me that Arlen Specter called you and asked for your support when he was running for the Senate this last time?

RUSH: Yeah, I think he called —

CALLER: Called for your help or something.

RUSH: No, he had a book out, and he wanted to talk about a book.

CALLER: Yeah, well, he’s been wavering on this stimulus plan, and it really bothers me. He and those two senators from Maine there, those two ladies, Snowe and —

RUSH: Yeah. I mean does this really surprise you?

CALLER: Well, it doesn’t surprise me, but I don’t know. This is McCainish.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: All this reaching across the aisle and all this other stuff —

RUSH: Except McCain’s on the right side of this. McCain’s kicking butt on this.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: But I mean, look, I went blue in the face when everybody was counting up the Senate votes on election night, are they gonna get 60, it won’t matter, they got Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, two or three Republican RINOs in there, Republican moderates that will join the Democrats on things. Look, in the Senate they’re going to do their test vote on this tomorrow to see if they can get cloture. Cloture’s been filed. They’ll probably get it. Senator Specter and Susan Collins and what’s her name — Olympia Snowe — will go for it. Where the rubber is going to meet the road is in the conference report, when the House and Senate get together and try to reconcile the two bills, ’cause they’re different. That’s where the fireworks are going to happen, and then the final vote in both houses will be taken on this, on a singular bill that they negotiate the differences out of in the conference committee. I think that’s why the pressure needs to be brought. This can’t be stopped. Folks, it cannot be stopped, but it can be slowed down and done much better than this.