Obama and Geithner: Con Men

RUSH: In the meantime, this press conference last night, the Drive-Bys are all over the place talking about how wonderful it is, how great Obama’s mind is. It was a bomb! It was a bomb of a press conference. He starts out with a teleprompter. He never once looked at the American people straight into the camera. He does his usual gaze over everybody, head turning left and right. It was a campaign speech. Then he goes to the questions, and you could tell the difference between Obama on a prompter and Obama impromptu. It was stunning. There are so many funny parts of this thing last night. The whole thing to me was hilarious. I thought I was listening to Fidel Castro. He went on for 13 minutes answering the first question and never answered it. In the first half hour he must have taken two or three questions. He never answered any of the questions. It was the White House lecture series. He ought to put this on DVD and start running it on PBS. Then we had Geithner, this is one of the funny parts of the press conference last night. Obama gets a question about what Geithner’s going to say today regarding the big bailout — and, by the way, is that going over good, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 277 to 288. It was down earlier before Geithner spoke, but now after Geithner spoke it is just plunging out there. Not a whole lot of confidence.

See, the real problem here, folks, is that Obama can con the base and the Drive-Bys, Geithner has to go out there and con the business community and the investor class and he’s not doing a good job of conning the investor class and the business class. The investor class, the business class is way ahead of the public in understanding what’s going on here, and it’s being illustrated here in the market plunge that is happening today. I was watching this last night, he gets his question about the Geithner plan, says, (paraphrasing) ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t want to step on the toes of the Treasury secretary.’ What do you mean, step on the toes of the Treasury secretary? You’re the president of the United States. He works for you. What Obama is really saying, ‘I have no idea what this plan is. I don’t know what he’s going to say tomorrow. I’ve not been involved in writing this. I’m going to have to defer to what Geithner says.’ He doesn’t know what’s in the stimulus bill! He deferred totally to Pelosi and Reid to write it. He has no clue what’s in it. All he cares about is that there’s spending in it, that’s the Obama economic plan: just keep spending.

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RUSH: Fox just ran a piece, by the way, at the top of the hour when this program began chronicling the history of the bailouts. A year ago, roughly a year ago the original bailout proposal or stimulus package, $56 billion in both the House and the Senate. By October of last year it had grown to $200 billion. Now we are at a trillion on the stimulus plan, the Porkulus bill, and now with Geithner out there today trying to con the business community and the investor class, he failed royally doing that. That’s his job.

Obama can con the base; he can con Democrats; he can con the media. He can’t con me and he can’t con you but he can con all these acolytes, these brain-dead supporters of his and these stupid fools in the media to whom he cannot fail, but Geithner, Geithner sounded like the dog ate my homework today when he went out and made his speech. He sounded a little bit like that and a little bit of an authoritarian, and he said, (paraphrasing) ‘By the way, getting federal money is not a right, it’s a privilege. And, by the way,’ he says, ‘we are not shoring up the banks to help the banks. We are shoring up the banks to help you so that the banks will loan money to you so that you will then borrow money.’ I think what their ultimate plan here is — and they’re botching it — I don’t think they know what they’re doing here because there’s a simple way to accomplish what they want, ’cause at the end of the day what do these people want to do? They want to raise taxes, and they can’t raise taxes right now, they just can’t. They can put all kinds of stealth stuff in their stimulus like this abomination. They’ve got nationalized health care in the stimulus bill, folks, which we shared with you yesterday and has now become mainstream, which again is why Obama doesn’t want you listening to me.

What they obviously want is for people to start investing; they want banks to start lending; they want people to start generating some income out there so that they can raise taxes. Geithner even said the other day, (paraphrasing) ‘We are not going to put out the details of our plan until we get it right.’ So he gave an overview today. This is a con job. And, of course, the people on Wall Street and in the markets are not being conned. We’re flirting here with being down 300 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The dirty little secret is Obama doesn’t mind this at all. Here’s a guy last night in his press conference talking about a catastrophe. Here’s a guy talking about it could get worse, it’s gonna get worse, even if we pass this. He’s out there lying. In fact, the New York Times today has vindicated your host, your lovable and trusted commentator El Rushbo by pointing out that I was right. They don’t use my name, of course, but we are nowhere near economic conditions as they existed in the Great Depression. We’re not even as bad as they were in 1981 and 1982, and the New York Times points it out here today. I don’t know that CNN will take notice of it or any others in the Drive-By.

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RUSH: The market’s down 350 or somewhere in that range, 381 now, and there are a number of reasons why the market’s down, but chief among them, nobody — see the markets are not being successfully conned. Obama apparently can easily con the Democrat Party base and the media in this thing, but the markets are not being conned, Geithner didn’t con ’em, and one of the things — and I heard an explanation just a minute ago, somebody trying to tell us why the markets are down today, and I don’t know that I believe this, but this is the Drive-By mantra. The markets are down today because Geithner wasn’t specific. All Geithner did was outline something. If Geithner had presented a specific plan, then the markets would not be down so much and might even be up. Now, the theory here is that the markets are all fired up and ready for the stimulus package, but they didn’t get any reports today, didn’t get any details. So it’s just going to be a long, long time. The Senate version barely passes, so now it goes to conference, so some people in the media are trying to tell us that the markets are saying today that since it’s not going to happen soon, it’s going to drag on, that’s why they’re reacting negatively.

Now, I hope that’s just spin. What I’m hoping is the markets are seeing this is a boondoggle and they’re learning more and more about what’s in it and because of that they want no part of it. We’ll just have to see. Regardless, it is slow going. Geithner actually said, (paraphrasing) ‘We’re not going to get you the details of this.’ Let me get his exact words here. ‘We’re not going to put out details until we can get it right.’ Now, I’ll tell you what I think is up with that. I think they’re trying to avoid attaching a dollar amount to this that would be added into the Obama stimulus package. I think that they’re trying to create distance between the Porkulus bill and Geithner’s bill so that nobody can run around and say, $2 trillion? They want it to be looked at as Obama’s stimulus of $800 and some odd billion, and then over here, quite distant and separate, is the bank bailout. Not to be confused with the Porkulus bill. So this is one thing, and it’s separate. I think Geithner’s just in delay mode, just to keep a money figure off of it, ’cause how in the world can they get it right before they know what they’re doing? It’s just nonsensical, this statement, ‘We’re not going to put out details until we get it right.’ The fact is nobody knows what they’re doing here.

Nobody knows what they’re doing, in terms of bailing out the — until they get it right? It’s like Mike Munger said, ‘We’ve already tried it once, and it didn’t work. Don’t do it again.’ The evidence is that it didn’t work. I know what’s going to happen, because Obama’s already set it up. What’s gonna happen when this doesn’t work, ‘We didn’t spend enough money soon enough.’ That’s what they’re out saying FDR’s mistake was. He didn’t spend enough money soon enough. So that’s how they’re going to take care of this not working, when it doesn’t work. Mark my words.