RUSH: Say, folks, how did you like that speech by Jon Favreau last night? Did you see the speech by Jon Favreau, Mr. Snerdley? Jon Favreau wrote the speech that Obama read off of the teleprompter. Now, Favreau, he’s not nearly as telegenic. He doesn’t have Obama’s smile, he doesn’t have Obama’s cool, but he can sure write a speech. He can write a speech that promises socialism while sounding conservative. Do you realize what a tough challenge that was? Even the guys at The Politico admit today, and this is a positive thing in a way — you have to look for them wherever you can find them — even the guys at The Politico today who are in the tank for Obama, and they’ve been in the tank for Obama for months now, over a year, even they admit that he couched all that he wants to do in conservative rhetoric. I’ll give you an example. (doing Obama impression) ‘By the way, no more dropouts. Not going to go for that. You are not only dropping out of school, you are dropping out on your country.’ Now, he doesn’t mean that for a minute. He wants as many dropouts as he can get. Now, folks, you have to understand (laughing) this is why I am host and you are not.
Before the speech started last night, I said, ‘I don’t even want to watch it.’ ’cause it was meaningless. I knew what it was going to be. His speeches to me are tired. We’ve established that he’s a great orator, have we not? We’ve already agreed he does great speeches. Okay, so what? What’s next? Even Tom Shales, I have a piece here by Tom Shales, who despises me — not that that’s relevant to anything, but I just know that he does — Tom Shales in the Washington Post today reviewing this thing, and he basically says, look, just another Obama great speech, liberals on the train driving in, a good speech, but it wasn’t as filling and satisfying as when he was new, a great speech but then, so what? I gotta sneeze. (bleep button) Sorry about that, ladies and gentlemen. I sneezed quickly. By the way, I do not hold back sneezes. If I’m going to sneeze, I sneeze. I get it out there. It’s a normal bodily function that happens for a reason, largely — well, never mind. (laughing) It offends people. That’s why I use the bleep button.
Here’s Shales: ‘For all his oratorical skills, however, it seems very likely that Americans who watched the speech probably are not terribly eager to see another one soon.’ Tom Shales, who is full-fledged as liberal as you can get. ‘His speeches will always make news, but the fact that he’s a pretty great communicator is no longer a revelation. So after perfecting a style, and having given a speech last night that was full of practical content, there isn’t much further he can go as a speechmaker. … Now the two words uppermost in the national consciousness: ‘What next?” That’s Tom Shales writing in the Washington Post today. I did end up watching it.
By the way, greetings and welcome, it is the Rush Limbaugh program, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, the nation’s most listened to radio talk show in America. Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program today is 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
It’s kind of a tough day for a lot of people. A lot of people are mistakenly disappointed in Bobby Jindal. A lot of people are depressed over the winning style of Obama. Did you watch the speech last night, Dawn? Did it depress you? Let me guess, it depressed you because he gave a great speech. It seemed like the timing was perfect, it seemed like the applause, the setting, everybody going nuts in there, the visuals, ‘Oh, my gosh, everybody’s buying this, everybody’s buying this,’ but did you listen to what he said? (interruption) All of Dawn’s female friends called up, ‘Oh, he was just wonderful, just wonderful.’ We gotta deal with this. That’s the impact the speech has and a great example of why you need me, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling, all-concerned Maha Rushie. When a president delivers a major address to the nation, standard operating procedure would be — we’ve done it in the past — to come in here and play key elements, key points, analyze ’em, parse them. But in this case the speaker was Obama. The words are not intended to be taken literally. They’re just words, words that you want to hear. They’re not for analysis. They are for feelings.
Folks, we did this with Clinton and it didn’t matter, and this guy’s better than Clinton. This guy lies better than Clinton. He says the opposite of what he means better than Clinton. Clinton got away with it. There is no way we’re going to sit here and change anybody’s mind by running through this speech sentence by sentence, and, ‘Oh, my gosh, what did he say here?’ That’s not the way this is going to happen. He attacked bankers, and then he wasn’t attacking bankers. And then he went back to attacking bankers. I guarantee you the most popular part of the speech was when he jammed the CEOs, ‘The days are over when you’re going to escape on a private jet.’ Yay! America probably stood up on that. That’s nothing new. America’s always hated the rich; America’s always hated barons; America has always had class envy. He declared war on earmarks in a bill that’s got 9,000 of them! (laughing)
Folks, I watched and I vowed I’m not going to get mad. It’s a waste of time to get mad, especially when what happens is what you expect to happen. It was exactly what I expected. The reaction from the Drive-Bys, exactly what I expected, even on Fox. They’re all the suck-up media now. They’re all in the suck-up vein here because of the historical nature of the presidency. They don’t like Big Government while he’s making it bigger than it’s ever been. There was another line in there. Get this one: ‘Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford — (laughing) — from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. (laughing) And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.’ And he said this without bursting out laughing, too. He’s got to know when he says this, that it’s just BS.
The only difference in his words and a bag of manure last night was the bag. And he knows it. Oh, these poor victims, somebody rounded ’em up in a bus and took ’em to the local bank. Get in there and borrow money for a house that you can’t afford, and the evil banker, ‘Get in here!’ they put leashes on these poor people bussed up to the bank, ‘Get in here! You are going to borrow this money. Don’t read it, just sign it, and get out there and enjoy the American dream.’ And nobody came along to try to stop this, other than George Bush 10 or 11 times. (laughing) It was just hilarious.
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We’ve got some audio sound bites here, but (sigh) I just want to get away from this. It doesn’t mean anything. These were just words last night. The most interesting thing about this is they did indeed try to make him sound Reaganesque now and then. He was all over the ballpark. Don’t misunderstand. He sounded totally socialist as well at the appropriate times. But the fact is, he knows he’s gotta sound conservative to sell this. Most people in this country’s instincts, the way they live, are conservative. They just don’t vote that way often enough for a host of reasons, but they live their lives that way.
The majority of people do. Don’t ever forget this. Don’t give up hope on that. It is the truth, and that fact alone provides us the opportunity for the rebound that will happen in the years ahead. Obama said that everybody’s going to see a tax cut in their paycheck coming up in April, starting April 1st. Maybe so, but you’re going to have to have a microscope to see it. He kept talking about the deficit that he ‘inherited.’ Maybe so. But Obama and every Democrat in that body last night voted for every spending bill that came out in the 2000s, the Bush administration. They were unhappy that there wasn’t more spending. What I thought was funny, there was a funny moment last night. Obama says, ‘We need to understand how this economic mess happened,’ and right then the camera turned on Chris Dodd.
Chris Dodd was pictured just after that. I don’t expect the Nimrods of our society watching this last night to get that, but I thought it was funny — and he said ‘wealth was transferred to the wealthy,’ that same old line. Funny, I thought wealth was earned except if you’re a Kennedy; or a Madoff; or this Democrat in Texas, whatever his name is, Stanford. I thought. How can we take charge of our future by borrowing and printing money? Obama says we can so I guess we can. How many of you noticed this? ‘So tonight I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training.’ Brian, are you signing up to go back to school? Dawn, you…? Every American. He said, ‘I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education.
‘This can be community college, a four-year school, vocational training, an apprenticeship, whatever the training may be. Every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. Dropping out of high school is no longer an option.’ Really? Dropping outta high school is no longer an option? We’ll find out just what kind of loyalty the dropouts of America have to Barack Obama. ‘Cause I’ll guarantee you that during the presidential campaign the dropouts of America thought they were going to have handed to them a plate load of goodies, like Henrietta Hughes over in Fort Myers. The last thing they thought they were getting when they voted Obama was a requirement to go back to school and learn to read! You might have the beginnings of a little protest here.
So Obama is going to require everybody to work. I find some of these things just hilarious. You know, folks, what would make this country a better place is this. Anyone in the public sector who has never worked in the private sector must work in the private sector at least one year, or they may not keep their job. Everybody working for government someplace has gotta leave for at least a year and work in the private sector and see what it’s like. Further, no one can work in the public sector unless they’ve worked in the private sector at least four years. It’d be better than spending four years in college. Everybody in the public sector must take their lunch hour and listen to the Rush Limbaugh program forever. It’d be the best free education they ever received and would be the best stimulus this country could ever get.
Can you imagine if every public sector employee were required to take their lunch hour whenever this program is on and listen to it exclusively during their lunch hour? ‘Oh, come on Rush, don’t be silly.’ What do you think you heard last night? You heard similar kinds of commands. You heard an authoritarian last night tell you what you have to do.
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RUSH: Obama might believe that the subtitle of his speech last night was ‘Suck it up, folks.’ Wrong. The actual title of the speech, ‘Suckle up, folks.’ The new national symbol is a bloated pig.
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RUSH: Joe in Richmond, Virginia. Great to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, hello. God, this is an honor. God bless you and everything you stand for.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I was watching the, what do you call, speech last night, and early on Obama said twice that something about — he was talking about the credit crunch and the lack of credit to businesses, and he made the comment about businesses now can borrow the money to make the payroll, and he said that twice, I don’t know if you caught that, and I was floored when I heard that. And I just wanted to know your thoughts.
RUSH: Well, I know he mentioned it twice. What he was basically doing was selling the concept of credit. He was selling the concept of debt, that America can’t be great without debt, without credit. It is how businesses expand; it is how you buy a car; you buy a house, some of you, some of you have no need for credit buying a house, and he said it’s how businesses make payroll, is with credit. There may be some businesses that have had to borrow it. If businesses have to borrow to make payroll, the business is in deep doo-doo. What Obama is doing, remember, pay no attention to what he says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says is irrelevant. The whole purpose of that was to once again dump on the banks, dump on the bank CEOs, ’cause guess who’s not lending? They aren’t. So they’re being blamed for the lack of economic growth, their corporate jets were trashed last night, their partying was trashed, remodeling was trashed.
This whole concept of debt with no collateral is what got us in the problem that we are in. Credit is necessary, obviously. But it’s not the lifeblood. He tried to make it out to be the lifeblood simply because he wants to attack the people who are not extending it right now. See, this is what I mean. If you’re going to watch Obama, you’re going to have to do one of two things: Don’t listen to what he says, or subset of number one, just assume the opposite, ’cause he doesn’t mean it. He declared war on earmarks last night while preparing to sign a bill with 9,000 of them in it. The next bill he’s going to sign into law, $400 billion, 9,000 earmarks. He knows there are earmarks, he knows he doesn’t want earmarks, he’s going to tell you he opposes them, he’s going to tell you there aren’t any. They’re there.
The words aren’t meant to be taken literally. They’re just words that he thinks that you want to hear. They’re not for analysis. They are for feelings. When he was attacking bankers, he wasn’t attacking bankers. He knows you wanted to hear him attack bankers. I will guarantee you when he talks to bankers in private, he’s not attacking them. They’re his best buddies. They voted for the son of a gun. He’s told them it’s for show, we have to do this. That’s why I’m not doing a line by line analysis of what Obama said because it doesn’t mean anything, it literally doesn’t mean anything.