RUSH: Everybody is wondering, ‘So, Rush, what happens now when they have to reconcile the Senate bill with the House bill?’ ‘Cause the House bill has a public option and the House bill has the Medicare buy-in, and the House bill has a lot more stuff that was taken out of the Senate bill. And, of course, people we can no longer trust anymore, like Ben Nelson, are saying, ‘If anything in the Senate bill changes, my vote is no.’ Now, Nancy Pelosi has said that she will sign anything; she’ll get anything through there. I think my best guess is that the House will bite the bullet on this, ramrod this thing through, ’cause, remember, this is just the starter house on the way to building the big health care mansion. Let me remind you of something else, ladies and gentlemen. There is a companion bill in the House that I want to put in context of David Axelrod saying, (paraphrasing) ‘Hey, look, Howard Dean ought to be very happy. We’re essentially destroying the insurance companies here. We’re going to limit CEO pay, and we’re going to make sure that they don’t spend wildly on administrative costs and shareholder profits are held in check.’ Fascism, folks, privately owned but run by the government.
Now, remember, insurance companies only average a little over a 2% profit last year. So his promises to rein in the profits of Big Insurance ring a little hollow. All you can do here is make sure that they end up with no profit, and then you’ll have to order them to stay in business, or gladly accept their going out of business and then hello public option, and I’m sure that’s what they’re going to tell the people in the House, ‘Just give us time, give us time, we knew it would be ten years before we’d get a full-fledged public option in there, full-fledged single pay payer, so just be patient with us.’ The companion bill in the House — and Barney Frank keeps talking about this, I mean he’s very proud of it. The financial regulations bill, the overhaul of the regulatory system for the nation’s financial community, allows the government to shut down any business, be it healthy or not, that they deem to provide a risk to the economy. Remember, now, Democrats and Obama are running around saying, (paraphrasing) ‘We need to build a new economic cycle so that the kinds of things that happened last year, a year ago, do not happen, and for that to happen we must take the risk out of anything Wall Street or anywhere else, with the banks, anywhere within the financial system.’
So if they see a successful company that’s doing gangbusters, but they still think that if that company failed at some point, that that would cause bad things, they can shut the company down or they can go in and run it. Now, you put that side by side with what Axelrod here is touting as a way for Howard Dean and the left radicals to be happy, ‘Look what we’re doing to the insurance companies? We’re destroying them.’ It’s a little microcosm. So these guys are setting up the circumstance where every aspect of the American private sector will be under their control, even to the point of being able to shut down a company simply on the basis that it, in their opinion, is too risky as it is currently operated. Well, why didn’t they shut down Fannie Mae? Why didn’t they shut down Freddie Mac? Because they control them! That’s how they were able to get the subprime mortgage thing going, that’s how they were able to get their constituents loans and in houses for which they would never have to pay.
Frank Rich, his column yesterday, ‘Tiger Woods, Person of the Year.’ Now, it’s a little sarcastic here. Tiger Woods, according to Frank Rich, should be the Person of the Year because he represents all the sham of the last decade. What we have in Frank Rich’s view is Tiger Woods as George W. Bush. He turns out to be nothing like how he was portrayed. Now, I would like to say to Frank Rich: Mark my words, Mr. Rich, just as Tiger Woods was unmasked as representing nothing the way he was portrayed, so shall that happen to President Obama. It will happen in due course. The parallels are amazing. The press and interested parties created a perfect person in Tiger Woods, absolutely perfect. This was done to maximize value in the corporate endorsement world, as well as to help the PGA Tour and a number of other places. And we’ve now learned that nothing that we were told was true. Barack Obama, the same. He has had a career of five minutes, maybe ten now when you add this year to his life. A ten-minute career, most of it spent in words, most of it spent reading teleprompters with a godlike echo behind his voice in most of his speeches.
Following his speech at the Democrat convention of 2004 we started getting puff pieces midway through 2006 about what a great figure, messianic, why, we had never before in the history of American politics seen a man or politician like this, a man who was to transcend race, transcend partisanship, transcend standard politics, and, by the way, I’d like to go back and ask David ‘Rodham’ Gergen, who’s all upset because no Republicans voted for this and it’s the biggest social entitlement ever in American history and it doesn’t have the support of one of the political parties, this is horrible — of course he’s blaming Republicans for this — but I thought Obama was going to end all this. I thought President Obama was going to be the end of this kind of partisanship, the end of racism. But hell’s bells, if you criticize Obama on anything you are racist. That’s the only reason you criticize it.
Frank Rich starts his piece: ‘As we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke.’ No, no, no, no. ‘If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).’
How do you mention this, how do you write this with any integrity without mentioning Barack Obama, who is flimflam and phony, and there’s nobody who knows anything about him, nobody really knows who he is. In fact, the people that he did hang around with, the people who did mentor him, the people who influenced him and educated him we’re all told he never heard them. Bill Ayers just friend down the street, (imitating Obama) ‘I didn’t know he blew up the Pentagon, that was a long time ago.’ He never heard a word Reverend Wright said in 20 years sitting in the pew of the church. Frank Marshall Davis, a communist friend of his families back in — (interruption) yeah, we know he heard Frank Marshall Davis because he loves him, he’s written about him, but all that we were told to ignore and instead rely on the farcical image that has been created, the puff piece image that has been created by the American media.
Chris Dodd, ladies and gentlemen, there’s a mysterious hundred million dollars people found in the health care bill. By now you’ve probably heard about the mystery appropriation, a hundred million research medical facility buried in the Senate’s health care reform bill. It’s for Chris Dodd. Headline, it’s from an amused Associated Press: ‘Dodd Gets $100 Million For UConn Health Center Put In Bill,’ U-Conn, University of Connecticut. But what a name for what’s happened to all of us, U-Conn. ‘A $100 million item for construction of a university hospital was inserted in the Senate health care bill at the request of Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who faces a difficult re-election campaign.’ Slush fund, anybody? Where do you think this money is coming from? How about from the Porkulus bill? You think those will be the funds that will be used for it or the unspent TARP money? We’ve got slush money all over the place voted by the Congress one year ago and almost one year ago for just this kind of thing. And Mr. Dodd’s office is actually proud of this achievement.
‘The legislation leaves it up to the Health and Human Services Department to decide where the money should be spent, although spokesman Bryan DeAngelis said Dodd hopes to claim it for the University of Connecticut.’ How coy. And Russ Feingold — this is from the Huffing and Puffington Post — ‘Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) formally announced on Sunday that he would support the Senate’s final version of health care reform. But in doing so he cast blame for the loss of a public option for insurance coverage partially,’ on the Obama administration. Here’s a statement: ‘I’ve been fighting all year for a strong public option to compete with the insurance industry and bring health care spending down. I continued that fight during recent negotiations, and I refused to sign onto a deal to drop the public option from the Senate bill. Unfortunately, the lack of support from the administration made keeping the public option in the bill an uphill struggle. Removing the public option from the Senate bill is the wrong move, and eliminates $25 billion in savings. I will be urging members of the House and Senate who draft the final bill to make sure this essential provision is included.’
The final bill will probably be the Senate bill. If this goes to a conference it may all fall apart, and I guarantee you they’re not going to let that happen. They are not going to let that happen. But Feingold, there’s no other way to describe this whole notion that the insurance companies need competition than utterly stupid and ignorant of the market system. If you want competition in the insurance companies, let them sell insurance across state lines. There are 17,000 insurance companies out there of all different sizes and types. The idea that a public option, a government- run insurance plan would provide them competition? All it would do is put ’em out of business because a government-run insurance company does not have to show a profit, a government-run insurance company could underprice things on purpose to put ’em out of business and to get all employers shuffling their coverage off of their own books onto the government’s. If these guys would just be patient, Howard Dean and all the rest, if they would just be patient, they could be made to understand how they’re going to get everything they want provided they can hold onto their majorities in the House and Senate next November.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Why don’t we just solve all of our problems like we’re solving the problem of health care insurance coverage? I mean this health care reform really shows us how foolish we’ve been when facing our problems in the past by tweaking around the edges instead of taking them head on. You say 40 million Americans are uninsured, well, hell’s bells, we could fix that. We’re just going to pass a law requiring everybody to buy health care insurance. Why didn’t we think of that sooner? How many trillions of dollars have we wasted on the war on poverty? Why didn’t we just make poverty against the law? Anyone earning under the poverty level will have to pay a fine or go to jail. Fifteen million people unemployed, throw them in jail if they won’t work. Solvy dolvy. I mean we’re just going to with the stroke a pen sign a law and fix the problem, look how easy it could be.
We don’t have to spend $2.5 trillion, create 111 new bureaucracies, 2,000 pages of legislation just to make people buy insurance. That’s what we’ve got here because essentially that’s all we’re doing, we’re making everybody buy insurance, or put ’em in jail or fine them if they don’t, and we’re doing that with 2,000 pages of legislation, 111 new bureaucracies, and two-and-a-half trillion taxpayer dollars? All you have to do is add a line or two to the tax code to fix this the way they’re going about it. But, see, that’s our Congress for you. They don’t want things to be simple. And it proves looking at it that way that this is not about health insurance, it’s not about insuring everybody because this bill doesn’t do that even after 15 or 20 years. This is about power and control, confiscating one-sixth of the US private sector. Here’s Dingy Harry this afternoon. Democrats are having a press conference, Senate Democrats are. Here is a portion of what Dingy Harry had to say.
REID: Like those in the medical field, our responsibility as legislators is to cure for all people, not just those that are fortunate. That’s what this historic reform fixes. It starts to break down the wall between a class of Americans who can afford to stay healthy and another that cannot.
RUSH: What an outrage. That is not your job. And he starts to break down the walls, this is just the beginning. Our responsibility as legislators is to care for all people, not just those that are fortunate, that’s the whole class envy thing again. They’re figuring that saying things like this, most people are not wealthy, most people are middle class, and that’s how they attempt to get the middle class on board, ‘Hey, we’re doing this for you and we’re going to punish the rich in the process, and that’s why you should support it.’ That’s worked somewhat in the past, not nearly as well as everybody thinks, but it’s not going to work this time because everybody knows that’s not what this bill is. This bill punishes everybody, mandates that everybody do something. It’s an insult. All of this is just a full-fledged insult. But they are being who they are. If you wonder what’s going on, you’re watching liberalism, progressivism, radical leftism, whatever you want to call it, you’re watching it full-fledged, out in the open, no disguises.