RUSH: Folks, it’s all going wrong for The One. Everything is all falling apart on Obama. Try this headline from the Jerusalem Post: ‘Obama: Our Expectations of Mideast Progress were ‘Too High.” M’yeah-heh-heh-hah!
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, I am Rush Limbaugh, serving humanity, having more fun than a human being… Wait just a second. This microphone sagging. Just a second. There it is. Okay. We’re back. 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
A hearty welcome to those of you watching the Dittocam today in high definition. It’s cool. If you haven’t seen the Dittocam in high definition, the only way you can is to become a member at Rush 24/7 and it’s the sweetest deal you’ll ever find anywhere joining any website based on the encyclopedic, voluminous information accessed easily by you. Okay. Get this. It’s from Jerusalem Post: ‘Getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to negotiate, or even to agree to the framework in which negotiations will take place, ‘is just really hard,’ US President Barack Obama said in an interview with Time magazine published Thursday, as the president was completing his first year in office,’ and that ‘is really hard’ is in quotes. It’s just really hard! (crying) ‘It’s just hard’ is how you have to interpret that. You talk about crash and burn all in one week? ‘Obama admitted that the administration ‘overestimated our ability to persuade (both sides) to (negotiate) when their politics ran contrary to that.’ So he ‘overestimated [his own] ability to persuade.’ Imagine that!
Now let’s go to this Politico story: ‘Obama’s First Year: What Went Wrong.’ ‘Specifically, it was wrong on three major counts: Obama and his team believed that the 2008 election represented something seismic — in other words, something fundamental and long-lasting,’ just like the Republicans made the same mistake in 1994 when they won the House. The second thing that went wrong: ‘Obama believed that early success would be self-reinforcing, building a powerful momentum for bold government action. This belief was the essence of the White House’s theory of the ‘big bang’…’ You get the Porkulus slush fund passed, and that provides the impetus and the momentum for everything else to follow. So this tells us they were in a panic for much of this year, particularly when we got to August when the tea parties started. Well, the tea parties started before August.
It was the town meetings. They started hustling trying to get health care done before the August recess. The third: ‘Most devoutly of all, the Obama team believed that there was something singular about the president’s appeal and ability to inspire.’ Now, this is in The Politico, and these are the first three things that went wrong. So they believed he was The Messiah, that the Porkulus bill was gonna presage the passage of everything else, and that America had undergone a seismic change. But there’s actually a fourth, ladies and gentlemen. Now, you know that I have manners. I was raised properly with a great set of core values, and one of those is to not brag. And, of course, it ain’t bragging if you’ve done it. It ain’t bragging if you can do it. I think it was Babe Ruth who said that. But as you know, I do not like talking about myself. I’m very uncomfortable with that.
I’m very uncomfortable with me being the issue, but I have been a lot of this year — and this is one of those things that if I don’t say it, it won’t be said, and this one is fundamentally true. There are four things that went wrong. The first one: Five days before he was immaculated, I said, ‘I hope he fails.’ That burst this messianic, celebutard bubble that Obama was in. Up until that time, everybody — every Republican, every Democrat, everybody in the political class — had censored themselves and were talking about the historic nature and how ‘We must drop all partisanship. We must all work together to help this historic president succeed in his job,’ and there came one voice. It belonged to me, El Rushbo: The all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling Maha Rushie. I simply said, ‘I don’t like his policies. They are going to destroy the country as we know it. I hope he fails,’ and that took away all of the gilding.
That took away all of the stars. That took away all of the celebrity that forced him into a political bubble, even before he was immaculated. Had that not been said the rest of these three things might not have gone wrong. Had I joined the fray and had I come before you on this program and behind this microphone and had I said, ‘Folks, we’ve got stand down. This is too important for the country. This is too historic. We cannot afford for this president to fail,’ not only would I have lost over half of you forever, but we probably would have health care today. We probably would have cap and trade by now. Maybe not on cap and trade because of the ClimateGate thing, and you never know. I mean, the tea party people and the town hall people might have been able to stop health care on their own. I’m not going to say I was a singular player here, but there was only one person who dared treat this president as any other president is treated: As a political figure.
This guy will have to tell us what we don’t understand. So the arrogance and the conceit are still there, and this story in the Washington Post says this election of Scott Brown had nothing to do with health care. It had nothing to do with Obama. Obama was not rejected and it was not that. Yet the New York Times lead editorial ‘The Massachusetts Election’ is about Obama. He has ‘lost touch.’ He ‘has not said or done the right thing often enough.’ Mr. Obama ‘seems to have lost touch with two core issues for Americans: their jobs and their homes. Mr. Obama’s challenge is that most Americans are not seeing a recovery. … Mr. Obama has not said or done the right thing often enough when it comes to job creation and housing. … Mr. Obama has three years to show the kind of vision and leadership on the economy that got him elected…’
There wasn’t any such ‘vision’ that got him elected. What got him elected was cult-like speeches. We were going to make the sea levels fall! Obama’s given it his best shot, New York Times. He only knows to do what he did. There’s a story in the stack, by the way: House Democrats, some of them have asked the White House to extend the Bush tax cuts because of this economic recovery being so bad. The White House said, ‘No way. We’re not doing it,’ but some House Democrats asked for the Bush tax cuts to be extended. New York Times: ‘Obama Trying to Turn Around His Presidency.’ They’re ‘reeling from the Republican victory in Massachusetts,’ and ‘Inside the White House, a debate ensued…’ This is the Times version of this, not the Politico version. ‘[W]hat lessons to draw: Did the president try to enact too much change or not enough? Was he too liberal or too close to financial institutions? Should he tack to the center or more aggressively push a progressive agenda? … Mr. Obama has often confronted moments of challenge with a major speech… With the State of the Union now scheduled for Wednesday, he has another such opportunity. Aides said he will use it to reframe his record and aspirations.’ A speech! Which is all he does. This is a speech. He gonna try to change it with a speech. Well, the luster is gone from the speeches. So they have not learned anything.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I have to hit this again, ladies and gentlemen. I touched on it but I have to hit it again. ‘Obama Says Too Optimistic on ‘Intractable’ Mideast — US President Barack Obama said in an interview published on Thursday he had underestimated the difficulty of resolving the Middle East conflict and had set his expectations too high in his first year. … ‘[I]we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.” Who…? (sigh) This idiot who is the president wasn’t quite sure how tough this would be before he was elected? That is scary! We all knew how tough it would be. (interrupition) No, everybody thought Bush was an idiot but nobody’s ever gotten Middle East peace. I think what he’s really surprised at is how intractable the Palestinians are. I think that’s what he’s found out.