RUSH: A great editorial today in the Wall Street Journal: ‘Paul Ryan v. the President.’ We just had caller, ‘Why don’t the Republicans say X?’ ‘Every argument has been made. Everything that there is
‘No one in the political class has even tried to refute Mr. Ryan’s arguments, though he made them directly to the President and his allies, no doubt because they are irrefutable.’ Cookie, see if you can get Paul Ryan. I think we aired ’em last Friday after the Thursday summit. There were two of them, if I recall. He was talking right to the president. Rather than read those comments to you as the Journal has published here, what I want to do is let you hear them again because the Journal is right. Nobody in the political class has even tried to refute what Paul Ryan said. Obama just shot him the bird, got a little mad, a little angry, you could see it was visceral anger. And the reason nobody’s tried to refute Paul Ryan is because nobody can.
‘If Democrats are willing to ignore overwhelming public opposition to ObamaCare and pass it anyway, then what’s a trifling dispute over a couple of trillion dollars? At his press conference yesterday, Mr. Obama claimed that ‘my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions — families, businesses and the federal government.’ He said it is ‘fully paid for’ and ‘brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion over the next two decades.’ Never before has a vast new entitlement been sold on the basis of fiscal responsibility, and one reason ObamaCare is so unpopular is that Americans understand the contradiction between untold new government subsidies and claims of spending restraint. They know a Big Con when they hear one.’
I’m going to tell you something. The question here that needs to be addressed: Is Obama delusional? Is he really crazy? Is he this detached from reality? Or is he just this narcissistic and dishonest? ‘Mr. Obama’s fiscal assertions are possible only because of the fraudulent accounting and budget gimmicks that Democrats spent months calibrating. Readers can find the gory details in Mr. Ryan’s pre-emptive rebuttal nearby, though one of the most egregious deceptions is that the bill counts 10 years of taxes but only six years of spending,’ which we mentioned yesterday. ‘The real cost over a decade is about $2.3 trillion on paper, Mr. Ryan estimates, and even that is a lowball estimate considering how many people will flood to ‘free’ health care and how many businesses will be induced to drop coverage. Mr. Obama claimed yesterday that the plan will cost ‘about $100 billion per year,’ but in fact the costs ramp up each year the program exists. The far more likely deficits are $460 billion over the first 10 years, and $1.4 trillion over the next 10.
‘What Mr. Ryan calls ‘probably the most cynical gimmick’ deserves special attention, which is known in Washington as the ‘doc fix.’ Next month Medicare physician payments are scheduled to be cut by 22% and deeper thereafter, though Congress is sure to postpone the reductions as it always does. Failing to account for this inevitability takes nearly a quarter-trillion dollars off the ObamaCare books and by itself wipes out the ‘savings’ that the White House continues to take credit for. Some in the liberal cheering section now claim that this Medicare ruse isn’t Mr. Obama’s problem because it was first promised by Republicans and Bill Clinton in 1997. But then why did Democrats include the ‘doc fix’ in all early versions of the bill to buy the support of the American Medical Association, only to dump this pricey item later when hiding it would make it easier to fake-reduce the deficit?
‘The President was (miraculously) struck dumb by Mr. Ryan’s critique, and in his response drifted off into an irrelevant tangent about Medicare Advantage, while California Democrat Xavier Becerra claimed ‘you essentially said you can’t trust the Congressional Budget Office.’ But Mr. Ryan was careful to note that he didn’t doubt the professionalism of CBO, only the truthfulness of the Democratic gimmicks that the budget gnomes are asked to score.
Yesterday Mr. Obama again invoked the ‘nonpartisan, independent’ authority of CBO, which misses the reality that if you feed the agency phony premises, you are going to get phony results at the other end. The President also claimed the reason his plan is in trouble, and the reason Democrats must abuse the Senate’s rules to ram this plan into law, is that ‘many Republicans in Congress just have a fundamental disagreement over whether we should have more or less oversight of insurance companies.’ So most of Mr. Obama’s first year in office has been paralyzed over nothing more than minor regulatory hair-splitting. This is so preposterous that the President can’t possibly believe it.’
The Republicans couldn’t stop anything! What the Republicans do on this is irrelevant here. Republicans in Congress have a fundamental disagreement over whether we should have more or less oversight of insurance companies? Here’s what Paul Ryan said. This is what the Journal is writing about. There’s two bites, last Thursday in Washington, Blair House. As you listen to this, nobody has refuted this, nobody’s even tried to tell anybody that Paul Ryan was wrong. The president didn’t say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Congressman Ryan, how dare you say that about my plan, that’s not true.’ They know it’s true. The fact that nobody’s tried to refute this is evidence that the contents of this, the details, are not even a factor in it. Here’s number one of our two bites.
RUSH: This is the breakdown of the financials to a certain extent.
RYAN: This is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud. When you take a look at the Medicare cuts, what this bill essentially does is it treats Medicare like a piggy bank. It raids a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare not to shore up Medicare solvency but to spend on this new government program. When you strip out the double counting and what I would call these gimmicks the full ten-year cost of this bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second ten-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit. Hiding spending does not reduce spending. And so when you take a look all of this it just doesn’t add up.
RUSH: Now, play the next bite again because I want to get this in the right order. He’s just said there aren’t any savings in this bill. The $500 billion of Medicare cuts are not really cuts, they’re just going to spend it on this new health care plan. You know, I remember talking to a Democrat who opposed this bill because she couldn’t believe they’re going to cut Medicare. I said, ‘There is not going to be any $500 billion Medicare cuts! You think the Democrat Party is going to do that? There’s no way. They’re putting that in there to get an accounting number that they want,’ and I was exactly right about it. Now, here’s Ryan again to wrap it up.
RYAN: We’ve been talking about how much we agree on different issues but there really is a difference between us and it’s basically this. We don’t think the government should be in control of all of this. We want people to be in control, and that, at the end of the day, is the big difference. We are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I’ve gotta tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you’re not listening to them.
RUSH: Nobody has refuted Paul Ryan. Nobody in Washington has even tried. They’re ignoring him. This is from TheHill.com: ‘Passing the healthcare proposals before Congress will ‘hang out to dry’ every Democratic incumbent running for reelection this fall, Howard Dean said Thursday. Howard Dean said that Democrats in Congress, plus Obama, ‘would do themselves more harm than good by passing the current healthcare bill. The plan, as it comes from the Senate, hangs out every Democrat who’s running for office to dry — including the president, in 2012, because it makes him defend a plan that isn’t in effect essentially yet. It’s easy to campaign on repealing something if no one knows what the something is, and fundamentally people don’t understand what the president’s healthcare plan is. And if it passes next week and get’s signed into law the week after, we’re not going to be able to explain it to people,’ because the full impact of it will not be felt for four years. All that’s going to happen is the tax increases. There are going to be no special changes in health care, none of the so-called magical health care reform will happen for four years. Zilch, zero, nada.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more Paul Ryan here. This is from last night on the Fox Business Channel. America’s Nightly Scoreboard with David Asman had Paul Ryan as the guest, and Asman said, ‘I gotta ask: Do you think this thing is going to pass. Will all these manipulations and maneuverings succeed?’
RUSH: Somebody needs to really nail home what this is all about to these Democrats. Well, that’s the wrong way to put it. We need to nail home to the American people what this is really all about. This is about destroying the system. It’s not about health care. This is not going to do anything Obama said. This is going to crash. We talk about hard drive cashes on the Carbonite spots. This is going to crash the United States economy; it’s going to crash the country. This is the intent of it: To overload this system. This is Cloward-Piven. The intent is to so overload the system that it cannot function.
You have to reboot it and you reboot it with Marxism, socialism, whatever you want. But you have to crash the system — and you have to do it slowly, and you have to do it by putting people out of work and making them dependent on government, unemployment benefits and what have you. It doesn’t matter how much debt you rack up. It doesn’t matter that you can’t pay for it. That’s the point. These are radicals like we have never seen in positions of this kind of power, and that’s what’s difficult for people to get their arms around. Even today, a lot of people still look at this as, ‘Wow, these are really strange Democrats. They really have a weird health care plan here.’ This is not the usual ebb and flow of Republican versus Democrat. We’ve never had this kind of radicalism.
We’ve never had a president where more and more journalists and commentators and pundits are questioning his motivations, sanity, psychological circumstance and health and so forth. It’s a really scary thing, what they’re trying to do here. Crash the system. I’ll betcha there are some duped Democrats who really think that it’s all about compassion and insuring a bunch of people who don’t have insurance and making sure everybody has health care and they think they’re doing a great, compassionate thing here. But for the leaders of this bunch, it’s not about that at all. That’s just how they’re choosing to sell it. Here’s Mitch McConnell, by the way, yesterday afternoon late on Capitol Hill. He had a little press conference and said this…
MCCONNELL: I assure you that if this bill is somehow passed, it won’t be behind our Democratic friends, it will be ahead of them. Because every election in America this fall will be a referendum on this issue, and there’s an overwhelming likelihood that every Republican candidate will be campaigning to repeal it.
RUSH: Back to the phones, to Fall River, Massachusetts. William, thank you for calling, sir. It’s great to have you here with us.
CALLER: Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be talking to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’m a great fan of you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: The thing I was questioning is I went back to apartheid. I know you remember the apartheid in South Africa and Desmond Tutu saying that ‘reconciliation,’ truth has to be in the forefront. In other words those who were engaged in the apartheid had to tell the truth or they would not get reconciled. I’m asking you right now: This movement that the Democrats are trying to do with reconciliation has got to be based on the truth, and I’m not hearing the truth.
RUSH: Well, of course you’re not; we’re dealing with Democrats here. Now, I don’t think that Desmond Tutu was speaking of budget reconciliation.
CALLER: He was speaking, though, Rush, about the ‘reconciliation’ of the hate and that in order for them to get pardoned they would have to tell the truth about what they did.
RUSH: You’re talking about Mandela, to get out of jail, to get pardoned he would have to tell the truth?
CALLER: Right, exactly.
RUSH: And he didn’t do that. He served the term. He didn’t admit what they wanted him to admit?
CALLER: Yeah, but during the apartheid… After it was all over, the apartheid, in order to get beyond the apartheid, he had to get the people who did the atrocities to admit the truth. And what I’m saying about the word ‘reconciliation’ is that the truth has to be present and what I’m hearing now isn’t truth.
RUSH: I don’t want to nitpick here but this is a word that has many definitions. You’re talking about ‘reconciling’ different arguments, ‘reconciling’ the truth on something here; admitting, being forthcoming. Budget reconciliation has no reconciliation. It’s like the US Geological Survey. There’s no actual ‘survey.’ It’s just what we call themselves. Just like the Geneva Conventions. It’s not a convention. It’s a list of rules. People don’t go to Geneva to attend the convention, and reconciliation here is a constitutionally created process for putting together the budget every year. The truth, in this, is nowhere to be found. There is no truth from the Democrat side about any aspect of this. I’m talking about their claims of who gets covered, how much it’s going to cost, all of that. Maybe that’s what you’re saying, that this thing doesn’t have a chance because using reconciliation there’s no truth in it. You’re right if you observe that.
Steve in Sunnyvale, California, thank you for calling. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Yes, Rush. I heard you talk about socialist this, communist that, and I think there’s a lot of your listeners out there who think, ‘Oh, he’s just being over-the-top and exaggerating.’ I’ve been to several anti-war protests in San Francisco, and I listened and saw and talked to these people, and you’re not kidding. You’re understating it. I saw the signs that weren’t shown on the TV broadcasts. You listen to the speakers. They’re just a whole series of people who talk about how horrible everything in this country is, and at the end the master of ceremonies at two of these said, ‘Our current system of government does not work. It cannot be fixed. It cannot be modified. It must be replaced,’ and that was almost the most enthusiastic applause and cheering that I heard at these things.
RUSH: I’m glad you called, because the point about this is… You’re talking about sixties rallies that you saw or are these recent?
CALLER: I’m talking about in 2003, 2004, 2005.
RUSH: These people have always been there.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: They were around with FDR. They’ve always been around. The difference is that we’ve never elected one of them before. They’ve always had a couple of these guys in the House of Representatives or some statehouse somewhere or in some bureaucracy, but we’ve never elected one of them to be president of the United States to where he can now pretty much fill up every czarship, cabinet position and bureaucratic position he has control over with similar radicals. And he’s doing it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to build on something that Steve in Sunnyvale, California, was saying. Because I have studied all this stuff, plus I’ve gotten to know people that have also studied it. One of the core principles — and there are a few of them — but one of the core principles of Marxism is that the capitalist system must completely collapse before Marxism can be installed. There can be no integration. It has to fully collapse. That is why the Russians, the Trotskyites, the communists, supported the election of Hitler in Germany, just to cite one example. They knew that Hitler, the National Socialist party, would collapse Germany. They thought that Hitler would bring about Germany’s collapse and then they would be able to take it over. And they were right partially for a while. But we usually see it happen around the world in other places.
Now it’s happening to us. It’s happening in our own country. Here we are in the middle of a Great Recession and there’s nobody doing anything to stop it. I mean laser-like focus on jobs, jobs summits, and now we’re going to add two-and-a-half trillion dollars more debt on a health care plan that’s not going to do one thing anybody says it’s going to do. You want to hear some propaganda? This person that you’re going to listen to is Linda Douglass, a former Drive-By journalist at ABC News. She used to be on the Brinkley roundtable on This Week on Sunday mornings. She finally said I gotta go to the Obama White House. I’m not having enough of an impact as a journalist, I gotta go to where the power really is.
So she is now the White House communications director for the Office of Health Care Reform, revolving door from ABC News to the Obama administration. She’s on chairman Obama’s channel, Mess NBC. She had this question asked of her: ‘The president is meeting with key House Democrats today. Yesterday we heard him say in a joking but serious fashion –‘ That’s really cool, joking but serious? ‘– that really everything’s been said about health care reform, he’s made his plan quite clear, so what are these meetings about today, Linda?’
DOUGLASS: Certainly there’s a conversation that’s been going on between the president and the members of Congress as they prepare to move forward to vote on a plan that would — certainly does contain the ideas, the best ideas of the Democrats, of the Republicans, it puts health care back in the control of consumers and away from the control of the insurance companies, it lowers their costs, it’s the biggest middle-class tax cut on health care in history. These are the kinds of things that the president’s going to be talking to the members about.
RUSH: Lying to the members about. They just keep ratcheting this up. Now this is going to be the biggest middle-class tax cut on health care in history? This is why people are asking, ‘Is this guy crazy? Or is he trying to drive us crazy? He is saying things that he knows are not true, or does he?’ I talked about the Big Lie the other day and how it works. You just keep saying stuff that everybody knows is so patently false that you couldn’t possibly believe they’d be making it up, it must be true because it’s just so unbelievable. And that’s where we are, that’s Linda Douglass, who said, (imitating Douglass) ‘I just don’t have enough power to save the world, to effect change as a journalist. I need to get where I really need to be.’ Health care communications czar at the White House.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Melinda in Worley, Idaho, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Hi. I just wanted to make a comment that by controlling Medicare and wiping out the elderly, you’re wiping out the people who know history and who know capitalism and who know that capitalism isn’t evil. You’re wiping out the least indoctrinated people.
RUSH: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I’ve heard that somewhere before. The young don’t know the truth of the eighties. The young do not know how tax cuts work. They don’t know the truth of the sixties and Kennedy’s tax cuts. You get rid of the most educated, the most informed people so they can’t teach anybody anything.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: It’s hideous out there.
CALLER: Yes, yes.
RUSH: Where did you come across that, Melinda?
CALLER: I just thought of that when this whole health care issue started a while back because that’s just the larger picture. If the government has control of health care, then everybody is vulnerable to it and everybody is subject to the government.
RUSH: Can I ask you something? How old are you?
CALLER: Forty-four.
RUSH: Forty-four?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Well, you have a few years.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I don’t.
CALLER: (giggling)
RUSH: (laughing) All right, Melinda. Thanks. It’s great to have you on the program, I appreciate it.
CALLER: Bye, Rush.
RUSH: All right.