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America Hangs by a Thread

by Rush Limbaugh - Mar 22,2010


RUSH: Today, as we start the radio program, America is hanging by a thread. So we have to see what we can do with a thread. At the end of the day, our freedom has been assaulted. This is the kind of change that people did not think they were going to get when they voted for Barack Obama. Freedom must win the day.

Great to have you here. We’ll be talking to you about all of this, 800-282-2882 is the number. The e-mail address: ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

You have to deal with reality here, and that means focusing on the future. Now, there are some people who want to look back at the past and say, ‘How did we get here?’ and that’s all fine and dandy, but we know how we got here. Barack Obama was elected president. If you want to go back any further than that, we can, but we are here because Barack Obama was elected president. We are here because the Democrat Party has a majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

There’s a lot of anger at Bart Stupak today. Bart Stupak was always going to vote for this. The thing that Bart Stupak needs to be hounded out of office for is for misleading an entire nation and giving an entire nation a big, fake feint job that he and his cohorts were somehow going to do something to stop this on the basis of a false premise, anyway. I want you to hear a piece of audio from Stupak. This is October 24th in Cheboygan, Michigan. He held a town hall meeting. This is Internet quality, here. He held a town hall meeting, and he told a questioner, one of his voters, that if he liked everything but the abortion funding he would vote for it. He said this last October.

STUPAK: If everything I want [is] in the final bill, I like everything in the bill except you have public funding for abortion — and we had a chance to run our amendment and we lost. Okay, I voted my conscience, stayed true to my principles, stayed true to the beliefs of this district. Could I vote for health care? Yes, I still could.

RUSH: And he did. He was always going to, as were the moderate Democrats. There were some of them that were given a chance to vote ‘no’ because they had enough of a majority last night. But up until four o’clock yesterday afternoon, theoretically, Pelosi did not have the votes. I’m asking myself what kind of country are we today. We’re not a representative republic. The will of the people was spat upon yesterday. The will of the people is of no concern to the people who now have power and authority from the White House all the way down to Capitol Hill. The will of the people is something to be crushed. So we’re not a representative republic. You can’t even say, loosely defined, we are much of a democracy. We have to restore these things. We have to do this by getting rid of these people at the ballot box. We must get them out of office. That’s the only thing here. I hear people talking about repeal, and that’s great, but there’s something that has to happen before we can do that. We can’t repeal this thing as we sit here today. We don’t have the votes. We didn’t have the votes to stop it; we’re not going to have the votes to repeal it. We have to start winning elections.

But I’m going to tell everybody in the Republican Party that’s running around talking about repeal: It had better be more than a campaign slogan. You better mean it. Don’t declare something as principle and then play it like a $5 poker chip like Bart Stupak did. Stupak has humiliated and disgraced himself. He lied because he held out the hope to millions of Americans that this travesty would not happen. Bart Stupak has not only humiliated and disgraced himself; he has as big a role in destroying this country as it was founded as Barack Obama does. Last night, Bart Stupak damaged the already crippled Democrat Party more than he knows, more than they know. That executive order? Totally laughable. Stupak just wanted his ‘Notice me!’ moment. Stupak is no different than Neville Chamberlain, who came back with that little letter from Hitler, ‘Oh, yeah, Hitler says no war between his country and ours.’

Churchill said, ‘Well, you’re a fool.’

Well, Stupak got his executive order which is worthless and can be rescinded, but it does not have the ability to counter statute. So whatever’s in the Senate bill — and there is federal funding for abortion in the bill; and folks, make no question: The lies that we have been told about what’s in this bill, what’s not in this bill, it is an utter disaster. If you want we can spend some time today going through some of these individual items, which we’ve been doing for a year-and-a-half. The point is, the American people have awakened and they finally have seen what statists look like and what they do and how they act.

Even McCain, who as recently as a year ago wanted to ‘walk across the aisle’ and work with these people, said today he’s upset just looking at how happy they are at what they’ve done. Of course, it need not have happened had we… Well, I don’t even want to go there. Focusing on the past is only relevant in terms of how we learn from it and not make the same mistakes in the future. So yep, we repeal — fine and dandy — and we take these lawsuits. These lawsuits are an uphill climb. We can’t rely on lawsuits to win the day. I mean, they need to be filed and they need to be argued, and we need to push back in every direction, but the focus has to be on defeating Democrats in November in these midterm elections. We have the people. We have the intellectual arguments. We have the commonsense arguments. We have history. But they won yesterday.


They won because they held Congress and the presidency, and therein lies the lesson: We need to defeat these bastards. We need to wipe them out. We need to chase them out of town. But we need to do more than that. We need to elect conservatives. If there are Republican primaries, elect conservatives and then defeat the Democrats — every last one of them — and then we start the repeal process. And by ‘repeal,’ I mean use every single legislative and bureaucratic tactic we can muster to obstruct, derail, and defeat them. Just saying ‘repeal’ does not make it happen. We’re going to have to turn out en masse in November and stop these people. As you have seen, the law will not stop them, the Constitution will not stop them, hoping that they will do the right thing will not stop them because their definition of ‘the right thing’ has nothing in common with ours.

They must, my friends, be hounded out of office. Every single Democrat who voted for this needs to know, safe district or not, that they are going to be exposed and hassled and chased from office. We now have leftist radicals in charge of your health care decisions rather than doctors. I got up today and I said, ‘We’re hanging by a thread,’ and there’s a difficult balancing act on this program today: Dealing with the reality of what has happened, which can’t be candy coated, with the need to fight on. The need to fight on and the urging to fight on must have some substance to it and not just be rhetoric and language and lingo. It has to have some substance behind it, because we really are facing the prospect that our country will never be the same after yesterday, if this stands. It will never be the same, and a majority of the American people understood it.

A majority of the American people understand it and know it and are outraged by this. Americans are now eagerly awaiting their insurance premiums to be reduced by $2,500 a year. Obama has been promising this since his presidential campaign of 2008. Americans are now eagerly awaiting for all of the uninsured to magically have health insurance. The American people are now waiting for their premiums to magically go down and for their access to go up. I was listening to some of the Democrats in the media last night. Juan Williams on Fox was just excited. ‘Oh, my God, this is so wonderful! It’s so wonderful! No more preexisting conditions! No more preexisting conditions! Everybody gets insurance,’ and I’m saying, ‘Does anybody not understand economics here?’ We’re not even talking about an insurance business anymore.

What’s happened here is not insurance. Insurance is you insure yourself against a catastrophe, something that might happen to wipe you out. This is not insurance. This is simply the insurance companies being captivated or taken over by the government and having their behavior mandated for the express purpose of putting them out of business. Under this bill, as I told you last week, you don’t have to buy insurance. You can wait until the accident or the illness happens and then buy it that day, and they have to sell it to you. No matter what. If you get terminal cancer and the doctor gives you three months, they have to sell you your coverage. Except you’re not going to have to buy it. If you can’t afford it, we — all your neighbors — will. No insurance company can stay in business doing this.

It’s the same thing with preexisting conditions. No preexisting conditions? The liberals keep talking about automobile insurance companies. What happens to you if you have an automobile policy, you’re driving around, and you have an accident and you do a lot of damage? Hey, guess what? You are a higher risk. Your auto insurance premium goes up, right? Why shouldn’t that happen with health care? Why shouldn’t it? (whining) ‘It’s not fair? No, it’s not fair!’ Well, it won’t now. It won’t now. So, yeah, preexisting conditions are going to be covered, but who’s going to pay for this? Insurance premiums are going to skyrocket in the next couple of years until they are out of business and the government steps in to take over with the…public option. Which is just waiting a couple of months, couple of days, couple years down the tracks. It’s just waiting to happen, because this bill mandates the destruction of the private health insurance business.