RUSH: Now, to show you just how literally insane some people on the left are — or if not insane, we’re not even on the same planet — I want you to listen to the first two paragraphs of a recent column by ‘Hurricane’ Katrina vanden Heuvel in The Nation. ‘The challenge for progressives and Democrats in these turbulent times is how to consistently and clearly explain the real causes of our current economic condition. One problem is that we live in a center-left country with a center-right media that consistently misinforms people about the perils of debts, deficits, and tax increases, and purveys misinformation about a good but modest health care bill that rightwing talk radio, tea partiers and GOPsters would have Americans believe is a ‘socialist’ power grab.’
‘Center-left country with a center-right media that consistently misinforms people about the peril of debt, deficits, and tax increases.’
So let’s go to the audio sound bites. This is Chris Matthews last night on Hardball, and he had the Washington bureau chief of the magazine Mother Jones on there. His name is David Corn. So keep in mind what Katrina vanden Heuvel just said and listen to Matthews here.
MATTHEWS: The problem is that we don’t think in terms of what would the country be like if we didn’t have Medicare for our parents as they get very old — in their eighties, for example, when they’re still alive, and they need health care, a lot of it. And they don’t have any source of income. They’re not working every morning. They’re not making a paycheck. What would it be like in this country? Calcutta? Poor people all over the place? Old people lying in the streets? I mean, we don’t think about what it would be if we didn’t have health care, if we didn’t have SocSecurity for people at the age of 65, if we didn’t have unemployment compensation, if we didn’t have a progressive income tax. There’s a lot of things we don’t think about. And the right-wing just pounds and pounds away at this idealistic notion of a cowboy country, everybody self-reliant. I think the progressives, for all their 
power on the blogosphere, have not done a positive case for the advantages of some kind of a social state.
CORN: Well, Obama hasn’t, either.
RUSH: So there you have it. Matthews admitting for all who watch MSNBC — of course, it’s a much wider audience he’s reaching now with this sound bite — they haven’t been doing a good enough job explaining the social state, the positive case for the advantages of some kind of social state. Chris, I talk to you a lot on this program. Let me explain to you why. It’s not that they haven’t done a good job; it’s that they don’t dare be honest that that’s what they’re doing. If they had run the election on all the wonderful social schemes that you just described here, Obama wouldn’t have gotten 30% of the vote. If he had said, ‘We’re going to socialize health care so that we don’t look like Calcutta and we’re going to expand on all these other programs that have made people dependent on the state and we’re gonna tax further the people who stupidly continue to work to pay for all this,’ he wouldn’t have gotten 30% of the votes. You people on the left who run for office have to lie through your teeth about what your plans are. You go back and you look at what Obama was projecting and promising versus what we’re getting, and you’ll see my point.