RUSH: Yesterday spent some time sharing with you my valued insights on the reason for the misery, the unhappiness, the despondency, the depression of all the leftists in this country — and it’s because they got their panacea. They got their guy. They got their ‘clean, articulate’ president. They got every policy wonk in power they ever wanted. They’ve got all the agenda. They got health care. They got 
stimulus to create jobs. They got people in homes that can’t afford ’em. It’s supposed to be utopia out there, and it isn’t working. They are staring their own failure right in the face. They have looked to the past, and they have seen the failure of socialism, Marxism and communism everywhere — and their response to it was, ‘Well, the right people have never been in charge. But we are the ones we’ve been waiting for!’
And now, 18 months in, it’s a disaster. Not one aspect of the leftist biblical belief is working as they have fantasized. There’s even more disillusionment coming from the left. Bob Herbert today in the New York Times, a columnist: ‘Wrong Track Distress — It’s getting harder and harder for most Americans, looking honestly at the state of the nation, to see the glass as half full. And that’s why the public opinion polls contain nothing but bad news for Barack Obama and the Democrats. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the war in Afghanistan and, above all, the continuing epidemic of joblessness [epidemic of joblessness!] have pushed the nation into a funk. All the crowing in the world about the administration’s legislative accomplishments — last year’s stimulus package, this year’s health care reform, etc. — is not enough to lift the gloom.’
In fact, it makes the gloom worse because it’s these legislative accomplishments that have led to the disaster! ‘Mr. Obama and the Democrats have wasted the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity handed to them in the 2008 election,’ and this gets to the nub of it, folks. It’s exactly what I was saying yesterday. ‘Mr. Obama and the Democrats have wasted the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity handed to them…’ No they’ve not. They have used it exactly as they have intended, Mr. Herbert. It doesn’t work! He writes, ‘They did not focus on jobs, jobs, jobs as their primary mission, and they did not call on Americans to join in a bold national effort (which would have required a great deal of shared sacrifice) to solve a wide range of very serious problems, from our over-reliance on fossil fuels to the sorry state of public education to the need to rebuild the nation’s rotting infrastructure.’
What was the ‘stimulus’ all about, Mr. Herbert? It was all about ‘jobs, jobs, jobs.’ It was all about ‘rebuilding the nation’s rotting infrastructure.’ It was all about ‘shovel-ready jobs,’ and it was all about ending our dependence foreign oil. A trillion dollars of it, Mr. Herbert! He hadn’t been focused on jobs? Of course there wasn’t any focus on jobs, jobs, jobs, because this never had a prayer of creating any jobs, jobs, jobs — and extending unemployment benefits is not creating jobs. Extending unemployment benefits is not creating income. It’s not producing economic growth; it is retarding it. Extended unemployment benefits do nothing but incentivize people not to look for work, and it does nothing to add to productivity in any way, shape, manner, or form.
‘Fifteen million Americans are unemployed,’ laments Mr. Herbert, ‘according to the official count, which wildly understates the reality. Assuming no future economic setbacks and job creation at a rate of 200,000 or so a month, it would take more than a decade to get us back to where we were when the Great Recession began in December 2007,’ but of course Vice President Bite Me has said over the weekend that we’re not going to replace all those eight million jobs we lost. We just can’t do it. Ronaldus Magnus created a 92-month boom, created millions and millions of new jobs with optimism and good cheer. There’s none of that. There’s nobody talking about the greatness of America. There’s nobody talking about the greatness of Americans. All we have is people lamenting about the unfair advantage America has had over the years, the problems that we have caused around the world.
Mr. Herbert says, ‘Americans struggling in a down economy are worried about the survival of their families. Destitution is beckoning for those whose unemployment benefits are running out, and that crowd of long-term jobless men and women is expanding rapidly.’ Right, Mr. Herbert. He concludes with this. ‘It’s not too late for the president to turn things around, but there is no indication that he has any plan or strategy for doing it.’ Right, Mr. Herbert! Congratulations. It took you near the end of your 750 words but you got it. Let me add to it: There’s no indication he has any plan or strategy or desire to turn things around, Mr. Herbert. That’s what you’re missing. Anybody with half an economic brain would look at what we’re doing and say, ‘This ain’t right. This is not how you go about expanding an economy and creating growth.’
It seems to me Mr. Herbert is not even the same room as reality. But alas, he does represent a kind of thinking that’s popular with Obama’s most valued intellectual peers. If Obama’s losing Bob Herbert and if he’s losing Paul Krugman on the economy, it could be likened to Lyndon Johnson losing Walter ‘Klondike’ on the Vietnam War. That is, it would be similar if anybody still gave a rat’s rear end what the salons in the New York Times opined about anything, but they don’t even care that much anymore what the Times says (except on the Upper West Side). So Bob Herbert: After a year and a half, we’re supposed to be in a panacea; we’re supposed to be in utopia. People that can’t afford homes were supposed to be in homes, uhhhh, paying their mortgages, or having them paid for them. We’ve taken over the car industry. That shoulda rebounded; it hasn’t.
We’ve taken over student loans, but the cost of an education is skyrocketing way out of proportion. We’ve taken over and punished Wall Street, the markets continue to plummet. We have spent a trillion dollars to create jobs. Obama’s urged the rest of the world, ‘Keep spending! More debt, more debt, more debt.’ The rest of the world said to the G-Whiz meeting over the weekend, ‘Ain’t no way! We tried it your way for 30, 40 years. It’s not working.’ So there is dissatisfaction, there is disillusionment, there is disappointment all over the left because nobody can stop them. They have the ability with their majorities in Congress to do anything they want, and if they don’t do it that way, they can do it by ‘deeming’ it to be done or by executive order — and after all these years, these 50 years block that they have been dreaming of this very moment like Herbert says, ‘a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,’ and they are witnessing the utter failure of their own sacred beliefs. I, in one sense, love that. I hate what they’re doing to the country. I despise and I resent it deeply, but I am happy in one small way, that people, including those on the left, can now finally see the utter destruction that comes from unchecked liberalism. Look at Detroit. Look at any red or blue city or blue state run unchecked by liberals for how many years, what are they doing? Bulldozing houses. Former corporate office towers occupied by ‘government workers.’ They’re not just bulldozing houses, 12,000 houses! They’re shrinking cities that they have run, that they still run, that they control — and some of them still harbor this hope that Obama will turn it around, when the dirty little secret is Obama has gotten precisely what he wanted.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Susie in Spokane, Washington. This the right side of the state. Great to have you on the program.
CALLER: Boy, you got that right, Rush.
RUSH: As I do most things.
CALLER: A couple of sweet things. First of all, Mr. Snerdley is the sweetest guy, love him — and secondly congratulations on your marriage.
RUSH: Thank you very much. Appreciate that.
CALLER: I like that a lot.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Okay. I’m calling because how come nobody has compared the recovery after 9/11 and the dot-com bubble burst and how good a job George Bush did compared to today?
RUSH: Well-ll-ll (laughing), because Bush is responsible for the depression that we’re in!
CALLER: Well, and I want you to know, I checked a few statistics, and as of — I think it was February 2002 this would have been, let’s see, seven months after 9/11.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Bush created 850,000 jobs that month.
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: I just find it ludicrous that nobody seems to remember that, and all because of the tax cut.
RUSH: Precisely. Because the template is that tax cuts led to where we are now.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And the economic disparity, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. They only have three TV sets and one air-conditioned car now instead of two.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: And all the other tumult and chaos — the oil spill, Hurricane Katrina — it’s all Bush’s fault. You can’t go back and look at the economic success. You can’t go back and look at Reagan’s success. You can’t go back and look at the success of Reagan’s means of coming out of that recession in 1980 and ’82.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, that and this whole oil spill is so mismanaged, I’m beside myself. It’s just too much.
RUSH: It is said ‘criminal neglect’ the other day.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: That may be strong, but this is outrageous, and they think we’re going to be mollified by sending Vice President Bite Me down there to hang around the command center and look at TV monitors?
CALLER: Well, he’s got all the plugs, Rush.
RUSH: Well, I know, but despite all the thousands of plugs Biden has, all of them together would not plug the leak.
CALLER: (giggles) Yeah. Well, hey, that’s all I have to say.
RUSH: Hey, Chuck, let ’em see you! Get out of that wheelchair, Chuck! Oh, God love you. Aw, gee. Bite me, Chuck.
CALLER: (giggling)
RUSH: Yeah, Vice President Bite Me is down there in the command center in New Orleans looking at monitors and so forth as experts explain, ‘Yes, what’s happening, Mr. Bite Me is there’s a hole and there’s oil in the hole. There’s a lot of pressure in natural gas and the oil is coming out of the hole, and it’s getting into the Gulf of Mexico. That’s water. The Gulf of Mexico is water and the oil’s getting in there. It’s been going on for 60 days.’
‘You don’t have to be a smart ass about it,’ Biden said.
You know, if you want to plug the hole, send Gore, folks. Apparently that may be the trick.
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RUSH: No country has ever been able to grow out of a recession through tax increases or deficit spending. The Germans told that to Obama the other day. I think the Germans also said, ‘You know, Obama, you’re really the first American president to do what you’re doing. You got two wars going. Normally people with wars have expanding economies. You’re the first president to kill an economy with two wars going on!’