RUSH: Well, let’s get into the hot news. And there’s all kinds of it, folks. The Democrats — this is the New York Times from today — ‘Democrats Put Lower Priority on Health Bill,’ which is a nice way to say, slam on the brakes. Could we also say that maybe it is a failure? ‘With no clear path forward on major health care legislation, Democratic leaders in Congress effectively slammed the brakes on President Obama’s top domestic priority on Tuesday, saying they no longer felt pressure to move quickly on a health bill after eight months of setting deadlines and missing them. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, deflected questions about health care. ‘We’re not on health care now,’ Mr. Reid said. ‘We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.’ He added, ‘There is no rush.” We have that audio sound bite right now.
REID: I’ve had a number of meetings with the Speaker, spoken to the White House on several occasions, and we’re going to find out how to proceed, but there is no rush.
RUSH: This from the guy who had to have it passed before the August recess, then they had to have it passed by Thanksgiving, then they had to have it passed by Christmas, and of course Nancy Pelosi said, ‘There will be a health care bill.’ All of that went out the window and I’m still not sure that even if Martha Coakley had won that election instead of Scott Brown this would have happened because as I pointed out the last time we were together, the Democrats are fleeing the ship and now we’ve got Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln, they’re categorized in the Drive-Bys as two moderate, centrist Democrats. And there’s no such thing in the Senate. I mean that’s just how they’re categorized by the Drive-Bys. They’re saying they would stop the reconciliation process if the Senate tried to go that way. They’re up for reelection. They’ve got conservative states for the most part that they need to win.
The Democrats are now at war with one another, folks. Everybody is blaming everybody for what went wrong in Massachusetts, what’s gone wrong with all of these pieces of legislation that didn’t happen. A CNN poll a couple days ago: ”Most Americans Applaud Democrats’ Loss of Supermajority’ — Americans are divided on whether Democratic control of Congress is good for the country.’ Divided? Seventy percent is not divided. ‘A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday also indicates that 7 in 10 Americans believe that the Democrats’ loss –‘ seven in ten is 70%, CNN. It’s a big number. We’re not going to let you get away with this seven in ten garbage. Seventy percent of Americans ‘believe that the Democrats’ loss of their 60 seat supermajority in the Senate is a positive move for the country.’ Seventy percent. It’s a number people get their brains and arms around. Seventy percent.
And how about this spending freeze? What a trick this is. What’s it going to do, by 2019, it’s going to save $250 billion? That’s the price of mustard for one hot dog at a baseball game when you consider the trillions this guy has wasted as far as the eye can see. All this is doing is locking in place massive, over the top spending increases last year. It’s just locking them in place. Freezing discretionary spending, the entitlement spending, it’s all but defense. This is like Jennifer Granholm saying that the green industry in Michigan is going to create 40,000 jobs in the next ten years, 40,000, when they’re losing 600,000, a million jobs a year. This is the populist Obama, the left doesn’t like this, Obama going triangulation. James Carville’s out there urging Obama, you gotta bash Bush more, you gotta bash Bush more. I think that’s sabotage. I think that’s setting up Hillary. And make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Clinton is out there eyeing this. I know she’s in Afghanistan now. I just saw some pictures. It’s not pretty.
The AP has run a series of pictures of Mrs. Clinton arriving — now I understand this — arriving after a long flight from somewhere. I don’t know how long the leg was. But remember I got in all kinds of trouble during the primary before Operation Chaos by correctly pointing out that a number of Americans would not want to watch a 60-plus-year-old woman age in office. I caught hell for that ’cause, you know, there are many obvious things that you’re just not supposed to say because of political correctness or sensitivity or what have you. But these pictures… ahem. Despite all that, I think Mrs. Clinton is out there, and Bill Clinton and her are eyeing this situation. Obama’s even saying, (paraphrasing) ‘I’m willing to be a one-term president. Yeah. I want to do the right thing, even if it means being a one-term president.’ Here it is. Grab audio sound bite number nine. This is last Monday on ABC’s World News Tonight with the new anchorette infobabe Diane Sawyer, and she said: ‘In the middle of all this coming at you, do you think maybe one term is enough?’
OBAMA: I’d rather be a really good one term president.
RUSH: No chance.
OBAMA: Than a mediocre two-term president. And I believe that. You know, there’s a tendency in Washington to think that our job description, of elected officials, is to get reelected. That’s not our job description.
RUSH: Bull.
OBAMA: I will not slow down in terms of going after the big problems that this country faces.
RUSH: Ha.
OBAMA: I don’t want to look back on my time here and say to myself: ‘All I was concerned about was nurturing my own popularity.’
RUSH: (laughing.)
OBAMA: That’s not why I came.
RUSH: (laughing) It’s exactly why he’s came. Look, if he doesn’t care about being reelected, why go through all the machinations here of changing his perception? Why go after the banks, why change his procedure, why change his image if he’s not concerned about being reelected. You know, they’ve gotta be in a state of shock in the White House, because the sole thing that they were relying on was what they perceived, and it was real during the campaign, Obama as a messiah, Obama as an empty canvas, a blank slate, anybody could make him to be whatever they wanted him to be, and he’s nothing more than the standard, ordinary, everyday political hack who isn’t really very competent, who doesn’t have any experience, certainly no executive experience. He’s got some legislative experience from the Senate in Illinois and from the US Senate for 150 days and from community organizing and agitating, but he does not have any executive decision, like governors do, or CEOs. The buck stops with them. He farmed everything out. Health care, let Congress do it. No, he’s out there saying: (paraphrasing) ‘By the way, I had nothing to do with that Cornhusker buyback. I had nothing to do with the Louisiana Purchase.’ His people were up in the Senate negotiating all that. Rahm Emanuel and the boys were up there putting together all of these plans.
He doesn’t want any blame whatsoever so he’s now washing his hands of it. This is why he didn’t have his own plan ever. He just let Congress do it, same thing with the slush fund on stimulus. Charlie Cook, Investor’s Business Daily: ‘Charlie Cook: Dems’ ‘Car Wreck In Slow Motion’ Continues.’ This is yesterday’s dispatch. ‘Veteran election analyst Charlie Cook wrote today that 2010 is not 1994 redux. But though the ‘circumstances and dynamics’ are different, it appears to be a nationalized election, he said. Often in these elections, inferior, underfunded or less-organized candidates and campaigns beat more amply funded and better-prepared candidates and campaigns. … The Cook Political Report now predicts Republicans will win 25-35 House seats in the fall. That’s up from 20-30 seats about a month ago and 15-25 seats a few months before that.’ And if the election were held today, some of these analysts’ analysis of the election were held today, it would be 103 seats. I read that yesterday that the Democrats would lose, Republicans would pick up. Looks like the Senate, if the election were held today, the Democrat number would go from 59 now to 52.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: ‘New Republic: ‘Barack Obama faces a moment where his presidency just might collapse.’ This is a liberal journal of opinion. Do you people realize how prescient I was? I was the only voice — over a year ago now — using the word ‘failure.’ ‘I hope he fails.’ I knew that this kind of stuff… My only fear back then was I didn’t know… Because of the election. I was worried, seriously, that this country had turned, that with so many people on welfare, so many people receiving some sort of government assistance, that we had gone socialist. Because that’s what I knew Obama to be. But most people do not look at these people, presidential candidates, ideologically. I, of course, do — and that’s my new mission, as you people know: To make sure everybody looks at liberals and understands who they are. They lie. They can’t be honest about what they want to do.
They wouldn’t stand a chance. They wouldn’t get 20% of the vote in the country now, I’m convinced. So they have to lie and they have to confuse and hide behind a mask, and they’ve unmasked themselves this past year in their arrogance and conceit with their supermajority in the Senate. The country has finally been able to see what happens when unchecked liberalism rolls on down the highway. It’s important that this realization be made and not lost. This ought to be a… In a sane world, with a super-informed populace, this would be a 20-year death knell for liberalism in this country, and this New Republic: ‘Barack Obama faces a moment where his presidency just might collapse.’ ‘How does this president handle a crisis? Thus far, the answer is not at all encouraging. The current crisis is the election in Massachusetts of Scott Brown, now the forty-first Republican senator.
‘His arrival in Washington has sent Democrats into panic mode — fearful that they too will be swallowed by a seething electorate — and caused many of them to flee in the other direction from health care reform. In short, Barack Obama faces a moment where his presidency just might collapse or, rather, risks heading into a wilderness where it would accomplish next to none of its ambitious goals’ which would be a godsend if that actually happens. Listen to this. ‘Never before has a Democratic president inherited more propitious circumstances for advancing reform to fruition. And, although liberals might have griped as reform plodded its way through the various fiefdoms of the Senate, a monumental bill ultimately emerged, an impressive work of consensus that survived the interest-group ringer … Congress was one or two perfunctory roll-call votes away from sending a bill to Obama’s desk. That’s when Brown won his upset, instantly making the distance the bill needed to travel to the president’s desk seem unbearably immense.’
I really — as I said earlier — think we had a chance to stop this beforehand, because these people all knew, they were governing against the will of the people. They all knew that’s what they were doing. Now, I don’t doubt that they would have twisted arms and done everything they could to ram that bill through. But the anger, the seething rage of the American people is understood by the left and the answer of course is, ‘Well, they’re too stupid! They aren’t bright enough to figure out what we are doing.’ In fact, let’s see. I’ve got a sound bite that says that but I can’t find where it is right now, but I do have Obama blaming Congress for the health care debacle. This is number ten, and this is also last night on ABC’s World News Tonight with Diane Sawyer. She said, ‘People think you must say at the end of day that, ‘This is not who I was in 2008, these deals with Nebraska, with Florida…” She means 2009, I believe, and this is what Obama said.
OBAMA: (stammering) W-well, well, well… Wait… Now, now, now… L-l-l-let’s — let’s hold on a second, Di-Diane. I mean I think that, ummm, this gets into a, uh, big mush. Uh… So — so let’s just clarify. Uh, I didn’t make a bunch of deals, all right?
SAWYER: Right.
OBAMA: There is a legislative process that’s taken place in Congress, and I’m happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress in how it operates the way, uh, I would have liked. So that’s point number one.
RUSH: Ohhhhh! So he had nothing to do with it. It’s Bush’s fault and now it’s Congress’ fault. This guy is so full of it. ‘B-b-b-b-but wait a minute, Diane! Let’s get — Uh, this a big mush. Let’s clarify. I didn’t make a bunch of deals. All right.’ He sent people up there to make a bunch of deals. It was Obama’s Rahm Emanuel and everybody that was twisting arms. The news gets even worse for these people. ‘A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released [today] indicates that 25% of the public thinks the stimulus package has benefited the middle class,’ and once again, CNN is playing with numbers. ‘Seven out of ten’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. ‘Seven out of ten’ think it’s good the Democrats lost their supermajority. That’s 70%, CNN, and now they say ‘25% of the public thinks the stimulus has benefited the middle class.’ So for those of you who are math challenged out there that means 75% do not believe it’s helped.
This is CNN. Way to hide the impact of the numbers, again. ‘One-third of the people questioned think the stimulus has helped low-income Americans with just over 40% saying the plan has benefited business executives.’ Those 40% are idiots. The stimulus plan hasn’t gone to business executives. That’s TARP money. But you can’t blame people for being confused. We got stimulus. We got slush funds. We’ve got the TARP money. It’s just a mess. None of it’s working. Everybody has had a year now to see, full-fledged, that Obama’s recipes for fixing things don’t do anything but make it worse. And, by the way, it was Obama who totally made the deal with the unions. He said, ‘I didn’t make any deals with Congress. I didn’t make any deals with them. Congress is on their own.’ Oh, yeah? He has all these union thugs come into the White House, and they threaten him with whatever, and he ends up exempting them from his 40% tax on Cadillac insurance plans. He did that right out in the open — and then, of course, he broke his promise to have C-SPAN televise all of the health care hearings. We have that. That’s audio sound bite number 11. This is what he said.
OBAMA: Your question points out to a legitimate mistake that I made during the course of the year, and that is that we had to make so many decisions quickly in a very difficult, uh, set of circumstances —
RUSH: Mmm. Oh, yeah.
OBAMA: — that after a while we started worrying more about getting the policy right than getting the process right.
RUSH: Right.
OBAMA: But I campaigned on process. Part of what I campaigned on was changing how Washington works, opening up transparency, and I think it is… Eh, eh, you know… I think the health care debate as it unfolded legitimately raised concerns — not just among my opponents, but also among supporters —
RUSH: Mmm-hmm.
OBAMA — that we just don’t know what’s going on. And it’s an ugly process, and it looks like there are a bunch of backroom deals.
RUSH: He says he made a mistake. I don’t know if he’s really apologizing there, but did you hear? He’s interested in policy and process. Folks, that’s community-organizer kind of stuff. Process is not what you want in a president. You know people that love process? They love the process. As long as the process is ongoing, they’re happy. But what stops process is a solution, the problem being culminated with a solution and then the process is finished. He loves process because that’s where he gets to show his intelligence, supposedly. So it’s all falling apart right around the Democrats, and they’re still blaming Bush, and they’re still blaming me and Sarah Palin.