RUSH: I have to tell you, folks, I’m getting profoundly confused here as I listen to everybody talk about the sequester. Of course, we’re one day closer now. Every day takes us one day closer. It’s a quirk of the calendar. Every day we get closer to it. And I’m gonna tell you, I don’t know what’s gonna kill more people now — assault weapons, global warming, or the sequester. If you listen to Obama and his minions in the news media, they’re all running neck and neck. Maybe we need to start exploring some kind of sequester control, because it’s out of control.
This whole sequester business totally out of control. We might need universal sequester registration in order to deal with it. In fact, I’m starting to think that the sequester might even cause more trouble in the world than man-made global warming. And global warming, man-made global warming, even causes asteroids. God knows what the sequester’s gonna cause. I mean, the pressure and the intensity is mounting. I got the most incredible story here just posted about an hour-and-a-half ago. Byron York at the Washington Examiner: “The GOP’s Astonishingly Bad Message on Sequester Cuts.”
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, House Speaker John Boehner describes the upcoming sequester as a policy, “that threatens US national security, thousands of jobs, and more.” That’s Boehner, the Speaker, the Republican leader in the House, writing in the Wall Street Journal today, which leads to the question: Why would they support it? But they are. The Republicans are supporting the sequester, and they’re positioning it — or Boehner did today — as something threatens national security and thousands of jobs. And yet the Republicans are all for it. This is a genuine head scratcher out there.
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Do you know, ladies and gentlemen, that back in November of 2011, you could safely say that this was campaign season, it was early, it was just a little less than a year from the presidential election in November of ’12. President Barack Obama promised to veto any effort to block the sequester.
Let me say that again.
In November of 2011, President Obama promised to veto any legislation that would undo the automatic spending cuts set to take effect on March 1st, known as the sequester. The president said, “Already some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts. My message to them is simple: No. I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy off-ramps on this one.”
So a little less than a year-and-a-half ago the president was hell-bent on the sequester happening. And any effort by anybody to prevent the sequester from happening, he would veto it. What’s his position now? His position now is that the sequester is going to lead to the ruination of the world. We played for you this defamatory litany of things that are gonna happen to people because of the Republicans if the sequester happens. If we wanted to we could go get the audio of this. There’s a YouTube video of his pledge back from November of 2011: Obama promises veto of efforts to get around the sequester cuts. And this was part of the presidential campaign. Because what this meant was that we gotta cut spending, the government’s out of control, and Obama, in campaign mode, clearly wanted everybody to know that if somebody tried to stop these automatic spending cuts, he was gonna stop it. He was gonna let those cuts happen.
Now he’s been reelected, and guess what those cuts are gonna do? They’re gonna destroy everything. You remember the litany from yesterday. It is getting increasingly difficult these days to use absurdity to illustrate absurdity when talking about Obama. He just promised to veto himself. You may have forgotten this. You may have forgotten. You may not have known at all. This might have been a topic back then that when you heard it brought up, “Ahh, spending, never gonna happen, ruling class.” You tune out. But he did promise to veto any effort to derail the sequester spending cuts. So yesterday he comes out in full hysteric mode vowing the sky’s gonna fall if a couple billion dollars are cut from the federal budget. He promised the veto himself.
So yesterday we had Kim Kardashian saying that she would love to have sex with herself if she was a guy. Remember that? Kim Kardashian basically said, “Yeah, if I were a guy, I’d love to know what it’s like to have sex with me. I think that would be a pretty great thing.” So Kim Kardashian was talking about a way to go screw herself and Obama’s saying he should veto himself. It’s getting impossible to keep up with all of this. And you throw into the mix, the low-information voter and trying to tell people now, “Hey, you know, a year ago, Obama said…” it doesn’t penetrate. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t matter because all that does matter, and you’ll hear it in the sound bites coming, all that matters is the Republicans are trying to destroy everything for everybody, and Obama is the outsider trying to fix it.
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RUSH: Okay. So let’s look where we are in regards to the sequester and the El Rushbo theorem that was postulated last week. You remember we played the sound bite yesterday. Obama gave this defamatory litany of destruction that the Republicans want to wreak on this country and on the people of this country. Obama is now threatening to punish the country if the plan he came up with goes through. He originally said that anybody that tried to stop these spending cuts, he’s gonna veto them.
He wanted these spending cuts a year ago.
Now he doesn’t want to go anywhere near these spending cuts, but it’s his plan. The sequester was his idea. Now he’s complaining that these cuts will hit the wrong people. But he’s the guy who decides what gets cut! That’s another part of the sequester. Obama gets to decide within certain frameworks. We know that defense gets hit big (which is fine with him, by the way, and one of the reasons I think he wants the sequester to go through). This is a perfect, perfect example of my theorem.
Obama gets to complain about the very things he caused and about cuts that he will choose. He’s the outsider complaining about all these powerful forces that want to do all this damage, and he’s doing everything he can to protect the American people standing up to all this. He started it all! He demanded the sequester, and he said that anybody who tries to stop it, he’s gonna veto their effort. Now he’s done a 180.
Here we go to the audio sound bites. F. Chuck Todd last night on MSNBC Nightly News. Brian Williams talked to him, and Brian Williams said, “What’s gonna happen here, Chuck — and, if it does happen, and if it’s fixed, you wonder why people are so deeply angry and cynical and checked out of our politics?”
TODD: I can understand if viewers tonight think this is Chicken Little all over again: The president holding another event surrounded by people who could see, uhh, dire effects of a budget compromise. It feels like we’ve been through this before. “The sky is falling! What are we gonna do?” The president is testing the political limits of the public cynicism, which is, “How much are they gonna believe this? Are they gonna look up and say, ‘How often are you gonna say this? I’m through listening to Washington.”
RUSH: Folks, to me, that is profound. Do you know what F. Chuck is saying? F. Chuck Todd is saying, “How many years is he gonna get away with this Chicken Little, ‘The sky is falling’?” And he’s right. We’ve been limping from crisis to crisis. The modern era of crisis fearmongering began in 2008 with TARP. Now, we know it predates that by a lot. But the modern era, the current cycle, began with 2008 and the financial crisis that was imminent.
I mean, it was gonna destroy the world economy, not just our economy. We had to allocate $800 billion for TARP! We had to do it in 24 hours! Well, the Republicans initially opposed it, and 24 hours came and went, and the birds were still chirping and the sky was still blue. Food was still being produced and consumed. Ditto, adult beverages. People were driving around. There was no disaster. Two weeks later, after the constant pressure of, “The sky is falling, the world economy is gonna collapse,” the Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, brought a bunch of bankers in.
He shut the door and refused to let them out until they took a portion of the TARP bailout. Until that happened, there was no action on it, and nothing bad happened. That $800 billion was authorized to save the world, to save the American economy. I think even now $200 billion of it has yet to be spent. Since then we’ve had how many debt limit deals? How many budget continuing resolutions have we had to do because there hasn’t been a budget?
It seems like every three to four months it’s the same thing, “We better do this now or, my God, everything is gonna implode! You’re gonna lose your job. You’re gonna lose your house. The sky’s gonna fall. Meteorites are gonna hit the country, are gonna hit the planet! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! It’s horrible. We’re gonna die! We’ve gonna die! We gotta do something,” and F. Chuck is saying, “How many times can Obama get away with this?”
Let me answer the question: As many times as you want him to get away with it, F. Chuck. The answer to that’s simple. He’s gonna get away with this as often as you want him to get away with it. “How much longer are they gonna believe this? How many people are gonna look up and say, ‘You know what? The sky’s not falling. I’m through listening to this.'” Obama doesn’t care, by the way, if people stop listening to it.
Obama, at this point, doesn’t care about public opinion. He doesn’t care what people think about this. This is about something that the American people are totally oblivious to anyway. All Obama is doing is wiping the Republican Party off the playing field. He is simply doing everything he can to eliminate all viable political opposition, and to the extent that he can bore people and get them to tune out and not pay attention to what’s happening?
I would think that’s all the better for him. More destruction can take place, more damage can be done, and the people that do hang around and still listen get to hear this prediction of utter disaster — and Obama gets to position himself as on the outside of, trying to save it, stop it, and protect everybody. But what does he care about people being bored and tuning out of it? He doesn’t care. The fewer people paying attention, the easier it’s gonna be to get away with the scam!
The fewer people in the bank, the greater the odds you’re gonna get away with robbing it. Here’s John Dickerson. John Dickerson, the CBS News political director. This is the guy who wrote a piece at Slate.com urging the president to annihilate the Republican Party, as a political move. (summarized) “Just do it! Get rid of them, and you can have smooth sailing if you just do that.” He was on CBS This Morning and Charlie Rose said, “What are the short-term gains and long-term gains either party can get out of this, John?”
DICKERSON: In the long-term picture, economies tend to be talked about by the presidential terms, and what the White House worries about is, this economy — which is struggling — would really take a hit if the sequester took effect over a long period of time. That, in the end, in history’s eyes, that makes the Obama economy weaker, and that’s not a great legacy item for this president.
RUSH: I think, once again, this guy doesn’t get it.
Obama has no intention to take any blame for the economy! What’s happening here is that Obama is setting up what he has been operating since he began, and that is whatever bad happens has no relationship to his agenda. Whatever damage the country incurs has nothing to do with him. He’s trying to stop it! The more damage, the better. The only downside to that is that eventually at some point people might say, “You know, you’re not any good at fixing anything here. You’re not any good at stopping it.” But, for now, he’s getting away with the Republicans getting blamed for all this.
He doesn’t care about the legacy of a bad economy right now.
Hell, a bad economy is what he’s aiming for!
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RUSH: Right on schedule, ladies and gentlemen, Leon Panetta at the Pentagon informs Congress today that if the sequester happens on March 1st, they will furlough 800,000 civilian employees.
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