RUSH: On the foreign money business we had the LA Times continuing the myth, helping to create the story line, feed the beast that the Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce are benefiting solely from the influx of foreign money. The Washington Post tried to get in on this big thing. ‘PACs Linked to Foreign Companies Legally Donate Millions to US Campaigns.’ Now, the headline leaves out something very important. Donations to foreign companies, PACs, must come from US citizens or residents, and they make up a small fraction of overall political giving. So the Washington Post wanted to get in on this, and as they researched it they found out it’s a nonstory. They found out it’s a total — well, not lie, it’s just a distraction. They also learned this: ‘One of the leading contributors to federal candidates among U.S. subsidiaries is BAE Systems, the Arlington County-based arm of the British defense and aerospace company. Records show BAE’s PAC has given nearly $600,000 to candidates in this cycle, with 55 percent going to Democrats. Top recipients include Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.),’ the rubber stamp for Chuck-U Schumer, ‘and Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.).’
So as they attempted to move the story along that the Republicans were benefiting from foreign money, the Chamber of Commerce, and Obama and Axelrod are demanding that the Chamber prove that they’re not having terrible amounts of money influx, the Washington Post learns that more foreign money is going to Democrats than Republicans. So that’s kinda out of the window. ‘Mark Shields on Friday accused the White House of making up the story about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce funneling foreign money into Republican campaigns. Appearing on PBS’s Inside Washington, Shields said of the issue the Administration and many of their media minions have been harping on for over a week, ‘It was absolutely fallacious on their part. And they made it up, the White House did,” and that was that. It’s at NewsBusters.org. Mark Shields accuses the White House of making up a story that’s been popular in the news for over a week and then the topic on the TV show quickly changing, ho-hum, no big deal, they made it up. And they carried it. Mark ‘Maxi’ Shields, (imitating Shields) ‘Hey, yeah, they made it up.’
This takes us to audio sound bite number 11, David Brooks. Last Friday night PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, David Brooks and Mark ‘Maxi’ Shields doing analysis. During a discussion about this New York Times piece, the magazine interview with Obama, Jim Lehrer said, ‘Speaking of President Obama, there’s this big piece in your newspaper Sunday magazine, Brooks, already been read by everybody, at least anybody who’s got an advance copy and who is interested in politics about President Obama. What do you think of the piece, Mr. Brooks?’
BROOKS: I found it depressing. I found it depressing on a number of levels. The lesson I got was that their — they got — it’s not their fault, they’ve done the right thing, the country is not ready for us, Washington is not good enough for us. After Bill Clinton suffered a political setback in ’94 he did some real thinking and some real adjusting of how to adjust. I would say at least judging from that piece this process of thought and rethinking has not started in this White House.
RUSH: Precisely. They’re not gonna moderate. Obama’s not gonna move in the Republicans’ direction like many ranking Republicans believe he will, and it’s all based on the usual story line in Washington, that people want to get reelected. So the ranking Republican theory is Obama’s gonna get shellacked and he’s going to read that as people don’t like his policies. Since he wants to get reelected, he’s going to have to move away from his hard left ideas. David Brooks, reading the New York Times Sunday magazine, ‘I don’t see this happening.’ Now, Brooks, must be honest here, Brooks is one of these people that drank the Kool-Aid at the very beginning of this. Brooks is a guy who said of Obama, (paraphrasing) ‘I like the crease in his pants. He’s smart. He’s an intellectual, he’s like us, not a radical, very, very, very moderate guy.’ And so Brooks reads the New York Magazine piece and finds it depressing. None of this is their fault. They’ve done the right things; the country is not ready for ’em; Washington is not good enough for ’em.
Now, how is it that a brilliant intellectual like Brooks could not see that at the beginning and we could? All of us, we knew and we didn’t even have to go to dinner with Obama like Brooks did at George Will’s house. We knew Obama was a hard-left radical. There was no question about it. None of us were obsessed with hope that he would abandon that and move and govern from the precious center where these intellectuals seem to think all the right thinking people are, moderates. So Obama, he’s moved on from blaming Bush. Now he’s blaming you, he’s blaming the stupid voters. Washington is not ready for ’em. That piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine actually said if Obama can’t be great here, nobody can. If Obama can’t do it, nobody can. He had supermajorities in the House and Senate. It’s not as though the opposition coulda stopped him. They couldn’t. Not legislatively. He couldn’t even unify his own side.
The Politico today has this story: ‘Democrats on health reform: Let us fix it — Nervous Democrats are grasping for a new message on their party’s health care reform bill: Give us another shot, and we’ll get it right this time. ‘I want to reform it and fix it and make sure that it works for small businesses and their families,’ Alexi Giannoulias, the Democrat seeking President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat, said on Meet the Press on Sunday. ‘If you can fix it — Democrats and Republicans agree on six or seven items — that’s a pretty darn good start,’ West Virginia Gov. and Democratic Senate candidate Joe Manchin told Fox News on Monday. ‘I’d like to fix health care,’ Democratic Kentucky Senate candidate Jack Conway said in a debate last week with Republican contender Rand Paul. ‘He wants to repeal it. And I think that’s a stark difference.’ … And even House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who helped rustle votes for the bill in March, told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz late last month: ‘We have three years to make it better before it fully goes into effect.”
So the Democrats are running here admitting it’s a debacle. The Democrats want to reform health care reform. It’s kind of like they drove the health care car in the ditch and now they want the keys back. I mean you could throw Obama’s analogy and metaphor right at them. Democrats on health reform: let us fix it before it fully goes into effect. Nobody on the Democrat side is running on the accomplishment. Nobody on the Democrat side is saying, ‘Look what we did, vote for us.’ What they’re saying is, ‘Look what we did, let us fix it.’ Stunning. I love it.
Another Politico story: ‘The Democrats’ Brutal Weekend — More bad polls. More bad fundraising numbers. More dreary talk on the Sunday shows. It added up to a brutal weekend for Democrats, as the consensus among election analysts, already bearish on the party’s prospects, took a turn for the worse over the past 48 hours. … Analyst Stu Rothenberg pegs the number of competitive seats at 100. Charlie Cook says it’s 97. Virtually all of those seats are held by Democrats. Rothenberg is predicting a likely Republican gain of 40 to 50 seats, with 60 seats possible. Republicans need a net pickup of 39 seats to take the House. One House Democrat, reflecting widespread conversations with his colleagues, guessed Sunday that his party will lose 50 seats. Many, he said, are calling with urgent pleas for more contributions. The Senate may stay in Democratic hands — but only by the narrowest of margins, so slim that it will make a handful of moderates from both parties the only people who will decide whether anything gets done.’ Well, that’s just wonderful. This all equals gridlock, which is what we want. We want gridlock. So does the market, by the way. The Democrat majority is so slim it will make a handful of moderates from both parties the only people who will decide whether anything gets done in the Senate.
Let’s go back to David Brooks again on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on Friday night. They’re talking about the New York Times Sunday magazine piece, and Mark ‘Maxi’ Shields says to Brooks, ‘How would you like to be a Democrat member of the House fighting for your life right now, getting hit over the head for having voted for the stimulus and have the president say in the New York Times Sunday magazine, ‘There’s no such thing as a shovel-ready job.”
BROOKS: Yeah, I shouldn’t have confessed this. He said this to me off the record about a year ago. It was obvious. I mean you’re trying to build a stimulus package, I mean they were trying to build it, believe me, they would have loved to have filled it with infrastructure jobs. But the projects just didn’t exist, they couldn’t do it, they couldn’t find them.
RUSH: This is from a guy who loved Obama. This is from a guy, supposed conservative columnist in the New York Times who now admits that Obama told him off the record, hey, by the way, you know what? There aren’t any shovel-ready job, we’re just saying that cause I know these stupid Americans will go for it, it’s a way to sell it but there aren’t any shovel-ready jobs. And we’re just now hearing about it from a New York Times columnist, and he said, yeah, I wish I coulda reported it but it was off the record to me. Peter Baker who wrote the magazine piece got it on the record from Obama, and Brooks was praising him. Now, okay, Brooks is a columnist, slash, reporter, and something was said to him off the record, I understand he’s going to protect that. But shouldn’t that at least flavor his opinion pieces on Obama in the ensuing year? If he knows that Obama is lying to the American people about shovel-ready jobs, which was the number one sales slogan for infrastructure to get the stimulus passed, shouldn’t that make Brooks suspicious of other things? It didn’t, because during the whole year he kept writing glowingly of Obama and holding out hope that Obama would be this miracle man everybody portrayed him as being. So what good is David Brooks? He knew it a year ago. He knew substantively that Obama’s a cynic, arrogant, filled with contempt, and yet he writes of him in the exact opposite way, brilliant, forward thinking, moderate, willing to bend with the times, all these dreamy things that these moderate intellectuals fantasize about. Which, of course, by virtue of being fantasies, never come true.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s the Mark ‘Maxi’ Shields sound bite. Inside Washington, the syndicated show, during the roundtable, the host Gordon Peterson talking about the Chamber of Commerce attack, foreign money and all of that.
PETERSON: Well, it was absolutely — it was absolutely fallacious on their part and they made it up, the White House did. I mean, is there some foreign money? Perhaps. But that isn’t the story. The real story is domestic money.
RUSH: Yeah, they made it up, ho-hum, the White House made it up, let’s move on now, next topic. Made it up, nonstory here.