RUSH: Now, there’s one other explanation for the VA mess only coming to light recently. And it may be a bit of a stretch because Obama may, and Shinseki may not have this degree of control over it, because this was affecting a whole lot of people, but it still has big possibilities here. Obama comes out yesterday and said (paraphrasing), “I didn’t know anything about this. I’m livid. I’m not gonna tolerate this. I’ve told Shinseki, ‘You investigate and you find out. We’re not gonna have this. We’re not gonna have 40 people die. We’re not gonna have all these fake wait lists. You fix it!'”

Why not come out and do this last year? Why not find out about it, get mad about it, and make a big deal of it earlier? And the answer — sad to say — plausible deniability. The only way that such a determined ignorance on the part of Obama makes any sense is if he didn’t want to know. And it’s entirely possible. You know, presidents love plausible deniability, particularly when there’s a scandal involved. “You keep my fingerprints off this. There aren’t gonna be smoking gun memos, IRS, whatever it is, I don’t want to know.”

See, he didn’t have to direct anybody to do anything. He’s got fellow travelers in all these key slots. They’re gonna do what he wants done. You think Eric Holder needs instructions from Obama on what to do? No. They’re cut from the same cloth. Lois Lerner, IRS, she didn’t need a memo instructing her what to do to screw the Tea Party. She’s gonna do it on her own. All she needs to know is that the commander-in-chief is gonna sign off on it. All she needs to know is that she’s gonna be covered. All she needs to know is that she’s pleasing the boss. All she needs to know is this is what boss wants done. But she doesn’t get a smoking gun memo. There isn’t gonna be one.

Same thing here with this VA business. But there’s another reason why Obama would not want the VA problems to come out in the media or anywhere else. In his entire first term Obama’s trying to sell us on Obamacare. The first two years he’s desperately trying to get this thing signed and passed, or passed and signed into law, and he can’t let, while all that’s going on, a scandal at the VA, which illustrates how poorly the government is running the health care system for veterans, come out. While he’s making this big push to get Obamacare signed into law, passed over there in the Senate and the House, he can’t allow for something like what’s gone on in the VA to become known. That would undercut the entire Obamacare effort.

So now that Obamacare is passed, signed into law and is in the process of being implemented, okay, now, we’ll take the lid off the VA and let things happen as they normally do. And, lo and behold, the way we’ll do it is I’ll act like I didn’t know. Plausible deniability, I’ll act like I’m mad and I’ll get to the bottom of it, and everybody will love me because they will think that I care. And, who knows, they might even think that people didn’t tell me. They might even feel sorry for me that I’m trying to do the best for everybody here and something’s gone wrong and I’m the CEO and they just didn’t tell me. Rely on that. Anything’s possible.

Perry in Cranbury, New Jersey, thank you for calling. It’s great to have you with us.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

CALLER: This is Cranbury, New Jersey, b-u-r-y. Our American post office, our US post office here is called the Todd Beamer Post Office. Remember him?

RUSH: Oh, Todd Beamer, yeah, “Let’s roll.”

CALLER: Okay, he brought it down. The reason why Americans tend to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt is because he got the bad guy. He got Osama Bin Laden. Now, you used the word before “ignorance.” Of course the root word of “ignorance” is “ignore.” Americans aren’t gonna ignore the fact that President Obama was not the one that sent us into Iraq for no reason. And then, furthermore, me and my wife pay $16,000 a year for health insurance. I’m a proud American, Rush. I don’t want it for free. I understand the free market system. I can afford maybe seven, five, but $16,000, I’m being victimized, and I don’t like it. And at least President Obama pretends or says that he’s concerned about the fact that I’m being victimized.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I don’t want the government to run the health care system, but I don’t want to be victimized.

RUSH: Now, you are explaining to me how an Obama supporter would look at this or how you look at it?

CALLER: How I look at it, Rush. I’m paying the $1600 a month and it’s a major health insurance company.

RUSH: Now, are you telling me that — so you’re a seminar caller. You think that Obama is getting a pass because he got bin Laden and because he’s fighting the insurance companies, they’re the bad guys, they’re the reason you’re paying 16 grand, and Obama is doing battle with ’em?

CALLER: Rush, in Cranbury we could smell the buildings burning. Anybody can go on YouTube and bring up President Bush saying that he didn’t even care where Osama Bin Laden was. These things were important to Americans. That’s why we’re patriots. My father stormed the beaches of Okinawa. You don’t just ignore the one who attacked you.

RUSH: Okay. So I got it, I got it. You have been very helpful. You’ve been very helpful. I would in no way ever assume an intelligent person thinks the way you do. But, I have had to deal with it here in this call, because what you are telling me is that Obama’s getting a pass on all this ’cause he didn’t send us into Iraq, Bush did, and he got bin Laden, and Bush didn’t even care about bin Laden. He didn’t care where bin Laden was. And now you’re paying $16,000 a year for health insurance, and, by God, Obama’s not happy about it, and he knows you’re being victimized by the evil insurance companies and so Obama, he’s getting your vote, he’s getting your support because he’s on your side.

This is the Limbaugh Theorem on display, right here. Bush did it. And, believe me, do you know that in certain polls on the economy Bush is still being blamed more than Obama? It’s closing, the gap is like 51-49 right now. But many more people still blame Bush for this economy, after six years of Obama, than they blame Obama. This guy, Bush didn’t care about bin Laden. He sent us into a war that we didn’t need to go to. He didn’t want to get bin Laden. He didn’t care. He didn’t try. It all boils down to this, doesn’t it? He didn’t care. He didn’t care where Obama was, or bin Laden, he didn’t care about getting him.

He didn’t care about us. He didn’t care what it was costing me to live. He didn’t care how much my health insurance was, Obama does. Obama doesn’t want me to be a victim of America. And there you have it. Limbaugh Theorem on display. This is exactly how it works. Obama didn’t send us into a war and Bush didn’t want to get bin Laden. Obama got bin Laden, got us out of the war nobody wanted, and cares that the insurance companies are victimizing people. It’s probably pretty representative of the way the Northeastern liberals look at all this. Well, some of it’s gotta be widespread. I know that 51-49 still blaming Bush for the economy is not just the Northeast. It’s narrowing.

Here, try this. I alluded to this earlier. I got it right here in the New York Times: “Democrats Seek Issues to Lure Midterm Votes After Races Buoy GOP — With TuesdayÂ’s primaries reinforcing the strength of the Republican establishment –” by the way, that’s another thing. If I have time, I might — the Drive-Bys are reveling here in reporting the death of the Tea Party. That’s an ancillary thing from this story. Maybe we’ll circle back to it.

“With TuesdayÂ’s primaries reinforcing the strength of the Republican establishment, House Democrats are reassessing their electoral strategy based on a major internal research project that shows their candidates stand a better chance when they portray Republicans as uncaring toward working-class Americans while they continue to back policies favoring the wealthy and corporate America. Democrats could build on this distrust, the research showed, by emphasizing support for policies such as equal pay for men and women, ensuring that corporations pay a fair share of taxes, and increased job opportunities in the United States.”

So Snerdley, in answer to your question, “is it widespread?” apparently so. And I take you back to the exit poll from the 2012 Romney-Obama race where, “Cares about people like me,” exit poll question, Obama won 81 to 19. What this research project, this so-called internal research project for the Democrats is showing, is that there’s still a wide perception that Republicans don’t care about people, particularly the middle class. But the Democrats do. And the evidence that the Democrats care, A, they care, B, they want equality. They want equal pay for men and women. And they want corporations to really get socked.

And it would dovetail with what our caller from Cranbury, New Jersey, said. He just loves the fact that Obama took it to the insurance companies. The fact that Obama is ripping the insurance companies — wait ’til he finds out Obama’s gonna bail ’em out. I wonder if that’s gonna make him mad. We haven’t talked about that but the story is in the Stack. Obama’s gonna bail out the insurance companies for all the money they are losing because his website doesn’t work, because Obamacare isn’t working, and because there’s no way for the insurance companies to get paid even for people who’ve signed up.

Obama needs the insurance companies to stay in business a little longer, because as the VA shows, the government’s not ready to run health care yet. They can’t even get their website up and running yet. People that have signed up for Obamacare and think they’ve paid for it — you remember those stories — the insurance companies have no record of it. And yet they’ve gotta provide payment for people when they go get their health care. Obama’s going to bail out the insurance companies because his own stupid website screwed up.

Now, wait ’til guys like our last caller from Cranbury, New Jersey, find out that the hated and despised insurance companies that they praise Obama for kicking their ass, are gonna get bailed out, by the guy kicking their ass. That’s gonna be fun when they hear that. But they may not hear it. The news sources they use may not report that. I have it in the Stack here. But it all seems to come down to this: Republicans don’t care and Democrats do. And it’s over things that you and I think are patently ridiculous.

Equal pay for men and women is a nonissue. Not a nonissue because it’s a problem, but because it no longer is. Women are running more and more things every day. The idea that women are underpaid is something that’s been dealt with. Yet it doesn’t matter what people know. Just pound ’em with the idea, equality, War on Women, we’re amazed that works, Snerdley, but it does with a significant percentage of the voting population.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The insurance industry story basically is that the insurance companies — some of them/pretty much all of them — have announced or are preparing to announce higher premiums before the midterm elections. Folks, it’s a real serious problem. The Obamacare website remains a de facto nonentity. People have signed up, but there is no evidence that they’ve signed up.

Plus, the insurance companies are not being paid by anywhere near by the number of people who have enrolled, which is a very small number when compared to the population anyway. Yet the insurance companies still have to provide payment. So they, like anything else, are gonna raise their premiums to cover people who are not paying them, and Obama doesn’t want that.

If they start announcing premium increases before the elections, Obama can’t run the risk that that’ll be blamed on Obamacare. He’s gonna bail ’em out. The LA Times even has the story: “The stakes are high for President Obama and the health care law. … Insurers around the country have started to file proposed 2015 premiums,” new premiums for next year announced this year.

Obamacare “remains a top campaign issue, and big premium increases in states with tightly contested races could prove politically disastrous for Democrats.” So the only solution for Obama is to bail ’em out. Cover their losses. Because his website is not transferring payments. He can’t afford for them to go out of business yet.

That’s, you know, five or six years down the road, but not now. He needs them now, especially with this VA scandal going on. Now, here, listening to this. This is Pelosi at her weekly press briefing, talking about the Benghazi thing and number of other things. But the point… Well, this is self-explanatory. I’ll analyze it after you hear it.

PELOSI: Maybe when we go into war we should be thinking about its consequences and its ramifications. You would think that would be a given, but maybe it wasn’t. And so we go into a war in Iraq — go into Afghanistan, leave Afghanistan for Iraq with unfinished business in Afghanistan. Ten years later, we have all of these additional veterans. In the past five years, two million more veterans needing benefits from the VA. That’s a huge, huge increase.

RUSH: Okay. So this is a harbinger. This is a little lead advance on what the Democrats’ plan is for the VA scandal. I guarantee you that the Obama investigation is aimed at this. This is why he called for it. Not to get to the bottom of it, but to fake an answer. Obama’s investigation of Shinseki and what’s going on the VA is gonna be laid off on Bush for his two “unnecessary wars.”

They were unnecessary ’cause Obama got Osama without a war. He didn’t need a war. So Bush wasted two wars. We got all these veterans and all these wounded and all these injured, and it’s all Bush’s fault. It has nothing to do with Obama, and nothing to do with the way he’s running the VA, because nobody could be running the VA well enough to absorb all of these unnecessary wounded soldiers because Bush started two wars we didn’t need.

If you don’t think that’s gonna resonate in New Jersey and New York and California, you have another thing coming.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Would you grab that last Pelosi sound bite? I just threw the transcript away, and I can’t find it, it’s in a mess. It’s sound bite number 24 and it’s Pelosi. This is what they’re setting up, folks, in terms of this VA scandal. It’s why Obama announced his investigation yesterday. And, by the way, before we get to number 24, while you find number 24, grab numbers 11 and 12, because this is somewhat interesting, and it’s CNN. They didn’t get the memo on how to deal with this. It’s actually somewhat amazing.

Last night, Anderson Cooper 360, the correspondent Drew Griffin. This guy’s already made news for not understanding how Obama could go out there yesterday and act mad. This guy doesn’t get it. “How do you know not know? You’re president.” We had that sound bite yesterday. How does he not know what’s going on? So last night after the press conference — and I want you to hear the shock in this guy’s voice. Drew Griffin interviewed the medical director of the Phoenix VA post-deployment clinic — her name is Dr. Katherine Mitchell — about the VA hospital medical treatment. During this discussion about wait lines for veterans to receive treatment, this is the conversation that took place.

GRIFFIN: You’re telling me that our troops coming back from war now separated from active service, coming to the Phoenix VA for follow-up care for war injuries, are being put on a waiting list and made to wait six to 10 months?

MITCHELL: Yes, or longer.

GRIFFIN: You’re kidding.

MITCHELL: No. But it’s the same for everyone. Everyone is made to wait.

GRIFFIN: That’s now?

MITCHELL: Yeah.

GRIFFIN: That’s happening now?

MITCHELL: Yeah.

GRIFFIN: Can you tell me what type of person we’re talking about?

MITCHELL: We’re talking about people that were injured by being blown up by IEDs. We’re talking about people who had a mental breakdown and have severe PTSD and can’t — are having trouble functioning. We’re talking about veterans that were severely injured.

RUSH: Now, the CNN guy can’t believe what he’s hearing. He can’t believe this. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t compute. Now, somehow they have got to get from this to it being Bush’s fault, see. Because this guy, Drew Griffin, this is the normal reaction to have. We’re six years into the Obama administration. We’re still in Afghanistan because of Obama. He’s got his drawdown, but he’s not pulled everybody out yet. We’re still there. Gitmo is still open, and we’re still capturing bad guys around the planet. And so this guy learns about all these delays, people not being treated and worse, and he can’t believe it. That’s the normal reaction. And this follows — you’ll have to remember, we had a sound bite from the same reporter yesterday who couldn’t believe that Obama would go out yesterday and act like he didn’t know about any of this. So then after this little exchange, Anderson Cooper weighed in with his two cents.

COOPER: I mean, it’s really incredible. I mean, you know, we all hear about delays and stuff, but, I mean, somebody who’s recently returned with a war injury, with an IED injury, lost a limb, severe PTSD is told to wait 10 months, I mean, that’s insane.

RUSH: Yeah, it’s insane. Now, what they’re going to have to do is transfer this incredulity and anger to it being the fault of George W. Bush. ‘Cause right now the normal reaction — this is six years we’re into the Obama administration. We’re in the second term. How can Shinseki or Obama or whoever allow this to happen? That’s the normal reaction. So let’s re-listen to Pelosi from earlier today as she sets the stage for how all of this at the VA is gonna end up being blamed on George Bush.

PELOSI: Maybe when we go into war we should be thinking about its consequences and its ramifications. You would think that would be a given, but maybe it wasn’t. And so we go into a war in Iraq — go into Afghanistan, leave Afghanistan for Iraq with unfinished business in Afghanistan. Ten years later, we have all of these additional veterans. In the past five years, two million more veterans needing benefits from the VA. That’s a huge, huge increase.

RUSH: So you see, Bush. Ten years later, we have all these additional veterans. So this anger that you just heard on CNN, this incredulity, they’re gonna blame it on Bush, unnecessary wars. We didn’t need a war to get bin Laden. Osama was killed by Obama without a war, we didn’t need a war. Bush, these two wars, they were wasted, and now all of these wounded vets are coming back, and poor Obama, he can’t handle the load. Nobody could, because it was Bush’s fault.

This is where they’re gonna take this. Folks, they’re getting away with blaming Bush for everything else. I mean, the public, 51-49, still blames Bush for the economy, not Obama. You just heard this guy from Cranbury, New Jersey. His insurance premiums are $16,000 a year precisely because of Obamacare. He’s blaming Bush. And he’s applauding Obama ’cause he thinks Obama is sticking it to the insurance companies, getting even with ’em. Everybody hates the insurance companies, Obama does too, and he’s getting even with them for us. Wait ’til this guy finds out Obama’s gonna bail them out so they can continue to charge him $16,000 a year.

But I remember, ladies and gentlemen, when the Democrats used to pretend we had to fight in Afghanistan. Remember, the whole time we’re in Iraq, the Democrats said, “This is the wrong war. We don’t need to be here. We need to be in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is where that war was launched. Afghanistan is where bin Laden is, Afghanistan.” They couldn’t wait to get into Afghanistan. But the wars are irrelevant. The problem is the covering up, the lying, the hidden waiting list, people dying because of the lying.

They’re not dying because of the wars. They’re not denying because of Bush. They’re dying because the VA can’t handle it and so they’re coming up with hidden waiting lists and any number of other things to cover up the inability to handle treatment. And the people at the VA wanted to keep getting their bonuses, and the bonuses were rooted in numbers of people treated. So they had to doctor the waiting list to make it look like more people were moving off the waiting lists and getting treated, which is why they set up the secret waiting lists. They transferred people to those to get ’em off the main waiting list to make it look like they’d been processed.

That’s why the waiting lists were secret, so nobody could find them. But the lid blew and people have found out about it now because of a whistleblower who has told everybody what was going on. Bush didn’t do any of this. The Republicans didn’t do any of this. The Democrats own the Veterans Administration, right now. Shinseki and these guys have been running it since Obama was immaculated. But nevertheless we now know that there are plenty of really, really ignorant, gullible people who just want to blame Bush for all this, so much has their hatred been ginned up, so much do they hate Bush. I mean, it took the media six years to make it happen, or five, but they pulled it off.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Mike in Washington, you’re next. Great to have you here, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. How are you?

RUSH: I’m great. Glad you called.

CALLER: Listen, I want to talk about this VA fiasco. I lay the whole thing right at Obama’s and Democrat Party’s feet. Obama, for six years has been cutting budgets, cutting budgets, and it sure as heck hasn’t been the food stamp budget he’s been cutting. If you want to go back even further, sometime in the early nineties, early in the Clinton administration, there was a big move on to convert VA beds to AIDS beds. You may remember it. The Clinton administration wanted to close down VA hospitals for AIDS patients.

RUSH: Yeah, I was gonna ask, “What do you think would be the case if…?” (chuckles) Well, never mind.

CALLER: You don’t want to answer to that question.

RUSH: Yeah. If AIDS were involved in this VA scandal, what do you think would be the reaction? Do you think there’d be any delays and secret waiting lists and all that?

CALLER: There wouldn’t be any delays.

RUSH: No. Not at all.

CALLER: The idea was to take it away from people who earned the right to the bed and give it to people who didn’t earn the right to the bed.

RUSH: Well, I don’t know about “didn’t,” but it’s clear that Democrats are gonna pander to donors and constituency groups here

CALLER: Yup.

RUSH: You know, one of the most recent callers said, “Look, Obama doesn’t like military people, they don’t vote for him, and so they’re not gonna be at the top of his list,” like you say food stamp recipients will be.

CALLER: And there’s not that many of us anymore.

RUSH: Veterans, you mean?

CALLER: Yeah. I mean, World War II had 15 million people in uniform. Vietnam had —

RUSH: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You heard her. Nancy Pelosi today is saying that we got two wars, two unnecessary wars worth of wounded veterans.

CALLER: Yeah, right —

RUSH: And that they’re flooding the VA system. (crosstalk)

CALLER: — military manpower business. She’s so full of it you won’t even want to talk about it.

RUSH: (laughing) Well, you don’t have to convince me. But she did, she’s out there saying that these two unnecessary wars have flooded the VA with wounded that we wouldn’t otherwise have had. And yet you’re saying that this number pales in comparison to World War II vets, obviously true.

CALLER: Well, yeah, it’s like the fire department. You don’t close down the fire department because you have a couple of good years with no fires. You don’t close down the VA because you have a couple of good administrations with not many veterans needing the facilities. But you’ve got to be there when it’s needed. And the Democrat Party keeps squeezing, squeezing. When we have a time of relative peace, they squeeze it down, and then they scream and holler when there’s not enough when something gets hot. It’s mindless. It’s insane.

RUSH: This screaming and hollering, though, it’s phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n’ roll anyway. I mean, they’re complaining about it because it’s a scandal. I mean, Obama had to go out and act mad about it. If he really was mad, it wouldn’t have taken all these years to show it. But look, he’s got a point here, folks, Mike does, because World War II vets, this is gonna shock you. World War II veterans were 11% of the American population back then. We’re nowhere near that number, percentage-wise, today, with Afghanistan and Iraq and whatever other deployments there have been in the War on Terror.

Eleven percent of the population, World War II vets. Nowhere near that now. But I do think, you know, we’ll find out soon enough, but the Democrats, they’re still goaled in blaming George W. Bush for whatever. And Pelosi’s little press conference this morning sets the stage for what I think Obama’s unnecessary investigation — it’s like this Drew Griffin guy at CNN said yesterday when Obama announced the investigation, he actually went on CNN. I’m surprised he was back today. He went on CNN, said, “What do you mean investigate? We already know what happened here. We know about the secret lists. We know about the deaths. We know that people aren’t being treated. What do you mean, investigate?”

Well, Pelosi’s little presser today told us why. They’re gonna do an investigation, they’re gonna find out the VA has been flooded with injured and wounded vets because of two unnecessary wars started by George W. Bush. And that’s all they’re gonna have to say. They’re into turnout here, folks. They’ve got to find something to turn people out. They can’t turn people out in November saying, “Vote for us so you can keep on getting more of this,” ’cause nobody wants more of what they’ve offered.

So they’ve got to scare everybody about the Republicans and what they’re gonna do and how bad and mean they are, and Bush works magic in that regard. So just keep a sharp eye. (interruption) What was your question, Snerdley? ‘Cause it’s veterans. The reason they’re worried that this could really hurt: veterans, veterans being wounded, veterans dying, veterans not being treated. That crosses party lines in most parts of the country.