RUSH: Did you see Nancy Pelosi yesterday on Fox News Sunday? We have some sound bites here. Here is Chris Wallace asking Pelosi, ‘Would you be satisfied with having some troops in Iraq in 2013?’
PELOSI: No. I would think that the minimal temp — I would describe a minimal temporary force to be there for a few years following the end of next year.
RUSH: Okay, so she stutters and stammers and fumbles when hit with the troops in Iraq ’til ’13 question. Kooks can’t like this answer. What the kooks want to hear is ‘No, if I have anything to say about it, they’re getting out of there.’ Wallace said, ‘You said the other day that you were praying for President Bush to change his mind about vetoing the SCHIP program. Do you pray for our soldiers to win in Iraq?’
PELOSI: Well, of course I do.
WALLACE: To win?
PELOSI: Of course I do. Of course. What a question. First of all, I pray for President Bush all the time, and I prayed especially hard that he would sign the children’s health bill because it’s so important to America’s children.
WALLACE: When you pray for President Bush, what do you pray for?
PELOSI: I pray that — that — well, at the same time as I pray for him, I pray for America’s children, and that there can be some compatibility in their thinking. But I pray for his health, his well-being, I pray that — that he makes the right decisions for the American people. But when I —
WALLACE: Do you ever pray for him to change his policies?
PELOSI: All the time. But I — let me draw a line. When I was growing up in politics, we were always told that we shouldn’t pray for a political outcome, that we just pray that God’s will would be done, we pray for the children.
RUSH: Gee. (laughing) We pray for the children. Ah, yes, and, of course, now she later in the interview talked about how the SCHIP program — she actually admitted it, or Mrs. Clinton did in a recent statement. This is not for the poor anymore, it’s actually a middle-class program. Pelosi sits here and advocates this program, which already exists and nobody’s talking about cutting it, the president wants to expand it by $4 billion, but not to the extent the Democrats do. He wants to keep it a program for poor kids. Pelosi admits in this interview that she wants it to include families up to 60, $65,000 a year. Of course the question that needs to be asked is, ‘How come, of all things in life, particularly needs, where have we arrived as a nation where apparently a majority of us believe that the particular need of health care is one we should not have to bear personally? Why is it that we can scrounge up the money to send our kids to private school, but it’s somebody else’s responsibility to pay for that child’s health care? It’s not the parents’ job. Where did this settle in?’ I know where it settled in. You know how it used to be?
Back in the sixties you went to the doctor, you got a bill and paid it. It was that simple. There wasn’t any middleman, didn’t have insurance. The government got involved, prices spiraled, and the average pay-as-you-go customer couldn’t afford health care anymore as it gradually increased. Now we’ve got the point where people think, ‘I can’t afford it, I need help, and health care is a right,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So while people will go out and spend all kinds of money on a new car, or on a plasma TV, or private education, for some reason, the notion of paying for their own health care for their kids is not their responsibility. We are not going to survive as a nation if that number exceeds 55 or 60%, because then we’re going to have mob rule. We’re effectively going to have groups that will go through every neighborhood in the country and tell people, ‘I’m taking some of what you earn so my kid can have health insurance.’ It won’t happen that way, but it’s going to happen. It will happen with legislation and tax policy. Here’s the next bite. Question, ‘What message do you think that would send: a woman president addressing the nation with a woman speaker behind her?’
PELOSI: When I travel, people are so excited that there is a woman speaker, that we’ve broken the marble ceiling, and they’re excited for what it means for young girls. And fathers of daughters particularly have been enthusiastic about what it means for their children, for their daughters, that anything is possible. This is a men’s club here, it has been, and this — I think sometimes it’s harder to become speaker of the House than president of the United States for a woman.
RUSH: Really? Well, how come you became speaker first before we’ve had a female president? It may be a men’s club, but my God, how many of their testicles are in Mrs. Clinton and your lockboxes? It’s been chickified.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House — one of the most powerful people in government and in the country today — is lamenting that she’s still part of some old boy’s club. It just goes to show that no matter what you give libs, it’s never enough. One more sound bite here. There’s some demagoguery on display. Chris Wallace says, ‘The president says he’s willing to compromise on the SCHIP program. If you fail to override his veto, will you consider a deal or will you keep sending him back the same bill again and again?’
PELOSI: It’s hard to imagine how we could diminish the number of children who are covered. The president —
RUSH: Stop. We are not diminishing. This is so out of control. We’re going to add four million kids, folks! Currently, nine million are covered. We’re going to add four, under the president’s plan, but they’re poor kids. Pelosi admits that this is not about poor kids. It’s about the children in general.
PELOSI: — calls himself the decider, and I don’t know why he would want to decide that one child has health care and another does not.
RUSH: Stop the tape. I’ll tell you why, Madam Speaker. It’s because some families have the ability to afford it themselves without stealing it from their neighbors! He knows that it’s a stealth plan designed to advance the whole concept of socialized medicine by covering all children, not just the children this program was originally intended to cover: the poor. This, by the way, is how every government program ever started works. I don’t care if it’s Social Security, I don’t care if it’s Medicare. I don’t care. Whatever it is, the original cost estimates never matter because it grows and expands to cover more and more people who were never originally intended to be covered. She knows it. She’s pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes. This is pure liberalism on display here, disguised as demagoguery.
PELOSI: This is bipartisan. We took it to the number that we could pay for, and that could pass in the Senate and in the House. Right now we would be talking about dropping children. You have to remember, uh, that the difference that they are talking about here would be 40 days in Iraq, ten million children, for one year, or 40 days in Iraq.
RUSH: Oh, we can play this game all we want, ten million children for one year, we could pay for by reducing Medicare benefits, or by cutting one of the many programs that we already have for child poverty. This woman’s invested in losing in Iraq, and she didn’t admit that to his first question. She’s invested in losing. She wants to de-fund it. Everybody knows it. She and Reid just can’t get it done, because they are ineffective leaders for their side. They can’t get it done. By the way, this business that children would be cut? This is the same old balanced-budget game they play: baseline budgeting. They want an additional, what, nine or ten million children covered. The president is going to go along with four million additional children covered, so to them this a ‘cut.’ But it’s no such thing. Folks, really, it’s no more complicated than to say, ‘At what point do certain people of a certain lifestyle and income and above in this country, assume the responsibility of paying their kid’s health care?’ If it’s that important to people, if it’s a priority, then people should make the decision to do with something less. It’s their children! But for some reason we’ve gotten to a point where, ‘This is a need I shouldn’t have to pay for. The government should be paying for this! It’s only fair.’ Well, the government is your neighbors and fellow taxpayers.