RUSH: I watched a little bit of Obama today. There was a web feed of an Obama appearance somewhere — and they were running it, of course, on DNCTV. They’re doing Obama telethons each of the next ten or 12 Tuesdays leading up to the convention. I mean, they’re not calling it Obamathons, but that’s what they are. Super Tuesday is devoted entirely to the presidential race, which is all they do 24/7 there anyway. At any rate, I’m watching and he’s talking about the health problems in this country, specific health insurance and he started talking about (and I spotted this, by the way, because I’m good at this). I spotted the tactic immediately. He started talking about the ‘underinsured.’ Now, this is a new category. The number ranges from anywhere, what, 40 to 43 million uninsured, and that was the number that Bill Clinton was using starting in the campaign of 1992, which dovetails with Jeffrey Lord here in a second.
That number has gone up despite eight years of Clinton, but now all of a sudden the ‘underinsured,’ people who have health insurance but they don’t have enough. And, lo and behold, a story from today from HealthDailyNews.com. ‘The number of American adults who have inadequate health insurance to cover their medical expenses rose 60% from 2003 to 2007, from 16 million to more than 25 million people.’ So if you have insurance and you are not worried about the issue, you now are part of the problem. You are underinsured and you are putting stress on the system, and you are going to be targeted, even those of you who have insurance but Obama and his people think not enough; you’re going to have to get it somewhere and they’re going to turn you to the government to get it. The underinsured are 25 million, added now to the 43 to 45 million uninsured. And, lo and behold, we’re up to around 65 to 70 million people with a health insurance problem in this country. And Obama’s going to fix it. Do you see the tactic here?
Jeffrey Lord’s piece: ‘Somewhere Lyndon B. Johnson has to be insulted,’ and he quotes Obama here from that acceptance speech Tuesday night of last week, wherever he was, St. Paul. ”[I]f we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…’ Excuse me? You mean all those LBJ Great Society programs didn’t provide care for the sick, secure good jobs for the jobless and take care of the environment? On the off-chance the Internet has a space limitation, let’s settle for a partial listing of LBJ’s efforts for the sick, the jobless, the environment and more as reflected in the list of legislation he proudly compiled and boasted of in his presidential memoir The Vantage Point.’
I only have a minute before the break, and I don’t have enough time to list for you every program or every area for which there are multiple programs in the Great Society and the war on poverty. ‘Clean Air. Vocational Training. Indian Vocational Training. Manpower Training.’ This is from LBJ’s own book. ‘Federal Airport Aid. Farm Program. Pesticide Controls. International Development Association. Urban Mass Transit. Water Resources Research. Federal Highway. Civil Service Pay Raise. War on Poverty. Truth-in-Securities. Medicine Bow National Forest. … Food Stamps. Housing Act. Nurse Training. Revenues for Recreation. Library Services. Federal Employee Health Benefits. Wilderness Areas.’ That’s a partial list, and Obama is out there saying it hasn’t worked because we are a compassionless country. We haven’t had the right charismatic messiah healing everybody with the power of his personality.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: If you’re just joining us, I was going through a piece by Jeffrey Lord right before the end of the previous hour in the American Spectator today (www.spectator.org) about Obama and his ongoing theory that the jobless can’t find work, that the sick cannot get well, that the oceans cannot be rolled back — and only with his election and with his messianic talents can all of these problems plaguing our once-great nation be fixed. Lord’s point here is: Wait a second, Obama. You have just insulted one of the Democrat Party’s heroes, LBJ, who authored the Great Society and the War on Poverty for the expressed purpose of healing the sick, finding work for the jobless, making sure the environment stayed clean and all of these things. Now, my point is focusing on all this is not so much to focus on Obama because it’s not a surprise that Obama — as a leftist — would be promoting Big Government, promoting the idea that America is in a permanent, constant state of decline.
That’s who they are. My point in focusing on this is to remind people just how much the government has spent, how many programs there are, and how ineffective they have been; and yet here we have another election where the point from the libs is, ‘We’re a heartless bunch of people. We don’t have any compassion. We have major suffering! We’re in a constant state of decline. We need government to move in where the Bush administration has failed.’ The government is what has failed, and that’s what’s illustrated by Jeffrey Lord’s piece. It’s sort of like this demagoguery that’s going on with Big Oil. Let me just ask you people a question. I know that you in this audience know this. I would love to go onto a college campus into a history class — a science class, a biology class, a political science class — and I would like to ask these young skulls full of mush in there one question:
‘Could you name for me the organizations who are, A, producing oil for you?’ Could you name for me the organizations, companies or what have you, that are doing their best to make sure when you pull up to the gas station, that there’s something there for you to put in your tank. And of course you would hope that they would say, ‘Well, Big Oil,’ to which I would then reply, ‘Well, then would you tell me why it is that your professors, probably — and the Democrats in the US Congress — are criticizing and trying to harm the only group of guys that’s involved in trying to create supplies of oil for your use? How does it figure?’ It’s just a matter of common sense. How does it figure that of the people who are responsible for making sure when you pull up there’s gasoline — when you get on the airplane there’s jet fuel in your airliner, when you need home heating oil there it is — the one group of guys doing anything to making happen, we have villainized. Not trying, we have!
We’re trying to destroy these people. It literally makes no sense. Has any college professor made it possible for you to fill up? Has any United States Senator or member of the House of Representatives made it possible for you to fill up? Has the president, any president, made it possible for you to fill up? No. Quite the contrary. A combination of these people are standing in the way of more supply at a lower price so that you can fill up at a price that’s not going to make you alter the rest of your life and the way you live it. And yet who have you been told to be mad at? The guys that are making it possible for you to get around. And it’s worked on so many people, the hatred for Big Oil, the suspicion that there’s some Oz behind this magic curtain that has the power to throw a switch and the price skyrockets, and we have wizards in the media even on our side who do entire programs on trying to find out who this Oz is, when there isn’t an Oz.
It would be tantamount to you needing surgery. Let’s say you need your appendix out, and it’s a crisis situation, and you go to the hospital and you’ve listened to nothing but Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy and all the other Democrats complain, whine — and Hillary Clinton — about health care, and you’re wheeled into the operating room, and it’s before that they have given you your sedation, and you start complaining and whining and moaning at them about whatever it’s going to cost to save your life. Imagine the doctors saying, ‘Okay, fine. Call Hillary Clinton. I’m going to go play golf. You get her in here and have your appendix taken out, or call Barack Obama.’ Now, back to Jeffrey Lord on the same principle here. I went through a list of just 1963 and half of 1964 from LBJ’s own memoir called The Vantage Point. Here are others:
‘Let’s move on to 1965, again with space prohibiting a full listing of what Senator Obama seems to feel were LBJ’s inadequacies in just not getting the job done: Medicare. Aid to Education. Higher Education. Four Year Farm Program. Department of Housing and Urban Development [creation]. Housing Act. Social Security Increase. Fair Immigration Law. Older Americans. Heart, Cancer, Stroke Program.’ Let me stop on that. Just how many — since 1965, when I was 14, I’m sitting here trying to remember how many times have I heard, in a State of the Union speech, for example, or a response, ‘We need to get started getting tough on cancer and heart disease’? Well, we’ve been doing that for most of our modern existence. It seems like people forget. It isn’t enough, because people are still dying from cancer and heart disease. And, see, the Democrats need people to believe that that’s going to stop happening. And so when people keep dying, ‘We’re just not doing enough! We need government to do more.’
We need government to do less! Just like yesterday, Dianne Feinstein said, ‘We gotta shut down the government-run Senate dining room. It’s losing money. It needs a $250,000 infusion. If we don’t get it, our prices are going up 25%.’ These are multimillionaires serving in the Senate worried about already-subsidized prices going up 25%. So they’re going to privatize it. They can’t run their own dining room! They want to run health care. They want to run the environment, they want to run, you name it. Just keep going.
‘Drug Controls. Mental Health Facilities. Health Professions. Medical Libraries. Vocational Rehabilitation. Anti-Poverty Program.’ Now, remember, we’ve already got in 1964 the War on Poverty, which was its own program. In ’65, we added to it with ‘Anti-Poverty Program. Arts and Humanities Foundation. Aid to Appalachia.’ To this day, Appalachia is what it is! It’s a cultural thing. We’ve been trying to fix Appalachia, and Appalachia says, ‘Screw it, we like who we are!’ There’s a new program, because Appalachia didn’t vote for Obama. So we’re going to get a new program for Appalachia. We had what’s-her-face — what’s-her-face? — Mrs. Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell referring to Appalachia and southern Virginia types as ‘rednecks,’ and she had to apologize for it five days later. We’re going to get to that. ‘Water Pollution Control,’ 1965. ‘High Speed Transit.’ Oh, yeah. All those light rail systems out there. High Speed Transit? I don’t know what it is. ‘Water Resources Council. Water desalting.’ That would be desalinization. ‘Juvenile Delinquency Control. Retirement for Public Servants.’
Now, Jeffrey Lord says wait, wait, wait, wait. ‘Stop! Stop with the list already! OK. But I warn you, we’re not even done with 1965 yet. With 1966, 1967 and 1968 still to go; I hate to leave out things like Child Nutrition, Rent Supplements, Clean Rivers, Child Safety, Narcotics Rehabilitation, Water Research, Water for Peace, Air Pollution Control, Education Act, Deaf-Blind Center, Safe Streets, Wholesome Poultry, School Breakfasts, Aircraft Noise Abatement, Better Housing, Oil Revenues for Recreation, Juvenile Delinquency Protection, Guaranteed Student Loans, Gun Controls, Aid-to-Handicapped Children, Hazardous Radiation Protection, and Dangerous Drugs Control.’ Now, after hearing all of this, ‘Is it any wonder that the ghost of LBJ is fuming? All of this and more, oh so much more, and suddenly here comes this Obama guy insisting that only by electing him can America ‘begin’ to ‘provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless’ and cite the Obama-era as the time ‘our planet began to heal…”
He has just effectively admitted that his own party’s great effort to fix all social ills, has failed. ‘Cause we have to ‘begin.’ Now, obviously, Obama doesn’t mean that. This is Democrat rhetoric. It’s built on the whole class envy business, built on the whole notion that they have tried to make as many Americans believe that we’re in a constant state of decline; that despite our prosperity, you are not paying enough. You are not contributing or ‘investing’ enough to help your fellow citizens who are in dire need. They’re in dire need despite transfers. Do you know what the total transfer now from the producers to non-producers, including the war on poverty and the Great Society. It’s over $6 trillion that has been transferred in the form of tax increases and benefits packages. It hasn’t worked. I mean, the percentages of people in poverty are still the same. And even if it had worked, the Democrats would still be clamoring for more, the leftists.
All of this can be placed underneath that umbrella, which was the big theme of yesterday’s program, that there is a very casual but direct onslaught on the concept of individual liberty and freedom — and it is being led by extreme, advanced leftists who have now taken over the Democrat Party. Joe Lieberman is a liberal, and they’ve kicked him out. It is extreme leftists who have hoped for, who have promoted the concept of America’s defeat in Iraq; promoted the concept that America’s heroes of today, the military, are criminals, rapists, and liars, thugs, murderers. It is those people who are doing everything they can to make you feel guilty enough that you’ll give up a
When the opposition, rather than fighting this and standing up for it, seeks to accept these premises and then tweak them a little bit and try to give a little conservative flavor to it because they’ve bought the notion the American people have already bought into this, they already think this is true; it’s a wasting of time trying to educate them and tell ’em it’s not. But it’s never too late to educate people and tell ’em that they’re being lied to. You don’t have to ‘revise’ conservatism. It doesn’t have to be ‘adapted.’ We don’t have to get rid of Ronald Reagan. The left never talks about getting rid of FDR. They never say that FDR is over with; the era of FDR is behind us. They never do that, but our side does, our own intelligentsia, conservative intelligentsia, ‘Well, we gotta get past Reagan.’ We can’t get past Reagan because the underlying foundation of Reagan was the concept that individual liberty and freedom never gets old. It never has to be reformed. It never has to be updated. It never has to be adapted. It has to be paid attention to because individual liberty and freedom is the root of all else that is conservatism.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Conservatism is under siege, it needs to be defended, and it needs to go on offense, and any Republican or any pseudo-conservative in our own media, in our own party running for office, any, any Republican, slash, conservative who thinks we need to add to this list of things that LBJ did is not conservative. Anybody who thinks we need a new program for unwed mothers, we got five. Anybody who thinks we need to a new program for the sick or for poverty, we’ve got 14. And any Republican, any conservative in the media, in the party who says we need more of these programs is not a conservative and should not be allowed to be called one because he or she is not.