RUSH: I am focusing on this economic turmoil for a host of reasons, but number one is, it’s a sitting duck issue for the Republicans, just as energy is, just as global warming is. All of these liberal cliche issues are sitting duck issues just to be swatted out of the park. Democrats created this mess that exists in the mortgage crisis, the housing crisis. And, by the way, folks, let me make one thing abundantly clear. It is not entirely fair to simply blame this whole thing on the fact that people who could not afford mortgages were nevertheless lent money. Once the price of money got to be very cheap, once they started making loans to people who could never pay ’em back, this spread throughout the whole housing market, and what was the result? It just inflated housing prices through the roof. We all remember the stories of investors buying houses, three and four at a time, and flipping them, never living in them, never moving into them. Lots of these foreclosures are homes that have never been lived in. People were not thrown out on the street. They were investors and they got out because they got caught on the flip, when all of a sudden this started to correct itself.
So this well-intentioned, and I’m not even going to say that, I don’t even want to give Clinton and his cronies the benefit of the doubt to say their intentions were honorable here. This was nothing other than buying votes. This was nothing other than expanding the size of government and getting it involved in every aspect of the private sector as possible. That’s what Bill Clinton was about, that’s what Robert Rubin was about, that’s what Jamie Gorelick was about, and they succeeded. So I don’t even cut them any slack and say this was all done with a benevolence. This was done selfishly as liberals do everything. They use every power they can to entrench government more and more in the private sector each and every day. So all kinds of turmoil, from the instruction from the Clinton people to go ahead and loan money to people who could never pay it back. Now we’ve got Obama, who doesn’t have a clue, trust me, in terms of education, in terms of understanding, he doesn’t have a clue what this is really all about. All he can do is go out and mouth sentences written for him by David Axelrod on his teleprompter demanding new regulation, reregulation, more punishment for the people on Wall Street who screwed all this up, in the meantime, totally exonerating those who had every role, every bit of responsibility in this.
I tell you, Obama’s a sitting duck. Just as when he went to San Francisco for that private fundraiser and came out with the bitter clingers comment, so he’s doing it again. Let’s examine how Obama is behaving, this man of the people, The Messiah, the man who has the hopes and dreams of the American people in his hands. While you are suffering, while you are worried because of all the tumult in the media about this, and with legitimate concerns, what happens to your money if it’s at Lehman? And now they’re talking about AIG, the insurance giant. AIG is my insurer. For the record, I’m not worried, just so you know, AIG is my insurer. The media is obsessed today, what’s going to happen with AIG. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen with AIG. CNBC, government money now on the table for AIG. So you folks are going to be buying my insurance. How do you feel about that? Not directly, but I don’t know how else to put it. Government, the treasury is open for AIG. That means your tax dollars are open for AIG, which is massive insurance company, does some other things as well. When I tell you I’m not worried, it’s not ’cause I know the government’s going to take over, it’s ’cause I know that I’m going to be okay, as we all are.
Remember the savings and loan mess? We came out of that, didn’t we? We’ve come out of a lot of messes. We even came out of the Great Depression, and they’re talking about another one, a Great Depression. How many of you lived through the Great Depression? How many of you know what it was? When Obama starts talking about we’re on the threshold of a depression, what does that mean to you? Well, let me describe the Great Depression for you, because my grandparents and parents lived through it, and they never let me forget it. In fact it was the formative experience of my father and mother’s lives, and they raised my brother and me in ways that they hoped would prevent us from ever being affected by the next one, which there hasn’t been a next one. And that was why my dad was so insistent that I get a college degree. Of course, the educational aspects meant a lot to him, too, but back then, from 1929 forward, if you didn’t have a college degree, you were SOL, you didn’t have a prayer unless you were an entrepreneur willing to take risks and so forth. So he kept pushing this at me, and I said, ‘Dad, I don’t want to go to college. I hate school. I despise it. I feel like I’m in prison. I’m smarter than teachers. And you always side with the teachers. And I want to get out of there. I know what I want to do, and I look out the window and I see the bread truck go by, I wish I was driving the bread truck; at least I wouldn’t be in prison.’
So I eventually had my way, but he, until five or six years before he died, thought he was a failure as a father because I didn’t have a college degree because of how bad the Great Depression was. Try 35% unemployment, try real soup lines, try Americans really starving. But even during the Great Depression, guess what? We built the Empire State Building, we built the Hoover Dam, and we built both bridges in San Francisco. We came out of it. While all this talk about the Great Depression is going on, led, of course, by the Obama forces, what is Obama doing? Well, Obama’s close to raising $400 million, an all-time record. What depression? What recession? What bad economy? Who is the candidate of the rich, $400 million from individual Americans. His running mate Joe Biden’s son was a Washington lobbyist, who they just asked to leave, by the way. Do you know Biden was one of the biggest recipients of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Biden was, not his son. Biden, I have the list of people here who received campaign contributions. (interruption) What’s funny? You’re distracting me. What have I said that’s funny in there? Hmm? Hm-hm. Oh, jeez, Dawn. Aw, this is too funny. Okay, so when I said Obama’s close to raising $400 million, Dawn’s in there saying, ‘Yeah, that’s eight years’ worth of work for some people.’ Now, Dawn, that’s really unfair of you, because I’m not asking people to give me anything.
Obama’s running around with his hand out producing nothing, and people are filling up his hand to the tune of $400 million, in a near-depression economy? His running mate’s son was a Washington lobbyist. Biden was one of the biggest recipients of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His advisor, Jim Johnson, made tens of millions of dollars from Fannie Mae. He claims to represent the middle class, and he claims this is an example of Republican and capitalism flaws? This is a sitting duck! And Franklin Raines made close to a hundred million dollars from Fannie Mae and he’s on Obama’s economic advisor team. Let me tell you the dirty little secret here, folks. Barack Obama believes in getting rich, and he’s done it. You know when he did it? When did Barack Obama get rich? During the Bush years, and what’s he out there saying on the campaign trail about the Bush years? That all hell’s broken out, that nobody’s had any chance economically. In 1996 at the Democrat convention Barack Obama couldn’t even get a credential. He had to take a cab home from LA to Chicago. He didn’t have any money.
Four years later Bush gets elected, now Obama’s got two autobiographies, which I refuse to believe he wrote. There is more information in the Stack today about abject lies in his books. One of them has to with the fact that one of the most touching moments for him was when he saw astronauts land, coming back from the moon or from space, and come back home, he watched it in person, with one of his family members. In the book he writes that whoever he was with, uncle, father, grandfather, who knows, this family is all over the world; I don’t know which one it was. He claims that the adult family member he was with got a tear in his eye, and said, ‘America, we can do anything.’ Now, people have looked this up. Obama was in either Hawaii or Indonesia when the three possible space shots landed during the time frame he gave them. The two of them that were closest to Hawaii were hundreds of miles away. He couldn’t have seen them. The third one was a Russian Soyuz. That was also hundreds of miles away. They were Apollo missions. He doesn’t specify which Apollo mission that he saw, that he was there when the astronauts landed. The astronauts were put on quarantine buses on the aircraft carriers. There weren’t any parades until long after. There were only two crews who got parades anyway, which one was the one that had a problem up there? Apollo 13.
The point is there are people looking into this now, because, A, these books are written in a way that utterly competent professional would write, and he’s written two of them, and he hasn’t lived a life long enough to fill two chapters being honest about what he’s done. So the guy is a fraud. He’s a fraud from day one. These books were written specifically for this moment, a presidential run, to hide and disguise who Barack Obama really is. Barack Obama believes in getting rich. He believes his running mate’s son should get rich. He believes his Democrat friends should get rich. He just doesn’t think anybody else should be able to make any money. And in fact, wants you to think you have no choice, no chance to make any money, because the Republicans are screwing you out of everything because of their tax cuts for the rich.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, let me clarify one thing. What I was just talking about with Obama and his astronaut dealy, the confusion is from his video at the Democrat National Convention. In the book, Dreams from My Father: ‘One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders as the astronauts in one of the Apollo missions arrived at Hickam Air Force Base after a successful splashdown. I remember the astronauts in aviator glasses being far away, barely visible through the portal of an isolation chamber, but Gramps would always swear that one of the astronauts waved just at me and that I waved back. He was part of the story he told himself, with his black son-in-law and his brown grandson, Gramps had entered the space age.’ Now, the video describes an entirely different circumstance and doesn’t specify which Apollo mission, just like this one doesn’t. If it really happened, you say it’s Apollo 11, or Apollo 13. Now, the account from his book, Dreams from My Father, it might be true from a distance looking through the porthole of an isolation chamber, but the video at his convention portrayed this in far more detail, with, you know, a lot more confusion as well.
Now, again, stick with me on this. We’re going to move on to Troopergate and I’ve got a lot of other things I want to get to here plus your phone calls, but just one other thing here on this sitting duck of an economic issue that’s been handed to the Republicans now, why hasn’t Obama called for a criminal investigation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? ‘Cause he can’t, because two members of his economic advisor team would be brought up. Why hasn’t Obama demanded congressional hearings with testimony from Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick? Why hasn’t Obama demanded that Johnson, Raines, and Gorelick return the tens of millions of dollars they received from these institutions to the shareholders? And why doesn’t he demand a special prosecutor to investigate these people?
Why doesn’t Obama criticize Chris Dodd and Barney Frank for blocking earlier reforms of these companies, including those proposed by the Bush administration and congressional Republicans? I’ll tell you why, I will answer the question myself, because Obama will not allow facts and evidence to interfere with his leftist ideology of more government, with his political pursuit of the presidency and his desire to trample all over private property. But this is why this is a gold mine. The McCain campaign has got to at some time figure out that they can’t just rely on Sarah Palin’s connection with the American people. They are running against Obama, and they gotta go out there, and Obama’s a Democrat, they’re running against Democrats. McCain’s out there talking about conducting an investigation into what happened, and that’s good. So keep it up. But it isn’t hard, and it isn’t incorrect to focus on the real culprits in this thing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, before we go to the phones, a couple of new Obama bites. You gotta hear these. He’s in Golden, Colorado, today. And remember, now, this is a man who is going to a $28,500 a plate fundraiser with Barbra Streisand headlining tonight. He’s expected to raise 9 million at this event tonight. He’s on his way to raising $400 million throughout his entire campaign. This is a man in 1996 who got kicked out of the Democrat convention, didn’t have any credentials, had to take a cab back, he had no money, his credit card was rejected from a bunch of places for rental cars or something. George Bush gets elected in 2000 and Obama is a multimillionaire. George Bush and his years, so often criticized by Barack Obama, those are the years Obama got rich, not during the Clinton years. The first of two sound bites.
OBAMA: What Senator McCain said yesterday fits with the same economic philosophy that he’s had for the last 26 years. It’s the philosophy that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down. It’s the philosophy that says even common sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise.
RUSH: No, it’s not.
OBAMA: It’s a philosophy that lets Washington lobbyists shred consumer protections and distort our economy so it works for the special interests instead of working people.
RUSH: Senator McCain, you are sitting on a gold mine here. We have just heard evidence this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Somebody wrote his answer for him on a prompter, wrote his speech. He hasn’t the slightest idea substantively what he is talking about here, and he has got so many factual errors in this, he is a sitting duck. If anybody screwed anything up, it was the Clinton administration, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick, Jim Johnson, Robert Rubin, these are the people that got rid of the regulations and replaced them with onerous demands on the private sector. I guess you could say they didn’t get rid of regulations, they overregulated them. Says we should give more and more to those with the most? What the hell is he talking about? McCain is opposing bailouts. He doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. What he’s talking about is not even relevant to the things that are happening today economically up on Wall Street. Then he blames Reagan for the S&Ls.
OBAMA: It happened in the 1980s when we loosened restrictions on S&Ls and appointed regulators who ignored even these weaker rules. Too many S&Ls took advantage of the lax rules set by Washington to gamble that they could make big money in speculative real estate. Confident of their clout in Washington, they made hundreds of billions in bad loans, knowing that if they lost money, the government would bail them out.
RUSH: Good Lord.
OBAMA: And they were right. The gambles did not pay off, our economy went into recession, and the taxpayers ended up footing the bill. Does that sound familiar?
RUSH: Yes, it sounds familiar. You should be describing what’s going on right now, you dolt. That is not what happened back then. Anyway, we’re dealing with a neophyte. In the 1980s, when the savings and loan scandal was going on, Barry was working at the newsletter, lying about his responsibilities with the newsletter in New York, which we discussed yesterday.
All right, let’s go to the phones, we’ll start in White Plains, New York, Alex, I’m glad you called. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: The key date on the financial crisis is November 12th, 1999. It was on that date President Bill Clinton signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. What that did was allow commercial and investment banks to consolidate. Now, banks began trading and underwriting assets called mortgage backed securities, CDOs, and SIVs, all of the toxic waste that’s coming home to roost today. That was after a one-year, $200 million lobbying effort by the Democrat lobbyists to put this thing through and it was done in opposition to the Congressional Research Service’s own report, the information is out there, all anyone has to do is go do a Web search for Glass-Steagall and repeal. It is unbelievable that the Democrat Party is trying to lay this at the at the foot of the Republican Party when it was Bill Clinton and Democrat lobbyists that pushed this thing through.
RUSH: I’m going to back you up on this, Alex, and I want you to listen to this with me. Robert B. Reich last night on MSNBC basically saying that Democrats and Clinton did exactly what you said.
REICH: In the latter years of the Clinton administration — when I was not there any longer, I should add — there was an attempt by Alan Greenspan and Bob Rubin and a few others to deregulate financial markets, and they did. They split commercial banking off from investment banking. And many people say, ‘Well, that was the beginning of the problem,’ and then, of course, in 2003-2004, Alan Greenspan reduced short-term interest rates to the point where every single bank wanted to lend money. I mean, if you could stand up straight, you could get a bank loan because there was so much pressure to get that money out the door. Money was so cheap.
RUSH: Okay, that’s good. So you see, Alex, he doesn’t use the name of the Glass-Steagall Act, but he’s basically describing what happened. He lays it off on Rubin and Greenspan rather than Clinton.
CALLER: But he’s also lying, Rush, because it wasn’t the new act that separated investment from commercial banking; it actually combined them. And the Congressional Research Service said this: ‘Depository institutions are supposed to be managed to limit risk. Their managers thus may not be conditioned to operate prudently in more speculative securities businesses.’ Rush, this is a problem that was caused by Democrat lobbyists and a Democrat president, and these are the historical facts.
RUSH: And, as you say, it’s coming home to roost and it just is, again, further evidence of the sitting duck nature of the Obama campaign. Look, what got me on this tirade today, if you’re just tuning in, what got me on this tirade was one of McCain’s chief economic advisors, Carly Fiorina was on MSNBC last night, and I like her. I’ve never met her, but she has a lot of stature. She dumped on George Bush for all of this, claiming he was from the Wild, Wild West, cowboy, no regulation, whatever, and that McCain’s not Bush and so forth. Bush is not the enemy here. You’re not going to win this election running against George W. Bush, and nor is Obama, for that matter, but I would encourage him to keep trying. But McCain certainly is not going to win this election running against Bush. I understand the need to distance themselves because Obama is trying to link McCain and Bush and so forth, but there are ways of doing this, but the Democrats are just sitting ducks on this, like energy and all these other issues. America’s chickens are coming home to roost here in a manner of speaking, and what we need to do here is have the fortitude, the testicular fortitude out there to start blaming the Democrats from the McCain campaign.
If McCain doesn’t want to do it, let Sarah Palin do it. Somebody’s gotta do it. And somebody’s gotta get hold of Carly Fiorina and have her read some things to get her up to speed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and who ran those joints into the ground and who was using them for what purposes, Democrats for political purposes.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Carolyn in Chesterfield, Virginia. I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. You know, Rush is one of my top ten favorite boys’ names, and I’m a longtime listener, but I’m a first-time suck-up.
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: I think the whole thing with McCain and with Obama illustrates so clearly to me one of my pet peeves about corporate America and it’s the confusion of management with leadership. When you look at Obama, how he approaches issues and how he deals with situations, he’s like a manager trying to fight fires all the time without any direction. He has no leadership presence to really look at the big picture. He’s so intent on finding some object of blame, particularly the Bush administration, and then trying to tie McCain to it and say, that’s what ails America. As far as the truth, he can’t see the truth for his ambition. He almost looks like he got dropped in Alaska and he doesn’t have the right clothes or hunting gear and there’s a bear coming at him. And you know he’s just going to get creamed. And, you know, you talk about sitting duck. But you look at McCain as a leader, and I kind of had hoped when he was in the primary and he was going up against Giuliani and he differentiated himself as a leader versus Giuliani being the manager and the different skills that are required as president, and I think McCain could do a good job as a leader or a manager. I think Obama doesn’t understand leadership. He thinks speaking inspires people, but that’s only one tiny element of leadership. There’s a lot more to it and he just doesn’t get it. When you were talking about puppets before, I just kept thinking of the old show, the Winchell-Mahoney show with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff. Every time I see Obama and Biden, that’s who I see. They’re just mouthing whatever they have to say to make people get a bad image of Bush.
RUSH: Well, that’s the bottom line here. It’s fascinating to watch the transformation of the Obama campaign. You could go back — in fact, I’ve got a bit here. I didn’t have time, I’m so crunched when this show is about to start, I find this stuff all over the place, didn’t have a chance to send this up to Cookie. But you go back and listen to a 30-second Obama ad before the Iowa cauci, the Hawkeye Cauci, and there’s Obama on his Messiah bit, he’s on this messianic role, ‘We are the word, we are the man, we are one.’ That’s gone. It’s striking to go listen to Barry pre-, well, even early 2008 and look at what’s happened to his campaign now. His campaign has been reduced to a traditional Democrat hack campaign. He is no different. He never has been, by the way, but he’s no different than any other Democrat who’s ever run for president, it doesn’t matter if the campaign manager is Axelrod or Plouffe or Bob Shrum or Beckel or Carville, it’s the same thing, it’s class envy. I mean Biden is repeating things he said in 1988 when he ran for the presidency the first time. There’s nothing to it. They’re trying to stoke fear, and there’s nothing inspirational about what these people say or do. It’s an indication here of just how his glory days are gone, and looking at the polling data, they know the glory days are gone.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
Allison in West Granby, Connecticut. Hi. Nice to have you here.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Yes. I’m from that lovely state of Connecticut, and everybody keeps saying, you know, they keep blaming Bush or the Republicans for this mess. What about Chris Dodd? How come he’s not doing a perp walk?
RUSH: Because he’s a Democrat. How come Obama is not being blamed? Chris Dodd is the number one guy who receives goodies, contributions, donations from Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and also Chris Dodd very, very close to the Countrywide guys, and he got a favorable mortgage deal he claims not to understand — just like Charlie Rangel, does not understand. He’s hired a forensic accountant. Charlie Rangel says, ‘Well, they started talking Spanish to me down there at the Dominican, and I didn’t know what they were talking about.’ Charlie Rangel is as typical a Democrat career politician as there is. He thinks that special deals are the norm; he isolates himself; greases his own skids; lies about what he reports to the IRS and on his financial data, and then expects to get away with it when he’s caught because he’s Charlie Rangel and he’s a Democrat. And he probably will get away with it. Same with these other guys. Obama is not going to call for an investigation because to do so would be to end up investigating three times as many Democrats as Republicans in this whole thing.