RUSH: Speaking of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you know what really is at the root of this: high-risk loans. High-risk loans. People had no way of paying them backs. They weren’t even asked about their ability in many cases, they weren’t asked to fill out the income or anything like that. High-risk loans were made on not much more than hope that they would be paid back, and each of these dead-end mortgages were pooled and packaged and sold and resold and resold on the hope that they would be paid back.
The loans were pushed by Democrats who actually were acquiring wealth and power for themselves while telling America these risky loans were going to be good for everybody. There was no history of untold numbers of unproven borrowers being capable of paying back loans of this size, but people just felt good about giving people that they knew nothing about the chance to live in a house that they had not earned. It was so typically socialist Democrat. ‘Oh, this is how we feel good. We gonna let people live in houses that they can’t pay back!’ By the way, remember this? And this is still true. Do you realize that 95%, 96% of Americans who have a mortgage are still paying them? Do you realize we’re talking here four or five percent. How could four or five percent of these mortgages failing cause all this? Well, like Chuck Schumer said yesterday, ‘Well, the lowly mortgage brought the economy to its knees.’
No, what happened is what was done with these mortgages. They were sold; they were resold. They were packaged. They were borrowed against. They were used as collateral for securities purchases. They were worthless from the get-go. It’s not so much that it’s just four or five percent of people in foreclosure; it’s the multiple of people who got rich trading, selling, packaging, borrowing on all this worthless paper — and that’s why it’s deep. People just felt good about giving people they knew nothing about a chance to live in a house that they had not earned. When I thought of it that way, when I thought of how good people felt about giving people they know nothing about the chance to live in a house they’ve not earned, I thought of Barack Obama and the White House. Barack Obama is nothing different than a high-risk loan.
He has no history of accomplishment. He has nothing besides a nice smile and a firm handshake as evidence he can deliver on what he promises. The White House shouldn’t be available to high-risk people, such as a 144-day junior senator who has a myriad of highly questionable, high-risk associates — and when he fails, we will be asked to bail out the United States for the damage that he caused. I’d like a little more collateral on a presidential candidate than just the having Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko as cosigners on his application! We know he’s the most liberal senator in America, and our country desperately needs to rein in spending and stimulate the economy — two things that liberals are totally unsuited for, especially a man who has surrounded himself with communists, Marxists, domestic terrorists, and anti-American bigots! Those are his cosigners, as he seeks a loan to be in the White House for a period of time. It might not be the time in our country’s history to take such a massive risk. We can all see how these massive risks can turn out.
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RUSH: I ought to continue on with this theme here of this empty suit that is Barack Obama and the media corruption that is in play here. Tony Blankley, a great piece today at Creators Syndicate: ”The Man Who Never Was’ — The mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign.’ It’s no longer journalism; it’s simply propaganda. ‘And as a result, we are less than seven weeks away from possibly electing a president who has not been thoroughly or even halfway honestly presented to the country by our watchdogs — the press. The image of Obama that the press has presented to the public is not a fair approximation of the real man. They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct. Thus, the public image of Obama is of a ‘man who never was.’ … The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to [Rush Limbaugh’s website] to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. … But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama’s life that are not reported at all.
‘The major media simply have not reported on Obama’s two years at New York’s Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. … Nor have the media paid any serious attention to Obama’s rise in Chicago politics. … The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media. Perhaps that is why the National Journal’s respected correspondent Stuart Taylor wrote, ‘The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis.’ The public will be voting based on the idealized image of the man who never was. If he wins, however, we will be governed by the sunken, cynical man Obama really is. One can only hope that the senior journalists will be judged as harshly for their professional misconduct as Wall Street’s leaders currently are for their failings.’
That is an excellent point, because there is as much corruption going on in the Drive-By Media as there is wherever it’s happening, Wall Street. This is a Democrat Party mess, though, folks, and all these people on Wall Street, for the most part, are Democrats, too. The dirty little secret, everybody thinks Wall Street’s a citadel of Republican free market capitalism. Think again. Everybody that’s ever run Goldman Sachs, dead in the water liberal. Lehman Brothers, dead in the water liberal. Citibank, dead in the water liberal. AIG — well, used to be headed by a conservative, got him out of there, Eliot Spitzer did that. And looky here: ‘The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under pressure to look at possible criminal activity in the financial markets, is expanding its corporate fraud inquiries in the wake of the tumult in the last 10 days, officials said Tuesday. The FBI has now opened preliminary investigations into possible fraud involving the four giant corporations at the center of the recent turmoil — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and the American International Group, The Associated Press reported. A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly,’ but said I’ll do it anyway if you don’t tell ’em who I am, ‘said it was ‘logical to assume’ that those four companies would come under investigation because of the many questions surrounding their recent collapse.’
Now, if this actually happens, folks, I hate to tell you, but they’re going to be investigating Democrats. Now, how come they’re not going to investigate Congress? Separation of powers, the feds can’t. You remember what happened, when the FBI wanted to get access to the office of Congressman William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana), none other than the Republican speaker of the House said, ‘Get outta here, you’re executive branch, you can’t come in here, rifle through our offices.’ But if you’re going to look at these groups, these are Democrat Party piggy banks. Lehman Brothers, do you realize Algore’s carbon industry went south when they went south? Do you also realize that there was no reason for them to go south? This is all due to Sarbanes-Oxley. This is all an overreaction to Enron, new accounting rules. The old accounting rules that existed before Enron, these people would not be out of business. But it’s called mark to market, and it’s not all that complicated but I’ve only got 30 seconds to try to explain this. Basically companies have to peg the value of their assets to what they could be sold for today. Well, guess what they had as their assets? All these worthless subprime mortgages. In the old days, you could do your accounting based on what you could get for these assets when you sold them down the road, when the market recovered. Sarbanes-Oxley doesn’t permit that, and they need to get rid of that. The guys that made this mess are sitting there on the left side of the aisle up in the House and the Senate, folks.