RUSH: If you don’t know what happened in the White House meeting, you’d have to say the Democrat spin today that this is all McCain’s fault, that his arrival blew this up, that’s their theme today and that’s what they’re trying to sell. This morning at a Capitol Hill press conference Dingy Harry and Chris Dodd — these guys make me sick — these guys make me physically angry watching them. They insult my intelligence.
Dawn asked me today about a half hour before the program, ‘You think Chris Dodd’s having trouble sleeping at night?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, because he’s so involved in this.’ I said, ‘No. Chris Dodd knows nothing’s going to happen to him, and Barney Frank knows nothing’s going to happen to him.’ Nobody’s going to investigate them, and their voters are not going to throw ’em out of office. They’re not worried. These guys are the most arrogant, condescending people you’d ever want to run into. Dodd reminds me of a slick snake oil salesman. Dingy Harry is just a mean, bitter little man, and Barney Frank is just Barney Frank. I mean he’s one of the most outrageous partisans, socialists to come down the pike. That’s who they are. So here, listen to Dingy Harry today, portion of his remarks at the press conference.
REID: The insertion of presidential politics has not been helpful. I repeat. The insertion of presidential politics has not been helpful. It’s been harmful. A few days ago I called on Senator McCain to take a stand, let us know where he stands on the issue, on this bailout. But all he has done is stand in front of the cameras.
RUSH: Wait a second, Senator Reid. These guys want it both ways. You can’t have him here, it’s the insertion of presidential politics, yet you want him to take a stand on it. But that phrase, ‘the insertion of presidential politics has not been helpful, I repeat, the insertion of presidential politics has not been helpful,’ that’s at McCain. It’s not aimed at Bush, certainly not aimed at Obama. It is aimed at McCain. These are his buddies, by the way. I want to point out these are his precious Democrat friends on the other side of the aisle in the United States Senate who are trying to wipe him out. Dingy Harry continued.
REID: We have Senator Bennett, who is a high-ranking Republican senator, standing before all of you saying we’ve got a deal in principle. All we have to do is put it down in writing and this — this is almost over with. And then, guess who came to town? And that completely fell apart. The vehicle came off the tracks. Now, the Republican House has to decide what they want to do. Are they serious about one of the issues that has to be taken care of, is lowering the capital gains tax? Is that part of what this is all about? They’re going to have to become realistic.
RUSH: So, you see, ridicule conservatism, ridicule the concept of lower taxes on capital gains that spur investment, ridicule that, make fun of that, you guys in the House, Republicans, you gotta get serious. You really think that’s what we’re talking about here? Trying to shame ’em, ridicule them, they’d love for them to give that one up, folks. Sherrod Brown just said what you heard Dingy Harry say. Sherrod Brown just said it this morning. ‘The thing came off the tracks. Guess who came to town? And it completely fell apart.’ Well, Obama came to town, too. And the fact of the matter is, Senator Reid — and you all know it — what fell apart was the White House meeting because of Barack Obama’s incompetence and inability to conduct one. Stop and think of this, now. The president’s in there, he’s trying to do this negotiation, and the Democrats all defer to Obama. They’re going to make him their representative in there, all to set him up to establish his aura.
I guarantee you, if this meeting would have gone differently, you know what the spin after the meeting would have been? And Paulson would have not told anybody not to say anything. The spin would have been, ‘You shoulda seen Obama, I have never seen anybody command a meeting like he did. He walked in there, had command of the issues, and he pointed at everybody and he said you do this and you do this, and you do this and take care of that and we’ll get it done.’ That’s what they were hoping for, that’s what they wanted. They wanted a myth that Barack Obama came in there and took over the White House and was acting as president to get this done. Except one thing happened: He didn’t know what to do without the prompter. They forgot to send in the teleprompter. So it went off the rails. If it went off the rails, Senator Reid, it was your boy, it was your guy, it was your candidate, Barack Obama, who took it off the rails. Now, here’s Dingy Harry admitting most Americans don’t like it but that that doesn’t matter.
REID: Is this pleasant work? No, it’s not pleasant work. Look what’s happening with the calls coming into our offices and the e-mails. People are very unhappy with what we’re doing, but we believe we have an obligation to the country and that is Wall Street and Main Street.
RUSH: Well, now, isn’t it interesting, when you don’t like the Dubai Ports deal, they listen to you, when you don’t like immigration, they got the message. You don’t like this, screw you. You are Main Street, you’re Main Street, you’re letting them know you don’t like it, as you have heard about it, and yet they’re going to do it anyway. That ought to tell you something, too.
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RUSH: Here’s Harry Reid. We’re up to sound bite seven here. I want to get where you remember here on Senator Reed, because I just had just a brilliant memory flash. I’m embarrassed that I had forgotten this. Here’s Dingy Harry speaking to the press about the meeting. This is his version of what happened at the White House meeting.
REID: I would, um, suggest that anyone in that meeting that tried to understand what John McCain said at the meeting couldn’t. He was the last person to speak at the meeting, talked for a couple of minutes, and, um, really didn’t say anything substantive.
RUSH: I don’t know how somebody does this. How do you go out and do it when you know the exact opposite happened. Well, that may have happened. Who knows? McCain may not have made any sense, I don’t know. But how do you go out there knowing full well that your plan backfired totally, that your effort to make Obama take over that meeting and look presidential, to come out and spin it as, ‘We don’t even need Bush! We can just put Obama in there now. He was magnificent. He was brilliant! He took over this meeting. He made it sing.’ That’s what they wanted to say. Now, is this Harry Reid who said he doesn’t want McCain anywhere near this, get outta town? ‘McCain came in here, screwed it up, took it off the rails, the insertion of presidential politics.’
Here’s the memory flash. Wasn’t it Harry Reid, the same Harry Reid who said last week, ‘We don’t know what to do. We don’t have any idea. We don’t know what to do.’ I don’t even know if we had that sound bite last week, but I know he said it. ‘We don’t know what to do.’ It was that sound bite that led me to say, ‘These guys are going to leave town without doing anything.’ You remember I started saying, ‘These guys are going to split the seen without doing anything.’ They weren’t, but they wanted no part of this back then. ‘We don’t even know what to do. Nobody knows what to do.’ Less than a week later they have all the answers but only if the Republicans will sign on? This stinks, and I am focusing on the politics of this instead of the substance because nobody knows what the substance is going to be yet, folks. Nobody knows, because the politics is in it.
Frankly, it’s what interests me. It’s what’s instructive. It is what’s the most informative about this right now. We have the Democrat Party’s presidential candidate — this magnificent man, this man who has graced us with his birth and his presence, this man, the likes of which we have never seen trod the soil of the American political turf — can’t chair a meeting without it falling apart. The great unifier, ladies and gentlemen! The great unifier screwed it up. No wonder he really didn’t want to be involved in all this because it would be easier for him to be able to say he had no idea that ACORN, his community agitator group, was getting all that money. On here is Sherrod Brown this afternoon, Fox News Live, Jane Skinner talking to him. She said to Senator from Ohio, ‘How we going to reconcile this if something isn’t done? The White House just said the Treasury Secretary thinks at the start of business Monday, by the opening bell Monday, we need to have something.’
BROWN: Before Senator McCain went to the White House, um, there was general agreement among, uh, Senate Republicans, Senate Democrats, House Dems on — on broad outlines of the panel, not unanimous, I’m not there yesterday because of — because of several things, but generally broad consequences, and the House Republicans and Senator McCain kind of blew it up.
RUSH: Well, isn’t he saying there wasn’t a deal then? He’s admitting essentially. He slips up. There really wasn’t a deal, and he wasn’t even signed on to it. ‘Admittedly I’m not there yet,’ and then he dumps on the House Republicans and McCain. Folks, the politics of this is what’s instructive. The politics of this is what is informative. Sadly as well the politics of this is what is just infuriating and maddening. It’s very seldom that I say, ‘TGIF: I’m glad it’s Friday,’ but I need a break from this garbage. My skull is about to blow up. I’m that angry over what the Democrat Party is doing — and there’s a lot to be mad at them about, and it’s cumulative. You ask, ‘Well, if this bothers you, how come…?’ It all bothers me and it’s just a cumulative effect. I hate criminals getting away with it. I hate liars getting away with it. I hate the people who destroy institutions getting away with it, and then being put in charge to ‘fix’ them, which would only screw ’em up more. I hate that. I cannot stand that.
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RUSH: Harry Reid nine days ago…
REID: No one knows what to do. We are in new territory here.
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RUSH: So we just played a series of Harry Reid sound bites. By the way, I just had a friend send me a ten-minute YouTube video. I don’t have time to watch a ten-minute YouTube video, of course. But apparently it’s a joint press conference between Reid and Chris Countrywide Dodd, and Reid just loses it. He says things like, ‘Get drunk and vote for McCain,’ and some such things. I’ve gotta send this up to Cookie so she can start parsing this thing. But regardless, I listened to Harry Reid just lie through his teeth. Here’s a guy, they go to the White House meeting yesterday; he comes out and lies about what happens in there. What happened in that meeting was the Democrats arranged for Obama to chair the thing on their behalf, and he blew it up with his incompetence and his inability, and he has admitted as such.
If you know what went on in there and if you listen to his sound bites later in the night, then you know that he knows he blew it up in there. He caused the whole thing to fall apart. The great unifier, the great Messiah, the great community organizer, couldn’t organize diddly-squat in the cabinet room yesterday. It fell totally apart, and he ends up admitting it. ‘You know, sometimes I work better on the phone, talking to the principals from afar. I think we’ve learned from the insertion of presidential politics.’ Meanwhile, Harry Reid is lying that McCain blew it up! I think Reid is unstable, is where I’m headed here. I think Harry Reid is unstable, among all the other things that he is. Now, here’s Harry Reid, ‘We got a deal. We don’t need the president involved. We don’t need anybody involved. We can handle this.’
This is September 26th. On September 17th, Bloomberg News reported (this is nine days ago): ‘US Congress is unlikely to pass new legislation to overall financial regulations this year because, ‘No one knows what to do,’ said Senate majority leader Harry Reid. ‘We are in new territory. This is a different game,’ he said in a briefing in Washington. He said neither Ben Bernanke nor Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, know what to do, but they’re trying to come up with ideas.’ So nine days ago, nobody knew what to do. Today, they say yesterday supposedly they had a deal that the Republicans in the House don’t want to sign on to. I don’t want to repeat the whole first hour, but it really is crucial. The House Republicans, God bless them. If this deal is so wonderful, the Democrats had the votes to pass it on their own and leave the Republicans out of getting any credit for it.
But they want Republicans on this bill. They want their votes ’cause they want ’em on the hook. The Democrats don’t want to be on the hook alone for this. They want the Republicans there. They want the Republicans to cave on their conservative principles; they want the Republicans to cave on their conservative ideas. This is all politics. Whatever you’ve been told about the imminent danger, ‘If we didn’t get a deal by today, why, we’re headed for depression! Why, we’re headed for recession! Why, if we don’t get this done, we’re going to be in big, big trouble! Oh, it’s going to be horrible out there the banks aren’t going to be able to loan any money,’ and, by the way, how about Washington Mutual? The feds just walked in and seized it under cover of darkness and sold the assets to J.P. Morgan, and in Seattle they were upset. They were a banking center until today and now Washington Mutual is just another branch office of J.P. Morgan. They went in there and they took over. Well, the bank was failing, their assets. There’s been a slow but quiet run on that bank for a long time. So that bank’s gone under. Penny Pritzker ran a bank in 2001. Obama’s chief economic advisor, Penny Pritzker of the Hyatt hotel fortune, ran a bank that just went under. It failed miserably big time. I have the details coming up here. She’s one of Obama’s fundraisers and financial advisors. Here is Harry Reid nine days ago on the Senate floor. He was asked what new regulatory actions Congress can take to help this problem, and he said…
REID: No one knows what to do. We are in new territory here.
RUSH: ‘Nobody knows what to do. We are in new territory,’ nine days ago, Harry Reid. The viciousness and the attempt to position this as a failure today because of John McCain continued on the Senate floor. Senator Charles Schumer of New York.
SCHUMER: We need the president to respectfully tell Senator McCain to get outta town. He is not helping. He is harming. Before McCain made his announcement, we were making great progress. Now, after his announcement, we are behind the eight ball. Get the House Republicans to be more constructive, get Senator McCain to leave town and not throw fire on these flames.
RUSH: These are his best friends, the Democrats in the Senate, dumping all over Senator McCain, lying through their teeth at the same time. Don’t forget it was Treasury Secretary Paulson that asked Grahamnesty to call McCain and say, ‘Get back here. We need you here to help with the House Republicans,’ and to his credit, McCain didn’t go in and make ’em sell out. McCain did not go to the House Republicans, he didn’t go to Boehner and say, ‘Look, my campaign is at stake here. You can really make me look like the winner here,’ apparently. I don’t know if he tried it, but if he did, it didn’t work, but I don’t think he did. I don’t think he made that effort. You think this is about a bailout now? You think this is about some rescue? You think these quotes from Schumer and Harry Reid are about anything to do with your mortgage or your bank? Listen to Schumer again. You tell me if you think this is really about a financial crisis in the country today.
SCHUMER: We need the president to respectfully tell Senator McCain to get outta town. He is not helping. He is harming. Before McCain made his announcement, we were making great progress.
RUSH: No, you weren’t!
SCHUMER: Now, after his announcement, we are behind the eight ball.
RUSH: You always have been!
SCHUMER: Get the House Republicans to be more constructive.
RUSH: He means —
SCHUMER: Get Senator McCain to leave town and not throw fire on these flames.
RUSH: Yeah. And Claire McCaskill from Missouri got into the act, too, on MSNBC Live this morning. The question: ‘Do you share President Bush’s optimism that you’re going to be able to reach a deal?’
MCCASKILL: Well, frankly, we had a deal until John McCain came to town to play politics. We had it done, and then John McCain came in and, frankly, it blew up.
RUSH: So the talking points have gone out among the Democrat conference and the Senate. They’re lying through their teeth. There was never a deal. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, admitted that. He slipped up this morning, but he admitted that there wasn’t a deal, and he admitted that he wasn’t even part of the deal. Here, grab sound bite number 30. Sherrod Brown, the Democrat Senator from Ohio, slips here and admits that there wasn’t any kind of a deal.
BROWN: Before Senator McCain went to the White House, um, there was general agreement among, um, Senate Republicans, Senate Democrats, House Democrats, on a broad outline to a package. Not unanimous. I mean I’m — I’m not there because of several things, but genuinely broad consensus, and the House Republicans and Senator McCain kind of blew it up.
RUSH: He went off the talking points. You know, he needs a prompter, too. He said, ‘Well, wait a minute, it wasn’t unanimous. I’m not there yet myself.’ Well, then how can you say you got a deal if you weren’t there, Sherrod? How can you say that you have a deal? Back to Claire McCaskill, question from the anchorette. ‘We spoke earlier with congresswoman Heather Wilson, who said that the Democrats have the votes to get this through the House, so if that’s the case, why not just push it on through?’
MCCASKILL: The markets and the world need to see that our government has come together to do the right thing, not for these jerks on Wall Street, but rather for the people we represent, for the essence of our financial institutions and how they impact the people in Missouri that need a loan — a student loan, a small business loan. And — and it’s not gonna work if we have this being about politics.
RUSH: You just throw your hands up! (laughter) Now, she’s a rookie senator. She’s a rookie senator, but ‘the markets and the world need to see that our government’s come together to do the right thing’? So the markets, the world is waiting to see what the House Republicans do? So the onus is on the House Republicans! See, this is what they want to do. This is the pressure that they’re trying to bring to bear. That’s why I say, ‘God bless the House Republicans.’ I hope they remember what happened to some of them in 2006 when they stopped acting like conservative Republicans. At any rate, ladies and gentlemen: What if, what if the House Republican plan is better? This is a question that no pundit raises.
So obviously, as most of the time it is true, the truth falls to my shoulders. What if the Republican plan’s actually the best plan? What if the House Republican plan is best for the taxpayers? What if the House Republican plan is best for the free market working? What if the Republican plan is best for the economy? The news reports are so busy building up the Democrats and tearing down the Republicans that they don’t dare ask themselves. So I will. What if the Republican plan’s the one to do? What if the Republican plan is the best plan?
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RUSH: Woodbury, Minnesota, this is Lind. Linda, thank you for calling. Thanks for waiting. You’re up.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, I’m so happy to talk to you. I have never been so angry in my entire life after watching that press conference. I didn’t even know I was capable of being so mad. He had the audacity, Reid, to stand up there and whine about the insertion of presidential politics by McCain, when I believe that entire press conference was an insertion of presidential politics and to prop up Obama. And did you hear him say, this is — I’m quoting — ‘Senate Democrats, House Democrats, and Senate Republicans agree those principles laid out by Senator Obama are the ones that must be implanted with regards to the issue.’ How dare he!
RUSH: They’re trying to prop up a little man-child. They’re trying to prop up their presidential candidate. Their presidential candidate is the one who blew up the White House meeting with his inability to run it. I’ll tell you this. How is it not the insertion of presidential politics when the Democrats try to engineer the White House meeting so that it becomes Obama’s meeting?
CALLER: Absolutely. And they’re trying to give him credit for what they were agreeing on, and McCain for wrecking the whole deal. And that entire press conference was presidential politics played on the part of the Democrats, and I’m sick of it, and I sent him an e-mail and told him he was a despicable human being.
RUSH: Well, I’m proud of you.
CALLER: I am proud of myself, too.
RUSH: Let me say, I understand your rage, I understand, you’re just infuriated. We’re rational people trying to understand irrational, demented, unstable partisan political hacks.
CALLER: Yes. And he is the greatest of them all, Harry Reid, and all he does is whine, and his whole press conference was called for that sole purpose. They gave us no other information.
RUSH: No, that whole press conference was called to cover up for the fact, to spin the fact, that Obama blew up and destroyed the White House meeting.
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RUSH: This morning at a press conference with Chris Countrywide Dodd, Dingy Harry said this.
REID: The insertion of presidential politics has not been helpful. I repeat. The insertion of presidential politics has not been helpful. It’s been harmful. A few days ago I called on Senator McCain to take a stand, let us know where he stands on the issue on this bailout. But all he has done is stand in front of the cameras.
RUSH: Okay. A few days ago I called on Senator McCain to take a stand, let us know where he stands on the issue on this bailout, but all he’s done is stand in front of the cameras. He then continued.
REID: We have Senator Bennett, who is a high-ranking Republican senator, standing before all of you saying we’ve got a deal in principle. All we have to do is put it down in writing and this — this is almost over with. And then, guess who came to town? And that completely fell apart. The vehicle came off the tracks. Now, the Republican House has to decide what they want to do. Are they serious about one of the issues that has to be taken care of, is lowering the capital gains tax? Is that part of what this is all about? They’re going to have to become realistic.
RUSH: Okay. All we have to do is put it down in writing and it’s almost over with. Then guess who came to town and it completely fell apart? Guess who came to town and it completely fell apart? Senator McCain. Chuck Schumer carried the same theme this morning on the Senate floor.
SCHUMER: We need the president to respectfully tell Senator McCain to get out of town.
RUSH: Stop the tape.
SCHUMER: He’s not helping.
RUSH: Harry Reid said earlier this week, ‘We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands.’ Today they’re saying get out of town, you blew it up, get outta town, you blew this thing up. I’m doing all this to illustrate the politics of this, which is what this is.
REID: We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands.
RUSH: That’s earlier this week. Today, ‘Get outta town. Bush, tell McCain to get out of town.’