RUSH: Once again checking the e-mail here in the obscene profit time-out. People think, ‘Rush, can’t you move on from this? I mean, it’s going to pass. The bailout is going to pass, and it’s going to be law. Let’s move on. There are other things out there. We’ve got Gwen Ifill and the Palin-Biden debate tomorrow.’ We’re going to get to all that. Let me tell you why this is important. Let me tell you why this blame business is important now. Somebody is going to get blamed for this, right now. Somebody’s going to get blamed. The Democrats have been desperate to find a Republican to pin this on, and they can’t. There isn’t a Republican anywhere in sight who has any culpability in this. Yet before this is all over and before it’s all fixed, the Democrats are going to blame somebody.
McCain is out there saying, ‘No, we’ve gotta deal with the blame later. Right now we gotta fix the crisis.’ Well, the problem for Senator McCain is, he is losing ground in the polls. I don’t care why. I’m being flooded with paranoid people concerned about how the press has destroyed Palin. We’ve got polling data today that says that the media coverage of Palin is why McCain is plummeting in the polls. I don’t care why. He has to do something to stop it. By ‘plummeting,’ he’s down six in some polls, down eight in others. We all knew the Drive-Bys were going to destroy Sarah Palin. We all knew they were going to try it. We all know why; she’s not one of them.
It’s just like Clarence Thomas. Like I said when the first assault hit on her weeks ago, ‘They had to destroy Thomas ’cause he didn’t go through the liberal prescriptions to get where he is.’ It’s the same thing with Sarah Palin. So let ’em have at her. We knew it was going to happen. I don’t want to go (crying), ‘I can’t believe what the media is doing to Palin!’ There is a way to fix both of these things, but if McCain is unwilling to assign blame here… This thing right now is all economy, economy, economy, and the Democrats know it. The people in this country are angry and there is hell to pay out there right now, and part of hell to pay is figuring out who’s responsible for this. Now, Senator McCain says that he wants to stay above the fray, that now is not the time to assign blame.
Well, the problem is he’s not hearing the public. He is not aware of the visceral rage and anger out there. It is indeed time to assign blame. We’re talking financial destruction on the part of a lot of American families. Somebody’s going to get blamed, you can damn well count on it, and the Democrats are not going to wait until January to assign blame. In fact, I’ll guarantee you right now you know who’s getting the blame for this? McCain! You can see it effervescing out there. ‘Yeah, McCain came off the campaign trail, big grandstand play. Went there to settle the crisis, nothing happened, had to leave. McCain’s ineffective. McCain didn’t get anything done.’ CNN blamed me yesterday, but that’s inconsequential.
Now, C. Edmund Wright writes a piece today at the American Thinker called, ‘Time for McCain to Name Names — ‘[S]hort of properly assigning blame to the liberal policies and politicians who are responsible for this mess, the blame will automatically fall to the current Presidential administration and by extension, his party. Right or wrong, that’s how our politics play out. McCain simply has no choice now. He will start doing what he claims he loves to do related to government corruption — naming names…’ In that debate the other night, I got worn out listening to him talk about all the people from Washington who are in federal prison because he went after ’em on corruption. Senator McCain, there are some people serving in Congress today, sir, that need to be federally prosecuted.
There are some people who used to work at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who need to be prosecuted and sent to federal prison, so they can be prison mates with all these other guys who seem happy they are there. It is indeed time to name names. ‘Cause if Senator McCain does not name ‘names he will be thrown on the ash heap of electoral shame alongside Bob Dole, George H. W. Bush and so on.’ He set the stage for naming names. He set the stage for being anti-corruption with his remarks in the first 45 minutes of the debate last Friday night. Now, Mr. Wright says this: ‘The good news for McCain, should he decide to grasp it, is that the party against which he is (supposed to be) running can easily be pegged with the lion’s share of the blame regarding our economic meltdown. There is no doubt that liberal policies on energy and housing have combined to put the country in this situation, and only unwinding these policies will lead the nation out of this problem.
‘Naming names properly will name a whole lot of folks with ‘D’ beside their names. Congress, of course, is now led by the very people who put us into this mess to begin with. If McCain thinks he can thread the needle in a bi-partisan fashion here, he is sadly mistaken. If he does not point out the facts, then his party will take the blame for and he will not win the election. … As far as he has run from President Bush, he will never get as far away from Bush as Obama can. … Recently he has been out rambling on about government spending, CEO pay and earmarks.’ He did that at the debate Friday night. ‘Yawn. None of this is pertinent unless you point out that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were Democrat earmarks and that the worst CEO pay abuse in recent memory is Franklin Raines’,’ his ‘incentive compensation from Fannie triggered by fraudulent accounting. McCain did not bother to point any of that out of course. We must not ‘assign blame.’ … [I]f McCain will not assign blame,’ and go after corruption like he claims to want to go after corruption — right now! — he’s in big trouble.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’re going to go to Sewell, New Jersey. This is Katherine. Glad you called. Great to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Oh, thank you, Rush. Listen, I love you, Rush, but we need to get Senator McCain in the White House, get him in the White House. Don’t keep bashing him with this fair and balanced radio. We don’t hear any of these other liberal stations bashing Obama. Get him in the White House however you can.
RUSH: What do you think we’re trying to do here, madam?
CALLER: I know, Rush, but listen, you kill me when you say things against McCain. It kills me because we’re in trouble.
RUSH: What am I saying against McCain?
CALLER: Well, you know, you said that he needs to assign blame. Get him in the White House and then he’ll get the blame on.
RUSH: No, okay, look.
CALLER: All right, I don’t know as much as you do.
RUSH: This is not a criticism; it’s a piece of hopeful advice. Let me put this in perspective for you, Katherine.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Do you remember a hurricane called Katrina?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Well, do you remember all of the blame the Bush administration and the Republican Party got for that?
CALLER: Oh, I know.
RUSH: Do you realize that virtually all of what went wrong in Hurricane Katrina, with the levees not being built right, the people not being evacuated, was Democrats?
CALLER: Yes. Yes, I do.
RUSH: All right. Well, then jump forward to this.
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: You didn’t hear what I said, if McCain doesn’t get involved in this, he is going to get the blame for this mess —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — and that’s going to kill any chance he has of getting elected. He has got to identify who’s responsible for this.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: There is a public clamoring for this. There’s a public clamoring for a leader who relates to them, who understands them, who’s able to voice their anger and fix the problem so it doesn’t affect them again.
CALLER: Well, now, see, I love you, and I love what you say, and I know you’re right. It’s just that I’m getting panicked because I don’t want Obama in the White House. That guy scares the heck out of me. That guy is dangerous, he’s dangerous.
RUSH: I agree more forcefully than you are saying, plus he’s a squirrel.
CALLER: All right, listen, you change my mind all the time. Now I’ll go with you.
RUSH: I’m not being critical of Senator McCain here.
CALLER: No, I know you’re not.
RUSH: It may sound like it. What I’m trying to do is — I’m just sharing my — for whatever it’s worth, I know with them it’s worthless because they don’t trust me at the McCain campaign, they don’t particularly like me, but believe me, I’m not advising him to do things that are not going to help. I know how the Democrats operate, and right now they’re looking for a way to blame this on McCain, and they’re very close —
CALLER: Oh, yes.
RUSH: — to saying he went in there and made a big grandstand play, didn’t get anything done. Yada yada yada.
CALLER: You know what, Rush, they’re going to do that anyway. They have killed Bush so badly —
RUSH: Yeah, and guess what, guess what? Bush doesn’t name names, either. Bush doesn’t come around and respond to it, either. And look where Bush is.
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: Katherine, I’m telling you something, this is war out there, this is political war. The aggressor in any conflict like this sets the rules. You can sit there and say, ‘I’m going to be honorable. I’m going to stay above all this. I’m not going to name names. I reach across the aisle.’ You know what that tells people? ‘I’ll criticize Republicans, I’ll do what I can to put corrupt Republicans in jail, but I’m not going to mess with my Democrat buds because I like to cross the aisle.’ He can’t name names in one of the biggest political economic scandals in history? Hell’s bells, folks, the Democrats will say this is the worst thing to happen since the Great Depression or the worst thing to happen economically since World War II. Name names. How we know that Senator McCain will root out corruption if he will not call for Barney Frank and Chris Dodd’s resignation now? How do we know he’ll stop mindless government spending if he won’t vote against it now? The bailout bill could bail out McCain’s campaign. Instead he’s letting it be used as cover for the people who caused this. This is not straight talk.
You know what, America is waiting for a sheriff to roll into Washington and clean the place up, and McCain says he’s the guy. He’s been given a golden opportunity here to prove that he is the change everybody has been waiting for. Americans want change in a way that Obama can’t even imagine. I think McCain, I think the Republicans are looking at a series of hanging curveballs here, but because they’re in Washington, because they read the neutered conservative intelligentsia media, they don’t understand the golden opportunity that they have. How about a speech that speaks truth to power, specific truth? Do you think Main Street would like that? I think there’s an opportunity here waiting to be had. But the whole point about blame, I don’t mean to sound childish like, ‘It’s your fault, it’s your fault.’ ‘No, it’s your fault, it’s your fault.’ I’m talking about political reality. The party in power’s going to get the blame for this when they had nothing to do with it. The party in power is going to get the blame for this. It’s just the way it works. Somebody is going to have to go out there and say, ‘Nope, party in power didn’t do this. Party in power tried to put the fires out.’ If the guy leading the party in the presidential race is not willing to do it, well, then you figure it out. Figure out what it all means and where it’s headed.
By the way, speaking of the blame, let me just read to you a portion of a Wall Street Journal story in 2006 that confirms what I have told you here about this scandal being larger than Enron — think back how mad you were about Enron, and think what the Democrats did. The Democrats went and got every Enron employee they could find and put ’em on television, ‘My investment is gone, my 401(k) is gone, my pension is gone, look what Ken Lay did,’ and Ken Lay was a Bush buddy. Have you seen anybody supposedly hurt by this scandal paraded on television by the Democrats? Nope. Wall Street Journal, this is February 24th, 2006: ‘A report commissioned by Fannie Mae’s board depicts executives of the big mortgage company fretting about how to increase their bonuses and pursuing an investment in a small Florida bank partly to score political points. The report by a team of lawyers headed by former Senator Warren Rudman released yesterday morning also says former executives misled directors about accounting manipulations that helped increase earnings and bonus payments for 1998. It chronicles a vast array of other accounting violations and concludes that many of the mortgage financed company’s policies were ‘motivated’ by a desire to show stable earnings growth and hit earnings targets, thereby bumping up the bonuses of the executives.’
This is why, ladies and gentlemen, I get steamed. There is steam pouring out my ears when I turn on the TV today and I watch Obama in La Crosse, Wisconsin, talk about Wall Street fat cats gaming the system and how that’s going to come to an end. This is not a capitalist problem. This is a government problem. The thing Obama says he wants to root out — fraud, fat cats getting their hands on a pile of money that’s not theirs — hello, Obama! It’s the Democrats who did this! Your advisors at Fannie Mae, and in an ancillary fashion, Freddie Mac. There are so many lies being told, there is so much deceit, there is an intricately woven web of deceit here that the Democrats have spun, and it’s just being reported hook, line, and sinker, everybody is falling for it hook, line, and sinker. So Obama goes out, (paraphrasing) ‘I’m going to make sure those Wall Street fat cats, they don’t do this.’ They didn’t do this to the extent they’re involved. They were under the gun. They were told to make loans to people who couldn’t pay ’em back, or else!
It’s just like Katrina. Bush took the hit for this. He didn’t do anything. It was Democrats running New Orleans, it was Democrats running Louisiana, screwed it up. From evacuations to shoring up the levees to using the money they were given to shore up the levees legitimately. You put a big pile of money in front of Democrats and they’re going to find a way to get it and blame Republicans for letting them. It’s just absurd what is happening here. This is why, to me, the blame game is crucial. The blame game to me is part of the presidential election. Folks, look. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, what do they do? They extended loans to people who couldn’t pay ’em back. Charles Gasparino, Newsweek reporter now at CNBC who covered the story, gave his theory on a December 28th, 2004 edition of CNN’s News Night with Aaron Brown.
Mr. Gasparino called Fannie Mae a politically correct company. He said, ‘They do all the things that, let’s face it, liberal journalists like. They put home mortgages out there for poor people, and so right now beating up on Fannie Mae is kind of politically incorrect, you can’t do it, just can’t do it.’ This was 2004. Can’t beat up on Fannie Mae, by design. Who are they lending money to? Who are people that can’t afford it? The poor? Minorities? There was one story that an illegal immigrant got $400 grand to buy a house! An illegal immigrant, $400,000 to buy a house. Or close to — I don’t think he got 400,000, he bought a $400,000 house, is what it is. Regardless, you know what we’re really talking about here? In a sense, we’re talking about reparations. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were used to pay reparations and that’s why we can’t take the money back by foreclosing.