RUSH: If I may have the attention of people you live in Los Angeles and the nearby surrounding environs. You have a newspaper. You may have forgotten that you have a newspaper out there, so few of you are reading the Los Angeles Times anymore. They laid off lots of people. Their advertising revenues are down. Their news pages are down. Their circulation is way down, and they did a hit piece on me specifically yesterday in the Los Angeles Times. You may not have seen it because so many people in Los Angeles have given up reading the Los Angeles Times, but I want to go through this to give you an illustration of just… Well, it is a hit piece but of just being so factually wrong about things that could have easily been checked. Now, you need to know the writer of this piece. His name is James Rainey. R-a-i-n-e-y.
He’s noted here as the ‘media writer,’ and the headline to the piece is: ‘Right-Wing Media Feeds its Postelection Anger.’ Have we sounded angry here? We have been almost giddy. I’ve had to try to actually suppress some of my laughter because some people find it strange that I find things to laugh at during these circumstances. ‘Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity dive shamelessly in, talking about the ‘Obama recession’ and other partisan lines.’ Mr. Rainey begins this way. He says, ‘You have to give Rush Limbaugh a perverse kind of credit. At least when he is demonizing Barack Obama, fabricating Obama policies, blaming Obama for single-handedly causing the recession and the stock market crash, he doesn’t pretend to be fair. Opening his first post-election rant … Limbaugh launched in with a certain relish. ‘The game,’ he told his radio listeners, ‘has begun.’
‘A healthy skepticism is not only the media’s right but its obligation,’ which, Mr. Rainey, is a fact that you have forgotten in the last two years. The performance by you, Mr. Rainey and your colleagues in the Drive-By Media has destroyed the credibility of journalism, and it’s going to be a long time before you people get yours back, and I’m talking about with your audience. You have just embarrassed yourselves in the media, and you say that ‘A healthy skepticism is not only the media’s right but its obligation’? You abandoned your obligation a long time ago. You’ve even got members of your profession, Mr. Rainey, who are on television saying they don’t know anything about Obama, except his two books. They don’t know what his policy on China is. They don’t know anything.
They’re a little worried. Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas at Newsweek who ran around with him say he’s a ‘creature;’ he’s ‘creepy.’ Not quite a ‘thug,’ I admit, but they still say that he’s creepy and a creature and that he doesn’t even believe the creature that he has created — and you tell me that I have lost my healthy skepticism? I’m the only one, me and my brethren are the only ones, that were skeptical about Obama during this campaign, Mr. Rainey; because you and your colleagues certainly had given up any skepticism whatsoever. Let me give you his whole sentence. ‘A healthy skepticism is not only the media’s right but its obligation. Indeed, commentators at many mainstream outlets — including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal — have already argued that Obama’s best bet to succeed will be if he hews to a centrist path.’
Okay, so the media says ‘if he hews to the centrist path,’ that will be the best thing to do, and that’s the final word? And you, Mr. Rainey, just because all these newspapers say (including your own that nobody reads anymore) that he should hew to a centrist line means he’s going to? Look at him, Mr. Rainey, and tell me if you find anything centrist in his life. In his voting record in the Senate, as a community organizer, find anything centrist. Don’t cite for me his campaign rhetoric. Don’t cite for me the speeches. Don’t cite for me what he says. Tell me what he’s done. I’ve looked at it. You, obviously, haven’t. If you’re expecting centrism out of this guy, you’re missing what they’re already talking about. You’re missing what Emanuel says (and I’ve got the audio coming up) about what they’re going to do.
Windfall profits tax on oil. They’re going to raise taxes on the rich. They’re going to implement as much their left-wing agenda as they can. They may call it centrist, but it isn’t centrist — and then he goes into the area where he says that I lied to you. Mr. Rainey of the LA Times writes, ‘[M]aybe that shouldn’t be so surprising, because radio’s Biggest Big Man also assures us that the Democrat welcomes ‘economic chaos’ because it gives him ‘greater opportunity for expanded government.” Mr. Rainey, you should go back and read your own paper and the papers of the Drive-By Media that you admire — the New York Times, the Washington Post — and read the transcripts of cable networks and you tell me if they haven’t been trying to create chaos in the minds of the American people over economic matters for the last six years.
You people in the media have been trying to create chaos and misery. You have wanted the American people in a state of crisis and fear for the longest time, be it Iraq, be it the economy. You were talking recession before there was a recession! You were trying to create a recession in people’s minds. Why do people want chaos? Why do the Democrat Party and the media want this chaos? Because they thought it would help them win the election, because that would go along with Obama’s mantra of change — and if you think the left in this country, Mr. Rainey, is not interested in a greater opportunity for expanded government then you need to go back to school and learn what socialists are and what liberals are. A big government is their god. It is their religion.
And then he writes this: ‘In a time when the nation calls out for cool leadership and rational discussion, Limbaugh stirs the caldron, a tendency he proved in a particularly grotesque way last week when he accused Obama’s party of plotting a government takeover of 401(k) retirement plans. ‘They’re going to take your 401(k), put it in the Social Security trust fund, whatever the hell that is,’ Limbaugh woofed. ‘Trust fund, my rear end.’ A slight problem with Limbaugh’s report: Obama and the Democrats have proposed no such thing. The proposal, in fact, emanated from a single economist, one of many experts testifying to a congressional committee.’ I have to take a break here, Mr. Rainey, because we have lots of sponsors (unlike the Los Angeles, which is losing advertisers).
I have to take a break here but I’m going to come back here because the Democrats have indeed talked about changing the whole structure of 401(k)s. A California congressman, Mr. Rainey: Mr. George Miller from up in the northern Bay Area. I said they have talked about it. I have said they want to. I have specifically said, Mr. Rainey, this is not Obama’s idea! This is a Democrat in Congress’ idea. I have openly wondered and speculated whether or not Obama would find this appealing. But I did not tie this to Obama, and I did not say it’s a definite. I simply reported exactly what happened before Miller’s committee and what Miller said. I didn’t lie to anybody — and you accuse me of engendering fear? You guys own that one.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Wrap this up here with James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times: Again, he says: ‘A slight problem with Limbaugh’s report: Obama and the Democrats have proposed no such thing. The proposal, in fact, emanated from a single economist, one of many experts testifying to a congressional committee. The president-elect has thus far shown as much interest in taking over your 401(k) as he has in moving the capital to Nairobi.’ Mr. Rainey, I never said that this was Obama’s idea. In fact, I said specifically this is not Obama’s idea. This is George Miller’s idea, and it’s not just a lone economist. George Miller, Mr. Rainey, at his own congressional committee said the $80 billion that we are losing with the tax deductibility of contributions to people’s 401(k)s hasn’t worked out the way we wanted, it hasn’t worked out the way the government suggests.
I’m paraphrasing, but he said maybe eliminating the deduction here because the government’s losing too much money, it’s not working. Then they brought in Teresa Ghiradelli, whatever her name is, and she proposed exactly what I said. She proposed it. I said, ‘The Democrats are talking about it.’ They bring her in, and it is her idea coming off George Miller saying that the 401(k) plan as currently structured is not working well for the government. She has an idea to take everybody’s 401(k) plans back to the month of August before the crash, have the government then fund those 401(k)s and the 401(k)s would then be taken over by the government, the government would put them in the Social Security account, quote, unquote, of each owner of a 401(k). They would grow at the rate of 3% plus inflation with the purchase of government bonds and people could contribute 5% a year to them.
Now, Mr. Rainey, all I said was that this is what’s being pondered. This is what’s being discussed. This is what’s being talked about. I specifically said that Mr. Obama had not signed on to this, had not said a word about it, that it was not his idea. You know, you people in the media have lost your credibility so profoundly that it might serve you well to start actually doing your jobs again and actually research things and call people when you’re going to report what they say, actually call them up and find out, ‘Is this what you really said?’ because you know, Mr. Rainey, you can’t trust your own Nexis database. The stuff in there on a lot of people is BS and some of these other sources that you might have also have a little bit of a bias as well. You might be thinking, ‘Rush, why are you spending so much time on this?’ ‘Cause, folks, this is what it’s going to be. The Drive-Bys are in the process now of doing as much as they can to discredit anybody who does not get on board and rapidly so, the huge train that is the Obama express, and if you don’t do that, then you’re against bipartisanship, and you are for anger and rage and hatred.
You know, this thug business, I just did a Google search. Bush and thug, hundreds of thousands of English pages. Cheney and thug, hundreds of thousands of English pages are returned if you just Google Bush and thug and Cheney and thug, and yet you would think that I’m the only one that ever called anybody a thug. So this kind of stuff’s gotta get stopped dead in its tracks because people who read this story who don’t listen to me are going to get an entirely incorrect idea about this, and this 401(k) plan that they’re toying with and thinking about in the Congress is an indication — there’s nothing bipartisan about this, there’s nothing centrist about this. With the government nationalizing as much of everything else as it can right now, bailing this out, taking that over, claiming it’s not working. See, the thing is Mr. Rainey, my experience guided by intelligence has told me that this plan that this economist and George Miller outlined over 401(k)s is entirely within the scope of the behavior of liberal Democrat politicians. People need to be warned about it.