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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: Have you seen they’re rioting in Reykjavik? They are rioting in Iceland over the financial crisis. They have really been whacked by it over there. They want the people responsible for it (i.e., their government leaders) whacked. They want them thrown out of office. Iceland has really been hit hard by this. I don’t know what they did, but the tentacles of the subprime crisis reach far. I mean, the question really needs to be asked, ladies and gentlemen: Is Ben Bernanke toast, the chairman of the Federal Reserve? AP-Obama had this story yesterday, and the headline says it all: ‘Bernanke Says he Erred in Gauging Mortgage Fallout — Ben Bernanke,’ who is toast, ‘acknowledges he was wrong in believing that there would be limited fallout to financial markets from the subprime mortgages that soured after the housing markets collapse.’ Wait a second, now. Which came first here? The housing market collapse, then showed us risky mortgages, or was it the risky mortgages that led to the housing market collapse?

The New Yorker magazine has an article, their December 1st issue. Bernanke says, ”I and others were mistaken early on in saying that the subprime crisis would be contained. The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict,’ he said in the piece titled Anatomy of a Meltdown. Subprime mortgages made to people with tarnished credit or low incomes were especially hard hit once the housing boom went bust.’ How stupid does AP-Obama think we are? Everything was fine with subprime mortgages. Everything was hunky-dory. Everything was peachy keen, lending money to people who couldn’t pay it back, who couldn’t qualify for it, who had no income or little income. That was all fine and dandy until the housing boom went bust? This is not a chicken-or-egg question. This is very simple. The housing boom went bust because there were a lot of worthless mortgages underwriting it. ‘Foreclosures spiked and financial companies racked up huge losses as these investments turned bad.’

Now, ladies and gentlemen, the Federal Reserve is technically not part of the government, but for all practical purposes in the way we understand things, it is. But it’s not! But it is. The fact that it is serves the purpose here. Here we go. The Wizards of Smart, the experts — they’re going to save us from all this and prevent all this happening — did not see it coming. Now the same people who didn’t see it coming have no idea how bad it was — and there are a lot of people who did, by the way. The OFHEO regulator thought it was bad, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, they knew how bad it was. They wanted to cover it up. Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, they supposedly weren’t part of the government, either. No, no, private sector! Special government enterprises, government special whatever. They were owned and run by the government, and they were populated by Democrats. They were Democrat piggy banks, which is exactly what they were set up for. Everybody in the know saw this coming. The Bush administration saw it coming. The people that saw it coming were beaten down to a pulp by Democrats who did not want to lose the concept of affordable housing for the constituents.

So here is Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, ‘Ah, we misread it. We didn’t see what was happening,’ and they’re the same people in charge of fixing it. That’s inspiring. See, this is the problem, ladies and gentlemen, with central planning. It only takes a handful of people to be wrong to destroy an economy. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd. They were responsible for the ultimate collapse in the mortgage industry. They failed to address the problem when the opportunity existed — and I know that some of you Obama voters out there, and I know that some of you liberal Democrats out there, ask, ‘Is everything the Democrats’ fault?’ Yes, folks, Republicans had their share of spending problems, but that’s what we’ve been trying to say. Yes, the Democrat Party is inherently flawed by virtue of its ideology. It’s inherently flawed by the corrupt people that lead it. Again I say: If there were a Republican that this could be blamed on, we would know his name. He would be at Guantanamo Bay in isolation. But there isn’t one. Bernanke and Paulson — and, boy, he really inspired the markets today. The markets were up. What were they up, Snerdley, 200-some-odd? A little over 200 points, and then Paulson goes out there, boom! Here goes the plunge.

Then Obama with his brilliant new OMB team announced. It plunges again. Where is it now? It’s down 85. So it’s down over 150 points today, and Paulson made it worse. ‘I’m not going anywhere, I’m going to serve to the last second of my term.’ I’m really worried because he had a press conference today, and they’re going to replay it, and that’s going to put downward pressure on the market every time he speaks. So Paulson and Bernanke, they charge into this crisis insisting only they knew what was best for the country, and then they proceed to ramrod the wrong solutions to the problem through Congress. Congress said, ‘Okay, we know you don’t know what you’re doing but here’s a pork opportunity for us so you want $700 billion, fine and dandy. We’ll give it to you, but it’s going to cost you $850 in pork for us.’ They say, ‘Go right ahead because if you don’t do it the country is going to collapse in 24 hours. Your schools are going to burn to the ground; the government buildings are going to run out of energy. It’s bad. We gotta do this now or we’ll lose our chance forever.’ What’s the result? Trillions of dollars of wealth on paper have been destroyed here!

A rookie radical was elected president to ensure change as a result of all this. I still maintain this is the greatest October Surprise in the history of politics. I still maintain it. By the way, folks, yesterday I was so amazed at all these Clinton people that are populating the Obama administration. I began to wonder. We know there’s a Hope, Arkansas, and Obama promised hope. So, we got some hope. I said, ‘Is there a Change, Arkansas? Because he promised hope and change.’ Hope and change obviously equals Clintons back in office, or Clinton people. We looked it up. There is no Change, Arkansas. I thought I was on to something. So we have this rookie radical who positions himself as a figurehead right now, just issuing orders and term papers to the auto companies and his economic team. We get news stories — there was actually a news story yesterday, folks, or it might have been last night. I was trying to do Show Prep with the first wave of family having arrived, and they were munching down on their Allen Brothers hot dogs and Wagyu cheeseburgers. We made some cheeseburger sliders out of these Wagyu burgers. It’s Kobe, American Kobe, and they’re huge, like eight ounces. You don’t want to eat a whole thing, so we just make little sliders. We cut ’em up and make inch-and-a-half sliders out of them.

So the family is chowing down on that and the jumbo dogs and the regular dogs and so forth, confirming my impression that the primary reason they show up when I invite them is because I serve Allen Brothers. In the midst of all this they wanted to watch the 24 Redemption movie, so we put that on. I’m trying to do Show Prep and I’ve got all these Allen Brothers sliders and hot dogs around me and I got the 24 Redemption movie on. It was great, by the way. It was fabulous, and so are the first couple episodes of the new season. It is so good. If you didn’t see 24 Redemption on Sunday night, it was a two-hour, sort of a bridge and a transition, and it would help if you watched it before the premiere, sometime in the middle of January. So I’m trying to do Show Prep and I come across this story about Michelle Obama’s bare arms, how in shape they are. There’s none of this tricep flab. Yeah, no wings, because she gets up and works out every morning at 4:30. That’s what it said. She gets to the gym at 4:30, we’re getting stories on Michelle Obama’s arms, while her rookie radical husband is out there trying to ensure change in the economy. Without this mess, who knows how this election would have turned out? The Wizards of Smart in Washington caused it; they exacerbated it. Now Obama is doubling down on these people and their meddling.

I was in the office of Snerdley at the top-of-the-hour break, and I’m watching somebody out there talking about more bailout money. Just never stops. I looked at Snerdley and I said, ‘I do not believe this.’ And he looked at me very cynically, ‘What do you mean, you don’t believe it? Not only do you believe it, you understand it and predicted it.’ Yes, this is true. All of this is the greatest opportunity, Rahm Emanuel, the greatest opportunity for the feds to seize as much control of the private sector as liberals have always wanted. So Bernanke, obviously, is toast.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: From TIME Magazine, posted just 15 minutes ago, Mark Kukis, the headline: ‘Left Out of the Bailout, The Poor — As the roster of corporations and financial institutions in line for government bailouts seems to grow, some public-policy advocates in Washington are calling on policymakers to focus more efforts on the nation’s poorest. The ranks of the destitute are growing quietly but alarmingly as much of the world focuses on troubles surrounding Wall Street. ‘Recent data show poverty is already rising quite substantially,’ says Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. ‘There is a strong potential for more hardship and destitution than we have seen in this country in a number of decades.’ Greenstein’s center released a new study on Monday projecting a sharp rise in the number of people living below the poverty line, which is roughly $21,200 annually for a family of four, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.’

So the poor are being hardest hit by the economic downturn, and there’s no bailout money for them. I just proscribed a way for George Obama to get out of the hut in Nairobi and just make his way to Somalia. It’s going to be tough. The guy makes a dollar a month. But if can find a way to get there and join up with the pirates, a life of luxury and pleasure without one bailout dollar.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, I actually think — take your pick, Bernanke, chairman of the Fed; or Hank Paulson — these two guys are the Donovan McNabb of Wall Street. They’re clueless and they are fit to be tied…up. Somebody said — I don’t believe this, either, but somebody said — McNabb said this morning in his press conference he didn’t know you could be benched at half-time. I refuse to believe that, but somebody said that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, we had a story mere moments ago about how the bailout is hurting the poor the most because they’re not getting any of it, the poor really hurt here by the bailout. It was by a guy named Robert Greenstein, who’s a big lib and he’s got this big liberal think tank that puts out all these position papers. The ‘purpose’ (and I say this in quotes, by the way) of these bailouts, whatever you think of them, is not to save executives on Wall Street. As Greenstein said, ‘Oh, it’s only the rich that are benefiting here.’ The purpose of the bailouts is to save or financial system. Whatever you think of them, these bailouts are not about class warfare. But of course leave it to the libs and their willing accomplices in the media to write their predictable, thematic stories that no matter what happens it’s women and minorities who are hardest hit. This entire collapse resulted from subprime mortgages, forcing banks to make loans to people who couldn’t pay ’em. I doubt that Greenstein and his liberal buddies favor eliminating the Community Reinvestment Act and divesting ACORN and all the rest of it. These people are hip deep in all of this.

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