RUSH: Let’s go to the audio sound bites. We have a lot of great ones here today. The Drive-Bys cannot wait for Obama to be inaugurated. They’ve got to do something. The wait is killing them.
IFILL: What people are beginning to say is that this President-elect should be President now?
BAKER: People voted for change and this strange, odd 77-day waiting period that we impose, in effect, between our election and our inauguration.
WESSEL: The President is a lame duck and is impotent then you want the new guy to take over.
RATHER: Thank heaven we now swear them in, new president, in January. I’d be in favor of moving it up to December 1st.
FINEMAN: The flow of news has so speeded up that from now to January 20th is still a lifetime.
MATTHEWS: We gotta change the Constitution to make the president take over December 1st.
RUSH: This is just incredible, folks. They can’t stand it. There’s one little problem, and let me give you the names of the people in this montage because I want to address them directly. They were Gwen Ifill, Peter Baker, who is from the New York Times, he said the 77-day waiting period that we impose, people voted for change, this strange 77-day waiting period, why, why, that’s only the Constitution. See, the Constitution is nothing but a bunch of suggestions anymore. The way that the left has been looking at the Ten Commandments for about 150 years. David Wessell is from the Wall Street Journal. Dan Rather is from HDNet. Howard Fineman, MSNBC and Newsweek, and Chris Matthews from everywhere. The only problem — I want to address all of you who want Obama inaugurated tomorrow. The biggest obstacle you’ve got to this is Obama. Obama does not want to be inaugurated now. A story in the Wall Street Journal — I think, ladies and gentlemen, I, El Rushbo, am the only who has been on top of this — the point of the story, ‘Obama Preserves Political Capital for Stimulus Plan,’ Barack Obama wants the economy to suffer even more. He wants your perception that the economy is suffering for as long as possible. Why? For his own selfish political purposes. He is not putting the country first here.
Barack Obama is helping to contribute to a negative perception of America by its citizens. ‘It’s gonna get worse,’ he said yesterday on Meet the Press. We elected Obama to make it better. It was supposed to be magically all better simply by electing him. Somebody forgot to tell us here that the magic wouldn’t happen ’til he was inaugurated. I mean now the Iranians are even upset. The Iranians are urging him to change his approach. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not like what he’s doing. The American left is all upset because there aren’t any communist kook freaks in the cabinet. For those of you on the left who are upset with Obama because none of your people are in the cabinet, chill out, babe. You’re gonna get so much of what you want. Just shut up. If you leftists would just slink away back to your sinkholes, let Obama work his magic. You’re going to get everything you want, or as much of what you want as is possible with a Democrat president and a Democrat Congress.
You’re going to have our culture blown up; you’re gonna get national health care; you’re gonna get abortion on demand anywhere, paid for by everybody else. You’re gonna get doctor-assisted suicide all over the country. You’re gonna get your culture of death. You’re gonna get the military being pared down to the point it’s not worth much; you’re gonna get the military fighting in places like Darfur, not protecting US national interests. You’re gonna get another Kennedy in the Senate. If you don’t get a Kennedy, you’re gonna get a Cuomo. If you don’t get a Cuomo you’re going to get another Clinton. You’re going to have your leftist royalty in the Senate. You people on the left need to shut up and stop embarrassing The Messiah. He knows what he’s doing. He’s putting all these figureheads out there, these centrists to make everybody on our side, like the Bill Kristols of the world think that we can meet up and meet him half way and go hunky-dorily into the future.
The bottom line is that Barack Obama wants you to think things are bad and he wants you to think they’re getting worse because he wants you in a state of crisis as much as possible. I tried to explain this during the campaign. The more you suffer, the more your perception is that we’re going to hell, the more you will be willing to let Obama and his magic fix everything, like taking over the auto industry and telling them how to run it and taking over health care. Let me give some details here from the story by Jonathan Weisman and Deborah Solomon in the Wall Street Journal.
‘In this week’s Democratic Radio Address, President-elect Barack Obama laid out key pieces of his economic recovery plan. Read the text of the address in which he outlines five specific components of the plan. Mr. Obama had been stressing for weeks his desire to increase assistance to homeowners as the program moves forward, a point he reiterated Sunday,’ and then to reporters as he introduced his choice for secretary of the VA, Eric Shinseki. ‘For more than an hour on the conference call, the people familiar with the situation said, Treasury and Fed staff outlined the three main ideas under discussion: A modification of the proposal being pushed by Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair; a plan to help bring down interest rates; and a proposal championed by the Fed to buy distressed mortgages.
‘When they had finished outlining the proposals, Treasury staff asked the Obama aides for their impressions. The aides demurred, refusing to endorse any of the ideas. When asked what they would like to see or how they envisioned a foreclosure mitigation program working, they were noncommittal, according to people familiar with the matter. A person familiar with the call said the Obama aides were vague about their thoughts. Obama aides said even before the call was convened, the administration had been warned that Mr. Obama saw the call as a chance for Treasury to brief the transition and that Obama aides weren’t there to offer their opinions or express transition policy. The aides on the call weren’t of sufficient rank to have made the policy decisions Treasury is demanding.’
And so you see, ladies and gentlemen, Obama wants nothing to do with whatever proposals are hammered out now, and, frankly, neither do the Democrats in Congress. They want to be able to hang as much of this on George Bush as they can, which means Chris Matthews and Dan Rather and Gwen Ifill, sorry to disappoint you, but your president-elect does not want the job right now because he’s not interested in fixing anything right now. He’s comfortable with it getting worse right now, so that when he does take office in January, he’ll have a smooth, clean, clear road in front of him to wave his magic wand and do whatever he wants. I think Chris and the rest of you, you better understand something. He’s stoking the fire of unrest. He’s turning up the heat on the notion of crisis. It’s gonna get worse. It’s gonna get worse. It’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets any better. In fact, let me stop quoting him. Let me find it. We have it here in the audio sound bites.
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RUSH: I found that sound bite. It was right in front of me, and I thought it was in the back of the stack, but it was in front of the stack. It’s audio sound bite number 11. This is on Meet the Press yesterday, Barack Obama being interviewed by Meet the Press anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw, and Brokaw said, ‘On this program, about a year ago, you said, being president is 90% circumstances and about 10% agenda. The circumstances now are, as you say, very unpopular in terms of the decisions that have to be made. Which are the more unpopular ones the country is going to have to deal with?’ Now, before I play his answer, you have to understand something here. This question from Brokaw as a media guy, as a leftist, this notion — remember during the Iraq war they were obsessed with all of us sacrificing? They were obsessed with pain. They are obsessed with suffering. They don’t like for certain people to have to suffer, but they think others of us should. It’s their class envy. It’s called getting even with everybody. So when he asked this question, ‘What’s the most unpopular decision that you’re going to have to make, that people are going to have to deal with,’ he wants us to have to suffer. Here’s the answer.
OBAMA: As tough as times are right now — and things are going to get worse before they get better.
RUSH: See?
OBAMA: There is a convergence between circumstances and agenda. The key for us is making sure that we jump-start that economy in a way that doesn’t just deal with the short term, doesn’t just create jobs immediately, but also puts us on a glide path for long-term, sustainable economic growth.
RUSH: There’s only one way to do that, and it isn’t his way. Government doesn’t do this. It didn’t happen in the Great Depression with FDR. It did not. All these make-work programs, infrastructure, all this jazz, it did not sustain or propel or even grow the economy. I’ll tell you why in just a second. Here’s more Obama, where he says the days of pork are over. Now, this, folks, I want to be very careful here. I don’t want to call this an out-and-out lie, but what the hell do you think this infrastructure spending is if it isn’t pork? It was Robert Byrd’s ticket to reelection. You can’t drive through West Virginia without seeing something named for him, except a rest area. They name the rest areas after the Republicans in that state. You have the Robert Byrd library and the Robert Byrd library reading room, the Robert Byrd freeway, the Robert Byrd exit ramp, the Robert Byrd — it’s everywhere! And that’s how he reelected himself. Pure pork. This is all Obama’s talking about.
OBAMA: When I met with the governors, all of them have projects that are shovel rate. Now, we’re going to have to prioritize it and do it not in the old traditional politics first way. What we need to do is examine what are the projects where we’re going to the most bang for the buck, how are we going to make sure the taxpayers are protected.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah.
OBAMA: — the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, those days are over.
RUSH: It’s just not true. This is pure pork. It’s a hundred percent pork coming out of Washington now with this plan of his. But he needs to listen to his own advisor there, Tom Daschle. He’s getting way too much into detail here. Just do the plan, Barry, to hell with the details. Daschle said the only way we’re going to get health care is avoid the details. Just do it and worry about it later on. Come up with a principle and do it. What’s the principle of national health care? Socialized medicine. Okay, right, we now have socialized medicine in America, put it up for a vote, it will win in the house, it will win in the Senate, Obama will sign it and they’ll go about doing it. That’s what Daschle’s recommending. Same thing here. Screw all these details, Barry babe. Screw all this stuff about protecting the taxpayers. We the government own all the bridges, we the government will pay for all of it. Just call it the New Constitution, call it Constitution 2, call it Obama’s Constitution, sign it into law. Forget the details. Bob Beckel was on Fox News Channel this morning, and the cohost, Bill Hemmer, said, ‘Look, Obama is talking about highways, roads, basic infrastructure, also talking about government buildings, making them greener, more energy efficient, about either broadband system for the Internet. Is this what we need, Bob?’
BECKEL: The New Deal, first of all, there is an argument about whether it worked, a lot of it did work. But, a lot of it was make-work projects, that’s what it was, trying to get people back employed. But in this case, the infrastructure needs we’ve got in this country and upgrading schools and doing the kinds of Internet outreach that we need are all things that are going to have to be done eventually anyway.
RUSH: I thought Algore wired all the schools for the Internet. I thought that was done. I thought he and Clinton personally ran the wires. They got up there in the crevices and the catwalks and the crawl spaces. I thought they already did that. Oh, rewire ’em with fiber, that’s right, because we rewire them with coax. That’s right, coax is going out of business now. Well, for our purposes. You know, I really hate to see people get sucked in. What Obama is telling us, folks, is he’s going to take our money, and he’s going to spend it like any good ChiCom. He marvels at the ChiComs, he looks at the ChiCom Olympics and he marvels, look at all the infrastructure they did, look at all the great stuff. Fancy way of saying Democrats are going to be getting their names on all these projects, bunch of plaques, boatload of new bridges, roads, and buildings.
This is ego spending. Remember, as I told, and I must say, folks, my own inimitable style, this is quite brilliant and quite perceptive. Barack Obama is fixing something, but not what you think. There is a repair project underway, but it’s not the US economy, and it’s not the country at large. What Obama’s fixing is the Democrat Party that was broken by Ronald Reagan, a little bit by Nixon, and a little bit by the Republicans taking over the House in 1994. FDR’s interminable, unending rule of the Democrat Party was interrupted, it was shattered, Democrats had the House for 40 years before ’94, so all this stuff is just FDR 2, New Deal 2, in an attempt to repair the Democrat Party so that it once again is restored to its rightful position of power by birthright for as far as the eye can see.
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RUSH: I listened to Obama’s infrastructure program looking like he admires the ChiComs. I’m convinced he’s not governing from the center; he’s governing from the Far East.
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RUSH: Here’s Obama. He was on Meet the Press yesterday. Tom Brokaw who said, remember, on the Friday before the election with Charlie Rose that he had no idea who Obama was, didn’t know what books he’d read, just written a couple of books, made some speeches. I’d love to know, Obama’s now spent about an hour with Brokaw on Meet the Press. I wonder if Brokaw knows him any better. So get this question now. Here’s Tom Brokaw. He’s just a reporter, just an anchor, just a guy. ‘Should the current automobile management be allowed to stay in their jobs,’ was the question.
OBAMA: We have to put an end to the head-in-the-sand approach to the auto industry that has been prevalent for decades now. What we still see are executive compensation packages for the auto industry that are out of line compared to their competitors, their Japanese competitors who are doing a lot better.
RUSH: Stop the tape a minute. So are the UAW workers being paid. Their compensation is, what did he say, ‘out of line’ compared to the compensation being paid workers in a successful auto industry in Southern states.
OBAMA: What I’m hoping to introduce as the next president is a new ethic of responsibility where we say that if you’re laying off workers, the least you can do, when you’re making $25 million a year, is give up some of your compensation and some of your bonuses. That kind of notion of shared benefits and burdens is something that I think has been lost for too long and it’s something that I’d like to see restored.
RUSH: Well, see, this is the thing. This sounds very fair. The premise — (interruption) — no, no, look, most people are not CEOs, Snerdley, and to people who aren’t CEOs, this sounds extremely fair. There should be shared sacrifice. The benefits and the burdens should be shared. Of course, the problem in the real world is, even if you take the bonuses and the so-called high salaries away from the CEOs, it doesn’t mean that these schlubs are going to get it. So there is no sharing of anything. It means government’s going to take it. But here’s a guy, a community organizer sitting there with Tom Brokaw, these two lugs acting and pretending like they know how to fix the automobile business.
I had the perfect plan earlier today. If you’re going to spend $15 billion to bail ’em out, buy $15 billion worth of cars from them. That’s the problem here. They’re not selling cars, right? So have Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and Obama, whoever else he wants to assign this, go out and buy $15 billion worth of cars, million or two, whatever it would be, and then Congress sell ’em. Congress has all the answers, Congress can go sell the cars that they buy. See the USA the Obama way. Oh, I can see the jingle now, put Obama’s face and likeness on the hubcaps, all kinds of incentives to sell these cars. Congress can do it. Obama had the audacity to say they have to restructure, they have to change the way they’ve been doing business. He doesn’t know the first thing about the way they’ve been doing business. They’re doing business abroad just fine, by the way. In 33 other countries they’re showing profits all over the place, profits almost as big as their losses here. It makes you wonder what the difference is. But it all doesn’t matter. It’s a fait accompli anyway because General Motors ran a print ad apologizing. Did you see this? They have run a print ad apologizing to the American people for letting them down, for designing bad cars.
Now, Snerdley, do not overreact. I predicted this last week. This is tantamount to saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ that’s how you get the money, ‘I’m sorry,’ you apologize to everybody, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ and, lo and behold, the administration and Congress working on $15 billion today, plus the establishment of a car czar to oversee the bailout. I don’t know what business the car czar is going to come from, probably from agriculture, ethanol. Who knows. Brokaw’s next question: ‘Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to four dollars a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers that the days of cheap gasoline are gone? We’re not going to have gasoline you can just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore.’ Tom Brokaw, on the side of who?
You can buy gasoline in certain parts of the country for a buck 60, you can buy it for a buck 40, Brokaw wants it to go back up to four. This originally was Charles Krauthammer’s idea, keep it up to four because that was the tipping point, that would cause people to drive less, that would cause savings and less consumption and all this sort of stuff. But it’s this notion that we have to suffer, we Americans, we have to suffer. Things in the world aren’t going to be right until we suffer. Brokaw is not going to suffer because he can afford four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline. But we’re supposed to suffer. This is among many things wrong with liberalism. They don’t see the best, they don’t see optimism, they see pessimism and they want pessimism to eventuate, they want it to be realized. So, what did Obama say? Here’s Brokaw saying we need gasoline up to four bucks a gallon, raise the tax so it’s always at four bucks a gallon. We gotta get rid of this notion of cheap gas, gotta get rid of that, gotta get rid of it. Obama’s answer.
OBAMA: Yes, gas prices have gone down, but in the meantime, maybe somebody in the family’s lost their job. In the meantime, their housing values have plummeted. In the meantime, maybe their hours have been cut back or if they’re a small business owner, their sales have gone down 50, 60, 70%. So, putting additional burdens on American families right now I think is a mistake.
RUSH: Yeah, did you hear that, ‘right now.’ I’m going to wait to put the additional burdens. Putting additional burdens right now, Tom, it’s a great idea, buddy, old pal, but a little too soon. We’ll wait to put those burdens on when it’s not as noticeable that we’re putting burdens on them. That’s what it means.