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RUSH: You know, for all the talk, ladies and gentlemen, about the Bush administration and George Bush personally trying to manage his legacy with the automobile bailouts and other things, you can see here that the Democrats are already building Obama’s legacy before he takes office. Wall Street Journal today: ‘Democrats Try to Lower Expectations — Even as they depict a massive stimulus package as indispensable to turning the economy around, U.S. Democratic leaders…’ Oh, by the way, speaking of that. Speaking of that, Obama has added to the number of jobs that he is going to ‘create or save.’ Remember it was two million. It was two million jobs he was going to ‘create or save’? Now all of a sudden, the Obama people are out there saying that he is going to save three million jobs. This comes, ladies and gentlemen, after last Friday. It’s audio sound bite number one here, Mike. This comes after last Friday after I said this.

RUSH ARCHIVE: Now, remember, Obama promised to add or save two million jobs, remember? He first said he was going to add two million jobs, his policies would add two million jobs over the course of a couple years or so, and then he started adding the word ‘save’ to the figure, add and save two million. Well, George W. Bush just saved two million jobs for him. The figure they’re throwing around is that an auto bankruptcy would cost one to three million jobs. So you round that off, you get two million. Bush just saved ’em before Obama saves them again. So by the time we’re finished here, we will have saved four million jobs because Obama will claim his two million.

RUSH: Do I know these people? I know these people like every square inch of my glorious naked body. I know what they’re going to do. So Bush saves all these jobs; Obama has to up the ante, otherwise Bush gets the credit for it. So two million jobs are already ‘saved.’ Obama has now gotta save or create just a million in order to make himself appear (with Drive-By Media assistance, of course) of having outperformed even Bush. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Steyn had a brilliant syndicated column from Friday last week. It starts out… Since we’re talking about bailouts of the auto industry, listen to some of the numbers that Mark Steyn reports in his column.

‘General Motors now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath And Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. GM has a market capitalization of just over $2.4 billion. For purposes of comparison, Toyota’s market cap is $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other [Big] Three, is a vast retirement home with a small loss-making auto subsidiary.’ What a way to describe the Big Three automakers: ‘a vast retirement home.’ He says, ‘The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has 3 times as many retirees and widows as ‘workers’ …’ Did you hear that, ladies and gentlemen? The United Autoworkers ‘has 3 times as many retirees and widows as ‘workers’ … GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people,’ and the UAW, of course…

This is one of the things, you know, Barney Frank is trying to stick his finger in the dike for. He’s trying to save the unions because the bailout is for the unions. The unions, of course, are going nowhere near anything like a concession. And there’s nothing in the Bush plan that bailed them out that mandates that anybody do anything. They just kicked this can down the road to March so that Obama can do with it what he wants. GM has 96,000 employees, and provides health benefits to a million people. I know what some of you are saying, ‘Yeah, Rush, but GM made the deal.’ They might have made the deal, but it can’t be sustained. That’s just it. If you don’t think this is one of the primary problems they’re having, then you need to take your head out of the sand.


How do you make that math add up? If you’ve got 96,000 employees and you’re providing health benefits to a million people, you’re not going to make up the difference by selling cars. Mark Steyn reported: ‘Honda and Nissan make a pre-tax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of between $500 and $1,500,’ per car. ‘That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it’s red.’ This is startling, striking information. So now with Obama upping the ante, ladies and gentlemen, on his job saving and job creation now to three million, the headline in the Wall Street Journal is ‘Democrats Try to Lower Expectations.’

‘Even as they depict a massive stimulus package as indispensable to turning the economy around, U.S. Democratic leaders are aggressively lowering expectations that the package will yield dramatic accomplishments quickly. Rep. David Obey, who is playing a key role in assembling the stimulus plan, which is expected to approach $800 billion, said recently that an infusion of federal spending is ‘the only game in town.’ But the Wisconsin Democrat, who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was careful to add: ‘The downward momentum appears too strong to end the recession anytime soon.’ … Democrats are facing an especially precarious version of that dilemma. In crafting a package that will sink hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the economy, they are apprehensive about the fallout if the economy merely continues sputtering along for several years.

And then they’re going to have Joe Biden. Joe Biden is going to chair a middle class task force. This was one of his themes during the campaign. So we’re going to have the federal government and a ‘task force’ run by Joe Biden working on improving the middle class. I guess with, what, ‘targeted spending’? There’s only two ways that you bolster members of the middle class, ladies and gentlemen. You either take those who are lower middle class or out of the middle class on the bottom and you elevate them so that they join the middle class. This is what capitalism does. The other way to bolster the middle class is take those who are above it and tax the hell out of ’em and regulate the hell out of ’em and confiscate as much of what they earn as possible so that their wealth declines, and then they end up in the middle class.

This notion that Joe Biden and Obama have a magic formula to help the middle class do something with targeted government spending, is absurd. It’s been tried throughout history. It doesn’t work. Capitalism is the only thing that’s gonna work; unfettered, just-get-out-of-the-way capitalism, allowing the fruits of one’s labors to be realized, reinvested, and so forth. Even Fareed Zakaria, wrote in the Washington Post yesterday: ‘For Obama to be remembered as a great president, he has to do nothing less than rescue capitalism.’ Tell me something. How in the world…? Fareed Zakaria is supposedly, by reputation, one of the smartest guys ever. Newsweek, CNN, Washington Post columns. He’s got a book or something out there about how it’s all over, the end of American dominance, because the rest of the world is rising up all around us, something like that.

How in the world do you look at what Obama’s stated plans are and some of the wacko extremists in his cabinet… That’s another thing. I’m getting a little weary here of the Drive-Bys pronouncing that all of his cabinet members are ‘moderates.’ This babe that’s going to run the labor department, what’s her name, Solis? What is her first name? Solis. The reason I ask is, you know, Patti Doyle Solis who used to work for Hillary. When I pronounce her name that way, I heard from all over the country, ‘No, no, no. It irritates Patti Doyle Solis.’ So it’s spelled the same way as this babe. It’s a Hispanic name. So that’s why in today’s Morning Update I pronounced it both ways, ’cause I don’t know. I haven’t heard it pronounced. I do not watch the news with the sound up.

It’s bad enough watching the news with closed-captioning. I do not watch it with the sound on. I’ve never heard her name pronounced. I’m assuming it’s Solis. But this woman has got ties to the Communist Workers Party. She’s going to do whatever she can to unionize as much of the country. There’s nothing moderate about any of these people that Obama has appointed on the domestic side, particularly when it comes to labor and a number of other things. How in the world, if you’re one of the smartest guys in the history of journalism, in the history of academia, Fareed Zakaria, how can you look at what Obama is doing and say his number one charge is to rescue capitalism? It may be his number one charge to rescue capitalism, but I’ll tell you something, folks. You don’t do it with socialism.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, folks, back to this business of the Democrats trying to lower expectations. No, no, no. That’s not how it works. That’s not how it works. You don’t campaign on a Messiah platform where you’re gonna lower the sea levels and you’re gonna fix all these problems. You don’t do that. You don’t run around and make people think the world’s going to love us. You don’t run around and say all war is going to end and all these problems are going to be solved. You don’t run around and do that. You don’t campaign to get elected on that basis, ‘Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, by the way, it’s going to be worse than even we thought; it’s going to be a big, big problem.’ ‘Democrats have begun speaking of the long term, emphasizing their goal isn’t merely to end the downturn but to change society and strengthen the economy for generations.’ They want to lower expectations so that you will go along with every emergency fix they come up with.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hey, folks, how many of you have heard the phrase ad nauseam now that taxpayers will pay for the bailout? Well, how many of you have stopped to realize that less than half of the American people pay taxes? So only half the taxpayers are paying for the bailout. If there ever was an argument that everybody should pay taxes, this is it. Greetings, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, great to have you. We come to you from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Telephone number is 800-282-2882. Looking forward to talking to you today.

So the Democrats want to lower expectations. See, they’re already trying to manage Obama’s legacy before he even takes office. By the way, isn’t this kind of like the guy running as Superman and telling us he’s just Clark Kent? ‘I’m just Clark Kent, don’t expect no leaping of tall buildings or nothing, no miracles here, I’m just old Clark Kent, you didn’t elect Superman.’ The dirty little secret here, ladies and gentlemen, is that when you lower expectations, what are you doing? You’re telling people it’s going to be bad for a long time. I know how they’re going to do it and the New York Times got the ball rolling yesterday with one of the most irresponsible pieces of journalism — and that’s saying something — than I’ve seen in a long time, blaming Bush for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, blaming Bush for the housing crisis. They didn’t touch on who started all this, Jimmy Carter. They didn’t mention who elevated or expanded the program, Bill Clinton. They didn’t talk about any of ACORN’s involvement, shaking down banks. They didn’t talk about the community agitators in Illinois, they didn’t talk about Barney Frank or Chris Dodd, other than to mostly exonerate them, and of course this gives Barney the chance to go out there now and say, ‘See? See? It was Bush all along, it was Bush,’ and the White House to its credit is firing back on this.

They sent Dana Perino out there; they sent Ed Gillespie out there this morning. Gillespie said here’s a company that’s worth no more than junk bonds having to mortgage its own building to stay afloat, and I guess that’s about what their work product is worth these days, junk, because this is classically untrue. So they’re shifting all of this now to Bush, which we predicted. Everything that goes wrong is going to be laid at the feet of George W. Bush. When Obama is inaugurated, and when it’s time to expand our troop presence in Afghanistan, and when it’s time not to get out of Iraq, I can tell you what they’re going to say. They’re going to say, ‘Well, you know what, we didn’t know all that we now know during the campaign. The Bush administration kept a lot of things from us. The circumstances are far more dire than we knew.’ Same thing is going to be said about the housing crisis. Same thing is going to be said about the credit crunch. Same thing is going to be said about the economy in general. In fact, that’s what this lowering of expectations is really all about. ‘Well, it’s far worse than we knew, we just weren’t privy to information they didn’t share with us.’

But the real secret here is that by proclaiming an ongoing crisis that is going to be a long time to being solved, you keep the people in a crisis mode, you keep ’em depressed, you keep them thirsty and hungry for a fix, which means that Obama and his team will be allowed to do whatever they want in the name of fixing this crisis. And they want to do a lot. They want to spend and spend and spend, and they don’t want to do this to rescue the economy. What they’re trying to rescue is the Democrat Party. What they’re trying to fix is the Democrat Party, and I don’t say this lightly, and I’m not trying to be funny with this. FDR got this ball rolling with the New Deal. The New Deal didn’t solve anything. It prolonged the Great Depression. Obama is set to follow in his footsteps. What did it do? It cemented Democrats in power for 50 uninterrupted years in the all-important House of Representatives. And it set them up for practically running the show. There were interruptions, but for 54 years they never lost the appropriations power in Washington. And that’s what they want to get back to. The loss of the House in 1994, for all those years up through 2006, stung them more than anybody knows. They and their birthright are power. They are not meant to be out of power, and they were for 12 years. They were wandering aimlessly in the deserts.

Now they’ve got it back, and they are going to grow it. They’re going to cement it, and they’re not going to give it up. Like Rahm Emanuel said, ‘This is too big a crisis to waste. We got a great opportunity here to implement what we want to implement,’ which is government control over as much of the free-market economy as possible so that whatever you want you have to go somewhere in government to get. Of course the risk they run is overreaching, overreaching too soon and too fast. The American people have very high economic expectations. That’s why small recessions make everybody so mad. The American people’s economic expectations are very high, and what Obama and his team plan on doing, especially here now by lowering expectations, is going to make people upset and angry because there’s still a sizeable number of people in this country who understand that their prosperity does not go through Washington, and they don’t want to have to go through Washington in order to become prosperous, and it’s going to irritate them. So they probably will overreach. I don’t know when or how long it’s gonna take, and the problem is they might overreach after a point has been reached that there’s not much can we do about it.

The 2010 elections are going to be pretty important in this regard, so we hope that they overreach pretty fast, and it sounds like they’re going to. Keep your eyes on out there, folks. Democrats are making the case that it’s bad now but our fixes will be in place for years to come. And they mean that. It’s bad now, but our fixes are going to be in place for years to come. That’s exactly what they’re hoping for, just as FDR’s fixes were in place for a long time. This is about rescuing the Democrat Party and returning it to power indefinitely. ‘Officials are casting doubt on an early projection that four million to five –‘ what, it was six million that were going to show up for the inauguration. They’re casting doubt on that now. ‘Casting doubt that four to five million people could jam downtown DC on Inauguration Day, saying it’s more likely that the crowd will be about half that size.’ Now, keep that in mind. What is half of five to six million? Two and a half to three million, right? Keep that number in mind. I just read you the opening paragraph, okay, and the headline: ‘Inauguration Day Crowd Estimated Reduced by Half.’


‘D.C. authorities said the earlier estimates, provided by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), were based on speculation surrounding the historic nature of the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president. After weeks of checking with charter bus companies, airlines and other sources, they’re reassessing.’ Oh, really? They’re reassessing. They made bets based on speculation. These guys sound like the same people that deal in the oil markets. ”It’s more of an art than a science,’ City Administrator Dan Tangherlini said. ‘The fact is, earlier it was speculation. Now we’re beginning to flesh it out and what the physical capacities of the system are.’ The Secret Service has dismissed the high-end estimates of 4 million to 5 million people. But there is universal agreement among security officials and planners that massive numbers of people will flock to the swearing-in of Obama (D), who had drawn huge campaign crowds.’

Now, listen to this. This is where it gets interesting. Remember, now, the headline: ‘Inauguration Day Crowd Estimated Reduced by Half.’ Officials casting doubt on early projection, four million, five million, six million people jam downtown. Go now to the next paragraph, ‘Turnout could easily reach two million.’ Two million is just one-third of what they were speculating. The two million would ‘far outstrip the 400,000 who attended the 2005 inauguration of President Bush. Although it is possible that 5 million people will descend on the area in the days leading up to the inauguration, it appears unlikely that trains and local roads could get them all to the Mall and parade route Jan. 20, officials said.’ Yes, we’re back to four to 500,000 now, whatever the crowd is. If the crowd is 25, it will be reported at 401,000. The crowd’s going to be bigger than Bush ’05 no matter what happens. This is classic Drive-By Media, classic, report six million, the sea levels will fall, all of these wonderful magical things are — uh, uh, uh, maybe two million, tops. We don’t have the facilities to get any more than that down there on the parade route on the Mall, but you let this image of a nation that cannot be kept away from Washington on Inauguration Day, and it’s all part of the strategy to make this guy Superman when he’s telling us he’s only Clark Kent.

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