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RUSH: Marie in Discovery Bay, California. Great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.

CALLER: Oh, my God, Rush, I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy. I bow before you.

RUSH: Now, see, that embarrasses me. If I were Obama, I would say, ‘Don’t get up until I raise you.’

CALLER: Well, I want to just phone in because I adore you but I have to hold you to account for the little person out here. I am a small business owner, one person, home based. I have a house that’s now valued at $200,000 less than what we bought it for five years ago, and up and down my street are all home-based, self-employed contractors, you name it, GCs, window guys, electricians, we all do our own business, and we’re hurting. I didn’t vote for Obama, I don’t believe in any of the socialist policies he’s got going on, but, God, I need the hope, I need people to open their wallets, I need them to start spending and believing that the economy is going to get better or myself and hundreds of other people up and down my street are going to lose our houses, are going to lose our families and everything. And that’s the thing that kills me. The thing that I really need for people to believe in.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: I realize I should care, I should care more about the policy and all that stuff but I need people to start believing that America is going to turn that corner, because we’ve gotta get to the bottom of this and start moving up. What do I do, Rush?

RUSH: Well, you might want to consult history. I don’t know how old you are, but I’ve got a story in the Stack that I’ll get to quickly. It was much worse than this 26 years ago in Ronald Reagan’s second year. The 1970s were an absolute disaster, double-digit unemployment, double-digit interest rates. Nobody could borrow because they couldn’t afford it. Back then you had to have 20% down to buy a house unless you went FHA and that was very tough to qualify for back then. I mean there’s a reason for 20% down for a house. It shows a commitment to the purchase. At any rate, the country came around with policies that got government out of the way, that lowered business and personal income taxes. It encouraged — you know, the one word that Obama didn’t mention yesterday in his speech? There were many words he didn’t mention, one word, key, he did not mention incentive.

CALLER: Oh, that’s true.

RUSH: What do you expect Obama to do to make your customers start spending money?

CALLER: You know, I don’t know, but when you’re watching the — I have to admit I agree with you that the fawning and I was waiting for the great golden idol to be put up in the middle of the square, you know, forget —

RUSH: But look, I’ve gotta run here, but you are willing to put up with that if you think some of this is gonna come your way. And this, unfortunately, is the trick that they are playing. They’re roping in otherwise responsible people like you with policies that have put you where you are in the first place.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Marie in Discovery Bay. I made a mistake. I shoulda held on to you and carried you over to the next hour, because the answers to the things that you asked me are so important right now. I’m going to expand on this when we come back from the top-of-the-hour break here, because I think she epitomizes a lot of people who voted for Obama and support him today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We just had a fascinating phone call, and I made a mistake in not asking the caller to hang on so I could continue to talk with her personally in this hour. Her name was Marie. She was calling from Discovery Bay. Discovery Bay where, Mr. Snerdley? Do you…? Yeah, Discovery Bay, California. She was a very important caller in many ways. Her business is in trouble. I didn’t get what her business is. I didn’t ask her, but she said that everybody in her neighborhood, everybody in her block is in trouble, that nobody has any money to spend, that the value of her home has plummeted. She’s all for the stimulus because she wants somebody to do something. She’s not particularly fond of Obama but at least somebody is going to do something, and she needs something to be done.

I think in Marie from Discovery Bay we heard probably the prototype example of why millions of people supported Obama. He doesn’t provide any answers to her problems, but she has hope that he does. And she said that the people need to have hope and confidence in the economy. They need to open their wallets. They need to start spending in order for her business not to go under and the value of her home thus to become what it once was, to wipe out that loss. So the hope to have confidence in the economy is something she thinks that Obama might bring. She was not begging, but she was plaintive, and she was asking me what she should do. Now, it strikes me as sad in a way, because honest, folks: If I were hurting like Marie in Discovery Bay and about to lose my business — and, by the way, I’ve been broke twice in my life. I’ve described the circumstances.

I wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for somebody to tell me what I should do. I wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for somebody in Washington to come up with a plan that’s going to start getting people to spend money. It’s just something that I cannot relate to. I would be doing everything I could to make money. If that meant a different line of work, so be it. But that may sound harsh to people in today’s America, because we live in an age where a great economy with burgeoning opportunity is something the American people expect. And when it’s not there on a cyclical basis, then a crisis ensues. And I think poor Marie has been subjected to how many years of media attempts to create a crisis mentality where the economy is concerned. For five years, at least, the media has been trying to convince every one of you that we’re already in a recession, and now they’re trying to convince you we are in a depression, that it is worse than the Great Depression — and it isn’t.

We haven’t even gotten close to how bad it was in the 1970s. We haven’t gotten close to the recession in 1982. Yet this willingness to… She started her business at some point, but now she’s willing to put aside whatever she did at that time to start the business and sit around and ‘hope’ that there will be some ‘change’ come down the pike because of a change in occupants in the White House. You know, this is somewhat analogous. The analogy here is somewhat flawed, but I have in my stacks of stuff here some amazing stories. One story out of Japan. Japan is looking at what happened here in America yesterday with its own hope and regret and disappointment. Japan has its own racial problems, and it has not overcome its racial problems, and they are looking now because of what happened yesterday with hope that they, too, might overcome their racial problems. In Brazil, too. There’s the same story out of Brazil.

They have racial problems. And they are looking at what happened yesterday and saying, ‘Oh, we have hope! We now have hope that we can overcome our racial problems,’ and this never written about, but I guarantee, go to the UK and other European Union nations. They got racial problems over there, and they had never dealt with them, and it’s hopeless. But this is that I think these people are making — and this is where this cult-like following behavior comes into play. Obama didn’t do anything. Now, this is not criticism. I’m just giving you history — and I know I’m not supposed to talk this way. These are things that no one’s supposed to say right now, but Obama had nothing to do with the racial problems in this country undergoing great progress and great change.

He is the recipient. He’s the one who benefits from decades… Frankly, this is what upset the Al Sharptons of the world way back in the campaign. This is why David Ehrenstein wrote in the Los Angeles Times of the ‘Magic Negro.’ This is what the whole discussion of whether Obama is ‘authentic’ was about, and that discussion took place exclusively among Democrats. That conversation took place in the campaign exclusively among the left. ‘Is he authentic, because he has no roots to the civil rights struggle in this country?’ But yet he’s the one that has benefited from centuries of work, from the Founders on, this struggle has been waged, and it’s been arduous. Much progress has been made. Japan is looking at us and saying, ‘We haven’t made that kind of progress.’ Brazil is looking at us and saying, ‘We haven’t made that kind of progress.’ America has made that kind of progress, not one man.

But this is not to be critical of Obama, now. Please don’t misunderstand. You know, my words are not nuanced. I mean, this is just flat-out, right between the eyes. It’s not criticism of Obama. What it is instead is an attempt to get people to understand the greatness of their country. Do you know how many people have been taught in the last couple of generations how rotten their country is? And the reason that they’ve been taught how rotten their country is, is because a bunch of multiculturalists got hold of the public education curricula and started tearing this country down on the basis of group victimization and how we have mistreated this group and that group; how we don’t even deserve to really be here because we took this country. We took this land immorally and unjustly.

And so millions of Americans have grown up, little kids, watching Saturday morning cartoons, then going to grade school and the middle school and the high school and the college, being told what a rotten place their country is. Now all of a sudden, despite all of this, the election of one man has made them love their country? Folks, this is not normal. It is not natural. It is aberrational, and it is unhealthy, because what has been at fault to these people who now love their country was a lie. This country has always been a great country with a number of problems that we, as a nation, addressed and fixed — or attempted to fix, and in many instances, did. It is America that is great. America is the sum of its parts. America is not one man. America is not a messiah. America is not a president. I don’t care who he is. A president is not a pied piper.

America is not a nation of cultists. Yet we have reached a point now, where because of the election of one man whose father was black, people are now being told that magic will occur, that the value of their home will automatically increase, that people will open their pocketbooks and start spending. The economy will rebound. You will have health care and it won’t cost you anything. Your kids will have education; there will be no problem. But even this man, Barack Obama, has been warning all of us for the past number of months that the problems are going to get worse before they get better. He’s now saying he may not be able to fix these problems for four years. Now, if I am Marie in Discovery Bay, California, and I hear that, I think, ‘Okay. I’ve gotta do it myself.’ It’s not old-fashioned, by the way, and it’s not selfish to do things for yourself, particularly in your own self interest.

There’s a huge difference between self-interest and selfish. Self-interest is what Marie wants in Discovery Bay. She wants everybody in her neighborhood to start spending, for their own good and ultimately it will benefit her and her spending will benefit other businesses. Well, if people are being told that this is a depression and massive numbers of people are being fired and laid off, and if the banks are worthless, and if the stock market is plummeting and if The Messiah is telling everybody it will take four years, would somebody tell me where in hell is all this confidence? All of this confidence that you think you’re going to have is not being provided you by your people in Washington. It’s just the opposite. These people who talk about ‘hope and change’ are doing their best to depress you.

If I may make this personal, I look at this program as one of the greatest motivational, inspirational institutions in America today. We have a recession? I don’t participate! That offends some people. But it took work to get there. I’m not saying everybody can do it. There was a time in my life where if there was a recession I had to deal with it like everybody else. And I’m not trying to rub people’s noses in it. I’m simply trying to take the experiences of my life in the greatest country on earth and saying, ‘If I can do it, then a lot more people can do it who don’t think they can,’ and I resent this notion that what’s coming out of Washington today is that you can’t do it until they do something. You can’t do it until Geithner is confirmed as the Treasury secretary, and we can’t be safe until Hillary is over at the State Department, and we can’t start moving forward until Obama’s actually sitting in the Oval Office.

Well, I’m sorry, folks. I don’t wait anymore. I don’t wait for anybody when it comes to something I need or something that I want. I used to. I used to think that all good things come to those who wait. Well, maybe in certain circumstances, but not now. It hurts me. It pains me greatly to see what apparently has happened to the thinking of millions of people. Voting for hope, voting for change — and listening to the victors depress you even more. ‘It’s going to be four years before we can fix it. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.’ I just don’t understand the sitting around and waiting, and I don’t understand placing all your hope in somebody you don’t even know, placing all your hope in somebody who isn’t even specific, placing all your hope in somebody who is a celebrity: a public figure PR caricature, a demagogue, who sounds confident and sounds smart but doesn’t ever really say anything.

There’s nothing wrong with being a self-starter. There’s nothing wrong with understanding that times are tough and you have to do what’s necessary when they’re tough. You’ve got a multitudinous number of choices. You live in the United States of America. You can sit and wait for these miracles. You can sit and wait for the magic. You can try to survive or subsist while you’re doing that, or you can go out and try to make your own way. You might have to change jobs. You might have to pull up roots. You might have to do any number of things that you wouldn’t have thought you would have to do, but nothing’s changed in America. Nobody has any guarantees. They never have had, and you don’t have any now. This is the greatest country on earth. It still is, but not because of who was inaugurated yesterday. It was like my examples of the Japanese and the Brazilians.

They now think, because of what happened yesterday, that they have hope to overcome their own racial divides. They haven’t made any progress or not enough to satisfy them. What happened yesterday was the result of centuries of pain, suffering, hard work, sacrifice, you name it. Yesterday was the culmination of events, and the person who was inaugurated had nothing to do with them. Again, this is not criticism. But the inability to see truth and the desire or the preference to live in a fog, to go along with the inertia of popular sentiment just because that’s what most people are thinking. ‘That’s what most people are thinking. I think I’ll think it and feel it, too.’ That’s a nation of followers. What are we following?

We’re following promises that are peppered with pessimism. We have elected to power a party which survives and thrives on the creation of daily crises: keeping you upset, uncertain and full of doubt about your own country; making you filled with suspicion about the institutions in your own country that would enable you to emerge from this economic malaise intact. Since you doubt the institutions, since they’ve made you doubt many of the traditions and institutions that have defined this country’s greatness, you now have thrown in with One Man. There are 302 million Americans and you’ve thrown in with one of them ’cause we ‘have to do something.’ Well, no. This America has been made great because YOU decided to do something. The people who made this country great, the people who made this country work, are listening to me right now, and I doubt too many radios are on in Washington.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, so I guess a number of you are waiting around for the miracle, the economic magic that will once again restore prosperity to your family circumstance. Well, that’s not happening. Instead, Obama circulated a draft executive order today that calls for the closing of Guantanamo Bay within a year and halting any war crimes trials in the meantime. ‘Closing the facility in Cuba ‘would further the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice,’ read the draft prepared for the new president’s signature. While some of the detainees currently held at Guantanamo would be released, others would be transferred elsewhere and later put on trial under terms to be determined.’ I don’t know what to believe about this because just last week Obama said, yeah, I’m going to sign that executive order, so I’m not surprised about that, but he said, (paraphrasing) ‘Look, some of the people down there are really dangerous, really bad people. And even though the evidence was tainted against them, it’s true. And I don’t know what to do. We may not close it for four years.’ Now all of a sudden he’s going to close it in a year. This has nothing to do with the economy. That’s not going to cause people to open up their pocketbooks and start spending money.

Cybercast News Service, staff writer, Fred Lucas, roaming the grounds in DC yesterday. Ann Marie Adams, a graduate student at Howard University, told Fred Lucas, ‘Obama has given us a reason to look at government as a way to get out of this mess. He has given us a reason to believe that government can help us. It’s not entirely tangible how he has changed America. It’s like when you go to church and you feel God speaking to you. It’s not tangible, but you just know.’ Now, she’s a college student. But he’s God to her. Doesn’t need any specifics. All she needs to do is hear him speak and things are going to change dramatically. Folks, I’m telling you this is not healthy, and he and his administration are encouraging this, and as such whether things get worse or better, these people are going to think they’re getting better because he is in charge of it. It’s sad to think we’ve lost this many citizens.

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