RUSH: Is the worm turning out there? At this point in the program yesterday, we had five sound bites for you, or maybe it was four. One, two, three, four, five sound bites of Warren Buffett, where he basically threw Obama under the bus. I promised I’m going to play those sound bites again today. He threw him under the bus on the economy, and finally somebody else is reporting this, somebody other than me. It’s from Reuters today. The headline: ”Vaunted Obama Message Machine is Off-Key’ — When billionaire investor Warren Buffett says President Barack Obama’s economic message is muddled and undermining public confidence, it’s worth listening. Halfway through his first 100 days in office, ace communicator Obama has struggled to find the right tone in talking about the economy, twinning bleak warnings with optimism about the future.’ Twinning? How about combining?
‘On the campaign trail, Obama said a president must be able to do more than one thing at a time, and his White House has been doing that.’ But he also said in that call back to the New York Times, ‘I got far more to worry about here than the financial situation.’ So let’s go back and let’s start again with Warren Buffett, because we have Jack Welch to add to this today. This is worth hearing again because Reuters has now picked up on this. Jack Welch has chimed in but covered his rear end at the same time. So here’s Warren Buffett yesterday, this is from CNBC, and here is a comment he made about card check. Now, by the way, card check is being introduced in the House and in the Senate today and it looks like it’s in trouble. Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas, who was an original supporter, Arlen Specter an original supporter back in 2007 when it had no chance of passage, both of them are changing their minds. It looks like card check is going to have some problems. Card check is the misnamed piece of legislation that would allow unions to come in and unionize virtually any small business that they wanted to.
Oh, and speaking of that, there’s a great piece today in the American Thinker and it is about government unions. Now, follow me on this. I’m paraphrasing this. I just read it. Mary Landrieu was also a supporter of card check and now she’s in doubt. You know, when the rubber meets the road, when the pedal hits the metal, when they Happy Meal has the order of fries, or the McNuggets, then when it gets serious and people start thinking about it in different ways, now that the vote may actually affect their futures as opposed to their words affecting their futures, some of these people are backing off on card check. Now, the point in the American Thinker piece today was, we’re all being told by the Obama administration that the government is our salvation, that the government is our destiny, that the government can and should handle all of our problems, that the government’s the only place that can deal with the economic decline, the government’s the only institution that can save the world, much less save America. If that’s the case, why do government workers need a union? I mean, the people closest to the government are the people that work for it, right? And yet they need a union to protect themselves from what? The government! From incompetence, from excess, it’s a great, great point.
If the government were so magnificent, if the government were so wonderful, why, nobody would need union representation to protect them against the government. I’ll share this with you in greater detail as the program unfolds. I still can’t get over all the gaffes that are occurring in this administration, and I’m wondering, if it were George W. Bush and he had sent his secretary of state over to meet with the Russians and that stupid little Lego game thing they put together, the red reset button, got the word wrong, can you imagine how the Drive-By Media would have talked about the stupidity of Bush and the State Department if Condoleezza Rice, or imagine if it were Colin Powell, he was the first secretary of State. Can you imagine if something like that — well, they would have slid past it, or as Dizzy Dean would have said, ‘They would have slud past it,’ if it were Colin Powell. But for Condoleezza Rice, oh, they would be demanding that she be thrown out and so forth. So we had that gaffe. We’ve got the tax cheats. The Gordon Brown insult. That still blows my mind. Obama giving the prime minister of the UK something you would give your mother-in-law for Christmas at the last minute when you had run out of ideas, so you dial up Amazon and pick 25 DVDs and fire ’em off. I mean, the basic etiquette that is missing here is shocking.
And again, this Hillary thing, it was embarrassing from top to bottom, and then Hillary wasn’t through! She visits Brussels. She speaks to leaders of the European Union, and in a speech they claimed that US democracy was older than Europe’s. She said, ‘I have never understood multi-party democracy. It’s hard enough with two parties to come to any resolution, and I say this very respectfully because I feel the same way about our own democracy, which has been around a lot longer than European democracy.’ Smartest woman in the world now, remember? You know what’s been the biggest myths in American politics is, is that liberal Democrats are all intellectually smart and that is Republican conservatives are Neanderthals. I’ll tell you somebody on the Democrat side who’s really smart, and that’s Clinton. He may sound like a bumpkin now and then, he may do some stupid things because of those excessive appetites he has that are just voracious, they can’t be satisfied. But he’s smart. Obama’s not even in Clinton’s league when it comes to the smarts, but he has the ability to talk it. You know, intellectuals are often the ones that are more surprised by the truth and the outcome of events, ’cause they’re removed, they live in their own little world of affected speech, worldviews and so forth.
Nobody would accuse Clinton of being intellectual simply ’cause he’s from Arkansas, and he sounds like it, but he’s smart. Bill Clinton is a smart tactician, he’s strategically smart. Obama’s not in his league, but they built Obama up to be the smartest guy, the brainiest, just like Hillary is not and never was the smartest woman in the world. We have been around, our democracy, the US been around longer than European democracy. Ever heard of Athens? Your mouth opens in awe. We thought that Obama sent Hillary out in the world where she has been virtually for the entire Obama administration, so she could stay out of his newly gray hair. But the fact of the matter is, she is plowing through one mistake after another, one giant embarrassment after another, and she is the one with experience between the two of them. All right, a brief time-out here, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll come back. Warren Buffett again from yesterday because I don’t think the worm’s really turning, but when the Reuters guys start writing about Obama’s vaunted message machine being muddled because Warren Buffett basically says, hey, you’re doing things wrong here, it’s worthy of comment here on the EIB Network.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
All right, Warren Buffett from yesterday morning on CNBC’s Squawk Box program, here are his thoughts on card check. Oh. And, by the way, I was just checking the e-mail during the profit center time-out there, and a lot of people ask, ‘Rush, which is card check?’ And I understand this. Card check doesn’t describe what this legislation is, nor does the title of the legislation describe what it is. Let me give you an explanation of card check that everybody can understand. You are a small business employee. Your boss has a shop that is not union. After this legislation passes, one day Tony Soprano will walk in with a lead pipe, and he will start beating people upside the head to vote to unionize, because you cannot vote in private.
Card check is a public vote on whether to unionize. So they send in a Soprano guy with a lead pipe aimed at your kneecaps or your head, and they tell you, ‘It would be a good idea if you participated in unionizing the shop.’ Then after they unionize the shop, they really couldn’t care much less about your shop. All they want is your dues, to be able to send it to the Democrat Party. So when you think of card check, think of yourself as a nonunion employee at a small business, you love the guy you work for — or maybe you hate him, it doesn’t matter — and some guy, Tony Soprano walks in, and threatens to beat you up on the side of the head if you don’t vote to unionize. That’s card check brought to you by the freedom-loving Obama Democrat Party. Here are Warren Buffett’s thoughts on card check.
BUFFETT: I think the secret ballot’s pretty important in the country. I’m against card check, to make a perfectly flat statement.
RUSH: Okay, throws Obama overboard, throws Obama under the bus on a signature piece of legislation: card check. He believes, Buffett does, in ‘the secret ballot.’ Card check is not secret, therefore they can intimidate you into voting the way they want. Here is Warren Buffett on cap and trade, which is basically Obama’s global warming carbon tax.
BUFFETT: Anything you put in that effectively taxes carbon emissions is… Somebody’s going to bear the brunt of it. In the case of a regulated utility, the utility customers are gonna pay for it. I mean, it’s going to become, in effect, a tax. (chuckles) I think we should get the economy straight. I think job one, job two, and job three is the economy.
RUSH: And he doesn’t like cap and trade. He doesn’t like the carbon tax. Your utility rates will go up 25% — minimum. And you — 95% — who Obama is telling that you will not face a tax increase? Maybe not on your income (although you will, I guarantee that, too), but your everyday living expenses are going to skyrocket. Here’s Warren Buffett throwing Obama overboard on cap and trade. Up next, corporate jets. Obama’s trashed them. John Kerry has trashed them. So has Barney Frank. Obama has said, ‘You can’t just get on your jet and fly to Las Vegas for a good time. You just can’t do it. Those days are over.’ Here’s Warren Buffett on that notion.
BUFFETT: I do have a — a — a dog in this fight. (snickering) So put me down as biased, but I — I do think — I use a jet both personally and with business. I mean, I have my own things I pay for, but I use it in business. Berkshire has been better off by me having a — a plane available to go and do deals or whatever it may be. I think it’s a big mistake to start demonizing anybody in this game. I — I just think that it — it causes the American people to look backwards, and we don’t want villains.
RUSH: Thrown overboard, Obama, three times now on fundamental signature Obama issues. Here is the corporate jet business. Buffett says, ‘Hey, I have one. I have a business that rents and sells these things. I have my own things I pay for. My company’s been better off. We don’t need villains.’ That’s Obama’s entire modus operandi! So here’s Buffett three consecutive — by the way, Buffett’s company, if you don’t know this, is NetJets, and NetJets is a fractional share ownership plan. Theoretically you can purchase a share (a quarter or a third, whatever is up for sale) of whatever jet in their fleet, and they have lots of them. It is incredible. The tail numbers of NetJets aircraft — they all have the same paint job, they all have the same interior, it doesn’t matter what the airplane is, and the tail number –always ends with QS, like N455QS, means for ‘quality service.’ And they have so many of these things that I think Gulfstream — I’ll have to double-check, this. I think Gulfstream has dedicated a single completion center in Brunswick, Georgia, just to finish jets manufactured for Warren Buffett. I mean, there’s NetJets, and then there is Marquis Jet. There’s all kinds of these companies out there, and he owns one of them. And here’s Obama out there trashing them and John Kerry trashing them. So here’s the third instance of Obama being thrown overboard by Warren Buffett. Here now is the economy in general, Warren Buffett.
BUFFETT: Job one is to win the war. Job — the economic war. Job two is to win the economic war, and job three. And you can’t expect people to unite behind you if you’re trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throats. I don’t think anybody on December 7th would have said that a war is a terrible thing to waste and therefore we’re going to try and ram through a whole bunch of things. It’s just a mistake, I think, when you’ve got one overriding objective to try and muddle it up with a whole bunch of other things.
RUSH: This is major! He’s just thrown Obama overboard on health care, on stem cells, or whatever Obama has announced. What is it? Health care, education, and whatever the third thing is. He’s just thrown not only Obama overboard, he’s thrown his strategy overboard. He has thrown his policies overboard. And he also doesn’t like this notion of ‘a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.’ There are a lot of great analyses to that one, by the way, that I’ve seen. I’ll share with you. So there’s one more to go here from Warren Buffett then Jack Welch gets in the act, but still this is amazing, and nobody in the Drive-Bys is covering this and reporting it in any way with the weight that it deserves.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, we have just heard Warren Buffett — Mr. Capitalist, Mr. Economy — essentially throw Barack Obama’s policies overboard, under the bus; yesterday in a wide-ranging two-hour appearance on CNBC and after those four instances, throwing Obama under the bus, Warren Buffett was asked what role the Republicans have.
BUFFETT: The minority has… They really do have an obligation to support things that, in general, are clearly designed to fight the war in a big way. Republicans have a — an obligation to regard this as an economic war and to realize you need one leader and — and in general support of that. But I think that the Democrats — and I — I voted for Obama, I strongly support him, and I think he’s the right guy, but I think they should not use this… When they’re calling for unity on a question this important they should not use it to roll the Republicans.
RUSH: All right. May I translate this for you? ‘I like Corn Flakes, but I’m not saying you should. If you don’t like Corn Flakes is fine with me. And Obama makes a valid point about Frosted Flakes though I personally find them too sweet, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid them altogether. We just need to be happy, work together, and Republicans need to realize there’s only one general, but a general has many majors, and sometimes majors disagree with generals. And at the end of the day we all have our eye on the prize, and I hope that when it’s all said and done, things work out.’ Uh, that’s… How in the world can you throw Obama’s policies overboard, how can you disagree profoundly with his signature policies and then come out and say, ‘I like his ideas. He’s the guy! I strongly support him. He’s the right guy’? How do you do that? You do that out of partisanship, ladies and gentlemen. But this is a huge no-vote of confidence in what Obama’s trying to do. What Warren Buffett’s basically telling you is he is not trying to straighten out the economy.