RUSH: I want to go back, folks. I think this is highly relevant. I told Cookie, I sent her a note last night in the middle of show prep, I said, ‘I want to go back to something Obama said in a presidential candidates debate January 15th in Las Vegas.’ This debate was moderated by the late Tim Russert of NBC News. They had, Russert and Obama, the following exchange.
RUSSERT: Senator Obama, you gave an interview to the Reno Gazette-Journal, and you said we all have strengths and weaknesses. You said one of your weaknesses is, quote, ‘I’m not an operating officer.’ Do the American people want someone in the Oval Office who is an operating officer?
OBAMA: Well, I think what I was describing was how I view the presidency. Now, being president is not making sure that schedules are being run properly or the paperwork is being shuffled effectively. It involves having a vision for where the country needs to go.
RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is crucial to me. This is President Obama without his teleprompter, this is during a presidential debate, telling us his view, not just of his role as president, but what he thinks operating officers are, like COOs, chief operating officers. This description of what an operating officer does is beyond ignorant and beyond shallow. A chief operating officer does schedules and shuffles paperwork? Another straw man argument. Who said being president was any of those things? Who ever said that being a president of the United States is shuffling paper and handling schedules? That’s what the chief of staff does. You know, we are witnessing as a result of this, we are witnessing what happens when a major organization has a clueless leader in charge, and that is Barack Obama, who I think is in over his head in an executive sense. Yeah, he can do the liberal vision things, and that’s what he’s trying to do. Details are tough, and he doesn’t like the criticism. You know, he got all exorcised out there, the teleprompter told him to get all exorcised out there because he was getting some criticism today about all this, and Geithner was getting some criticism, and he doesn’t like that. Central planners do not accept criticism well.
Tim Geithner, I don’t know, has he ever held a private sector job? He’s running one of the biggest companies in the private sector. He is simultaneously lost and overwhelmed. Geithner is being asked to run and save dysfunctional companies. They are in desperate need of world class help, reorganization and bankruptcy, what have you. Instead, AIG’s being run by a guy who is pretending to know what he’s doing, and while the guy who actually is running AIG, Tim Geithner, gets exempted from all this and this poor guy Liddy up there, who is the government-appointed CEO, is now the sacrificial lamb. Geithner is so inept senators like Chuck Schumer are running to microphones telling the world how the Senate’s going to solve the problems created by Congress. And what are they going to do? They’re going to tax retention bonuses. Yeah, that’s going to fix the problem. Think about that. Chuck Schumer just ran over Geithner. Schumer wasn’t going to wait for Geithner ’cause he doesn’t respect him. Geithner is dead to Schumer. Geithner’s toast to a lot of these people. I wonder how much respect Geithner has now on Wall Street or in Congress. This guy’s radioactive, plus he’s a tax cheat. When the boss has to tell those that work with Geithner that Geithner’s a good Treasury secretary, which Obama did, came out, vote of confidence without being asked about it, then today compares him to Alexander Hamilton?
The problem Geithner has is very simple. His boss, Barack Obama, cannot help him because Obama doesn’t understand this job. His politics are anti-capitalism. All Obama knows to solve problems is throw money at them, or to get a bunch of protesters marching in the streets. That’s how he knows to solve problems. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing in the private sector. He’s never been an executive of anything. So he can’t give any help to any of these people he’s put in charge of things. And because Obama has no executive experience, and I don’t know how much Geithner has, either, decisions are not being made. The velocity of information and the need for decisions is too much for an overworked, understaffed, and leaderless amateur like Geithner. Remember, Geithner’s on a committee of clowns in charge of the automobile industry. Do you believe this? He’s on that committee and look at what’s happening to it. While he’s running the car business and running the bank here, AIG, trying to staff his own department, he has all the other responsibilities of a cabinet secretary, nothing is being done. No wonder we haven’t seen a toxic asset plan for banks yet. It’s why the bonuses weren’t dealt with. The issue got shoved aside, very big pile of papers and so forth.
We are watching incompetence on parade among people we are told are the smartest and the best and the brightest the country has to offer. All of these Ivy League academic eggheads who come out of these schools with arrogance, conceit, and contempt for everybody who didn’t go to these schools. No practical hands-on, real-life experience in anything, just a bunch of highfalutin liberal, slash, socialist theory that have been drilled into them, and they’ve been told they’re the best and they’ve been told they’re the smartest and they’ve been told they’re the brightest, and they believe it. And then, when magic doesn’t happen once they attach themselves to it, they get totally confused, they don’t understand ’cause they have no idea what they’re doing. The very people who gave us the problem are in charge of fixing it. This is like nominating Colonel Sanders to save the chicken population so that there will be plenty of Chicken McNuggets at Mickey D’s in Port St. Lucie when somebody shows up and wants an order so they don’t have to call 911 when there aren’t any.