RUSH: I want you to hear some of the sound bites of the flip-flop and the double flip-flops that are happening here with the administration. First off, Gibbs, daily press briefing, reporter says, ‘What’s been the response so far, kinda feedback to this suggestion in recent days that a public option might not be part of health care reform?’
GIBBS: The president, his position, the administration’s position is — is unchanged, that we have a goal of fostering choice in competition in a private health insurance market. The president prefers the public option as a way of doing that. That’s what the president has said for months. Coincidentally that’s what the secretary of Health and Human Services has said for months. It’s what I’ve said for months. I think that suggestion that somehow anything that was said Saturday or Sunday as being new administration policy is just not something that — that I would agree with.
RUSH: Well, now, this is flat-out unbelievable. I mean Gibbs is trying to tell the press corps yesterday and everybody else that what Obama and Sebelius said on the weekend never happened. They didn’t say what you heard ’em say, it didn’t happen. And this is supposed to be the most competent press secretary and the most savvy White House machine that we’ve ever had in terms of communications. So let’s go, yesterday, Washington, the Administration on Aging’s Senior Medicare Patrol Conference. What the hell is with all these names? The Administration on Aging’s Senior Medicare Patrol Conference. And Kathleen Sebelius spoke, and here’s what she said.
SEBELIUS: All I can tell you is that Sunday must have been a very slow news day, because here’s the bottom line. Absolutely nothing has changed. We continue to support the public option. That will help lower costs, give American consumers more choice, and keep private insurers honest. If people have other ideas about how to accomplish these goals, we’ll look at those, too. But the public option is a very good way to do this.
RUSH: Okay, so now she comes out and says that what she said Sunday she didn’t say. Gibbs says, no, Obama and Sebelius didn’t say what you heard ’em say and Sebelius said it must have been a slow news day because you guys, I mean, I didn’t say it. She blames the media. Kathleen Sebelius blaming the media for what she actually said on Sunday. Let’s go back. This is what she said on CNN State of the Union on Sunday, John King asked her a question: ‘You don’t have the votes right now in the Senate for the public option. Is the message from the president that the votes aren’t there, it’s time to come up with a plan B?’
SEBELIUS: What we don’t know is exactly what the Senate Finance committee is likely to come up with. They’ve been more likely focused on a co-op, a not-for-profit co-op as a competitor as opposed to a straight government-run program. What’s important is choice and competition. And I’m convinced at the end of the day the plan will have both of those but that is not the essential element.
RUSH: All right. You know, I only had two or three hours’ sleep last night, but I can follow this. And these people have no idea. They have lost the message. There is no discipline. Now, some people might think, ‘Rush, they’re doing it on purpose, they’re just trying to keep everybody distracted and have you talk about how they’re saying one thing and doing another thing,’ but this is not productive. Obama has lost the only thing he had going into all this, he’s lost the trust of a majority of the American people. More and more people do not trust what Obama is saying. They don’t believe him, and without that he’s got nothing because he’s got no success track. I mean everything he’s done to supposedly fix problems has made them worse. I hoped for it, folks, I’m going to be honest. When I said I hope Obama fails, this is exactly the kind of stuff I hoped would happen from day one. But I mean this is the Keystone Cops. This is the gang that can’t shoot straight and they still, of course, pose a great danger.
Now, Rasmussen has polling data out that’s interesting on this. Just 34% of voters nationwide support the health care reform plan proposed by Obama and congressional Democrats if the so-called public option is removed. In other words, without the public option, enthusiasm for the health care reform, especially among Democrats, collapses. Well, now, that is a double whammy, because most people don’t want the public option, they understand what it is. What lingering support there was, or is, for Obamacare resides in the public option. A lot of Democrats think that’s what we have to do. Now with talk of it coming off, Obama’s losing even the people that were locked in on this. The stuff that I dreamed of when I said I hope he fails is starting to happen. I just wish it had started six months ago instead of today, but I’ll take it. Here’s Linda Douglass yesterday afternoon on MSNBC’s Dr. Nancy. Dr. Nancy Snyderman says, ‘Could you shed some light as to why, perhaps, that’s the reason the president, at least it appears, to be opening the door to co-ops instead of a public option?’
DOUGLASS: Let me just say again, as I’ve said to many of you over the last 24 hours or so, nothing has changed. I mean it’s very interesting that somehow there is this story that something happened when actually nothing happened. Nobody in the administration’s said anything different, the president has always said that one of the key goals — among the key goals of health insurance reform is you’ve gotta lower costs and you’ve got to increase choice and competition in the insurance market. The president said over the weekend, said again, a good idea of achieving those goals would be a public option.
RUSH: And there’s another thing, too. They keep talking about wanting competition. They do not want competition. They do not want competition and choice. But here’s Linda Douglass, the cheap propagandist, you know, she is — it’s a toss-up. Remember Baghdad Bob, Brian? Do you remember Baghdad Bob? Our troops were in Baghdad. Saddam Hussein was hiding in bunkers and places around town. We had pictures, live TV shots of our troops moving in on Baghdad and there’s Baghdad Bob saying, ‘Oh, no, the troops aren’t here, they’re not even close.’ Well, I think Baghdad Bob perhaps has taken over the bodies of Bob Gibbs, Robert Gibbs and Linda Douglass because Baghdad Bob is the PR operation, the communications strategery they’ve got. This is utterly absurd. They’re trying to tell us that what Obama said and Sebelius said they didn’t say, and then Sebelius is saying, ‘I said it, but you’re distorting what I said and I really didn’t say it, it was a slow news day.’ So Dr. Nancy Snyderman, MSNBC, ‘Another NBC News poll just out today looking at people, the American public and how they’re looking at the public option. And 45% are saying they believe in lower costs, but a significant number believe that it will limit access. Now, if you would reframe the White House message that a public option is in fact Medicare but without the age restrictions, can you address these numbers?’
SNYDERMAN: Well, you know, the way the public option works, and people really don’t have a lot of information in some ways. I mean there’s a lot of misinformation floating around there. There certainly are scare tactics underway to try to prevent people from getting at the truth. The president thinks it would be a good idea to have a public option or a mechanism that would lower costs and increase choice and competition. So it’s not a question of limiting access. That’s certainly not part of it. It’s a question of expanding access.
RUSH: It cannot possibly be expanding access. There was no way around this. A good idea to have a public option that would lower costs and increase choice in competition? We’ve already got numerous choices that people have in the private sector. Why is it that a public option, a government-run option is going to provide great competition, it’s going to really bring these insurance companies into line? It’s going to do just the opposite. There’s no way costs are going to get lowered. Now, the overall costs are not going to be lowered. We are going to spend less on certain people, and that is the sick and the elderly. By the way, the AARP, what is it, 60,000 members canceled their membership. That’s a good start. We only have 40 million more to go. Who would have ever thought that a Democrat president could come along and get 60,000 seasoned citizens to tell the AARP to go to hell? But it’s happened.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, folks, following their argument out here, this ‘We need a public option to increase competition. The public option out there will lower costs.’ That would be the same thing as if there were no post office now and them telling us we need to create the post office to drive down prices at FedEx and UPS. I mean, none of this is sensible at all. All right, very short segment here because, as I say, I went long. We gotta take another break here coming up. There’s not enough time to get another sound bite. But it is interesting, ‘Democrat Investigators Targeting Health Insurers.’ Wait ’til you hear this story. You have to ask yourself: Do we still live in the United States of America?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
Have you noticed, by the way, in all these sound bites — from Gibbs, to Linda Douglass, to Kathleen Sebelius — the words ‘lower costs, increased competition’? Do you realize that the Democrats now have had to resort to conservative principles and ideas to sell a radical, socialist health care overhaul? And that’s right out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: ‘Never make an argument outside your audience’s area of expertise.’ What Alinsky’s rules are really all about is how to lie to people effectively. The truth doesn’t matter. Words are just tools. There are no facts. It’s how you present what you want. So this is a tacit acknowledgement and admission by the Obama crowd that the American people ain’t liberal.
The American people are not a bunch of socialists and they don’t want a socialist country or government. So they’re having to sell this radical overhaul as filled with competition that is going to lower costs. Now, if they really believed that, they would have never done the stimulus. They would have been doing things to get themselves out of the private sector so that stimulation could occur there via competition, via incentives and costs coming down and so forth; the way economies revive anyway, on their own, at some point or another. And Gallup… The reason they’re doing that — you know, they’ve got the same polling data that we have and probably even more. ‘Self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states now,’ according to Gallup.
‘At the same time, more Americans nationwide are saying this year that they are conservative and have made that claim in any of the last four years.’ Thank you, President Obama and the Democrats because they are bringing it out. The only… If you want to attach something that’s — well, not really negative to this, but it’s still worth pointing out. It’s not because some magical conservative figure (other than me, of course) has popped up and is dominating the scene. There is no identifiable Republican in elective office right now that’s articulating this. Well, maybe Palin, but even so. This is all happening because we’re finally seeing what ultra-radical leftism is. We’re seeing exactly what it is. Thank you, President Obama. It is arrogance; it is contempt. He is finally opening up being exactly who he is. And this next sound bite from Eleanor Clift I think illustrates this. She was on Matthews’ show last night on MSNBC, and he says to Eleanor Clift, ‘Are we going to get a bill or not?’
CLIFT: If the Democrats don’t produce, I think the anger against them in the midterm elections next year will be quite strong. And they would condemn Obama’s presidency to failure. I’m waiting for the Barack Obama who the country voted for to show up in this battle —
MATTHEWS: Mmmph!
CLIFT: — and they view everything through the last campaign, and they’re saying, ‘Oh, he’s a great closer.’ There’s still fight left on this public option.
MATTHEWS: Yeah. Mmm-hmm.
CLIFT: And if you use the analogy I think we’re in the Reverend Wright stage of the campaign right now (haughty laugh) —
MATTHEWS: Ha!
CLIFT: — on health care.
RUSH: This is amazing. She says that Obama is as low as the Reverend Wright stage. She’s waiting for the Obama from the campaign trail to show up. She talks about what a ‘great closer’ he was. He was not a great closer. He could not put Hillary Clinton away. It took the superdelegates to get rid of Hillary Clinton. Remember Operation Chaos. She was a viable contender up until the superdelegates decided to throw it for Obama and end that campaign ’cause it wasn’t looking good for Obama. He was not a closer. So now here they are. They’re waiting for the Obama of the campaign to show up. Where is this guy we voted for? He’s been campaigning the whole time; he’s never stopped! Where is the Obama? You know, what’s happened, Eleanor, is that your guy never had to leave platitudes in the campaign.
But now there are specifics. Now Obama has done things, and they don’t jibe with any of the platitudes that came out of the campaign. The bloom is off the rose here, and she pointblank says here: ‘If the Democrats don’t produce, they would condemn Obama’s presidency to failure.’ See, it’s all on the Democrats now. The Republicans really can’t stop any of this, as we keep saying. And all this trumped-up, bipartisan garbage? There was never any bipartisanship here because they don’t need to it. In fact, where is it? Newsweek has a story today. Oh, yeah. Here it is. This is just amazing. It’s by Andrew Romano. ‘Bipartisanship is Dead.’ Newsweek is now proclaiming bipartisanship is bad. That’s the headline of the piece.
Now, what a fascinating sentiment after eight years of bashing Bush and Rove because of their unwillingness to compromise with Democrat critics. You know, they were just slapping everybody out of the way, refused to compromise, needed bipartisanship. If Andrew Romano in this piece can really claim with a straight face that, quote, ‘Since the early 1970s Democrats have drifted only slightly leftward.’ You need to get outta Washington, Mr. Romano. You need to get outta Washington and go to California or go to North Carolina. Go to Florida. You will see. (chuckles) ‘Drifted only slightly leftward’? So now bipartisanship is bad. Just change the rules during the middle of the game in order to make Obama look good. It’s just fascinating.