RUSH: For all this talk about the civil war in the Republican Party — like the Drive-Bys, the State-Controlled Media just loved jumping all over my comments about Mitch McConnell and the sense I was making about the fact that Republicans were not doing everything they could to stall this. 
They were running around all weekend. ‘There’s a civil war in the Republican Party and Limbaugh is running the show and that’s the death knell!’ I’ll tell you where the civil war is. The civil war is in the Democrat Party, and it’s over health care. Lieberman is officially out now. Claire McCaskill says that she will not sign onto this if it spends more money. If it doesn’t save money, she’s not going to sign onto it.
So I don’t know about McCaskill but Lieberman sounds pretty locked in and that means he doesn’t have his 60 votes unless he can get Olympia Snowe, and the Republicans seem to be holding pretty firm on this. The news of the day is that the health care vote that Reid has is in a big mess. Let me give you some headlines as an example. ‘Senate Health Care Bill Would Allow Insurers to Limit Coverage for Seriously Ill Patients.’ Now, what have we been hearing for the past two weeks? We’ve been hearing for the past two weeks that you’re going to get coverage for existing preconditions and that no matter how sick you are you’re going to get treated. However, there’s a loophole. ‘There’s a loophole in the Senate health care bill that would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses like cancer, which has prompted a rebuke from patient advocates.’ So. The patients — people, American citizens — realize they’re being lied to left and right.
The Lieberman story: ‘Senate Democrats who thought they had found a workable compromise learned otherwise from [Joe] Lieberman over the weekend. Lieberman threatened Sunday to join Republicans in opposing health care legislation if it permits uninsured individuals as young as 55 to purchase Medicare coverage.’ Now, Mike, let’s move to the top of the sound bites rather than go to Kroft interview, because this is the dirty little secret that we’ve known on this program for years. Expanding Medicare… We’ve played you audio sound bites of Obama saying throughout his career of words that expanding Medicare and lowering the mandatory age at which you can qualify… Remember, Medicare and broke, and just a year ago people were talking about raising the eligibility age in order to save money. Now everybody’s talking about — Obama and others — lowering it to 55. Which would break the system, but it is the way that they see to get to single payer. We have a newly discovered audiotape of Obama. This is in 2007 on the campaign trail admitting that he was considering a Medicare-plus plan. This is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on April 3rd, 2007.
OBAMA APRIL 2007: Let’s say that we — L-l-let’s say that I proposed a plan that, uh, moved to a single-payer system… L-l-let’s say Medicare plus. It would be, essentially, everybody can buy into Medicare, for example.
RUSH: Okay, so he’s thinking about it back in 2007. Let’s go back further, February 16th, 2004, in Urbana, Illinois, on a radio show. Obama said this…
OBAMA FEBRUARY 2004: At the federal level, what I’m looking at is a very specific proposal that would provide health care coverage for all children who need it all across the United States, would allow 55 to 64-year-olds to buy into the Medicare system. And I think that if we can start with children and, uh, those persons 55 to 64 that are most vulnerable, then we can start filling in those holes and ultimately I think, uh, move in the direction of a universal health care plan.
RUSH: ‘A universal health care plan.’ We played all these sound bites for you but now this is coming out of the woodwork again because here’s the timeline. Last Sunday, a week ago yesterday Obama goes up to Capitol Hill at two o’clock in the afternoon for a pep talk with Dingy Harry and other Democrats in the Senate saying basically, ‘Win one for the Gipper, here. You gotta do this for me. Do this for me.’ The next day Dingy Harry comes out and says, ‘I’m dropping the public option and instead we’re looking at expanding Medicare to people 55, maybe all the way down to 45 years of age.’ So it looks like Obama went up and then proposed that. Now, in addition to that, back in 2007 at an SEIU health care forum. This is his buddies, the unions, the Service Employees International Union — and, by the way, when he’s in front of these people (his buddies, the people he trusts) he tells them exactly what his plan is and what his hopes are. This is what he said in March of 2007.
OBAMA MARCH 2007: My commitment is to make sure that we’ve got universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president. I would hope that we can set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be, potentially, some transition process, I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out or 20 years out.
RUSH: Now, this is what’s being planned on Capitol Hill. What the Senate is looking at doing. Obama has not put his name on any plan so that he can blame this all on other Democrats if and when it ever happens but we have these tapes. We’ve got these sound bites. And we’re going to be forever playing them, because this is Obama’s plan coming out of the US Senate. Dingy Harry is doing his bidding. Let’s go back even further at the 2003 AFL-CIO conference, while campaigning for the US Senate.
OBAMA 2003: I happen to be a proponent of single-payer universal health care plan. (applause) A single-payer health care plan. Universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see.
RUSH (godlike reverb): ‘I happen to be a proponent of single-payer, universal health care coverage, a single-payer health care plan, universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see.’ (end godlike reverb) That’s what they have in Cuba. So let there be no doubt. All of this is smoke and mirrors. We are headed for single payer. We’re headed for universal health care. And we’re using it, we’re going to expand Medicare, do whatever we can to get it, and it’s Obama’s plan. It is his desire even though he has not put his name on it, and this is what Lieberman — and I’ll betcha quite a lot of other Democrats — are getting nervous about, because they know the Medicare program is going bankrupt soon.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, on the single-payer universal health care, it’s not only Obama who since 2003 has been openly telling us his desires. So have various members of Congress. July 27th, National Press Building in Washington, DC, this is 2007, Barney Frank, reporter said, ‘Real quick, why is single payer off the table?’
REPORTER: Congressman, real quick, why is single payer off the table?
FRANK: Because we don’t have the votes. I wish it weren’t. I’m all for it. I’m a big sponsor. I’ve been a cosponsor of single payer for a very long time.
REPORTER: Don’t you think we should scratch everything and start anew with single payer?
FRANK: No.
REPORTER: Why shouldn’t we start with single payer anew?
FRANK: We just don’t have the votes for it. I wish we did. I think if we if we get a good public option, it could lead to single payer, and that’s the best way to reach single payer. The best way we’re going to get single payer, the only way, is to have a public option and demonstrate its strength and power.
RUSH: Now, the public option is now supposedly off the table, because that wasn’t going to fly in the Senate. That wasn’t gonna get 60 votes in the Senate. You see, regardless whether you listen to Obama or Barney Frank or any of them,, whatever is in this bill is just the vehicle to get to single payer. That’s the objective. Jan Schakowsky, who is a congresswoman from Illinois, April 18th of this year.
SCHAKOWSKY: And next to me was a guy from the insurance company who then argued against the public health insurance option, saying it wouldn’t let private insurance compete, that a public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and — (cheers and applause) He was right! The man was right. I — I — here’s what I told him. I said, ‘Excuse me, sir, the goal of health care reform is not to protect the private health insurance industry.’ (applause) And I am so confident in the superiority of a public health care option that I think he has every reason to be frightened.
RUSH: (godlike reverb) Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from April of this year. Do you understand what you are hearing? Whether it’s Barney Frank or whether it’s Barack Obama or whether it’s Jan Schakowsky or any of them, there is a pure hatred for capitalism, a pure hatred of the private sector, and this audience is cheering the destruction of the private health insurance industry. She wants a public option, she wants single payer. Everything they say to the contrary is a lie. Now, from Byron York at the DC Examiner: ‘Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin admitted Friday that he is ‘in the dark’ about the national health care bill currently under construction by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In an exchange on the Senate floor, Republican Sen. John McCain asked Durbin, ‘Should we not at least be informed as to what the proposal is that the Senate Majority Leader is going to propose to the entire Senate?’ Durbin’s answer: ‘I would say to the senator from Arizona that I am in the dark almost as much as he is, and I am in the leadership.’ Durbin explained that during a Democratic caucus, Reid and the small group of senators involved in crafting the bill turned to their fellow Democrats and ‘basically stood and said, ‘We are sorry, we can’t tell you in detail what was involved.”’
So there you have it. It doesn’t really matter what’s in it, folks. They are just hell-bent on getting it passed so they can send it up to Obama for his signature just to give Obama a monument and something to talk about in his State of the Union speech in January. Although it’s not quite that innocent, the things that are in this that are known are destructive. They would destroy the essence of what has made the United States the United States of America. And I believe that’s the intention as I’ve expressed and explained countless times before. If you listen to Obama talk with real anger in his voice about fat cat bankers and so forth, and then you go back and read Dreams from My Father where he rips into fat cat bankers and so forth, you readily understand what Obama was taught, the way he was raised, and what he believes now.
And I’ll summarize it for you yet again. He looks at the United States of America much as one of our enemies would look at it, Western European socialist or worse: unjust, unfair, immoral, no equality of outcomes, too great a disparity between achievers and underachievers, although he looks at that as the gap between the rich and the poor. And he’s hell-bent on taking away as much as he can from the achievers and redistributing it in order to make this country more fair and to get even with it for all of its evil deeds in its history. That’s who we’ve elected as president of the United States, and it’s patently obvious to anybody who wants to open-mindedly look at what he says.