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RUSH: Well, imagine that, folks, Howard Dean is actually making our case for just blowing up the health care bill. That’s coming up in mere moments, and also Susan Collins, who I focused on yesterday and asked, ‘What’s a nice way to call somebody ignorant?’ Susan Collins now says the health bill is too deeply flawed for her to support it. Byron York has it, and it’s interesting. The health care bill will be a primary focus of the program today as it requires it be. Rush Limbaugh here at 800-282-2882. And the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

One of the things that really has the left upset about the health care bill, there are two things in it, well, three, but nobody is focusing much on the third. The first is the public option coming up. The left doesn’t like that. The Medicare buy-in or Medicare expansion, that’s come out, supposedly. The left doesn’t like that. And they really don’t like that because they think Obama has crawled into bed with Big Insurance. Remember, now, the left hates companies, they hate corporations, and they really hate the fact that Lieberman is seeming to be the guy who’s getting everything he wants here.

But there is a third reason, ladies and gentlemen, that the left is fit to be tied. And that is the Dorgan amendment. The Dorgan amendment would have allowed the reimportation of drugs from Canada at a much cheaper price. That amendment went down in flames. And so the whole concept of drug reimportation, which Obama — and we have it on tape — which Obama supported, a number of other Democrats supported, now it’s gone. And you take this over to the House, and there’s no way the House can reconcile any of this. But you have the public option supposedly gone, you have the Medicare expansion supposedly gone, and now you’ve got the continuing of expensive drugs — that’s how the left is looking at it — with American corporations who are hated by the left benefiting, and they think they’ve been sold out. They think they have been sold out.

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RUSH: Here’s Howard Dean on public radio in Vermont. He’s on fire yesterday afternoon with these comments.

DEAN: This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate, and honestly the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House and start the reconciliation process. You only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.

RUSH: Now, he went further. After that appearance on Vermont Public Radio, he was on MSNBC last night with probably a smaller audience than on Vermont Public Radio. He got this question: What would be your advice to a Senator, Democrat Senator on the floor of the Senate on passage of this bill, the choice is to vote yes or no?

DEAN: No. Absolutely not. You can’t vote for a bill like this in good conscience. It isn’t health care reform. It’s not even insurance reform. If it were me, I’d kill the bill entirely and have the House start reconciliation, which is what they should have done in the first place. To be held up by four senators, a minority of 40 who were totally uncooperative, which is the Republicans, and then four Senators that are beholden to the insurance industry I think is wrong. But that’s what’s happened.

RUSH: This is the former chairman of the Democrat National Committee. He continued with this.

DEAN: Don’t run our children into debt and come back and do this two years later. I disagree with the administration when they say a president won’t take this on for another 20 years. We’re in crisis here. This bill I think is more likely to make the crisis worse than it is better because it’s so expensive. So we could come back with a new Congress, which unfortunately, as a result of all this, will have fewer Democrats, but it will still have Democratic majorities. We could come back with a new Congress and we could pass a bill, which we had on the Senate floor last week, that would insure people faster, even though it’s delayed by a year-and-a-half, than the bill that’s going to be passed in the Senate.

RUSH: Howard Dean making the case for opposing this health care bill. It doesn’t accomplish anything, it’s way too expensive, it piles debt on kids. That’s as far as making our case goes. We don’t want the public option back in, which he does, we don’t want the Medicare expansion back in, which he does. So this is a direct hit at the Obama administration and calling them out. You guys say we can’t do this for another 20 years, you’re wrong, do it right in the first place, scrap this. That’s a Democrat talking.

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RUSH: Now, we have another Dean sound bite coming up in the next segment, but in that sound bite, Howard Dean says that the failure to pass the reimportation of drugs amendment, the Dorgan amendment, amounts to a bigger bailout to the insurance companies than AIG. Now, that’s code words to the leftist base to stand up and stop this and hate it, because they hate AIG.

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RUSH: Howard Dean was on Vermont Public Radio, he was on MSNBC last night, he’s on ABC’s Good Morning America today. See, I happen to think that what’s going on here is a little payback. You may have forgotten, but of course it is my job never to forget and after Obama won election one of the first things he did was to get Howard Dean and everybody that was part of Howard Dean’s staff out of the DNC. He didn’t want Dean anywhere nearby, and these two guys are not friends, and Dean particularly has a huge animus for Rahm Emanuel. So here’s Dean all of a sudden, when the public option’s tossed out and Medicare expansion is tossed out, here comes Howard Dean all over the media sounding like the Republicans ought to be sounding, saying the things Republicans ought to be saying to kill this bill. And this next comment, this bite is designed to enrage the left-wing kook fringe base at Obama. It’s a question from Stephanopoulos: ‘You call this a collapse of health care reform. The president’s poll numbers at new lows. A lot of leading Democrats believe if this bill goes down it will cripple the Obama presidency. Are you prepared to do that?’

DEAN: We’ve gotten to the stage, George, you know this better than most, in Washington where passing any bill is a victory. And that’s the problem. Decisions are being made about the long-term future of this country for short-term political reasons, and that’s never a good sign. There are some good things in this bill. The problem is we are now committed to a solution using the private insurance companies, and you will be forced to buy insurance. If you don’t, you’ll pay a fine and 27% of the money that you put in will not go to your health care; it will go to CEOs who make $20 million a year. This is a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG. And not one person — excuse me — a very small number of people are going to get any insurance at all until 2014, if the bill works.

RUSH: This is the kind of stuff — throw the AIG stuff out — this is the kind of stuff the Republicans ought to be saying. I’ll play it one more time, but I want to analyze it first. ‘We’ve gotten to this stage, George, you know this better than most, in Washington where passing any bill is a victory, and that’s the problem.’ That is a stab not in the back but in the front of President Obama. That is ‘et tu, Brute.’ That is right in the heart and twisting it. He is saying, ‘Obama, you’re irresponsible. You just want something because you want to be able to say you got it done. Well, that’s typical Washington. Obama ran as untypical Washington.’ Howard Dean has just called him your average run-of-the-mill political hack who doesn’t care about anything other than his own narcissistic self and getting a monument for what he supposedly accomplished. That’s how you read the first sentence.

‘Decisions are being made about the long-term future of the country for short-term political reasons.’ What that means is Barack Obama wants something out of the Senate so he can go to the State of the Union speech in January and huff and puff and put his chest out, and say, ‘Look what I did. No president since FDR’s been able to do this, but I did it.’ And Dean is calling him on it here, says, ‘That’s never a good sign.’ He said, ‘There’s some good things in the bill. The problem is we’re committed to a solution using the private insurance companies now, and you’ll be forced to buy insurance. If you don’t, you pay a fine, 27% of the money you put in will not go to your health care.’ This is exactly right. He is exactly right. What bugs him about this, he wouldn’t care if everybody was forced to buy insurance from a government insurance company, he would love that, but now that the public option’s gone, and what does the public option gone mean? It means all of this talk that we have to come up with a government option to provide competition against those evil private insurance companies because they’re ripping people off and they’re causing people to die.

So now the competition, the whole nuts and bolts of so many Obama speeches, selling the public option, competition against the evil insurance companies, what’s it become? Howard Dean is telling his charges, this bill is so bad, you’re still going to be forced to buy insurance but you’re going to be lining the pockets of greedy insurance company CEOs who make $20 million. Folks, this sound bite, I’ll guarantee you, Rahm Emanuel is up there throwing knives at his television while he watches this. He may even chop off another finger. This may disorient him so much that he will put back on that ballerina costume he has in the closet from his days as a young child. And then to say, to top it off by saying this is a bigger bailout than what AIG got, bigger bailout for the insurance companies than what AIG got, this is a call to arms to every fringe kook lunatic wacko lurking on the left-wing fringe websites out there to stop this and see to it that it doesn’t pass. Now, here it is again in Howard Dean’s own words.

DEAN: We’ve gotten to the stage, George, you know this better than most, in Washington where passing any bill is a victory. And that’s the problem. Decisions are being made about the long-term future of this country for short-term political reasons, and that’s never a good sign. There are some good things in this bill. The problem is we are now committed to a solution using the private insurance companies, and you will be forced to buy insurance. If you don’t, you’ll pay a fine and 27% of the money that you put in will not go to your health care; it will go to CEOs who make $20 million a year. This is a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG. And not one person — excuse me — a very small number of people are going to get any insurance at all until 2014, if the bill works.

RUSH: And what he’s saying there is, ‘Look, folks, you’re going to be paying higher taxes and fines and so forth but you’re not going to get any health care benefits until 2014 because they don’t start until then.’ And that’s to protect Obama’s reelection.

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RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, Howard Dean out there just with a broad swipe right across the bow of the Obama steamship. He says this is a lousy bill, it’s horrible. He said things in opposing it saying it should just be killed and start over, said things that Republicans say and think about the bill. And they’re ticked off out there about this. Last night on MSNBC, Howard Fineman from Newsweek was there to discuss this, and the guest host said to Howard Fineman, ‘What affect will the Dean defection on health care have on the Senate vote?’

FINEMAN: Well, I think it could have a big effect, Lawrence. The interview that you just conducted with former Governor Dean was remarkable for a couple reasons. First of all he’s a doctor, he’s got credibility on this. Second, he’s been a reformer for years and knows it as well, if not better, than anybody as an issue. Third, he was chairman of the Democratic National Committee — hello! That interview that you did with him could be cut in its entirety and placed in a Republican ad attacking the process right now. And I don’t know how much weight Howard Dean has nationally anymore, but in terms of a weapon the Republicans can use, I think he’s very useful.

RUSH: It depends on what kind of influence Howard Dean still has with the kook fringe that makes up the Democrat base. My guess is he has a lot. So this morning, a little montage, again on PMSNBC, Mika Brzezinski and Norah O’Donnell talking about Howard Dean.

BRZEZINSKI: The White House Christmas party last night and there was a skunk in the room when we thought it was Joe Lieberman, but it was Howard Dean.

O’DONNELL: They want to tie him up and let people come and beat him. They are so angry with him, that the skunk at the party and the issue is he said, ‘Kill the bill.’

RUSH: The propagandists in the media are livid at Dean. The skunk in the middle of the room at the White House Christmas party. This morning on, again, MSNBC, White House correspondent Savannah Guthrie said this about Howard Dean.

GUTHRIE: Dean is having what one official called a tantrum, but at the end of the day the president’s been able to hold them in line and they think progressives will be with them.

RUSH: Progressives — read radicals. Progressives: Radical leftists, pure, unadulterated liberals. We move on so sound bite number ten, Dylan Ratigan had Anthony Weiner, Democrat, New York, on. And he’s a member of the House, and he’s upset at what’s happening in the Senate. And so Ratigan says, ‘You have no leverage, because you can’t vote no.’

WEINER: Well, you know, we’re kind of like a group holding ourselves hostage with a gun to our own head. This is: ‘You make one more move, we’re gonna shoot.’ Forty-four years ago when we passed Medicare, a lot of people said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to start with those 65 and over and then come back in a couple years and expand that.’ We’re 44 years later, and that incremental expansion hasn’t happened.

RATIGAN: Would you vote no?

WEINER: If the answer to that question is it does more harm than good, I would vote ‘no.’ And there are a lot of people around here in that same place.

RUSH: So what he’s saying is that when the bill gets over to the House and if it doesn’t have the Medicare expansion in it, he’ll vote ‘no,’ and if it doesn’t have the public option, he’ll vote ‘no.’ That’s what he’s saying. Now, this is before Pelosi, again, gathers her charges in her dungeon and starts whipping them into shape.

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RUSH: You know, ladies and gentlemen, Anthony Weiner in that sound bite we played was all upset here that the Medicare expansion is not in the Senate bill. Yeah, 44 years ago we passed Medicare and they said that they would expand it to beyond age 65, and they haven’t done it. It hasn’t happened. Hey, Weiner? After 44 years, the program is going broke! It is trillions of dollars in debt, and you want to turn Medicare into government-run national health care. You are truly a fool! It hasn’t been expanded for a reason. It’s out of money. Hell, the whole country is out of money.

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