RUSH: Brian Lamb, by the way, he was on a radio program yesterday. Brian Lamb just blasts Obama on this C-SPAN promise. He promised eight different times to have health care deliberations televised so that people could see what choices were available. And there’s I think one hour total of health care debate that has been televised in the Senate. Here’s Brian Lamb yesterday.
LAMB: We are an independent journalistic institution, and the president — or when he was a candidate, had no right to assume that we would cover anything. We were used as kind of a political football during the campaign. We obviously would cover these negotiations. The only time we’ve been allowed to cover the White House part of it is one hour inside the East Room, which was kind of a — just a show horse type of thing. The American people pay for all this that goes on in this town. If we pay for something, and it’s the public’s business, we ought to be able to see how it’s done.
RUSH: And Brian Lamb is not the only one. Jack Cafferty on CNN unloaded on Obama. I guess it was yesterday. I watched the video clip on YouTube. I’m going to have to send it up to Cookie and have her prepare it here for us. It’s just the latest lie from the Obama administration. You would think that Cafferty is talking about George W. Bush. There are a lot of people on the Democrat side of things here who do not dig this. Remember, now, all politicians lie. All politicians break their promises. But Obama was different! Obama was something like which we’d never seen before, Obama was postpartisan, Obama was postracial, Obama was postaccomplishment, by the way. He hadn’t accomplished anything. He was post-everything. We were going to have a new guy unlike anything we’d ever had before. His promises were believed and he’s breaking them left and right, and he doesn’t even seem to care, he doesn’t even seem to acknowledge, he doesn’t seem to be concerned with it in any way, shape, manner, or form.
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RUSH: One of the things Democrats are mad at President Obama about is he is urging an excise tax on high cost insurance. Even Pelosi is upset about this. She doesn’t want there to be any tax increase on the middle class, like Obama promised, but there are tax increases on everybody, including the middle class, throughout the Senate health care bill. ‘The White House has long expressed a preference for the excise tax on high-cost plans.’ What the House Democrats want is an increase in the income tax. Obama and the Senate want an excise tax to the Cadillac plans. ‘The Senate proposal would impose a 40 percent excise tax on the cost of individual insurance policies above $8,500 and on family policies above $23,000, with higher thresholds for retirees and employees in high-risk fields like police officers.’ Forty percent excise tax.
And the Washington Post says: ‘Health-Care Reform Bill’s Proposed Tax on High-Cost Plans Raises Questions.’ The plans being taxed are not all Cadillacs in terms of lavish benefits. Some are going to be taxed because of the state they’re in, the type of business that they’re in, and the age of their workers, all that drives up cost. So another campaign promise being broken, and it’s no big deal when a politician breaks a campaign promise, but with Obama the rumblings are small but they’re starting to happen on the left now, on the Democrat side of things. Gitmo, for example, has not been closed. And this mess with counterterrorism, the counterterrorism chief, he was on the ski slope somewhere when he was told about the Christmas Day bomber. He stayed on the ski slopes. He did not come back to town to the Counterterrorism Center. You can have the greatest system, quote, unquote, in the world, if you don’t have good people running it, the great system is worthless, and we do not have great people running any of these systems.
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RUSH: Here’s Jack Cafferty, and this is yesterday on CNN’s The Situation Room.
CAFFERTY: How dare they? President Obama, Democratic leaders have decided to bypass a formal House and Senate conference committee in order to reconcile those two health care bills. Instead, White House and Democratic leaders will hold ‘informal’ — that’s another word for ‘secret’ — negotiations, meant to shut Republicans and the public out of the process. What a far cry from the election when then-candidate Obama pledged to, quote, ‘broadcast health care negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are,’ unquote. President Obama hasn’t even made a token effort to keep his campaign promises of more openness and transparency in government. It was all just another lie that was told in order to get elected. Here’s hoping the voters remember some of this crap when the midterm elections roll around later this year.
RUSH: Oh, baby! ‘[J]ust another lie that was told in order to get elected.’ Now, this is the way that Cafferty sputtered and spewed about George Bush every day — practically every day — during Bush’s administration. This is categorizing Obama as no different than anybody else — and that, my friends, is the realization that a lot of these people that drank the Kool-Aid are now beginning to have. Speaking of Obama’s tax increase on health care, let’s go back. Here’s a presidential candidate ad that Obama ran. It’s entitled, ‘One Word.’ This was in 2008. He ran this ad against Senator McCain.
OBAMA: I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.
ANNOUNCER: On health care, John McCain promises a tax credit, but here’s what he won’t tell you. McCain would impose a new tax on health benefits, taxing your health care for the first time ever. It’s a multitrillion-dollar tax hike, the largest middle class tax increase in history. You won’t find one word about it on his website, but the McCain tax could cost your family thousands. Can you afford it?
RUSH: Yeah, I know. I know. It’s politics as usual, but I’m still going to point this out. McCain was being accused of lying, and here’s Obama doing exactly what he accused McCain of wanting to do, and that is raise your taxes by thousands. I was communicating with a buddy of mine this morning, and there’s story in the New York Times about Michigan congressman Bart Stupak. Bart Stupak is a pro-life Democrat, which makes him a dinosaur (except he’s not extinct but he’s close) and he is actively fighting the health care bill in the House of Representatives. A Democrat! My buddy and I started realizing that a Democrat is saying more in opposition to the health care bill than elected Republicans are.
Now, where are they? They treat this as just another piece of legislation. They’re going to add amendments to it to improve it. The American people don’t want any of this! This is such a golden opportunity for the Republican Party, once again, to contrast itself. Folks, there are a number of reasons here why they don’t. I think the main reason is that the longer you live in that town the more you become of that town. And these leaders that have been there 25 or 30 years, ten or 15, they are of Washington now. And when you are ‘of Washington,’ you are ‘of government,’ and you just believe in trading power now and then — and, you know, constituents are to be mollified every election year but after that, to hell with it.
Then I think there’s a residual fear. In addition to, you know, becoming ‘of Washington,’ I think there’s a residual fear that they’re going to be criticized and they’re going to be called racists and they’re going to be called other things if they start criticizing Obama. Now, everybody is starting criticize Obama now, and it knows no boundary. I mean, the people on both sides of the aisle are criticizing Obama. I bring all of this up because the Gallup poll has reported today that conservatives have finished 2009 as the number one ideological group, and the uptick owes largely to the fact had more independents are now calling themselves conservatives. So the Republicans are scared to death that they’re going to anger independents and moderates, at a period of time where independents and moderates are now flooding the Republican Party — and not because the party has done anything.
If the party leaders would come out and start echoing and validating the criticisms of this health care bill shared by their constituents and the majority of the American people, even more people would flock to them. What they’re probably saying is, ‘Ah, we’re going well here by not doing anything.’ It could be much better. Stop this! It’s not too late. Remember, 300 Spartans came close to stopping the Persian Empire at Thermopylae. ‘Political independents showed increased attachment to the ‘conservative’ label in 2009, boosting the overall ranks of that group so that it now clearly outnumbers moderates in Gallup’s annual averages for the first time since 2004.’ There is a conservative ascendancy. There is no desire for moderate Republicans. No moderates. Anybody running on the Republican ticket ought to be working like mad to win the conservative vote. If you win the conservative vote, you’re going to win the election, pure and simple. It’s in the data.
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RUSH: Lot of people are saying, ‘Hey, Rush, how can Obama promise to televise anything in Congress anyway? Separation of powers.’ That’s true. Obama cannot force Congress to televise what they do. In the House it’s up to the speaker. So it’s a moot point. You know what Gibbs ought to say in response to these questions that the reporters are badgering him with is, ‘Look, the president wants it to be seen but the Speaker of the House doesn’t,’ because that’s the truth of the matter. Pelosi doesn’t any more want these hearings or negotiations televised than Obama does. But he could throw it off on her and he’d be constitutionally correct and he’d be being truthful. But to go out there and stonewall this?
Even the media, even liberal journalists are starting to get in the act here of getting really angry about this. I don’t know whether the angry is faux anger — if they’re just doing this for ratings or to try to hold onto some credibility and they’ll come back and protect him at the end of the day on this — or if they’re genuinely ticked off about it. He made eight different promises to televise all this, but he can’t make that promise. He cannot do it. Now, he can ask ’em. He can ask Pelosi to do it, and he may have asked Pelosi to do it. I don’t care. She’s not gonna do this. I mean, they’re not doing a conference committee on purpose. There’s really nothing to televise. She’s not going to let a camera in her office, and Harry Reid’s not going to let one in his, and that’s where all this is taking place. So it’s actually a moot point.