RUSH: Do they have the votes for health care in the House? James Carville on Good Morning
CARVILLE: No. (laughing) I’m glad to hear that [Pelosi]’s confident and you never know, I — I — guess she knows more about where her votes are than everybody else but the math is pretty daunting. I think — I don’t think it’s impossible but it’s going to be difficult. If the bill loses, it will prove Senator DeMint right. It will, I think, by and large be a lot of the president’s Waterloo.
RUSH: Well, it’s going to be somebody’s Waterloo. If it doesn’t pass, maybe it’s somebody’s Waterloo. If it does pass, it’s going to be Waterloo for a whole bunch of Democrats — and Nancy Pelosi is urging them to lose. Folks, I predicted this. I have been warning the Blue Dogs of this for I don’t know how many months. I have been saying Pelosi wants to thin her herd in the House. I told you last week: ‘Imagine you want something so bad, like Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. You want it so bad, it just consumes you. You will do anything, including lose everything you’ve worked for in order to get it,’ and Pelosi in effect came out and made me right again, because she’s urging Democrats to show ‘courage.’ Her definition of ‘courage’ is to vote for this thing knowing nobody wants it, and lose big time. She said, ‘It took courage to vote for Social Security and Medicare.’ Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The real courage is in opposing this. The real courage is in opposing Democrat leaders from the president on down. The real courage — and imagine this — is standing with the American people in our representative republic and not force dog food down their throats when they don’t even want the can opener.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back to James Carville now and Pelosi’s health care bill. Stephanopoulos said, ‘James, the other Catch-22 here is that a lot of Democrats who are going to have to take this tough vote may be doomed anyway this year because the political winds are so heavy for them.’
CARVILLE: If it goes down, it’s going to be a simple statement: The Democrats can’t govern. They came in with a majority promising health care and they came away with nothing. How can you trust them to do anything else? And I have to tell you: As a Democrat, that message frightens me — and to some extent it will probably be true, and we’re going to have to acknowledge that. We’re going to see how effective our leaders are. We’re going to see how effective the White House can be in pushing this through. But, I mean, it’s crunch time out there.
PELOSI: They had had plenty of opportunity, uh, to make their voices heard, and if they wanted to truly have it… Bipartisanship is a two-way street. But let me say this. The bill can be bipartisan even though the votes might not be bipartisan, because they have made their imprint on this.
RUSH: Okay. So you got Juan Williams saying that Rahm Emanuel has failed to get the American people to eat the dog food. They don’t want to eat the dog food. Carville is saying that if health care goes down the tubes it’s going to be a total disaster for the Democrat Party. Then you have Pelosi saying that ‘the bill can be bipartisan even though the votes might not be bipartisan.’ Are we actually on the air or am I dreaming? We’re here. This is live. The tsunami stuff actually happened? Okay. Well, there’s Pelosi: ‘The bill can be bipartisan even though the votes might not be bipartisan. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to make their voices heard,’ which they have not. Everything they want to do has been rejected. Then this is the biggie, ladies and gentlemen. This is Elizabeth Vargas on This Week. She was a fill-in host yesterday. ‘What do you say to your members when it does come to the House to vote on this, who are in real fear of losing their seats in November if they support you now?’
PELOSI: The American people need it. Why are we here? We’re not here just on self-perpetuate our service in Congress. We’re here to do the job for the American people, to get them results that gives them not only health security but economic security because the health issue is an economic issue for — for America’s families.
RUSH: They don’t want it, and Pelosi says, ‘They’ll like it once they’ve seen the details.’ They’ve seen the details! We’ve seen the details, and nobody wants it. So she’s basically telling her troops: ‘Walk off the cliff! Fall on your swords! The American people need it! We’re here to do the job for the American people.’ Let’s just be honest on this one. The American people do not need nor do they want you to do this, Madam Speaker, which is why you have to advise your members to plan on being unemployed to get this passed. I mean, we’re dealing with… Well, this is not idiocy, it’s not stupidity, it’s something far, far worse. She’s asking every one of these people in the House that vote for this, or the vast majority of them, to basically say good-bye to their careers, just make it their Waterloo, put to music.
(playing of Waterloo spoof song)
RUSH: That is ‘white comedian’ Paul Shanklin, the vocal portrayal there, Barack Obama and Waterloo.