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RUSH: Here is State-Controlled Media outraged, this a montage, outraged by the Bret Baier interview with Obama last night on Fox.

TAPPER: Giving an interview to his least favorite network, Fox News.

O’DONNELL: A contentious interview with Fox News.

REID: A very contentious interview.

MADDOW: The Fox News interview with President Obama definitely not interruption free.

SHUSTER: The broadcast world is buzzing today over a contentious interview Obama had with Fox.

BROWN: A very combative interview with Fox News.

VIQUEIRA: Wow, what a contentious interview on Fox News last night.

KING: He went into hostile territory. The host interrupted him.

O’DONNELL: Most news organizations tend to defer to the office of the President in matters of conversational decorum.

RUSH: Most journalists, when they get a chance to ask the man at the top, ask him questions to which we all want answers. For the first time in a year our young man-child president was challenged. For the first time in a year, these guys that you just heard in this montage ought to be profoundly professionally embarrassed and chagrined. These guys got a lesson in how journalism is supposed to happen. Do you remember Sam Donaldson interrupting President Reagan and being applauded by the press corps? Presidential interviews you’re not supposed to interrupt? How about the way Rather interrupted Dick Nixon and how the media cheered? And how about how the press always ganged up and lined up on George W. Bush? Do you think you need to say you’re sorry? Do you think you need to say you’ve made mistakes? So we have one legitimate interview of the president of the United States in a year, and the State-Controlled Media can’t handle it, they just had their lunch handed to them.

There are a lot of things in the Bret Baier interview to highlight. It’s tough to pick one, but I had to pick one. This next is my favorite. Bret Baier, early on in the interview, said, ‘Mr. President, I got 18,000 e-mails here. I asked our listeners, our viewers, to submit questions. I mean 18,000, Mr. President. And here’s one. Lee Johnson from Spring Valley, California: ‘If the bill is so good for all of us, why all the intimidation, arm twisting, seedy deals, and parliamentary trickery necessary to pass the bill when you have an overwhelming majority in both House and Senate?” A great question that not one journalist can see fit to ask him. Bret Baier did. And Obama, you shoulda seen his face. He’s bobbing his head up and down and smiling and so forth, because what Baier was doing here was turning a favorite Obama tactic around on him. He read another e-mail, Sandy Moody in Chesterfield, Missouri: ‘If the health care bill is so wonderful, why do you have to bribe Congress to pass it?’ Here’s Obama’s answer.

OBAMA: Brett, I get 40,000 letters or e-mails a day.

BAIER: I know you —

OBAMA: And I could read the exact same e-mails —

BAIER: But these are real people. It’s not just Washington punditry.

OBAMA: Listen, I’ve got exactly the same e-mails that I could show you that talk about why haven’t we done something to make sure that I, a small businessperson, am getting as good of a deal as members of Congress are getting and don’t have my insurance rates jacked up 40%? Why is it that I, a mother with a child with a preexisting condition still can’t get insurance. So the issue that I’m concerned about is whether or not we’re fixing a broken system.

RUSH: So refused to answer the question. I watched this thing in stunned disbelief. I have never seen Obama as rattled, as uncool, as uncalm, as uncollected, as uninformed. He was stuttering, he was trying to filibuster, (imitating Obama) ‘let me finish, let me finish. You’re nothing but a student. I’m the professor here. You don’t know anything.’ That’s the attitude that he had. But what’s great about this is that Bret Baier turned one of Obama’s favorite tactics around on him, the sympathy play. ‘Oh, I’ve gotten all these e-mails,’ Obama talks about all these letters he gets and all these e-mails, and Bret Baier, ‘I got 18,000 here.’ And Obama, like a petulant, competitive kid, ‘Well, I get 40,000 a day, screw your 18, I get 40. I’m not going to answer anything that your 18 said, I’m going to go ahead and stay on message.’ But Bret Baier kept boring in on this, on the process aspect of it, and Obama clearly didn’t want to talk about it because he doesn’t care. The end justifies the means.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Another thing about these e-mails. The one thing about these e-mails is Bret Baier had his with him. We saw them. We never see Obama’s e-mails! We just hear about them. He just says, ‘I’m getting e-mails small businessmen.’ Who the hell are they? What small businessperson is e-mailing Obama with a genuine concern? If a small businessperson’s e-mailing Obama, it’s got a ‘damn you’ in front of it instead of a ‘Dear president.’ It says, ‘Stop screwing me!’ No small business in his right mind is writing a letter begging Obama to do anything but stop what he’s doing. I’ll tell you something else. I’ll tell you something else about this: These e-mails that Obama is getting are generated. Remember the name ‘Ellie Light,’ this woman that was getting letters to the editor printing papers all over the country? There’s a machine, a computer out there generating all these e-mails. It’s probably coming from his own website.

It’s all fraudulent! Look, these people are liberals, socialists, whatever. They’re frauds, they lie. There’s nothing genuine about Obama. Zip, zero, nada. Everybody is asking me, ‘Why do you think he went on Fox?’ I’ll tell you why he went on Fox. The Cartoon Network has a larger audience than CNN or MSNBC. In the cable TV universe, the Cartoon Network is number 13. MSNBC is 26 and CNN is 32. Fox is #2 behind USA Network. So the Cartoon Network has more viewers than CNN or MSNBC probably combined. That’s why he goes on Fox. It’s the only place the audience exists.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Bret Baier and Barack Obama. Bret Baier: ‘Do you know which specific deals are in or out as of today?’

OBAMA: That’s not going to be something that is going to be in this final package. Something that was called a special deal was for Louisiana. In fact, that provision, which I think should remain in, said that if a state has been affected by a natural catastrophe that has created a special health care emergency in that state, they should get help. Louisiana obviously went through Katrina, and they’re still trying to deal with the enormous challenges that were faced because of that.

BAIER: Understand, but do you know which ones are still in…

OBAMA: But hold on a second. Hold on a second, Bret…

BAIER: …is my question?

OBAMA: I’m giving you an example of one that I consider important. It also affects Hawaii, which went through an earthquake. So that’s not just a Louisiana provision. That is a provision that affects every state that is going through a natural catastrophe.

RUSH: I can’t wait for this, ’cause, folks — (laughing) — I don’t know, I really don’t know whether he’s this ignorant or naive or he’s just lying. It’s a toss-up. The guy’s not as bright as everybody thinks. What is this Hawaii earthquake crap? Do you know what the provision for the Louisiana Purchase is? You know how it’s written? I’m going to have to paraphrase it, but it says if your state has had a natural disaster in the month of August or September of whatever year Katrina happened, then you qualify for an exemption from added Medicare mandates. It was written specifically to apply only to Louisiana. It did not apply to Mississippi. Mississippi got hit just as hard as Louisiana, but Mississippi has a Republican governor, Haley Barbour, and they ran around putting themselves back together on their own for the most part. They had a lot of help.

And it wasn’t the hurricane that did in New Orleans. Everybody forgets this. It was the levees that failed, and we all know the corruption that led to that, the Corps of Engineers and so forth. The hurricane was long gone, the hurricane didn’t cause the flooding, the levees broke after they’d supposedly been shored up. But this thing was written specifically for Mary Landrieu. Hawaii earthquake? It didn’t allow for any other state, including Mississippi, to participate in this exemption. And he’s out there telling everybody, ‘Well, if any state had a natural disaster, of course we want to help out.’ It was written specifically for Louisiana, specifically for Mary Landrieu. Next, Obama endorses the deem-and-pass. Bret Baier: ‘You’ve said at least four times in the past two weeks, the United States Congress owes the American people a final up-or-down vote on health care. So do you support the use of the Slaughter rule, the deem-and-pass rule, so the Democrats avoid the straight up-and-down vote on the Senate bill?’

OBAMA: I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or the Senate.

BAIER: Will you support this measure?

OBAMA: What I can tell you is that the vote that’s taken in the House will be a vote for health care reform, and if people vote ‘yes’, whatever form that takes, that is going to be a vote for health care reform and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise —

BAIER: But Mr. President, this Monday —

OBAMA: Brett, let me finish. If they don’t — if they vote against it, then they’re going to be voting against health care reform and they’re going to be voting in favor of the status quo.

RUSH: So he said, ‘You support the deem-and-pass rule?’

OBAMA: I am not —

BAIER: You’re saying that that’s that vote.

OBAMA: What I’m saying is is that whatever they end up voting on, and I hope it’s going to be sometime this week, that it is going to be a vote for or against my health care proposal. And that’s what matters and that’s what ultimately people are going to judge this on.

RUSH: He doesn’t have a proposal, folks. Barack Obama has not submitted a proposal. There is no reconciliation bill to vote on, which is why the CBO said today that their guess is preliminary because they don’t have any solid information. He would not answer the question about deem — well, he did say, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the process. He does not care what has to be shredded. He doesn’t really care what’s in this because he knows that it’s not about health care. He knows what it’s ultimately about is destroying the private sector insurance business and making the government the sole insurer, the sole provider, if you will, of health care, which expands government, limits freedom, puts all these mandates, costs, bankrupts the country. That’s what he’s interested in. Process? Ah, it’s minutia to him. But he was clearly outclassed here and not nearly as prepared or knowledgeable as Bret Baier was.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Vickie in the Washington, DC, area, great to have you on the program, and I thank you for waiting.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s an honor to talk to you.

RUSH: Thanks very much.

CALLER: You know, God, I’ve been listening to you for, God, almost two hours now and so many things you said I want to comment on, but my initial reason for calling was about the Bret Baier interview last night and my outrage with Obama’s talk about the constitutional process being ugly and tedious and not something that really America wants to focus on, that they’re more interested in the outcome. I find that as a total dumbing down of our society.

RUSH: It is that, but what you’re also hearing is somebody saying, ‘I don’t care, the ends justify the means.’

CALLER: Exactly. Right, it’s his attempt just to tell the public, don’t pay attention to the process, what comes out is the important thing in the long run, and, you know, this country was founded because we didn’t want government intervention in our life. I’m so frustrated with it. And, you know, I’m a stay-at-home mom who is also running a small business, my husband works full time and with two jobs, starting this business, so he works full time to maintain our health insurance and he works full time to start the business that he hopes someday will be, you know, our business long-term.

RUSH: Uh huh.

CALLER: And, you know, we have never taken public money, we don’t ever plan on taking public money. We’ve actually had in the past, years ago my husband worked for the electrical union and was injured, and he was not able to work for many, many months. And his insurance carried through for quite a few months, but he lost it and then got food poisoning and was hospitalized for four days over a long weekend. And we ended up having to foot that bill totally ourselves because he had no insurance. We weren’t married at the time but he had no insurance, and the hospital charged us $6,000 for him just to room and board. And we fought them, we asked them to cut the price down, to be reasonable, you know, reasonable and customary charges of what they would reimburse an insurance company and they would not, but we never complained when they said no, instead of ruining our credit we took out a loan and we paid the hospital off. We believe that there is a need for reform, but not at the government’s hands.

RUSH: Yeah. Exactly right, because that $6,000 is going to become 12. They can’t run anything efficiently and you may not even have the legal right to pay for it yourself if they follow this through. I understand your frustration. Obama doesn’t care about the process, whatever it takes, and Pelosi said the same thing. They don’t care. This is tyranny. It’s right in front of you, folks, this is tyranny. It’s what it looks like. We’ve always looked at it from afar; we’ve looked at it in other countries. Now we see it right in our own nation’s capital.

Shelly in Pittsburgh, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Oh, thank you Rush, it’s so great to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I wanted to tell you that I live in Jason Altmire’s district and we’ve been really hammering him with our position on this health care bill. He was interviewed yesterday morning on our local radio station Quinn & Rose. Two things he said that I think everybody really needs to know, he said that he doesn’t believe the Senate bill will lead to single payer health care, and he also said when the radio host asked him, ‘Well, don’t you think in the future it could?’ And he told the radio host, ‘Well, I can’t think about what’s going to happen 30 years from now, I can only think about what’s in this bill right now.’ That’s what we’re up against. I believe he really wants to vote ‘yes’ for this bill and I think that we are really making it hard for him not to vote ‘yes’ for this bill. Polls were done in our district that says only 26% of the people polled in his district want this bill passed as is.

RUSH: I want to give him the benefit of the doubt on something here. When he says to you, as he looks at the Senate bill he doesn’t see it leading to single payer, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt on that.

CALLER: Rush, according to my research, even the Congressional Budget Office said on December 7th, 2009, up to ten million people will lose coverage by their employers because the penalty is cheaper than covering.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: That paves the way, we all know that.

RUSH: No, no, no. I wasn’t finished.

CALLER: Oh, I’m sorry.

RUSH: When I say give him the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume he’s not that stupid is what I mean.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Let’s assume Jason Altmire really believes that the Senate bill doesn’t lead to single payer. Has he not heard what his own speaker has said, that this is the first step?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Do you think Dennis Kucinich didn’t get some promise that it’s going to go single payer at some point down the line?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: This Altmire guy needs to have the truth pounded into him and you don’t go, ‘Please, please, please, don’t, don’t vote yes.’ ‘Mr. Altmire, you’re wrong. Congressman, you’re wrong.’ The whole purpose of this is single payer. The whole purpose, that’s all Obama wants, that’s all Pelosi wants, and they’re willing to get it if it takes ’em ten years, if it takes them five —

CALLER: Absolutely, and not only that, but the arrogance of the statement, ‘Well, I can’t think about what’s going to happen 30 years from now.’ I have to think about what’s going to happen 30 years from now and so does every person in his district. He’ll get his health care benefits and all of his federal pension, and he’ll be able to withdraw Social Security —

RUSH: Well, there’s all kinds of ways to answer — (crosstalk)

CALLER: — reelected in November.

RUSH: I’d keep pounding him. Your responsibility is to think about the long-term implications of what you’re about to do here, congressman, it’s that simple.

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