OBAMA: What has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny, our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like, even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there, we know we’ll get there.
RUSH: Well, I mean this is as empty as anything I’ve been hearing Obama say since the campaign. But last night all of his leftist buddies in the media were scratching their heads going, ‘What does that mean? What the hell is he talking about? It’s worse than Jimmy Carter!’ I said yesterday: There’s only one guy experiencing good news in this country right now, and it is Jimmy Carter because now he can be confident that before he dies, the country will come to recognize that he is not the worst president in the last 150 years. It’s Obama. So there’s at least some good news for one guy out there: Jimmy Carter. So let’s go to MessNBC’s special coverage — and, you know, they promoed this all day. Oh, folks! I mean, this was pre-orgasmic. They were talking about this counting down Obama’s Oval Office speech, first ever Oval Office speech. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that he could find the Oval Office to make the speech last night. So here’s an exchange between two of the hosts on that network.
OLBERMANN: I thought it was a great speech if you’d been on another planet for the last 57 days.
MATTHEWS: He said we have to accelerate the transition to renewables. That is the hardest thing in the world! That’s what broke Jimmy Carter. That’s what Ronald Reagan took a bye on completely —
OLBERMANN: Mmm-hmm!
MATTHEWS: — and Bill Clinton didn’t deal with. Is he going to do it this year? Is there going to be a bill that goes from cap and trade to something like Lugar? Is there a particular direction he’s going in? He didn’t tell us.
RUSH: Hey, let me help you guys out. I read the tea leaves last night and what was plain as day to me is Obama threw cap and trade overboard. He doesn’t care what it is. He wants a piece of legislation that has as its title ‘the Obama Renewable Energy Reform Act’ of whatever year it’s passed — and whatever it is, he’ll take it. That’s why these guys are so much scratching their heads because he mentioned cap and trade, but he made it clear with this gobbledygook that we just played for you that at the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be that. So all of these people, these ideologues wedded to the genuine 150% ideology of Obama are scratching their heads over what seemly was an abandonment of, to them, a seminal issue. Here’s Howard Fineman on MessNBC last night.
FINEMAN: Somewhere between earlier today and tonight this went from being a war and all about an assault on the Gulf to an epidemic, the commander-in-chief thing was lost.
RUSH: War? War? You know, I have often said on this program that the left hates war. I have often said on this program that the left really does not like a victorious United States military because it discredits their notion that the military is the focus of evil in the modern world and war doesn’t work, but I’m actually going to revise that because I started asking myself: What is the war here? Are we at war with an oil well? Are we at war with an oil company? What war? Meanwhile, we have a real war going on that he seems totally uninterested in. The enemy he will not name. But look at this! He wants this to be looked upon as a war, as something akin to putting a man on the moon? And it got me to thinking. I started scratching my sizeable head. I said, ‘What the hell is in it for him to talk about a war?’ And it finally hit me. When the left is running the show, a war permits them to do anything, including go after the enemy — which in this case is not just BP, but Big Oil. Oh, and, by the way, would you like a little interesting factoid? This Thad Allen guy, the Coast Guard? Do you know who he is? He’s the guy that was put in charge during Katrina after they got rid of Mike Brown. A Bush guy! Thad Allen was a Bush Guy. They got rid of ‘Brownie,’ and Thad Allen took over the role, not as the official head of FEMA but as the boots-on-the-ground guy. I kid you not. I kid you not. Don’t doubt me. I’ll have documentation here coming up. Okay, Matthews. Back to Matthews, MessNBC. He has had it with Obama talking about all of his professors with Nobel Prizes.
MATTHEWS: Why does he continue to say that this secretary of energy has a Nobel Prize?
OLBERMANN: Muh!
MATTHEWS: I mean it’s almost gotten ludicrous.
OLBERMANN: (chuckles)
OLBERMANN: Yeah.
MATTHEWS: — or a guy calling in experts or naming commissioners or whatever or citing people for their Nobel Prizes.
RUSH: Sorry, Chris, live with it. That’s all he knows how to do. He’s not an executive. He’s not a leader. He’s more suited to be a legislator. What do politicians…? Jack Welch had a perfect definition of a politician: ‘They exist to blame everybody else when things go wrong.’ That’s their job. Primary thing politicians do when something goes wrong is to blame somebody else. Executives and leaders fix it. There’s no hands-on executive experience here, anywhere in this White House. Naming a commission? The best and brightest academic minds? Nobel prizes? That’s the definition of best and brightest to this bunch. Command-and-control? There’s plenty of command-and-control. You’re just taking your eye off the ball, Chris.
How about the command-and-control destroying the private sector? How about the command-and-control destroying the housing market? How about the command-and-control destroying the private sector? How about the command-and-control that is destroying the US automobile industry? It’s a lot of command-and-control going on. You’re just missing it, because you’re looking for command-and-control words. You’re looking for a command-and-control image. Well, you’re getting it. You’re just missing where it’s actually happening. Last night on CNN, Anderson Cooper, 215, he spoke with David ‘Rodham’ Gergen about the speech, and Cooper said, ‘You’ve worked in White Houses all over the place, Republican and Democrat, you heard a lot of these Oval Office speeches. What did you make of this one?’
GERGEN: Chris, well delivered speech. President looked good. Anderson, I think this was his last shot to convince the public that he’s really taken command, effective command of this situation. I don’t think he succeeded in that mission.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, maybe that’s not his real mission, Mr. Gergen. Maybe it’s not. Did anybody ask themselves: ‘Why did it actually take 50 days for there to appear to be any interest whatsoever in stopping the leak or dealing with the people being harmed by the leak, or the gusher?’ It’s an opportunity! ‘Don’t let a crisis go to waste.’ This is an opportunity. Do you think I enjoy saying this? I do not enjoy saying this kind of stuff. This is why most people don’t say it ’cause they can’t conceive that they’ve elected somebody president who doesn’t like the country, who thinks it needs to, you know, get its mind right. The country needs to be chopped down to size and get even with itself for all the transgressions it’s committed since it was founded. No executive leadership. Command of the situation?
BROOKS: Was it okay. I guess I was a little disappointed. I don’t think it’s really going to change people’s perceptions. People in the White House were describing this speech as a battle plan. They said they were going to learn from Franklin Delano Roosevelt some of his speeches during the Depression and World War II, and what Roosevelt did was he told people to lay a map on the floor and he went through sector by sector with great specificity of what we were doing, what we were going to do. And I was hoping the president would do something like that, maybe even show a map.
RUSH: What? The lead Brainiac conservative columnist at the New York Time wanted him to show a map? Wanted him to use a map? For what? To show us where the well is? We know where it is. To show us where the oil leak is? Or does somebody need to know where the Gulf of Mexico is? And what map would this be of, Mr. Brooks? Would it be a map of the 57 states Obama said he’s visited? Doris Kearns Goodwin. Charlie Rose. Panel discussion. ‘Can you argue, Doris, this is one example where the lack of kind of experience contributed to the slow response by this administration?’
GOODWIN: Well, I suppose if somebody’s been in public office for a long time as a governor or a mayor and had a series of crises to deal with before, then you might have some instinctive understanding of how to get out in front on a communication basis. Maybe to go down there the very first day that something happened just so somebody’s not going to say, ‘Oh, he waited eight days to go down.’ He probably would have learned that. I suppose the other thing is if you’d been a governor and you had a lot of administrative people that you’d worked with, maybe those middle-level jobs could have been filled more easily, as in MMA, so that that person who finally had to leave might have already been the right person there in the first place.
RUSH: I listened to this and all I can think about is how these very people trashed and destroyed George W. Bush ’cause he didn’t go down there soon enough. He wasn’t hands on. Now you’ve got polling data from people in the Gulf region who say that Obama’s response to all this pales, it’s worse than whatever happened in response to Katrina at the Bush administration.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Did you hear Doris Kearns Goodwin, in talking about Obama’s speech last night and his general ineptitude about this, ‘Maybe if he had been a governor,’ blah, blah, blah, blah. You mean like Sarah Palin has been a governor? Ha-ha-ha-ha. You know, it’s fun, you know what irritates these people and you know when you pull the switch and they get irritated it’s just fun to do. All in all, folks, the speech last night was embarrassing to the president. I’ll bet he doesn’t even realize it. He didn’t say anything substantive as even his supporters on the left now agree. He provided no policy aimed at the actual disaster, and then after giving lip service to it, turned immediately to promoting more of his agenda, spouts off about clean energy and wind and solar. Well, Mr. President, you have run the government with one-party rule now for one and a half years. Where are these green jobs? I mean where are the jobs, period? Now, if the technology exists — and this is the central question — if the technology exists to end the use of oil and gas and replace it with windmills and solar panel, what’s the problem? Why aren’t we doing it?
You’ve nationalized health care. You’ve nationalized the car companies, the banks, student loans, you’ve interfered and intervened in scores of areas, and yet you simply cannot make good on any of your promises, not one. Not one problematic area that’s been tackled by this man’s policies is shown any improvement whatsoever. He told us last night he’s going to return the Gulf to its pre-oil disaster condition. Now, exactly who is going to do that in his regime? When will that be done? What department is going to return the Gulf to the way it was before the disaster? This whole regime is a fraud. Nothing of the sort is going to happen. And if it does happen, it will not be because of the regime, it will be because of the industriousness of the people who live there who need it to be brought back to where it was both businesses, small and large, and private citizens. They’re the ones that are going to make it work down there. Apparently they’re the only ones that can. The people will do it despite all the job killing, all the business killing. The moratorium on drilling, the people of that region are going to do it. There’s nobody else to do it. It’s their livelihood, it’s their life and they’re not going to sit around and wait for commissions, blue ribbon or otherwise. They’re going to do it, but no bureaucracy or commission named by this regime will have anything to do with it.
Now, also, this speech last night, in addition to everything else, was fraudulent. Cap and trade has nothing to do with this oil disaster. Cap and trade is aimed at dealing with another fraud, global warming. So we had a fraud talking about another fraud and a hoax to promote the hoax and fraud using something he has no clue how to deal with: a gusher of an oil well. What’s global warming have to do with what’s going on in the Gulf? Zip, zero, nada. If it did, Algore would be speaking despite all the rumors. If global warming had anything to do with this, my God, folks, every environmentalist wacko from every four corners of this earth would be on the case, led by Algore. But they’re not saying it. But the president did. He moves from one industry to another, one region to another destroying everything in his wake, always in a hurry, a man without substance, without experience, without a clue, always in a hurry to destroy, reform and reinvent.
The troubling thing to me is the Constitution was supposed to guard against somebody like this. The Constitution was supposed to guard against the political party the Democrats have become. The Constitution has been abandoned. They don’t consult it. They don’t care about it. Just sprint ahead. Whatever happens, happens. When it fails, just keep marching and demanding, attacking and spending and taxing and naming all of those functions as the solution. I don’t think, in my lifetime certainly, I don’t believe any president has done this kind of damage to this country in such a short period of time. It is breathtaking to observe this. And we’re only 18 months in. And judging the president’s own words, we’re committed, he’s committed to do a whole lot more before the November elections ’cause he knows the end may be near there. The American people will throw his sorry cronies in Congress out of office in November. That’s why the push. I’ve never seen it, 18 months, I’ve never seen this kind of destruction, not even in a war waged against this country.