RUSH: I was talking about gas prices with Snerdley. In fact, I got a number of people e-mailing and instant messaging me about gas prices. The price of gasoline per gallon finally hit five dollars in Washington, but big whoop. How many politicians there will even notice? How many of them drive their own cars or pump their own gas or even pay for their own gas? And, if they do, they’re
If you go back during the Bush years, when the gasoline price exceeded three dollars and started its incremental rise on the way to four dollars, the oil price itself was skedaddling upward on its way to $150 a barrel. It’s all we heard about. The oil speculators came in for a shellacking. The CEOs of major oil companies, Rex Tillerson at ExxonMobil and all the rest of them were vilified. We heard never-ending stories on windfall profits. And now none of that, none of it. In fact, the stories we’re getting on the gasoline price approaching five bucks a gallon — we had one yesterday — here are some of the positives associated with this. Here are some of the things that we should be happy about for this. I was reminded all during the Bush years we were in a roaring boom economy, yet the media was reporting that we were on the verge of a recession. They were trying to create a recession in people’s minds day in and day out. You talked to people and they thought we were in one, so we’d ask them, “Well, how are you doing?” “Oh, I’m doing fine. I’m having one of my best years, but I watch the news and my neighbors must be in really big trouble.” “Well, have you asked ’em?” “Well, no, but the news says that it’s really bad out there.”
So whereas individuals may be complaining, they may be feeling the pain of rising gas prices, they’re not seeing it in the media and so there’s no sense of shared experience. So if you are a person that’s been profoundly affected by rising gasoline prices you might think you’re the only one because you’re not seeing the pain-and-suffering stories. It’s just like we have an incompetent boob in the White House, and yet we continue to hear nothing other than how eloquent he is and how elegant and how much smarter than all the rest of us he really is. We just can’t keep up. In the meantime, we’re in the midst of an utter economic disaster. If this were a media that were at all interested in journalism, what they did during the Bush years, which was phony, made up, and exaggerated, all they would have to do was report the truth today. But they’re not doing it. So it remains a curiosity. A friend of mine said, “You wait, Rush, I mean it’s gonna get really wild out there as these prices keep going up because that’s causing the price of food to go up.” I know, I don’t disagree with any of this. I know it’s gonna get wild, but is it going to be reported that it’s getting wild?
People somehow are reluctant to assume that what’s happening to them is happening to everybody else. They have to be told that it is. And if they don’t see it in the news and they don’t see it reflected by the media they may not think that it’s that widespread. So they’re not gonna run around and complain about it because they don’t want to be thought of as whiners. The bottom line is the media’s doing everything it can to make sure Obama is untouched by this. Look at Libya. LBJ was driven out of office for essentially micromanaging the Vietnam War. Here Obama starts wars and then runs away from ’em. Now the Brits are starting to send in ground troops. Hello, that’s how Vietnam started escalating. The French, the Brits, NATO started to escalate the war in Libya. Where’s Obama? He doesn’t care. You know, he did what he could to get his PR spin and value out of it, now he’s off to other things. He’s got a Facebook deal this afternoon. What’s he doing? Question-and-answer session today on Facebook at 4:45. He never talks to adults anymore.
I found out, by the way, that the number of friends — Facebook as friends. We have a bunch of on our own Facebook page. And the White House, Obama has his own Facebook page. And I’m told that just 1% of the friends on Obama’s Facebook page have signed up essentially to be part of this question-and-answer session today on Facebook. So aside from talking to union goons, he never anymore talks to adults. There must be some kind of fancy psychological name for such a syndrome. You could call it cowardice. But he’s not out talking to adults about any of this. So the gas price is rising. We’ve got the one-year anniversary of the Gulf oil spill. The media is trying to tell us — I’ve got stories here — they’re still looking for that oil. It’s there. That spilled oil, it’s there, and it’s wreaking havoc somewhere. They just don’t know where it is, but they’re gonna find it. Meanwhile, they have not noticed the rising gasoline price. They’re still trying to make hay out of a one-year-old oil spill that never amounted to much, and it was not destructive, not nearly the terms they described.
We’ve got a montage of media people attempting to claim that Bill Clinton’s tax increases are what led to the economic boom of the 1990s. So additional assaults on individual liberty and freedom still the order of the day of the Democrat Party. There’s a poll out. ABC News/Washington Post poll, and, apparently, folks — I mean it’s bad, but the Drive-Bys are really depressed by this. It is apparently even worse for Obama than it appears to be. His approval number is plummeting. F. Chuck Todd offered an opinion today that one of the reasons Obama’s opinion number went down after his speech with Paul Ryan in the audience and where he got exceptionally partisan and mean-spirited the approval number went down and F. Chuck Todd at MSNBC says, (paraphrasing) “You know, it doesn’t work for Obama when he goes partisan. He’s gotta stay above the fray. When he goes partisan like that, starts getting into partisan attacks, it just doesn’t work.”
Well, they’re doing everything they can to advise this guy on how to avoid the quicksand. (interruption) I know, when is he not partisan?
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RUSH: From TheHill.com: “President Obama’s approval ratings are plummeting, and the timing is terrible for the White House. Even as Obama skewered Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and the House GOP budget plan, his approval rating dipped in a Gallup poll to 41 percent, the lowest number yet of his presidency. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released [yesterday] shows Obama at 47 percent, down seven points since January. Worse yet for the White House, Gallup shows the president in a nosedive with independents, who are coveted by the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign.” Okay. That’s TheHill.com story.
“As The Post noted in a front-page piece headlined (in the print edition): ‘Economy is Battering Obama in the polls’: … by a margin of 44 to 28, US voters believe the economy is getting worse under Obama,” and that is not insignificant. The general public is catching up to the Tea Party: 44-28. “Perhaps most worryingly for President Obama, just 28 percent of Americans now say they will ‘definitely vote’ for his re-election in 2012…” The Story continues with this: “It is increasingly clear that the president’s heavily panned speech last week on the budget deficit has failed to convince not only the American public, but the markets as well.
“With the huge vote of no confidence on Monday from credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s, which cut its outlook for US debt from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’, the Obama [regime] is looking remarkably out of its depth in the face of a massive deficit crisis, which it simply refuses to confront.” That is A-1, on the money: “[R]emarkably out of its depth in the face of a massive deficit crisis which it simply refuses to confront. Even the International Monetary Fund is laughing at Obama’s deficit plans. I’ve got the story here in the stack. Folks, you can’t go on television and say, as he did yesterday, “You can’t spend more than you take in. You just can’t do it.”
I don’t know who writes this stuff for him — and I know that that was a prelude to raising taxes; that’s why they said it — but somebody is totally tone-deaf. From the architect of spending more than you take in, after the fact — after it’s done to the point of destroying the US economy — the guy goes out and says, “You can’t do what I just did for the past two years,” as though somebody else did it. “Remarkably out of its depth.” MSNBC.com, their First Read yesterday, from NBC’s F. Chuck Todd: “Did Last Week’s Speech Backfire?” They cite the Washington Post/ABC poll: 47% percent approval.
F. Chuck notes that “Obama usually doesn’t get rewarded when he comes off as too partisan. He thinks his lack of focus on jobs may have hurt him.” That’s F. Chuck’s opinion. Really? His lack of focus on jobs. What was their first clue? You know, this is an indictment of you people in the media, too. You people in the media have been trying to trump up this guy and make him sound like Mr. Perfection, the architect of reviving the Bush economy. Obama has all the answers! Obama’s above criticism! Obama’s unlike anything we’ve ever had in office before! Obama understands fairness! Obama is focusing laser-like on jobs!
You guys, in the Drive-By Media, have gotta be just as concerned about your own level of influence as you are about Obama’s polling numbers because you have been trying to tell the American people the exact opposite of what these polls indicate they think. Imagine! Imagine working in the Drive-By Media and for the last two years you have made it your objective to convince the American people he’s the greatest president we’ve ever had, that this guy is so far ahead of us that we’re just fortunate to be alive at the same time he is, to be able to look from afar and to marvel at his brilliance and his talent.
This is the message. This is the image. This is what we’ve been told. We’ve been told to be patient. “His plan, his policy, they’re gonna finally make it fair, make it even. Utopia is ours!” So wherever you look today, there is panic in the Drive-By Media over this one poll, the ABC News poll and the Gallup poll, too. So panic over two polls. And make no mistake: It’s not just panic because of the impact on Obama. It’s panic because the people in these polls are essentially saying they haven’t bought the drivel the State-Controlled Media has been telling them for two years.
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RUSH: From The Politico today: “President Barack Obama dialed back his criticism of Republicans on Tuesday on the first leg of a three-day tour to sell his deficit-cutting plan, saying a ‘big philosophical divide’ separates the parties but that a deal is possible. Obama panned Republicans for their plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system for people younger than 55. But in a marked departure from his speech last week announcing his deficit-reduction framework, Obama spent less time attacking the GOP plan directly and more time talking up the merits of his proposal.”
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