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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: As you know, ladies and gentlemen, when was it that Obama beat up on me? Thursday? In the Harry Smith interview. I got a request from Byron York in The Politico for a reaction. I gave ’em a reaction and I said, ‘I’ve never seen a regime that governs against the will of the people, purposely like this. I’ve never seen a regime that is so inconsiderate of the American people. I’ve never seen a media so impressed and supportive of a regime amassing such power.’ This set Chris Matthews on fire Friday night. Oh, yeah. We have two sound bites. He’s talking here with F. Chuck Todd. I don’t know that F. Chuck Todd ever appears in our sound bite, but here’s the first of two.

MATTHEWS: I’ve never seen language like this in the American press referring to an elected representative of the government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election, we’ll have another one in November, we’ll have another one for president in a couple years, fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country, and this guy, this walrus, underwater, makes fun of this administration, calling it a regime. We know that word ‘regime.’ It was used by recent presidential — by George Bush, regime change. You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They’re juntas, they’re military coups. The use of the word regime in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus to stop using it.

RUSH: And he’s right, my use of the word regime is to connote an authoritarian government. And it fits. It is a regime! They’re governing against the will of the people, the election be damned. Public opinion be damned. The budget be damned. The Constitution be damned. What the hell else is it if not a regime? Here’s the second bite, but the best is yet to come, not this bite, it’s what follows.

MATTHEWS: What about the walrus, walrus underwater, Rush Limbaugh, what do you make of a guy calling this a regime today to the DC newspaper? He calls this government a regime. I have never heard that language. This isn’t Stalin. This isn’t some junta. He was elected the same way a Republican would be elected, and the next time if a Republican is elected it will be Republican administration, it won’t be a regime. We don’t have regimes in this country. We have Franklin Roosevelt; we have Harry Truman; we have Ronald Reagan; we have administrations. To use the word ‘regime’ suggests to me just like ‘kill the Nazis,’ regime change. More part of this neocon lingo.

RUSH: So Byron York, himself amused by this, started doing some searches, and he found out that during the Bush administration — and I might get these two reversed — the New York Times used the word ‘regime’ 24 times to describe Bush, including Maureen Dowd a number of times in her column. The Washington Post described the Bush administration as a regime by no less than Howard Kurtz. Seventeen times total; once by Kurtz. And none other — wait for it — than Chris Matthews himself in 2002 while talking to a panel about Bush’s horrible response to 9/11 starts asking Al Sharpton a question, ‘What do you think this says of the Bush regime?’ So the Post has said it, used it, and written it. Grab sound bite six and have it standing by again. Chris Matthews himself has used the word regime, as have numerous MSNBC hosts in describing the Bush administration as a regime. Knowing that, listen to this again.

MATTHEWS: I’ve never seen language like this in the American press referring to an elected representative of the government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election, we’ll have another one in November, we’ll have another one for president in a couple years, fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country, and this guy, this walrus, underwater, makes fun of this administration, calling it a regime. We know that word ‘regime.’ It was used by recent presidential — by George Bush, regime change. You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They’re juntas, they’re military coups. The use of the word regime in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus to stop using it.

RUSH: I gather he thinks I sound like a walrus underwater. I still don’t know what that means, but nevertheless, Chris — (laughing) — your own network popularized it, your own New York Times, your own Washington Post, and even you, sir, back in 2002, at least once that we could find. It was all over the left’s discourse. The only difference here is, remember nobody really got upset about them calling Bush a regime because it had no basis in fact. The reason these guys are upset is ’cause it’s true. They’re upset because I have the audacity to properly describe this as a regime.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Chris Matthews doesn’t like the word regime but he also said, ‘in a country of free, fair elections’. Chris, you mean like 2000? When you regime supporters were attacking that election? And then the White House escalates the fight with Karzai in a fraudulent election there that we are responsible for, according to Karzai, as you did with Bibi, as you did with Honduras. This regime is taking action against traditional friends and allies. By the way, on Thursday, April 3rd, 2003, John Kerry. ‘What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, we need a regime change in the United States,’ Kerry said, in a speech to New Hampshire Democrats at the Peterborough, New Hampshire, Town Library.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ve had a couple of e-mails asking me, ‘Are you really serious about this regime business or are you just trying to be funny and irritate them?’ I don’t mind irritating them as you well know, but I’m serious about it. Let me give you just a recent example of why this is a regime. Take a look at AT&T, John Deere, Caterpillar, Verizon, a number of companies found the elimination of a tax provision in the health care bill that requires them, if they follow the law, to take a charge to their bottom line by however much it’s going to cost them by having this tax cut taken away from them, the tax break. In the case of AT&T, it’s a billion dollars. The law says, thanks to the Enron scandal, that you have to take the charge against your bottom line during the quarter the legislation was passed, not implemented, but signed. Well, that happens to be the first quarter of this year. So these companies have taken the charge, in the case of AT&T, of a billion bucks, to their bottom line. That’s one billion out of three.

Now, other companies it’s smaller, based on their size, number of employees, and so forth, but the key here is that the law says you have to take the charge in the quarter in which the legislation was signed into law. So what happens to these guys? They follow the law, ’cause if they don’t the SEC is gonna end up on their back, so they follow the law, and what happens? They get the essence of a subpoena from Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, of their oversight committee, demanding that these guys show up and not just show up, but they show up with their books to explain themselves because everybody knows Obamacare is going to reduce costs. And they think that this is a trick that all these Republican CEOs are playing on our poor young president, Obama. Well, now, that is what makes this a regime. They follow the law to keep the SEC off their backs.

When that doesn’t work, the regime comes after you. These companies are following the law. They’re taking the charge as the law prescribes, and yet the regime is coming after them to make them justify themselves, to explain themselves. Henry Waxman has no right to these books. Henry Waxman has no right to any of this. But these guys go up there and they’ll open the books because when the regime calls you, the regime calls you. Chris, if you don’t like regime I’ll call ’em a junta, you know, whatever. They’re governing against the will of the people, it simply doesn’t matter. Backroom deals, bribes, unconstitutionality in order to get legislation passed. Legislation the vast majority of the American people don’t want. It’s a regime.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Morris County, New Jersey. Ed, I’m glad you waited. You’re on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to talk a little bit about this ‘regime’ word you’re using, and I get a kick out of the whole weekend, almost five full days of the mainstream media having angst about you using this word. And in the process of doing that, they’re talking about, ‘Oh, he must be trying to relate Obama to communist regime,’ and they miss the point. I think he’s more like the Nazi regime in the fact that he wants to lead the world with the perception in America’s industry is privately owned but the truth is he wants to really control what they make, how much of it they make, how much they charge for it, and who they hire to do the work —

RUSH: That would be more like Mussolini. That would be more like fascism than Nazism, but I was not thinking of Hitler when I said ‘regime.’ I’m thinking of Idi Amin Dada. I’m thinking of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, governing against the will of the people. In fact, President Obama doesn’t even govern. He looks at himself as a ruler. If you really understand that about Obama, then everything else falls into place. He is a ruler, and regimes rule.

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