What Has Obama Done for You?

RUSH: Let me just say something. We have evidence that spans decades. We have evidence that spans centuries that the Obama way fails, that anybody who believes that socialism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, whatever strain of big-governmentism you want to cite, if you’re gonna say that’s the best way to make things fair and equitable, the best way to make people prosperous, there’s no evidence whatsoever that it does. The evidence is that that generates failure, misery, unhappiness, squalor, certainly not prosperity except for the people at the top. So when the evidence is clear that your way doesn’t work and you keep doubling down on your way, what does it say? Does it say that you’re stupid, naive, ignorant, unaware, or does it say that you are an arrogant, egotistical guy who thinks the system works, it just hasn’t been tried by the right guy yet?

You know what I think, folks? I think there are a lot of people out there that used to be liberals, and now they’re not liberals. They’re neocons or they’re conservatives or what have you, but they used to be liberals. A lot of people used to believe the same things Obama believes and they just can’t come to grips with the fact that the stuff they used to believe is as destructive as it is. And so when they hear that stuff like Obama is doing is done on purpose, they just can’t — ‘No, no, no, I never wanted to hurt anybody. My liberalism, I never wanted to harm the country.’ They just can’t get their arms around the fact. But Obama’s not them. I mean we’ve got two years of Obamaism. We know that none of it works. I mean, point-blank, let me ask you a question. What has Obama done for you? If you want to look at it that way, what has the government done for you? Obama as the steward was gonna get rid of all this unfairness, he was gonna make the world love us, he was gonna get rid of all these bad places like Abu Ghraib and Club Gitmo, he’s gonna get rid of all the hate for America, he’s gonna rebuild the roads and the bridges and rebuild the schools and bring the test scores up and lower the seas. What has he done for you? What’s the country done for you? If you want to ask it that way.

I would submit that most people going through life hope and pray they just stop doing what they’re doing because it’s an obstacle. Government’s putting obstacles in people’s way. And they don’t want obstacles in their way. The government’s not supposed to be an obstruction. It’s supposed to be a facilitator. The government’s supposed to be on the side of the people. But wherever you look today, headline after headline, story after story, guess who it is targeted by this regime, targeted by Democrats, targeted by leftists? It’s the achievers. The people around whom any economic recovery will be built are being targeted for punishment. Tax increases or what have you.

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RUSH: Joe in Fairfax, Virginia. Hi. Great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. One thing I always like about you is you’re always kind of a nice guy as wrong as you are. You started out your show today talking about, uh… uh… the — the failed progressivism and Obama. (laughs) I want to know what you’re thinking, man. I mean, we had eight years of George Bush. He started out with a balanced budget. He gave us huge tax cuts, and over his eight years? Well, we had the lowest job growth of any eight-year president ever. In fact, the eight year — the job growth over those eight years was, uh, generally worse than most four-year presidents.

RUSH: Where are you reading that?

CALLER: I’m not reading it. It’s just a fact. But, uh, if you —

RUSH: No, it’s not a fact, which is why I’m wondering where you’re reading it.

CALLER: Over eight years, three million jobs were created under George Bush.

RUSH: Uhhhhhhh —

CALLER: 3.2 million jobs (garbled).

RUSH: How is it then that the unemployment rate was 4.7%? You know, we came out of this double-dip recession. We had a recession and we had 9/11, and we had huge economic rebound coming out of both of those things and eventually we got the unemployment rate down to 4.7%. Now, how did that happen?

CALLER: I don’t know, but I see on your Dittocam. You can Google the same things I can Google. All I know is that he was the worst job-creating president ever after eight years of huge tax cuts.

RUSH: Google is an arm of the government. Google is the arm of the regime.

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: You put in the word ‘stupidity’ and the first search result is Bush. Now, you gotta be more open-minded than this. The question I asked was, for those of you who support Obama, what’s Obama done for you? I mean…

CALLER: Let’s see if we can find anything we can agree on. Do you agree that Bush’s term was bookended by Enron and the financial collapse of Bear Stearns and the Lehman Brothers, that he entered office with a surplus and he left office with the first trillion-dollar deficit this country’s ever known?

RUSH: I will stipulate that there was way too much spending in the Bush years, but that’s been dwarfed by what’s happened since the Democrats took over Congress in 2007. Your bookend analogy and the Enron business, what we’ve got going on with the federal government right now dwarfs the corruption with Enron, for crying out loud. But that doesn’t —

CALLER: I agree, what’s going on on Wall Street right now is just inexcusable, and I think Geithner and Obama have really dropped the ball in terms of putting people in jail that need to go to jail for that, instead —

RUSH: Why? Why do people in Wall Street need to go to jail?

CALLER: — we’ve got right-wing talk show hosts defending their bonuses every day.

RUSH: Why do people in Wall Street need to go to jail? Bonuses, did you say?

CALLER: I said instead of putting people in jail for the crimes they’ve committed, we’ve got right-wing talk show hosts defending the bonuses that they get.

RUSH: Why…? (sigh) If you want to be contentious for no reason, go ahead.

CALLER: Not really. I like you.

RUSH: I’m trying to have a bipartisanship conversation here with you, and yet you have to be provocative here with absolutely no reason. I’m just asking you a question. Why should they go to jail? What did they do that warrants jail time?

CALLER: All the phony mortgages they committed.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: Shorting one end of a deal while selling it long to people and not disclosing their own positions.

RUSH: See, what we have here are two entirely different belief systems, see? I have a belief system oriented on where the subprime mortgage problem began, whose idea it was, and its ill-designed purpose.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: You think Wall Street created the subprime mortgage and the subprime mortgage mess. I don’t.

CALLER: Well, I can kind of prove you wrong there, too, Rush. I mean, the subprime mortgage mess wasn’t created by a bunch of black people enjoying the benefits of the Community Reinvestment Act. If you looked at where the foreclosures are, they’re in Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. We don’t see large numbers of minority populations buying million-dollar homes in those areas.

RUSH: Again, you’re selective here in your application of fact and history. The Community Redevelopment Act is clearly a guilty party, and it was first created by Jimmy Carter, it was expanded upon by Bill Clinton, and it was defined by no less than Barney Frank as ‘affordable housing.’ We have to give people loans who can’t afford to pay back loans. We have to give ’em money; it’s only fair.

CALLER: That’s not what the law said at all. What the law actually says is that you can’t discriminate against qualified buyers because they live in black neighborhoods.

RUSH: That’s the sales technique. The purpose was to put people in houses who couldn’t afford them, and this was done by government coercion. Janet Reno was threatening banks who would not make these loans with federal investigation and so forth. The bankers had to go out and make these loans, they had to bring these people in, and then they had to go about a creative way of trying to make what was worthless paper worth something. So they started creating all these new products called ‘derivatives’ and all these insurance packages designed to help them kick the can down the road so that at some point somebody would not go totally bust implementing absolutely impossible business practices forced upon them by a left-wing government.

The subprime mess is the foundation and the root of the economic malaise that we’re in today. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Now, if you want to blame this on Bush, you are more than entitled to try but it was the Bush administration that attempted to get regulators in there to stop this, and I could play you audio sound bites of Maxine Waters and Barney Frank threatening these regulators and accusing them of all kinds of political bias and racism and everything else. This is a travesty here, and it was pure liberalism and the liberal kind of thinking that created the mess. Now, I don’t think Bush did enough to stop this! The Republicans in Congress tried to stop it, they got showt down, because anybody starts calling you a racist or anybody starts telling you, ‘You want to starve kids,’ or that you want people…

It’s like in Australia now the news is Republicans are kicking Big Bird to the curb. With the threat of, you know, defunding the CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Big Bird is a freaking puppet, for crying out loud! But all of a sudden now, ‘The Children’ will lose Big Bird if Republicans — those mean, dirty, rotten SOBs — get their way on budget cuts and so forth. Nobody is blameless in any of this, but the fault lies in the creation of this very concept — which has its roots in liberalism, which is unworkable. Affordable housing, put people in houses they can’t afford because it’s discriminatory. It’s not fair that people don’t own homes. My problem is I live in Literalville. I have a reality-based belief system and you have a fantasy-based belief system based on whatever. You called here a lot of animosity, a lot of contentiousness here today. You know, I asked, ‘What’s Obama ever done? What have you gotten?’ and what do you do but start attacking Bush and me rather than try to answer the question, because you can’t answer what Obama’s done for you.

It’s typical.

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RUSH: George W. Bush called for reform of the subprime mortgage crisis 17 times in 2008 alone, called for reform of these government sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, 17 times in 2008. His father, George H. W. Bush, will soon be awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama. Imagine how tough that’s gonna be because Obama’s in this mess because his kid, Bush 43, left him all this mess. He’s gotta give his dad the Medal of Freedom award. That’s gotta be tough.