RUSH: Obama met with some top Republicans yesterday and lectured them on the economy for about 75 minutes, about the debt ceiling and Medicare and all these other things. At the end of the meeting Paul Ryan actually had the nerve to suggest that Obama wasn’t helping things by demagoguing the Republican budget plan, and Obama replied by saying, “I did my homework.” Well, I don’t know who his teachers are if he’s doing his homework, but Ryan got a standing ovation from the rest of the Republican participants in the meeting. Let’s go to the audio sound bites. This is yesterday, Washington, outside the White House, after meeting with Obama, Ryan and other congressional Republicans held a press conference. A reporter said, “Chairman Ryan, did you say to the president, ‘Leaders have to lead and you haven’t shown leadership’? That sounds confrontational. Did you say that?”
RYAN: I just said we gotta take on this debt, and if we demagogue each other at the leadership level, then we’re never gonna take on our debt. We have a debt crisis coming and we want to deal with this. If we want to grow jobs and the economy, we gotta get our spending under control, we gotta get our debt under control, and if we try to demagogue each other’s attempts to do that, then we’re not applying the kind of political leadership we need to get this economy growing and get this debt under control.
RUSH: That figures that this would be the focal point for a reporter. Did you dare confront our boy president? Were you confrontational with our leader? As though of course Obama, Mr. Congeniality, sitting up there two and a half years, not demagoguing anything or anybody, not being confrontational about anything or anybody. Another reporter said, “Did you ask him to stop calling your plan a voucher plan?”
RYAN: I simply explained what our plan is, how it works. It’s been misdescribed by the president and many others, and so we simply described to him precisely what it is we’ve been proposing so that he hears from us how our proposal works so that in the future he won’t mischaracterize it.
RUSH: Well, one thing I know, Obama doesn’t like to be spoken to this way, and he certainly doesn’t like Ryan going out there and telling people that he spoke to Obama this way. Authoritarian figures do not cotton to this. This is looked at as insolence, disrespect. This is frowned upon in the upper halls of dictatorships. What Ryan basically said is stop lying about our plan here. You know, demagoguing is a nice word for lying. Stop lying about it here. Here’s what it is. We’re telling you face to face what it is so you can stop lying about it. But everybody knows that Obama knows what their plan is. He’s not sitting there being schooled by Reverend Wright and Saul Alinsky. He knows what the plan is, and he knows he’s diametrically opposed to it. And he’s gonna continue to demagogue it. Certainly not gonna adopt it. Here’s Boehner. Reporter said, “What was the point of this meeting today? Was it negotiations? Was it optics? Was it PR? Why did you guys come up here?”
BOEHNER: I told the president one more time, this is the moment, this is the window of opportunity where we can deal with this on our terms. We can work together and solve this problem. We know what the problems are. Let’s not kick the can down the road one more time. Now is the time to deal with it.
RUSH: Well, to the extent Obama wants to deal with it, he goes only so far as November of 2012, and that would be for the purposes of his reelection. That, to me, is not even arguable. Everything that’s been done policy-wise has made the US economy worse. They know it. I know I’m repeating myself, I am stunned here, even knowing the biases and knowing what State-Controlled Media is, I am still surprised they are so willing to make fools of themselves by trying to act and speak as though there has been an economic recovery in the last two and a half years. The idea that they think they can pull that off, that they think they can convince people that we have been in a recovery and all of a sudden this wonderful recovery is threatened again?
There’s not a single person living in the real world who believes we have been in a recovery. And the reason is, we haven’t been in one. (imitating New Castrati) “What about Wall Street, Mr. Limbaugh, your vaunted Wall Street.” Yeah, because the Federal Reserve has been printing money and giving it to ’em. It’s called Quantitative Easing 2, and guess what? They’re now begging for Quantitative Easing 3 when they see what happens when the money is about to run out. Next up is Eric Cantor. This morning on the Early Show on CBS, he was questioned by cohostette Erica Hill. Here’s what she said to Cantor. His response follows.
HILL: We are getting those unemployment numbers tomorrow which are not expected to be great. May is expected to be fairly soft. Part of the problem that we’ve been talking about a great deal on this program is that companies, great profits, they’re sitting on a lot of cash. They now know how to do more with less. How can any government, doesn’t matter which side of the aisle, how can anybody convince a company that they should spend money on new hires?
RUSH: You know, we had a great piece that I read to you on Monday. One of these guys, why he’s not hiring. Because he doesn’t know what the rules are gonna be. The rules change from taxes to regulation, they change. He doesn’t know what the cost of doing business is gonna be from month to month. Anyway, here’s Cantor’s reaction to Erica Hill, her question. Of course, the question put the onus on business, yeah, sitting all this cash, why don’t they hire people, those meanies? What would you do?
CANTOR: Well, I mean, that’s the question. You can’t wave a magic wand in Washington and tell companies to hire. What we’re trying to do is create an environment where you do have more small businesses starting up, more entrepreneurs willing to invest money to create jobs. And we know in America that’s where most jobs come from, from small businesses. That’s why we Republicans unleashed a plan last week for America’s job creators, the small businesses and entrepreneurs of this country, to get them back into the game. And what we’re trying to do is make sure that Washington stops hurting small business and again begins to create an environment where you’re gonna see entrepreneurs, small business folks willing to invest their capital.
RUSH: You see here we are. We have arrived at the point in time where Republicans have to teach remedial economics to news anchors at the TV networks. You talk about retraining centers and so forth. Eighty percent of the news media needs to go back to school and learn the fundamentals. Eric Cantor, that answer is embarrassing to me, to have to explain that to a TV infobabe. But that’s where we are. Remedial economics. She didn’t get it. She thought he was just being disrespectful, not taking her question seriously. What he said to her is gobbledygook. What do you mean, entrepreneurism, what do you mean, startups, what do you mean invest and so forth? The language doesn’t even connect with them.
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RUSH: AP in this story on unemployment are actually starting to blame the people for being shirkers. They’re blaming people for giving up, blaming people for not trying to find work. Here it is: “More Job Seekers Give Up, Reducing Unemployment.” So they’re blaming workers for being shirkers; they’re blaming employers for being tightwads. Now, did the media “blame” workers and businesses or George Bush when the unemployment rate was way, way up there at 5%? “The labor force, those who have a job, or are looking for one is getting smaller, even though the economy is growing and adding jobs steadily.”
Do you see what I mean? That’s Paul Wiseman in the AP. Now, the headline here: “More Job Seekers Give Up, Reducing Unemployment.” Where did all the workers go? The labor force is “getting smaller, even though the economy’s growing and steadily adding jobs. That trend defies the rules of a normal economic recovery.” See, poor Obama’s getting screwed no matter what he does! “Nobody is sure why it’s happening,” AP says. “Economists think that some of the missing workers have retired, have reentered college, or are getting by on government disability checks. Others have probably just given up looking for work.” You notice here how the AP makes it sound like the economy would be robust if it weren’t for those darn missing workers — those shirkers, those quitters!
They’ve given up looking for work, making Obama look bad. “By the government’s definition,” AP says, “if you quit looking, you’re no longer counted as unemployed, and you’re no longer part of the labor force.” We still haven’t been able to find — and we’ve looked — the official definition of when somebody’s considered to have quit looking. Now, naturally AP wouldn’t think to report or even ask about official policy here because they’re just interested in advancing an agenda. “Since November, the number of Americans counted as employed has grown by 765,000 to just shy of 139 million. The nation has been creating jobs every month as the economy recovers.
“The economy added 244,000 jobs in April, but the number of Americans counted as unemployed has shrunk by much more, almost 1.3 million during this time, which means the labor force has dropped by 529,000.” AP, Mr. Wiseman, did you ever think that one explanation for this could be found at the regime? The regime wants an unemployment number close to 8%. One ways to do that, Mr. Wiseman, is to simply have your Bureau of Labor Statistics reduce the job universe. Just say, “You know what? There are 400,000 fewer jobs in America now, that means 400,000 fewer jobs to have. They’ve just vanished.” So the total number of jobs, the universe is down. Therefore, relative employment is higher. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the regime is toying with the numbers here, rather than the American workers being a bunch of quitters sabotaging poor old Obama?
Ray in Livermore, California, as we go back to the phones, great to have you here, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Rush, can you hear me?
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: In the first hour you were talking about Weinergate, and I don’t want to talk about it any more than you do other than to launch into a question. First of all, if this were a Republican, the fundamentalist leftists and the fundamentalist Democrats would not let go of this story, but instead because it’s a Democrat, you don’t even see it written in headlines. Now —
RUSH: Oh, no, that’s not true. Oh, no, no, no. That’s not true. All over the New York tabloids where Weiner happens to hail from it’s all over. It’s all over. No, you can’t say that. I realize it’s a little different here than if it were Mark Foley; they’re a giving him all kinds of outs here. I know the coverage is different, but it’s being reported. It’s being headlined.
CALLER: Well, the left often likes to make the Rush Limbaugh listeners and the Mark Levin listeners out as a bunch of mind-numbed robots, and the reason they do that is because that’s how they see their own constituencies. It kind of ties into what you were just talking about with the economy: If we just say it, then they’ll repeat it, and they’ll believe it.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And I wanted to build back to what you said, that we can’t win these battles with scandals; we’ve got to win with ideas, and we can because we have better ideas. And here’s my question. How do we win the battle of ideas when our opponent is armed with baseball bats that have nails spiked through them?
RUSH: Well, see, I think we are. This is the tough thing to convince people. Who won the elections in November? Republicans did, and it was a landslide. It was a shellacking. And it was not just federal elections, but state elections and local elections. If you look at polling data, there’s not one issue Obama is winning a majority of. Everything he holds dear, his side is polling in the minority right now. The American people, by any measure you want to look at, have rejected Obamaism. Regardless of the fact that they got baseball bats loaded with nails, regardless the fact they got the media on their side. But you see, there’s no record of it. There’s no record of this shellacking, other than the results. But nobody treats the Republicans as winners.
The media doesn’t act like November really happened. In fact, the media is tell us that the public’s changed its mind since November. That’s why you really need an independent, steel trap mind. If you’re gonna watch the mainstream media, you’ve got to do he went you can to not be affected by it. You have to watch it studiously, but not as a genuine consumer. You don’t want to consume what they’re reporting. If you do, they win. That’s what you’re talking about. They get control of your mind and they’re able to shape not only events, but your thoughts on events, and this is never going to change. The media is never gonna reflect our strengths. The media is never gonna even legitimize conservatism or conservatives. It’s never gonna happen. But in the way these things are actually measured, in elections? I’m telling you here again, by the way: More and more people now are starting to write about how beatable Obama is. There’s a number of them out there, and all it took was one person saying so (me), and all it took was one person saying so and now the echo chamber is out there: Obama can be beat easily.
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RUSH: In Laurel, Maryland, this is Burt. Great to have you on the EIB Network, Burt. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Nineteen-year student of societal evolution under your tutelage.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: First-time caller and how is my heart pounding.
RUSH: (chuckles)
CALLER: If I may relax by first saying hello to my beautiful wife of 18 years next week. Hello, honey! But I want to discuss how you’ve mentioned people are so surprised that the workers are exiting the workforce. One thing I’ve heard reinforced by you here at EIB is that history is important. If I understand correctly, our friends across the pond with their social programs and government health care, et cetera, in Britain have seen an exodus of about one-sixth of their workforce, who now exist on government support alone. So my question is, you know: What have the Democrats done here except to tell more people they need to rely on the government? They’ve extended unemployment.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. But I don’t know what you’re getting at here. I think you’re saying it’s all on purpose.
CALLER: Yeah. I mean everything from cash for the unions, I mean cash for clunkers to —
RUSH: Yeah, it’s like this debt ceiling, what did Greece do? Greece was told to raise their debt ceiling, and they did. Look what it got ’em? More trouble. Look, it all ties in, it all ties in. There’s — there’s virtue in — in not working. We had news stories on the virtue of not working. “Get closer to your family! Spend time with people you haven’t seen in a long, long time.”
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