RUSH: I was up very late last night. I was up exceedingly late consuming adult beverages. Well, I actually only had one. But I didn’t get to bed until about 2:30. I was getting ready to go to bed long before that and I started getting e-mails from people blaming me that the vote on Plan B failed in the House. I kid you not. They’re blaming me for riling this audience up and threatening members of Congress via phone call and fax.
I didn’t take a position on Plan B.
If you have been listening carefully and closely, you know that I believe this whole thing went up in smoke weeks ago when Boehner agreed to raise taxes on the rich. That’s what Obama’s been after. He got it. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. We lost the election. I mean, the idea that… I actually had somebody send me a note, “Would you please explain to me how…?” By the way, before that part of the note, this person was practically quoting me verbatim. Unknowingly.
He apparently had not listened to me. He was telling me strategically about how Obama wants to go over the cliff and he’s gonna get credit for cutting taxes after we go over the cliff and so forth and so on. So I’m reading what I have said already. Somebody’s written me this. And then, “Would you please explain to me how this is going to end up with Obama getting blamed? I just don’t see it.”
A little red light went off. Somebody is out there telling the inside-the-Beltway conservative intelligentsia that I have some strategy that I’m telling you about that guarantees Obama’s gonna get blamed for this. Excuse me? I’m the guy who’s been telling you from the get go, “If we can’t make Obama own the first four years of his term, what makes us think we can make him own a weekend or one day of going over the cliff?”
I have never been under the impression we’re gonna be able to blame Obama for this, and I don’t have a strategy to blame Obama for this. We lost the election! I spent a lot of time yesterday explaining that, and we now have a better idea — an excellent idea — of why we lost. But we know why we lost. It’s not that we didn’t move to the center enough. We got all the independents. We didn’t get our base out. We coulda won this election by a pretty big margin if the Republican Party weren’t so skittish of conservatives.
Anyway, I don’t want to rehash all that. That’s from yesterday. But if anybody is under a false impression out there, I don’t have a strategy for blaming Obama for this. I’m not an idiot. I can see the polling data. Only 24% of people blame Obama. The rest blame the Republicans. The bottom line is this: “No matter what the Republicans do, they’re going to get the blame!” That’s written, etched in stone.
The media templates and narratives are written.
Whatever they’re saying about Plan B failing is what they were gonna say regardless of what happened.
Wayne LaPierre went out today. Wayne LaPierre called a press conference to announce what the NRA’s gonna do on this, and he was disrespected, shouted down. Code Pink is there calling him a hater and a killer and a gun nut and a wacko. No matter what he said, Wayne LaPierre sounded like an adult looking for real solutions, but that’s not what this country’s interested in right now. Sorry. The adults are not running this show.
LaPierre sounded like a guy looking for real solutions. He said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” It happens to be true, but you just can’t say it. Look, the… (sigh) You can call it a stacked deck, a rigged game, whatever, but the fix is in. The NRA is the enemy. The NRA is hated. Go to Twitter. Go to Facebook. Go to ABC, CBS, NBC. Go to any of the blogs. Go to any of the newspapers.
The NRA is to blame for this, and there’s no way we’re gonna be able to turn that around. LaPierre tried and Code Pink shows up. Have you ever noticed that the left never interrupts hearings about Fast and Furious, where hundreds of people died because of US policy? Have you ever noticed that Code Pink never interrupts a hearing on Benghazi by shouting, “There’s blood on your hands”? The Democrats can get away with it.
They run the show here. The Democrats and the liberals own the media. They own Twitter. They own Facebook. The idea that I think somehow there’s a strategy to make Obama take the blame..? What I think is going on is there are some delusional conservatives who believe that there is some policy the Republicans could adopt in the House that’s gonna guarantee the American people see the truth about Obama.
Sorry.
If we couldn’t pull that off in four years, what makes us think that we’re gonna be able to pull it off in a day? The only thing we can do is stand by our principles so that we have that going down the road. But when we agreed to raise taxes on the rich, that’s when I thought it was over. I know that I’m still, in terms of the inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia and conservative media, a lone voice in this belief. People are writing in refutation of me without mentioning my name.
I know they’re reacting to me because I’m the only one saying this. But I’m as convinced now as I ever have been that Obama’s objective is to wipe out the Republican Party in a political sense. Just because we don’t view the Democrats that way doesn’t mean they don’t look at us that way. While we’re preoccupied with showing we can be bipartisan and get along, what are they doing? They’re in all-out destroy mode.
If you don’t understand who Obama is, why he thinks he’s where he is, what he thinks his job is and what his desire is — if you don’t understand that — then you’re never gonna understand anything I say about it. If you don’t accept the fact that Obama believes this country was unjustly, incorrectly, immorally, unfairly founded — and that for 230-plus years this country’s been a stacked deck and a rigged game in favor of the 2% of the population…
“They’ve taken all the money from everybody and they’ve made sure nobody else ever gets any! They ran around the world and they plundered the rest of the world. They stole this, stole that. We don’t deserve to be a superpower. The US military is the focus of evil in the world. We torture! And Obama has arrived in his messianic way to fix this finally.” After 236 years, it’s time to fix it. It’s time to make it fair.
It’s time to address all these grievances that have been in place for 200-plus years. Why do you think we’re drifting further apart again racially? And don’t tell me that we’re not. We are. The war between men and women is heating up. This country’s drifting apart and more divided than it’s ever been in my lifetime, and all of this is the result of policies taking place in the last four years. So you got a guy who thinks that it’s time now to “fix” this country and make it what it should have been in the first place.
The first thing that has to happen here is that the guys in charge of the rigged deck, stacked deck, rigged game, pay the place. It’s time for them to pay. So, “Hello tax increases on the rich!” It’s time to punish ’em. And even if they don’t get punished, it’s time to make everybody else think they’re being punished. It’s time to make everybody think, “We’re getting even now! We’re finally fixing this.”
It’s much easier to tell failures and unsuccessful people that none of it’s been their fault. It’s always been “Them” or “They,” the people who really run the show. They’ve been in charge, and they’ve managed to arrange things so that they have all the stuff, and they their families and friends and so forth get all the stuff and you’ve been shut out. Now here comes Obama, in a Robin Hood sort of way as far as they’re concerned.
The real danger that I think we face, and I mentioned this earlier, is Ronald Reagan was a transformative president. That’s in the sense that he genuinely changed the direction of the country. He genuinely changed the direction the country was going, and Obama knows that. He admires Reagan in that sense. He wants to emulate him. But his transformation is not Reaganesque.
He wants to be Reagan, but he hopes transform this country into a quasi-European, socialist, so-called democracy. That’s what Obama wants is for the majority of people to think that him, his policies — that liberalism and socialism — are the great hope, the great salvation. That’s the transformation he’s seeking to make here. Now, if you don’t believe that about Obama, or if you don’t accept that about Obama, then you’re gonna have a tough time agreeing with anything else I say about it.
So here comes Obama and his class warfare plan, and that’s not being executed because it’s traditional Democrat Party policy. This is being done ’cause Obama genuinely believes this stuff and wants other people to believe it. This country is a mess — we have a bad economy, we have an unfair job situation, we have unfair this and discrimination there — because government has bestowed too much on the rich. It’s time to take it back now.
It’s time the rich paid the price. So tax increases on the rich is a small part of it, but in terms of perception and Obama’s voting constituents, it’s big. He has a lot of people that are really champing here. I mean, they love the fact that Obama’s finally going after these people; that he’s going after LaPierre, going after all these people that have created this mess. And so, if you establish as the premise that our economy and every other problem we’re having is directly traceable…
Let’s just stick with the economy. If you’re able to make the connection that unemployment, housing prices, home values, housing market, whatever — every economic problem — is because the rich haven’t been paying their fair share… Do you know how many people really think we’re gonna balance the budget if we raise taxes on the rich? You’d be shocked how many people really believe that.
No matter how many years they’ve been told it can only run the government for 11 days, it doesn’t matter. They believe it, and Obama is helping facilitate this. They’re low-information voters. “Low-information voter” means a “high-liberal-information voter.” You know, people can only absorb so much information. Most brains have a limit. Mine, of course, is larger than most, but most people’s brains have a limit.
And if most of your brain is filled up with liberal gobbledygook, there not much room left for reason. Anyway, what Obama wants is a confession — a confession that he’s right; that the rich, the elites, the 1%, whatever you call ’em, have an unfair advantage. The government’s given ’em too much, orhe government hasn’t taken enough from them. Whatever. They’re the reason that there’s poverty.
They are the reason that people’s incomes are down, ’cause they’re taking all the money and they’ve always taken all the money and they have all the money. Obama’s going and getting it now! So when the Republicans come along and say, “Okay, we’ll see that. We’ll raise taxes on the rich, a million and above.” I guarantee you they popped champagne corks in the White House when they see that because that’s the Republicans agreeing.
But that’s the generic view of this. I’ll get specific, after a brief time-out here, about the Plan B circumstance of what happened there and what’s being said about it and how I think that’s incorrect in some in places. But I’ll tell you this: From what I’ve been told — and if want to be, I’m connected. If I want to call somebody in the House and get some information, I can. I don’t a lot. But if I want to, I can.
In this situation I did, and what I have been told by a bunch of people is that the speaker was never even close to having the votes for Plan B, folks. This whole thing was a giant roll of the dice. He was never even close, because most of the Republicans do not want to cave in. Do you realize Republicans have not agreed to an income tax rate increase since 1990? George Bush, “Read my lips,” was the last time it’s happened. And this current crop in the House doesn’t want to be the one to break the record.
They weren’t even close here.
Plan B never had a chance.
It wasn’t even close.
It was really risky even calling the vote.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me tell you why conservatives and the like are upset over Plan B not passing. Folks, I’m gonna admit here: I may be in a very small minority of people who think this. I, as you know, am the mayor of Realville. We lost the election. Elections have consequences. We also do not have very many conservatives in elective office who can articulate it. We just don’t.
We also have a Republican Party in paralysis, paralyzed with fear — and this paralysis is becoming a self-realization, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fear of being blamed is leading people to behave in such a way as to guarantee that that happens. So Plan B, just to refresh your memory about what Plan B was… And the House, by the way, has already… This is what’s maddening.
The Republicans in the House have passed two pieces of legislation going back to last August that have dealt with the fiscal cliff; Obama just won’t agree to any of it, and the Senate will not support it. The House has already done it. The House is negotiating with itself. The House is voting against itself. In August and one other vote after August, the House has already passed legislation that would give Obama what he says he wants, other than raising taxes on people.
The Republicans are adamant that that’s not a problem. But we’ve dealt with the fiscal cliff in two pieces of legislation, and Obama’s rejecting it. So the Republicans go back and try to imagine up something else, and he rejects that. He’s gonna reject everything! Now, there are some conservative-media types, some elected Republicans and others who think that there is a way to expose the president in the fiscal cliff negotiations.
And by “expose the president,” what they mean is that there is a way to see to it that the American people blame him. The polling data on that right now, where we are… To the extent that people are paying attention to this and understand it, 24% think Obama is to blame, 67% think Republicans are to blame, and the rest don’t know, don’t care, but probably think that Obama’s the innocent party. So there is no blaming Obama here.
There’s no strategy that is gonna result in the American people thinking the guy they just reelected — the guy they’re not holding accountable for anything, the guy who’s not responsible for anything going wrong — is to blame. There’s no magic piece of legislation that results in Obama getting blamed, but we have people on our side that think that that’s possible. So now they’re wringing their hands that Plan B went down to defeat.
They’re mad at people like me ’cause they think I ginned up all the opposition to it, when we didn’t take a position on Plan B. I didn’t urge you to do anything. I didn’t tell you to call Washington. You know me. I thought this was all over when we agreed to raise taxes on the rich. We went over the cliff a long time ago, actually, economically. I don’t know how long ago we went over the cliff in this country.
But in terms of “over the cliff” in the current vernacular: When we agreed to raise taxes on the rich, that’s all Obama needed. So I’m hearing a fairly consistent argument out there that by stopping the Boehner vote on tax increases, it’s a foolish victory because now the Democrats are capitalizing on this by saying the Republicans just voted to increase taxes. In other words, we have commentators and media types who claim to be conservatives, attacking other conservatives because of the Democrats’ attacks on Republicans.
It is as though Democrat attacks on Republicans are brand-new and they’re only happening because of the intransigence of certain conservatives in the media. Now, I don’t know how this pretzel logic works. Do people in Washington…? My question is, do they really not know what is actually happening in Washington? Do they really not understand what Obama is doing here? Not just with the fiscal cliff, but his whole agenda.
Obama was always going to be blame Republicans for tax increases. That is what Obama and the Democrats in the media want! They went to be able to get the Republicans to agree that tax cuts have been the problem all along. “Tax cuts for the rich!” So Obama wants tax increases, and he wants the Republicans to get the blame for it. And no matter what happens, that’s what’s going to happen.
That’s what will happen.
And passing Plan B, which was a tax increase, wouldn’ta changed anything. It’s giving Obama exactly what he wants, in my view. Obama had already said that the speaker’s proposal would result in tax increases, because Obama couldn’t sign a bill that wasn’t supposedly “balanced.” In Plan B, Republicans were voting for the first time in decades (since 1990) to raise income tax rates. That’s what had been maneuvered here.
I don’t know how that gets construed as victory. Now, some people say, “Well, you’re getting it off the table, Rush, and you’re moving on to spending cuts. So the media’s then gonna go to the Democrats and say, ‘Okay, what are you gonna cut?'” It’s not gonna happen! The media’s not gonna go to the Democrats and say, “Okay, Republicans have done their part. Now what are you gonna do?” It’s not going to happen.
The story is gonna be, “Republicans Agree to Raise Taxes,” and the champagne corks are gonna pop. So the Republicans would not have had a leg up politically. They woulda been on record supporting tax increases. That, somehow, wins? See I know the thinking. By agreeing to raise taxes on 1% or 2% of the people and keeping tax rates the same for everybody else, Republicans hope to get credit for not raising taxes on 99% of the country. And when their taxes do go up, Obama gets the blame for it.
But what’s always going to happen here is that taxes are going up, and then Obama’s gonna ride in later as the white knight and offer to cut them. Now, I think the way to do this — and, again, I’ll stress: I don’t do their job, and it’s easy to be critical of these people when you don’t know their job. I’m not in their shoes, and it’s easy in the armchair being a quarterback. It’s easy from a distance to say, “What they ought to be doing is this and what they ought to be doing is that.”
I understand all of that. But you know what would have been great? Pass a bill that cuts taxes! If Obama’s gonna veto something, make it a bill that cuts taxes for middle-class people! Or go ahead and pass Simpson-Bowles or some version of it. That’s Obama’s own deficit-reduction panel that he totally rejected!. But if you want to put the onus on Obama, if your objective here is to see that he gets blamed for something — if that’s your objective — then pass a bill that cuts taxes!
Be Republican and be conservative and pass a bill that cuts taxes! (New Castrati impression) “Mr. Limbaugh, that is absolutely absurd because everybody knows that the deficit and the national debt were caused by people not paying enough in taxes. Now, what we need to do is increase taxes on the rich to close the deficit.” This is my whole point! That’s just Washingtonspeak!
That’s narrative stuff. That’s right out of the template.
That’s what everybody inside the Beltway thinks. So think outside the box! The objective is to put Obama in a hole. If the goal is to put the onus on him, then pass something he doesn’t like. He’s going to reject and veto everything he likes. “What is that, Mr. Limbaugh? Do you really mean to say that?” Yes! The Republicans have offered him everything he wants.
They’ve had some spending cuts in there that he doesn’t really want, but they’ve offered tax increases on the rich. Major ones! They’ve offered him the rates on the rich. They’ve offered to leave the tax rates on the middle class the same. He says: No way. He wants to go over the cliff. I’ll tell you this. I was telling Mr. Snerdley this morning (Tthis theory could be cockeyed, so see what you think), “There are some people who believe that Obama doesn’t want to go over the cliff.
“I happen to know that Speaker Boehner is one of them. Speaker Boehner is confident that Obama doesn’t want to go over the cliff. That’s why Speaker Boehner has been writing legislation as he has. Now, I think he does want to go over the cliff. But Speaker Boehner and others think that he doesn’t, that this is all a big bluff.” Okay. Plan B being defeated — in fact, so soundly that it wasn’t even called for a vote. Do you realize what that means?
That means that they were nowhere near having the votes, and it raises another question. Why even call for the vote when you’re in that bad-a shape on it? But this may flush Obama out. Okay, so the Republicans have demonstrated that they aren’t going anywhere near where Obama wants. The Republicans in the House are not going to cave. They’re not gonna give him what he wants: The admission, the confession, the concession that their policies are to blame for this.
So Obama knows that for Boehner to get anything out of the House and to avoid the cliff, the House is gonna have to pass something that the Senate will pass that Obama will sign, and the Republicans have just put their foot down that this isn’t the way to do it. Now, if Obama does not want to go over the cliff, this might flush that out. It’s a long shot, and I’m just thinking off the top of my head.
But if he doesn’t want to go over the cliff — if he really doesn’t and just has everybody thinking he does want to go over the cliff — this failure of Plan B (this dramatic, giant failure) is going to tell him that he’s gonna have to make some movement in the Republicans’ direction. Now, I happen to think he wants to go over the cliff. I happen to think that he’s salivating to go over the cliff. It’s a Democrat wet dream, folks, going over the cliff.
I mean, it is stuff they’ve been dreaming of all their lives, like getting health care.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So my point here is, folks: When some people argue that Plan B, the tax increase on the rich who earn over a million dollars — when some people argue that that would have put the onus on Obama, that that would have exposed Obama, that it would have somehow won the political argument — they’re wrong. Republicans were supposedly gonna have big talking points and expose the president.
“We’ve given him what he wants.”
The president’s had what he wants since August. The president won the election. There isn’t anything… See, I’m not one of the group that thinks there’s a strategy, a miraculous strategy where the end result is Obama gets the blame. But if you want to put the onus on him, if that’s what your objective is — if you’re sick and tired of getting blame for everything when you’re not responsible, if you’re sick and tired of the media hating your guts — send him a tax cut, not a tax increase!
Make him go wailing and moaning about that.
(New Castrati impression) “Mr. Limbaugh, that is absolutely silly. The Republicans would be tarred and feathered for tax cuts for the rich in the midst of the recession.” No, these would be tax cuts for everybody, because that’s what Obama is gonna end up proposing himself if we go over the cliff. I just… I don’t know. Being asked to vote against your own principles for some specious argument that won’t put the onus on Obama?
It’s like deja vu.
We’ve been there and done this every budget deal. I don’t know one that we’ve won. I can’t think of any one of these that we’ve won. Now it is apparent that the objective is to see to it that we don’t get blamed. “To hell with what we do in terms of substance. Let’s just make sure we don’t get blamed.” I just think that for the long haul, you stick to your principle and what you know is right policy-wise, and that’s what you propose, knowing full well it may well be defeated.
We lost the election.
Again, I don’t want to sound like a broken record here but we haven’t been able to have these first four years stick to Obama. He’s somehow not at all responsible. He’s not even present. He’s not even involved. This all Bush’s fault still. You think there’s some magic out there that all of a sudden the fiscal cliff, the American people, the Obama phone people, the low-information people that made him Person of the Year are gonna all of a sudden say all this is Obama’s fault?
It just isn’t there yet.
So if he really doesn’t want to go over the cliff, if he really doesn’t, this Plan B blowing up may actually flush that out.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Just to illustrate my point: The White House has a graphic posted at their website, and do you know what it says? It says that Boehner’s Plan B raises taxes on the middle class. It doesn’t! It leaves middle class taxes exactly where they are. There’s no tax increase for anybody except the rich in Boehner’s plan. The White House is lying through their teeth and the media is repeating the lie that Republicans raised taxes on the middle class.
It’s not true.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, look, I don’t want to beat a dead horse here, and I realize my problem. I’m obsessed with the truth. I just have a tough time giving up the truth, giving up common sense and what’s right. I don’t know. I’m not gonna be able, easily, to abandon that and become something else. Now, this Plan B going down to defeat and all these conservatives wringing their hands, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!
“We just lost a chance to expose Obama! We just lost a chance to make the public realize it was Obama raising taxes! Oh, no!” The argument is that by stopping the Boehner vote on tax increases, it’s a foolish victory because now the Democrats capitalized on it by saying, “The Republicans just voted to increase taxes.” Well, they did! They did. It went down to defeat, but they proposed it.
The fact is, Obama is always going to say that the Republicans raised taxes. What is the analogy? That’s the golden nugget for Obama. Now, to prove the point that we’re not dealing with reality when we’re talking about Obama and the media: The White House… Here’s what they’re claim. I’m gonna read to you what is up on the White House website about Plan B, and I’m gonna tell you what Plan B is or was. It’s very simple.
The only people who would see their tax rate go up are people that make over a million dollars a year. Everybody else’s taxes would stay the same. If you make less than a million, whatever your tax rate is stays the same. If you make more than a million, it goes up to 39.6%. That was Plan B. Here’s what’s on the White House website. “The wealthy get tax cuts under the Republicans’ Plan B.
“Boehner’s plan provides an average tax cut of $50,000 for those making over a million dollars. That’s just 0.3% of all American households, while the middle class foots the bill. Twenty-five million working middle-class families would pay, on average, a thousand dollars more in taxes.” It’s an out-and-out lie! How do you combat that? All these people out there telling us that we’re gonna put the onus on Obama?
The White House is out there lying through their teeth about what Plan B was even though it went down the tubes! It was a thousand-dollar-a-year tax increase on the middle class? Not true. “Eleven million families would lose a tax credit that helps pay for college.” There wasn’t anything about that in Plan B. “Two million Americans looking for work would be cut off from a vital lifeline of unemployment…”
So Plan B contained reducing unemployment compensation benefits? No, it didn’t! “[A]nd devastating budget cuts would be enacted, crippling investments in education, research,” blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that was in Plan B! So people on our side think we could end up putting the onus on Obama or expose Obama by passing a tax increase on the rich? They’re just lying through their teeth about what the thing was, and you know who’s gonna soak it up and believe it.
The low-information voter.
The media’s gonna spread it around. The media’s not interested in truth. The media is interested in wiping out the Republican Party. I don’t think the Republican Party understands what they’re up against. This is not just politics as usual where Democrats win one and then we win one and horse trade here and horse trade there. That’s not what this is about anymore. This is about a guy trying to transform this country, and he has said so.
So that’s that.
That’s my only point.