RUSH: So if the uncertainty over the continuing resolution causes prisoners to be released, maybe the Democrats should offer a real budget! You think maybe that might be a solution? We haven’t had a real budget in four years. If bureaucrats are panicking over the continuing resolution expiring in one month and releasing prisoners, maybe if the Democrats would get in gear and get a budget in the Senate, we wouldn’t have to go through any of this.

What if some career officials running Obamacare decide to start killing off old people and don’t tell anybody about it? Do you see where this is going? Obama is setting it up that career bureaucrats can engage in all kinds of stuff that he doesn’t know about until he reads it in the newspaper. Sad to say, there will be low-information voters who believe that. You know, speaking of this sequester business, try this. The Associated Press has a story that says Americans are not even paying attention to the sequester.

They’ve done polling on it, and nobody cares.

Nobody’s paying attention to it.

“President Barack Obama is pulling out all the stops to warn just what could happen if automatic budget cuts kick in. Americans are reacting with a collective yawn. They know the shtick: Obama raises the alarm, Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of holding a deal hostage, there’s a lot of yelling on cable news, and then finally, when everyone has made their points, a deal is struck and the day is saved. Maybe not this time,” says AP.

“Two days before $85 billion in cuts are set to hit…” It isn’t $85 billion. Anyway, “there are no signs that the White House and Republicans in Congress are even negotiating,” and that’s what the big deal to the Drive-Bys. There are no talks. And that’s why they’re panicking. F. Chuck said it the other day. F. Chuck Todd said it yesterday. We had the sound bite; I just didn’t get to it. F. Chuck said, “They’re not even talking!” and it was reason to panic, because there were no negotiations.

If there aren’t any negotiations, they can’t stop it, and if the sequester happens, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! We don’t even want to contemplate it.” But the fact of the matter is, only one in four Americans is following the sequester closely. Now, you know what’s odd about this, folks? The sequester’s big news in the Drive-By Media, it’s practically all they’re talking about, and only 25% of the American people are following it.

Yet the fiscal cliff deal, 75% of the American people followed that toward the end of the year, when supposedly nobody is paying attention to the news. It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and no one’s paying attention to anything then. They’re all in holiday-vacation mode. And AP is telling us that back then, 75 or 80% of the people were really invested in the fiscal cliff deal. But now the sequester, only one in four care about it. Another thing is, most people think it’s not gonna affect ’em.

The reason why they’re not paying attention is that most people don’t believe that they’re gonna be financially impacted, they’re not gonna be hurt financially as a result of the sequester. Now, I have to tell you, the Obama regime people looking at that cannot be happy. Because the whole point of their argument about the sequester is that everybody’s gonna get hurt. No doctors, no firefighters, no first responders, no teachers, no aircraft carriers, no research and development, no drugs, no nothing. Screwed up airlines. I mean, it’s all gonna go south. Everything’s gonna fall apart.

That’s what the regime’s message has been. Everybody’s life is gonna come to a screeching halt because the government’s gonna come to a screeching halt. And nobody’s paying attention? Only 25% of people are paying attention, and those think that it isn’t gonna affect ’em? When all Obama is doing is campaigning about how everybody’s gonna be affected, everybody’s gonna get hurt, nobody is gonna benefit. They can’t be pleased with this. That means Obama’s messaging isn’t getting through, if we are to believe any of this.

And how about AP writing this. “[The American people] know the shtick: Obama raises the alarm, Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of holding a deal hostage, there’s a lot of yelling on cable news, and then finally, when everyone has made their points, a deal is struck and the day is saved.” The AP says that’s what everybody thinks is gonna happen. Well, if that’s true, what that means is that everybody knows the way the game’s played and they don’t care. What that means is that 75% have not been ratcheted up into crisis mode, which means Obama’s not getting his message out. Believe me, the left knows this if all this is true. They read this like you and I do. If they think their message isn’t getting out, they’re gonna panic.

Now, you may have heard Keith Ellison, Democrat from Minnesota, literally went banshee on Hannity last night. He just lost it. He started accusing Hannity of all kinds of things, just lost it. He was not exuding or exhibiting an attitude of people who are winning. At first blanch, you know, I heard about it. I didn’t see it, but I’ve read about it now, and I thought, why? What caused Ellison to go nuts last night? I had no idea why. Maybe — and I’m just throwing it up against the wall here, maybe it sticks — maybe Ellison went nuts last night because this stuff isn’t working.

The American people don’t think they’re headed to a crisis. The American people don’t think the government shutting down is gonna ruin their life. They’ve thrown everything they’ve got into this sequester argument, and it’s been 24/7. Now you got this AP poll, only 25% of the people care. Most people don’t think it’s gonna affect them one way or the other. Just a wild guess. But everybody’s trying to figure out why Keith Ellison literally went bonkers last night on Hannity. Hannity eventually had to get rid of him, said, “Look, I can’t subject my audience to you anymore. You’re just over the top here.” He was insulting Hannity and all kinds of right-wingers and stuff.

So, I don’t know, maybe the libs think they’re losing this stuff. Folks, I know that doesn’t seem possible, but this is a real odd collection of stories. Prisoner release, Obama saying, “I didn’t know about it.” Jay Carney says, “We didn’t know about it.” Janet Napolitano didn’t know about it. A bunch of bureaucrats at ICE did it, and they’re worried the sequester and the continuing resolution stopping. Nobody cares about any of this. The buck never got here, Bill Clinton. You know, Harry Truman said, “The buck stops here.” Clinton (doing impression), “Ha-ha, the buck never got here. I couldn’t take any blame, it never got here. I had nothing to do with anything.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I need to make a correction. I misspoke when I said that 75% of the American people were concerned or paying attention to the fiscal cliff at the end of the year. It was 40%, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press. Forty percent were interested in the fiscal cliff and the outcome, and it’s only 25% paying attention to the sequester. But the real news in that poll is that most people don’t think any of this is going to affect them.

Now, stop and think of that.

You’ve got Obama out there telling everybody that the sun’s not gonna come up on March the 1st — the sun isn’t gonna come up, the sky isn’t gonna be blue, the birds aren’t gonna be chirping — and nobody thinks they’re gonna be impacted by this? I don’t want to read too much into any of this. I’m just trying to understand why the libs are so damn mad. They’re winning everything, and yet they’re fit to be tied out there.

They’re becoming even more arrogant and condescending and angry and egregious on every cable network where there are liberals. As far as you and I are concerned, they’re getting everything they want. They are winning everything. They don’t have any opposition, and Obama’s not being called on anything. Yet they’re mad and they’re getting angrier. Now, I know they always are perpetually angry, and they’re not happy.

I could be misreading it, too, but something strange is going on. This little poll here says that most people think they’re not gonna be affected, while Obama is telling them the sun isn’t gonna come up? That cannot be received well in the White House. I’ll tell you this, too: With Bob Woodward out there saying that what Obama’s doing is “madness,” I guarantee you, that’s not going over well, either. Madness is a mental condition. This is sheer madness.

Woodward said there’s no reason for any of this, and there isn’t. Maybe one of the reasons why Obama’s so over the top every day on all of these disasters that are gonna happen is they’ve got polling data themselves that says the American people aren’t buying it, and then you’ve got the AP writing a story that says the American people know the drill: Panic, panic, panic, followed by agreement, and everything’s fine.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Here’s Bill in Cincinnati. I’m glad you waited, Bill. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Mega dittos from Cincinnati, where, if you’re a Democratic poll worker, you can vote six times.

RUSH: There you go. Cincinnati. I knew it was somewhere.

CALLER: Yeah. Hey, Rush, you talked about Obama not knowing about Benghazi, he supposedly doesn’t know about the prison release, and he can’t speak without a teleprompter, so the question has to be, what does this guy know? Among these 30,000 low-priority illegal aliens that Obama is releasing from jail, some of these people are gonna commit crimes, Rush, and some are gonna commit violent crimes. And God forbid, some of those be rapes or murders, and Obama and the media are gonna blame the Republicans for that, Rush, when these people wind up committing crimes.

RUSH: Well, they’re gonna try. The problem is that Jay Carney actually said today that the people that authorized the release were these bureaucrats at ICE. Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying that the Republicans will ultimately be blamed because they’re the ones that made the bureaucrats nervous because of budget cuts.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: And, sadly, that’s where we are. We’ve got a president who is totally disconnected from the government. We have a president who’s totally disconnected from anything happening in the country. He has nothing to do with it. It’s amazing, folks. He’s into his fifth year, and it’s like he hasn’t been elected yet. He’s still campaigning for the job. He’s still running against these mythical, powerful forces who are causing a lot of pain for you.

CALLER: I think I’ve got an idea how to get to these low-information voters, Rush.

RUSH: Tell me.

CALLER: All right. Obama’s constantly campaigning. There’s always constant puff pieces, whether it’s the Oscars or ESPN or a Super Bowl interview. There’s no negative pieces on Saturday Night Live or Leno or Letterman, and definitely no negative news stories. I think the Republicans need to, in a way, do constant campaigning on their own, but the low-information voters have low attention spans, so do it in the form of commercials and not where you’re promoting a candidate, but where you’re explaining in very simple, easy to understand terms, about the national debt, or important news stories, or taxes, or the sequester. Run commercials on shows that they will watch, but do it year around.
RUSH: This is actually a good idea. I don’t want to take your thunder, but I have heard this suggested from some people. I don’t remember who, but it is an excellent idea because Obama’s running ads year round. The Democrats run ads. The union people are running ads year round. The Democrat interest groups, they’re running ads year round. And we don’t. We don’t run ads and when we do run ads, “Boy, Obama’s a really nice guy, just in over his head, and we’re gonna put the country back together.”

And the next ad you see is how Romney doesn’t care some guy’s wife died of cancer. So I think that is a good idea. I think it’s one way of going about this. You buy ads. The ads have to be put together right. You gotta have somebody that knows what the purpose of them is. You have to have a campaign, there has to be an objective here and a way of going about it. Then you make the ad buys within certain shows —

(interruption)

What, you don’t think it will work? Well, no, no, Snerdley, you’re saying this current crop of Republicans couldn’t do it. That’s not what I’m talking about. The idea’s a good idea. If you could have the right people put it together, if those people existed it is a good idea. Get a bunch of ads running on websites. A lot of low-information voters happen to watch TV on the Internet now, because cable’s too expensive. Big corporations run cable. Get these ads on Facebook and Twitter. Those are all Obama organizations, by the way. They could ban the ads if they’re too pointed against Obama, but I like the idea. I do. We live in an advertising marketing world. We do. I appreciate that, Bill. Thanks much.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ve been thinking about why are they increasingly angry? And I’ve already answered it. I don’t think it’s because they think they’re losing. I think that’s their strategy. It’s their campaign. Anger and rage is part of the leftist appeal. That’s how Sotomayor and Michelle Obama in college, angry, enraged, that’s how they got where they wanted to go. The left is perpetually angry. It’s part of the campaign. It’s of part of the perception of not governing. Being angry at what’s happening in the country right now is a way of distancing yourself from it, actually.

So the increased anger level is an illusion. Keith Ellison on TV last night or whoever, the increased anger level on the part of the Democrats is all part of the illusion to make it look like there are things happening out of their control that have them really ticked off that they’re trying to fix, when the truth is they are in control and are making those things happen. That’s what’s going on. It’s an illusion. It’s the prestige in a magic act. These guys are actually making it look like things are getting worse in this country, and they’re trying to stop it and they’re fighting and they’re getting angry at who? Us. The conservatives, Republicans. When the truth is they’re the ones in charge and making this happen.

It’s manipulation. They’re creating a false reality that they are not part of. They’re outside of it trying to stop it, fix it. I mean, it’s a massive game of manipulation they’re playing.