RUSH: You know, here we are, this is Christmas week. I mean, we’re four or five days, depending on how you count it, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and I made reference to this last week, this is the strangest month of December. Normally — and the last three or four have been — normally when we get into December and late December and a little, I mean, the subject matter here changes and it becomes, I don’t know, certainly less pressure packed, more jocular and so forth.
But I really may have sounded like a little bit of a downer today when I opened the program, and I apologize if that’s the case. It just ticks me off. I think back to these seven years and it just really set me off when I just realized today that we still have a majority of people on our side who still haven’t figured out what he wasn’t going on or are only recently are figuring it out, and it’s just so unnecessary. All of this seven years there hasn’t been any push-back for all the reasons that we have discussed, and it just hit me today. So I have spent the first hour, hour and a half detailing all of this, and if it’s a downer, I apologize. It’s certainly not my intention to be a downer during this week in any way, shape, manner, or form.
At the same time, if I went home today and had not discussed any of this with you, I would have had a guilt complex about that. So it’s one of those can’t-win-either-way kinds of things. But it is a genuine, genuine problem, and this next election — well, I don’t even want to go there right now. I’ll save all that for the coming of the new year. Now, I mentioned earlier in the program that I was again or am again half of the sound bite roster today. And as is the usual case, I have delayed playing those sound bites here until the final half hour. Let’s start Friday afternoon, Mechanicsville, Virginia, Senator Cruz held a press conference before a campaign rally, and during the Q&A he had a little back-and-forth with a female reporter.
REPORTER: I just heard Rush Limbaugh criticizing Donald Trump for criticizing you, so what’s your reaction?
CRUZ: Listen, I love Rush Limbaugh. He is a powerful voice for freedom and conservative principles, and as it concerns Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s a friend of mine. There are an awful lot of folks in the media that want to see a cage match between me and Donald Trump. I think the Washington establishment is desperate for that battle. I have no interest in giving them what they want.
RUSH: “I just heard Rush Limbaugh criticizing Trump for criticizing you. What is your reaction?” Boy, journalism’s so easy today. “What do you think of what X said about you,” seems to be the number one question journalists ask these days. So same place, Mechanicsville, Virginia, Cruz and another unidentified reporter had this exchange. The reporter said, “At the time you said that you supported what you were pushing because it would legalize the undocumented.” This is a reporter trying to either nail Cruz down or clarify the argument he was having with Rubio over legalization, the Gang of Eight bill.
CRUZ: That statement is false. Jeff Sessions and I both stood on the Senate floor, were assailed from all directions. I spent 30 minutes on the radio with Rush Limbaugh. During that half hour Rush Limbaugh interview the phones on Capitol Hill erupted as people across this country lit up the phones and we turned the debate. Senator Jeff Sessions has come out publicly and said: Ted is telling the truth, Marco is not telling the truth. And Rush Limbaugh has come out publicly and said: Ted is telling the truth, Marco is not telling the truth. As John Adams famously said, “Facts are stubborn things.”
RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute. I haven’t accused anybody of lying here. All I’ve tried to do is properly characterize what the debate was. This is about the poison pill that either was or wasn’t a poison pill. This is about essentially there’s a Gang of Eight, not a Gang of Nine. The Gang of Eight, Senator Rubio’s in it, and the pictures show him in it, and Cruz isn’t. And so members of the Gang of Eight are trying to make the case that Cruz at one point would have made it a Gang of Nine because he was for legalization but not for citizenship.
And mixing definitions and so forth, some are trying to say, “Hell, there’s no difference in the two. If you’re for legalization, you’re for amnesty and all that,” and they’re trying to trip Cruz up. I was just recapturing the argument as it went back and forth and trying to translate it for people. Anyway, Ted Cruz was on Greta on Friday night on the Fox News Channel. She said, “Why, in the days and weeks and months after June 4th of 2013 did it never come up that what you were doing, your amendment, was a poison pill?”
CRUZ: It came up over and over and over again. Chuck Schumer publicly said he knew it was a poison pill. In the last 24 hours Senator Jeff Sessions has gone out publicly and said Ted is right and Marco is not telling the truth. And Rush Limbaugh has come out publicly and said Ted is right, Marco is not telling the truth.
RUSH: So you see, ladies and gentlemen, no commentary needed here. I’m just playing you the sound bites, half of which I star in today. CNN’s State of the Union, Jake Tapper spoke with Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader, about my criticism of Republicans over the passage of the budget.
TAPPER: Rush Limbaugh said, quote, “It’s as though Pelosi is still running the House and Harry Reid is still running the Senate.” I’m guessing you disagree with these assessments?
MCCONNELL: We can’t do things one party only in a town with divided government. But there were other important things done in the context of that overall bill. For example, we got rid of a 40-year-old relic of the past called the oil export ban. So, it was a big compromise. That’s what you have to do when you have divided government.
RUSH: Well, there you have it, folks. Now, if they’re doing one thing they’re staying focused on the tune they’re singing. Remember, when all they had was the House, the Senate said, “Well, I’m sorry we can’t do anything here. We don’t have the Senate. The House can pass all at once. We can’t pass it over here so it can never be sent to Obama.” So voters said, “Okay,” so they gave the Senate to Republicans. They elected a majority of the Republicans in the Senate. And therefore they expected a lot of compromise legislation to be sent to Obama, expected the Republican Party to take a stand, expected the Republican Party to stand up and say no, even if Obama did veto it.
And the Republicans said, “Hey, all Obama’s gonna do is veto it, there’s no sense passing anything. He’s just gonna veto it. We don’t have the White House. We got divided government. And if we got divided government, there’s no way we can prevail on anything. We don’t have the White House yet.”
So on the budget deal, “Hey, we got the oil export ban lifted, first time in 40 years. I mean, it’s a great thing. That’s as much as we can do, as much as we can do because it’s a divided government. When you got a divided government, all you can do is compromise. So we still can’t do anything because we don’t have the White House. We’re making as much ground as we can, we’re covering as much ground as we can.” That oil export ban thing, I explained how that’s gonna work.
Let me just remind you and prepare you for it again. This is going to have the effect, in time, of raising prices, which, if you’re the oil industry, is a good thing, okay? And the oil industry is donors, right? So it’s a good thing. And to a certain extent, you know, oil can get too low. The cheaper it gets, it becomes unprofitable to get it out of the ground. That’s not good. So there’s a happy medium and a price balance. It can get too low. Not for consumers.
Gasoline is under two bucks in certain places now for the first time in a long time. But industry-wide, it can have negative ramifications. Well, lifting the 40-year-old oil export ban is going to facilitate the process of oil prices rising, but not overnight. So let’s pretend it’s next September, October, 2016. Gas prices are rising, oil prices are rising, and Democrats out there skewering Big Oil. “Once again, they’re raping the average American, causing the price of gasoline to skyrocket.”
And Democrats could say, “Wait a minute! We remember why this is. In that budget deal, the Republicans demanded that we agree with them to lift the ban on the export of oil. We went along with it, and look what’s happened? The Republican Party in that budget deal is pending passing money from your back pocket right to Big Oil,” and that’s gonna be a campaign issue next fall. You watch. Make book on it. Make a note right now: On December 21st, 2015, that I, El Rushbo, said so.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There are five more sound bites here that are based around me, one with Teve Torbes, Lou Dobbs, Republican strategist Cathy Lynn Taylor, Betsy Woodruff, Newt Gingrich. I may have to hold these over to tomorrow.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s… Yeah, grab sound bite number seven. Steve Forbes thinks I’m wrong on the budget deal. He was on Fox Business Network Friday. David Asman says, “Rush Limbaugh says the Republicans threw away the power of the purse by giving everything to the Democrats. Chuck Schumer loves it. So is this good for conservatives or what?”
FORBES: There are a couple things in there that I think, uh, the liberals, uh, are overlooking. One is removing that oil ban which is good. Uh, a second thing is, uh, postponing, uh, the device tax on Obamacare, postponing the Cadillac Tax on Obamacare. This is the beginning of the unwinding of Obamacare. The other thing is that by making permanent certain tax breaks, it’ll perversely make it easier in 2017 for a president to simplify the tax code. It will actually make tax cutting and simplification easier. I don’t think the Democrats realize that.
RUSH: A lot of people don’t. (sigh) So I just… I don’t know. I’ve heard it all before. “Hey, you know what? We may have lost everything here but there’s a couple things in there, and the next budget that comes around, we’re gonna skunk ’em! We’re gonna skunk the Democrats. They don’t have the slightest idea how we have set them up like you can’t believe. We’re gonna ram tax cuts through ’em and they’re not gonna know what hit ’em,” and this has been the way it’s gone for the last five years.
Every time we take it in the shorts, we are told how we have set them up. And they just continue winning and winning and winning. And, by the way, folks, if I may say one more time on this postponing the device tax on Obamacare and postponing the Cadillac Tax? You know, that can work in a detrimental way. Those are very, very punitive things. If those things were implemented, it would do a lot to make people mad. We are now delaying elements of Obamacare that people would really be ticked off about, and we’re just allowing these Obamacare tentacles to get woven even deeper into society, making it tougher to ever repeal this thing. I just… I don’t know. It’s a boondoggle if you ask me.