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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: Now, here’s what the president needs to realize. I say this with all humility, by the way. Don’t misunderstand. The president needs to realize that his base is still with him. They are with him as much as they ever have been. In fact, it’s actions like this in the House and Senate that make them even angrier, because it doesn’t make common sense. Most people don’t see the world as I just described it; they see it as Republicans and Democrats, and they think right now the Republicans don’t have a lot of gonads.

They don’t think the Republicans have a lot of desire. But that’s as far as it goes. Maybe they understand that Republicans don’t totally support Trump. They wish somebody else had won the nomination. And they think maybe the Republicans are afraid of the media. Whatever, it’s got them angry ’cause they don’t understand it (even though they do). The Republican Party owns everything, the House and the Senate. I don’t care that it’s only 52 votes in the Senate. So what? Since when is 52 votes not enough? When does that become a convenient excuse?

And that’s exactly what it is. “Well, we don’t have 60,” and if they had 60 they’d claim they really don’t; it’s really 58, because the desire to do this isn’t there. It’s no more complicated than that. People voted for this because the people that now don’t have the desire to do it assured everybody they were gonna do it during the campaign, and they did do it when they didn’t have the power to make it happen. When they were up against Obama in the White House, they passed repeal legislation every year. They sent it up there; he vetoed it. They can do it.

They’ve demonstrated they can do it. They’ve demonstrated they can come together and do it. They’ve demonstrated — the moderates, the women, Latinos, whatever the makeup of the Republican caucus is — they can come together and do it, except when it might actually matter. So the president and his team need to realize his base is still with him. I don’t know if Trump’s discouraged by this stuff or not. I mean, you look at his tweets, and he presents the image of an optimistic, never-giving-up fighter and so forth, which he is. I mean, don’t misunderstand.

But to me, there has been way too much reliance on traditional party politics to get this done, and that was never gonna get done because the Republicans don’t want to get it done. They don’t. Everybody sees things through the eyes of the left. All they see is (sobbing) “the grief they’re gonna get for taking away benefits from people.” They don’t see all the people who can’t afford it anymore. They don’t see all the people who literally can’t even afford to use the policies they buy because of the high deductibles. They instead only see the criticism they’re gonna get from the media that they’re killing people.

It’s time to fight back on this stuff, instead of cowering in the corner and trying to not generate the criticism. Who in the world…? If somebody simply fights back and says, “Are you serious? Our policies are gonna kill people? Let’s look at who’s dying now, if you want to go that route.” There’s any number of ways — if you really want to do this — to fight back on all this stuff, and I think the Democrats are making it easy. The charge that the Republican Party wants to murder people to come is one of the easiest things in the world to rebut and make embarrassing rejoinders out of, embarrassing to the Democrats and the media making the allegation.

Plus, it’s predictable. Everybody knows what the Democrats and the media are gonna say, and they gonna say it no matter what the Republicans do. They’re gonna mock ’em and make fun of ’em and rip ’em and destroy ’em and criticize ’em no matter what they do. It’s been the case for 30 or more years. It’s more, many more than 30 years. But when you see everything through the eyes of the left, when you see everything through the eyes of the media, the way that President Trump is gonna have to make this happen is marshal his army of base supporters.

“You’ve gotta take the army that you have,” Rumsfeld said. If you’re Rumsfeld, you have to find a way to frighten or intimidate or manipulate or whatever, ’cause that’s what’s going on here. I have no doubt Trump’s a patriot, believes in America, wants it to be great again, knows that Obamacare subtracting greatly from that. It has to go. It has to go. No matter what governors will be upset if they lose the benefits. It’s destroying health care! It’s destroying budgets. It’s destroying the whole concept of insurance because the government is running it.

The greatest insult of all is that when it implodes, then the only recourse is for government to take over all of it with single payer. The government: An institution that demonstrates daily how it cannot compete with the free market in terms of cost, efficiency, timing, you name it. The government excels at bureaucracy and blocking things and roadblocks, all kinds of things. But it doesn’t excel in actually achieving things. Certainly not like it was once able to do, say all the way back in the Great Depression. But even then, it was government relying on the private sector to make things happen.

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