RUSH: What is the ongoing fascination with accepting the premises advanced by the Democrats and thinking we can improve on their premise? Whatever happened to standing up and fighting their premise? This whole concept of change, the idea we got some new candidate here with change.
Jeffrey Lord in the American Spectator today does a yeoman’s job of exposing that there is absolutely nothing new about Barack Obama, that, in fact, Barack Obama is nothing more than Jimmy Carter serving his second term. Let me give you some excerpts of this piece today: ‘Are there enough voting Americans who survived the disastrous odyssey through the late 1970s that was led by blessedly now ex-president Jimmy Carter? While Ronald Reagan is rated in poll after poll by Americans as a great president, (most recently he rated second only to Lincoln), are there enough people who recall that Reagan’s election came about because of Carter’s…ahhh…’performance’ in the Oval Office? And will they be able to make the Obama-Carter connection for younger voters hearing terms like ‘windfall profits tax’ for the first time? … And as the string of American presidents and presidential campaigns gets longer, the newest candidates and the latest president have taken to looking backwards to select the presidential policies of admired predecessors.’
You know, that is dead-on right. I have to take a departure here before getting to the meat of Mr. Lord’s piece, because on the conservative side, on our side of the aisle, ladies and gentlemen, we have conservative pundits in the elitist northeastern corridor who are out there suggesting we can’t go back to the eighties, the eighties are old hate, Reagan era is over, we gotta forget that, gotta leave Reagan alone, that was then, this is now, we got whole new set of challenges now, we need to look to the future. We need to take stock in what America is now and come up with policies that define the new conservatism. What do we have? I don’t care whether you look at Obama, you look at McCain, you look at people that are going back to recreate policies of the past under new names, under new titles, but it’s the same old thing.
Those of us who still proudly call ourselves Reagan conservatives are the ones looking forward. We’re the ones looking forward with the desire to save this country, to preserve the institutions and traditions that made this country great which basically are capitalism and liberty. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, small government, get it out of the way. Yet everywhere we turn in politics, doesn’t matter where the party, Big Government, more expansive government, even though it might be a compassionate government. We got people looking to emulate the socialist democracies of western Europe, on both sides of the aisle. Doesn’t matter. And yet those of us who are Reagan conservatives are told we’re the old-fashioned ones, that we’re the ones stopping progress. All right, well, let me get back to Jeffrey Lord’s meat and potatoes here in his American Spectator piece. ‘Obama’s windfall profits tax idea?’ Keep in mind now Obama, a new visionary, a man trodding the political soil unlike any man who has ever trod the political soil; a man who will be able to unify the American people; a man who can make us forget our disagreements and come together in common purpose.
What a bunch of BS. There is no such politician. Every politician, every iteration of politician has already trod the precious political soil. It is not possible for somebody new to come along. Just like it is not possible for something new in a football game to happen that hasn’t happened before, or a baseball game. Everybody was going nuts. Some guy in the Cleveland Indians had an unassisted triple play the other day. ‘Ooh, wow,’ you look it up, it’s happened before. So is the windfall profits tax idea. Jimmy Carter on national television in 1980, quote, ”Unless we tax the oil companies, they will reap huge and undeserved windfall profits.’ The New York Times agreed, warning darkly that ‘legislators who sit by idly while oil profits soar will have to answer to the voters.’ With Democrats controlling Congress they got their way. As if on cue, oil production — fell. To the tune of 1.6 billion fewer barrels. America’s dependence on foreign oil rose.’ Now, some of you might be asking, well, why? Why did our domestic oil production decrease? Because Big Oil says, ‘Okay, fine, you’re going to put a windfall profits tax on American oil, we’ll leave it in the ground and we’ll go elsewhere.’ They are, after all, global companies. It will happen again.
There’s nothing new about it, Senator Obama, there’s nothing visionary, nothing unifying, and it doesn’t work. And of course it’s not intended to work. It’s not intended to produce a drop more energy. It’s not intended to produce a drop more oil or gasoline. It’s designed to punish. ‘Another Carter favorite was to appear to attack the wealthy, going after ‘rich businessmen’ who enjoyed themselves with the ‘$50 martini lunch.’ That was the creation of Jimmy Carter, the 50-dollar martini lunch. ‘Elected, Carter went after the martini business lunch tax deduction all right, but then quickly turned on the middle class with a Social Security payroll tax. Obama is already well on board with Carteresque rhetoric about ‘tax cuts for the wealthy.’ What taxes will a President Obama raise that, as with Carter, can’t be discussed as a candidate? Appeasement and the notion that we can look evil in the eye and smile? Another Carter favorite (captured forever with the image of the American president kissing Brezhnev on the cheek at a Moscow summit in 1979) that more famously was the notion underpinning British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s desperate face-to-face sitdowns with Adolph Hitler. Didn’t work either time, nor will it ever work as Obama seems to be seriously proposing with Iran. Why? Because bullies are bullies — be they Russian Communists, German dictators or Iranian mullahs. Senator John McCain succinctly sums up Obama’s take as a lack of both judgment and experience, which surely is true.’
Here’s another thing, ladies and gentlemen. This business, Obama’s out there, he’s being praised by Hamas. I gotta get to this before the program ends. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post today is just fuming at McCain for daring to point out that Hamas has endorsed Obama, even though they did. Even though they did. (interruption) What do you mean? What do you mean, Snerdley? Yes, they did. Because it’s unfair, it’s dirty politics. It’s dirty politics because McCain ought to know that Obama is not seeking the endorsement of Hamas, and he doesn’t want to make deals with them, and Richard Cohen says McCain ought to know this. But this is exactly what the Obama camp’s all about. Any criticism is not allowed. That’s a distraction. Wait ’til you hear this, get to it in due course.
‘Obama’s views are also something else. They are the product of a worldview that has been around for centuries — failing every time it’s tried. Obama’s campaign website says Obama ‘will take several steps down the long road toward eliminating nuclear weapons. He will stop the development of new nuclear weapons; work with Russia to take US and Russian ballistic missiles off hair trigger alert; seek dramatic reductions in US and Russian stockpiles of nuclear weapons and material; and set a goal to expand the US-Russian ban on intermediate- range missiles so that the agreement is global.’ He also pledges to stop the research and deployment of a missile defense, the same system that Reagan created to end the Cold War. America was led down this philosophical garden path most recently by Carter. Whether advocated by Carter in 1979, Chamberlain in 1939 or a President Obama in 2009, the philosophy behind this idea has simply never worked. Period. Yet, to borrow from Reagan’s line in his debate with Carter, here we go again. … Perhaps more astonishing than his advocacy of a return to Carterism, Obama channels the Republican president to whom Carter was frequently compared — Herbert Hoover. Obama is completely on board with protectionism, seemingly oblivious to the lessons of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff that was a product of the Hoover administration in 1930.’
The bottom line to all this is that there is nothing new about Barack Obama. Zilch, zero, nada. In fact, it was all tried before, 1976 through 1980. We needed something called the Misery Index to be able to categorize just how rotten things got under Jimmy Carter.