RUSH: I got a couple of audio sound bites I want to play here for you from President Obama. Before playing these two sound bites, I want to recognize something that I don’t think the White House seems to understand, or maybe they do. It’s always problematic to characterize these people because you really don’t know what they know, what they understand, because they are so inwardly focused. But I want you to understand that I understand just how much fear there is in this country among people who have seen over half of everything they had saved vanish, and there is no indication that it is going to start building again. The whole notion that the American dream of hard work, ambition, combined with dreams can make things possible, more and more people are losing belief in that, understandably so. Not everybody is, but a lot of people are, more than you know. There is palpable fear.
Let’s talk about seasoned citizens first. Some of them have only their Social Security, but others have more or had more. They had retirement accounts, various places that their portfolio was diversified. Whenever anybody’s portfolio was, however it was diversified, half of it’s gone in six months with no end in sight, and certainly no rebound in sight. And people are wondering what to do. Should they take their money out of the market? They see everybody else shorting the market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average down 16 points today. It’s been flirting up 25, down 25, but it isn’t moving up, it’s not ticking up. So people are wondering should they actually pull their money out, convert it to cash and put it in a safe somewhere? There is fear of the banks not being solvent. More banks in Georgia were shut down late last week or over the weekend. It’s something that happens now with a predictable frequency. And generally people are talking, ‘Where is the bottom going to be?’ Nobody can tell you where the bottom is going to be.
The president of the United States is not inspiring any confidence whatsoever. All of this economic tumult is really the result of a banking crisis with no effort to fix it. There is no plan. Geithner doesn’t know what he’s doing. He just got three assistants that were nominated to serve with him, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. There’s nobody in this administration inspiring confidence that there is an end in sight to this. The only people being inspired are those who simply believe the words of Obama because he’s Obama, the same people that voted for him, because there’s certainly nothing of substance. Let’s listen to a couple of sound bites. This is last Friday. Less than 90 minutes after Air Force One landed on the way back from Columbus, Ohio, President Obama called the New York Times about the interview he gave them earlier.
One of the things that he was upset about, they’d asked him about whether he was a socialist, and apparently his handlers thought that his answer wasn’t any good, because he says, (paraphrasing) ‘I’ve been thinking about this socialist thing that you guys at the New York Times asked me about, and I thought you were joking, but if you were serious, I want to give you a serious answer to this.’ Clearly the accusation that he’s a socialist is bothering him, and if you call a news agency back to try to set the record straight, in the first place he’s the only guy that can get away with that, calling back, ‘By the way, I want to change what I said to you guys,’ da-da-da-da-da. If I tried something like that, ‘Uh-oh, uh-oh, we caught Limbaugh! Mr. Limbaugh called the New York Times back trying to change the record, but, a-ha, we’ve discovered that we hit a sore spot.’ It’s not how it goes with Mr. Obama yet, but the New York Times reporter says, ‘So who’s watch are we talking about here, sir, when it comes to this socialism business?’
OBAMA: By the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system, and the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people is that if coming in the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it.
REPORTER: Right.
OBAMA: You know, I have more than enough to do without having to worry about the financial system.
RUSH: Now, that’s an inspiring thing to say. I have more than enough to do without having to worry about the financial system. This does not inspire confidence among people who listen to what this man says. This frightens them. This whole answer that he gave, ‘I constantly try to emphasize to people that, if coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it.’ The dirty little secret is, Mr. President, we had stimulated the banks. We stimulated Wall Street, and it didn’t work. This is a question that I asked last Friday. Aren’t we about out of time now? Don’t we have enough evidence that these political solutions don’t work? We bailed out General Motors. Their auditors are talking about bankruptcy. We bailed out Chrysler, ditto. We bailed out banks, they continue to go south, they continue to lose their share price. The New York Times has had to sell and buy back or done some maneuver with its own building today. Anything that we have touched, anything the US government’s bailed out is not working: AIG, Citibank, Citigroup, whatever, any of these banks, the vast majority of them, not all, continue to have trouble.
All of this stimulus, quote, unquote, is not stimulating, it’s not causing confidence. It’s not creating confidence, it’s not causing a rebound, it’s not causing an uptick in any market indicator. And the president says, ‘You know, I have more than enough to do without having to worry about the financial system.’ Mr. President, the financial system is all there is right now to people. The financial system undergirds every other failure that’s going on here, from the housing to the car industry to wherever you want to look. And then we hear that the president was too tired to give a proper welcome to Gordon Brown. Yeah, he didn’t know that you have to have a joint press conference and maybe a state dinner the first time the leader comes to see you from your number-one ally. He was just overwhelmed, just too tired, so much going on, he had no idea. Well, what is that supposed to mean? Did we elect a kid here that has no executive experience at all, is that what we’re now being told, that we elected a good-intentioned, a well-intentioned kid, a community agitator, he had no executive experience, and he’s going to figure it out at some point, but don’t hold it against him. He didn’t know that these kinds of things are important. What do you mean, he didn’t know? There’s all kinds of protocol people in the White House.
Have you ever stopped to think how it is the White House functions from one day when Bush leaves ’til the next day Obama goes in? Do you think everybody gets swept out? I tell you, it defies logic for me sometimes to try to understand how people are being told to appreciate or understand Obama. To say that there’s nobody in this White House that understands the importance of the allied relationship with Great Britain, that’s not the way to put it. The way to put it is this bunch doesn’t care about that relationship. That’s the way to look at it ’cause that’s the way it is. This bunch doesn’t care nearly as much as past administrations have about our allied relationship with the United Kingdom. Who do you think it is that tells the new arrivals how things operate when the old arrivals leave? There’s orientation. They can’t play this game of ignorance and inexperience, ‘Oh, I’m too tired, we didn’t know.’ That’s a cover-up. Whatever they decided to do with Gordon Brown was purposeful and I would come up with something better as an excuse than to say our young, energetic, in-shape, very disciplined young president was tired. That just doesn’t wash. Not with me. Here’s the next sound bite, Friday aboard Air Force One, a portion of the interview where President Obama is talking about the economy.
OBAMA: What I — I don’t think people should do is to suddenly stuff money in their mattresses and pull back, you know, completely from spending. I don’t think that people should be fearful about our future.
RUSH: You don’t think people should be fearful about the future? Well, they are. They are because they’re losing it. They are losing their future each and every day, Mr. President. They see their future dwindling away and they’re wondering how to save what’s left. There’s no inspiration coming from the White House on this. There’s no motivation, there’s no uplifting whatsoever. And, by the way, the last time a president said, ‘Go out there and spend, engage in commerce,’ it was George W. Bush, and the Democrat Party raked him over the coals for being insensitive. There’s supposed to be shared sacrifice because of the war in Iraq, it was supposed to be shared sacrifice. Well, hello. You’re getting shared sacrifice. This is what they meant all along, everybody gets poorer. That’s shared sacrifice.
Then the San Francisco Chronicle today with an AP story: ”Wall Street’s Pessimism Expected to Trump the Data’ — The weekly calendar holds little meaning on Wall Street these days. Traders and investors who normally plot their course around expected economic figures and corporate announcements are trying to hang on in a market that isn’t being corralled by the usual forces. These days, fear does the driving. … Analysts don’t expect the coming week to be an exception. Investors are focused on trying to detect whether there’s any shift away from the market’s overriding pessimism.’ Pessimism? Pessimism is ruling the day on the market, not the data. What this story is saying is, even if there’s some good data that pops up, the pessimism is going to overwhelm the data, the pessimism’s going to survive, and people are going to invest and use investment strategeries based on pessimism.
On page two of the story: ‘Investors are still looking to the government for insight into what will happen with the nation’s biggest financial companies and its bloated home inventory.’ Can we go back and play audio sound bite number seven, have it standing by in just a moment. ‘Investors are still looking to the government for insight into what will happen with the nation’s biggest financial companies and its bloated home inventory.’ So investors, they’re waiting for a plan, they’re waiting for new rules, they’re not going to throw money back in the market ’til there are some rules that the government sets, bad or good rules, there are no rules ’cause Obama has got more important things to do.
OBAMA: By the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system, and the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people is that, if coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it.
REPORTER: Right.
OBAMA: You know, I have more than enough to do without having to worry about the financial system.
RUSH: Aw, damn it. Now I gotta worry about the financial system, too. I had such grandiose plans. Now I gotta worry about the financial system. The market’s waiting for somebody to do something, set some rules, come out with whatever the bank bailout plan, the next one is going to be, or what have you. So pessimism is ruling the day in the investment markets. If you’re scared, you’re not the only one. You are joined by millions that are scared who don’t know what to do and are looking now at cash in a safe in their homes as a safer thing to do than to leave money in a bank or in an investment account, a portfolio of various investment instruments or what have you. And he expresses frustration that he has to deal with that. He’s got all these other plans he wants to do.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s shed a little light here, ladies and gentlemen, on the White House policy with the United Kingdom. He was just tired. He was just tired. From the UK Telegraph, he was just ‘too tired’ to give a proper welcome. However, if you read further in the UK Telegraph story, you come across this: ‘The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key. The [State Department] official [working for Obama] dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: ‘There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” That from a State Department official quoted in the UK Telegraph to explain why Obama disrespected Gordon Brown and the UK.