×

Rush Limbaugh

For a better experience,
download and use our app!

The Rush Limbaugh Show Main Menu

RUSH: Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy, President Obama out there with a brilliant, brilliant speech, ladies and gentlemen. He’s at Georgetown University. We gotta give him credit when he deserves credit. We gotta be willing to acknowledge when Obama does something right, and he’s giving a great speech. I think the students are falling out of their chairs there, so mesmerized. I found myself unconsciously drooling near a coma state while listening to Obama’s speech, brilliant speech, making anybody listening to it think that not only does he have a grasp of all the economic issues but that they do, too, brilliantly conceived, flawlessly executed. One teleprompter glitch, President Obama appeared to lose his place. But, man, he’s good, he snapped right back in there like it was hardly anything at all. Greetings, my friends, and welcome back. Great to have you here. Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. The telephone number, if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

President Obama, in an economic speech at Georgetown University, started by saying, (paraphrasing) ‘Look, it’s going to be a longer speech than I usually give because it’s so important.’ He has laid out in this speech — we’re cutting it up now, we’re going to have audio sound bites on this as the afternoon progresses, or as the morning, depending on your time zone, progresses. President Obama is laying out all the reasons why this happened. It’s predominantly George Bush, Wall Street, Main Street, everybody but the Democrat Party that had a role in this. The Democrat Party tried to stop this from happening. They’re now in the process of trying to fix it. He has just laid out, in a brilliant speech, all that has gone wrong, and then he’s laid out in the second part of the brilliant speech all that he has done to bring this economy back. And just as this program was starting, after laying out all the brilliant steps that he’s taken, and using the straw man arguments that he uses, ‘Some say we shouldn’t do anything.’ Nobody’s ever said that. But he uses the straw man argument; he lays out all the brilliant steps that his young administration in less than a hundred days has taken to fix all of these problems, and they’re on the road to being fixed.

After brilliantly laying out just exactly how much brilliance has been employed in the form of policy, more government spending, larger government, government owning part of the automobile industry, after brilliantly laying out why that’s called for, he said, (paraphrasing) ‘I don’t want you to get falsely optimistic here, 2009 is going to be a bad year.’ So after telling everybody how all of these steps that he’s taking are brilliantly positioned to cause a massive revival — this was not just the normal down business cycle. This was caused by greed on Wall Street. He has — I love this, as you know — he has trashed AIG four or five times in this speech. Oh, he has. He’s really trashed AIG a lot here. He made a show of trashing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but it wasn’t very sincere. He threw that in there. But even that, despite all of the brilliance of our brave young president and his new plan, his policies, all of the things that he has dictated that will happen here to bring the economy back, still says it ain’t going to happen this year. So — (laughing) there is a glimmer of hope, just not this year. The glimmer of hope is not this year. There’s a glimmer of hope in 2010, an election year. Glimmer of hope will happen in 2010, which happens to be an election year. The glimmer of hope is there. We have to keep agreeing with all of the brilliant policies and plans that he has put forth in order to see that glimmer of hope become a glimmer of reality, is the modus operandi here.

The way the Associated Press deals with this, of course, they got a text copy of the speech before the president delivered it today. ‘President Barack Obama is trying to strike a careful balance between highlighting economic progress and underscoring continued challenges as he seeks to reverse the recession he inherited but now owns. … The speech would outline the state of the economy when Obama took office in January, steps his administration has taken in its first three months, and what still needs to be done to right troubled sectors, including the housing, banking and financial industries.’ He started out by once again claiming, ladies and gentlemen, that the subprime problem is due to predatory lending and lending money to people who had no hope of paying it back. They were predators. The people that lent the money did it for quick profits. They convinced people that couldn’t afford a house to buy a house. They convinced people who couldn’t get a loan to get loans, leaving out, conveniently, any of the role of government in ordering the banks to behave in this way, but nevertheless we are told that we must praise President Obama when he does good things, and he’s delivered a good speech. I have to tell you, it’s a brilliant speech.

If you watch this speech, you conclude he knows intimately what he’s talking about, and he makes it sound like you do, too. So he’s doing a great job delivering the speech. Teleprompter is on the money today. You gotta give the teleprompter credit, too, because the teleprompter put the words up there that President Obama is saying. Now, he’s into the second half of the speech and it’s starting to slide now into the Barbra Streisand, starting to slide into the BS. The second half kicked off with the success at the G20. It was not a success. The things that he wanted Europe to do did not happen. The G20 trip was not a success. But it doesn’t matter because it’s being reported as a success, and he’s saying it’s a success. So it’s a success, even though it’s not or wasn’t, it is. He’s talking about how the money is already doing great things, but it isn’t going to happen this year. All the money we’re spending is creating new credit, even though your credit card companies are raising your interest rates and lowering your balances that you can carry, there’s still credit out there. You can go buy a house now, you can go buy a car, his policies have worked to create an expansion of credit. So the BS is starting to settle in now, just so you know.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Norman in Winter Haven, Florida, a truck driver. Nice to have you on the program, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, before I get to my main point, can I make a quick comment about this global warming thing? The thing that I don’t understand about that is that you can have congressional hearings on baseball players and steroids, but they will not bring the brightest and the most prestigious minds in front of Congress because the liberals cannot take the chance of anybody with any, you know, reputable reputation saying anything negative about global warming. But what I called about was I’m a truck driver, and I was at a truck stop while the president was making his speech, and I’m sitting there listening to him, and one of the first things that stood out to me was that he talked about economists on the liberal and the conservative side, and one thing that they do agree on, I thought he was going to say, do not raise taxes —

RUSH: Grab sound bite 22. This is what Norman, the truck driver, heard. And this is a classic Obama straw man argument. Everybody agrees with me! Everybody agrees with me. Economists on both the left and the right agree with me.

OBAMA: Economists on both the left and the right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending.

RUSH: It’s a lie.

OBAMA: You see, when this recession began many families sat around the kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back, and so have many businesses. And this is a completely reasonable and understandable reaction. But if everybody, if every family in America cuts back all at once, then no one is spending any money, which means there are more layoffs, which means that the economy gets even worse. That’s why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand. That’s exactly what we’re doing right now.

RUSH: All right, Norman, what was your reaction to that?

CALLER: Okay, that was just — you know, I kind of blew that off when I’m sitting there. And then he’s telling us that all this money that’s supposed to be in our paycheck, and then I just say to myself, I said, and I said it out loud, I said, ‘Do you know what? If this was true, he wouldn’t have to be on the TV telling us this.’ And by the time I got that out, everybody turned around and looked at me and the place just erupted, you know —

RUSH: This is why I love the truck driver community. The truck driver community, these guys are the epitome of free market capitalism. You don’t earn a salary, I’ll bet, do you, you get paid on how often you work?

CALLER: Yeah, I get paid by the mile. But you know what, Rush? You are absolutely right. And just where the Democrats have the unions and stuff like that, this is a huge amount of the —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: — of the workers that are out there —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — that the Republicans can incorporate, or they could connect to them, because all these people, a large percentage of them are small business owners —

RUSH: Let’s not talk about the Republicans right now. I’m in a foul enough mood as it is. Let’s stick with Obama ’cause you are exactly right. If all this great stuff was happening, we’d know it. Can you imagine this truck stop? Here’s Norman out there, he’s watching this drivel, he’s watching this bilge, he’s watching this sewage on his television, and he’s saying, ‘Whoa, man, all this money out here, all this spending, all these jobs, all this demand, I don’t see it, I don’t have it, where is it? If it was happening you wouldn’t need to be on television telling me it’s happening.’ And Norman is exactly right. Norman, this speech today was to blunt the tea parties tomorrow, it was to get the press saying, ‘Hey, we see a glimmer of hope, it’s starting to work out there.’ There’s so much wrong with this comment. I get so sick and tired of parsing liberals anyway. I’ve been doing it for 20 years and I’m fed up that I have to do it. ‘Economists on both the left and the right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is cut back on spending.’

No, that’s not true. And then he goes on to blame every one of you, you’re cutting back, businesses are cutting back, everybody with a brain cuts back when you’re in debt and your income is stagnant or falling, you don’t go spend more. But since you’re doing that, since you’re living responsibly, since all of you are cutting back, you’re not spending, government has to. It’s your fault. Government has to because you’re not. Government has to step in, temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand. I want to see the demand that’s been stimulated. Where is it? And then after laying all this out — and we have two sound bites and I’m not going to play ’em because I don’t want to listen to him, you know, lie through his teeth about how great the economy is doing, all these signs of recovery coming along, but then after doing all that, this is what he said.

OBAMA: 2009 will continue to be a difficult year for America’s economy. The severity of this recession will cause more job loss, more foreclosures —

RUSH: What about all your spending?

OBAMA: — and more pain before it ends.

RUSH: What about all your stimulation?

OBAMA: The market will continue to rise and fall, credit is still not flowing nearly as easily as it should.

RUSH: You stimulated it!

OBAMA: The process for restructuring AIG and the auto companies will involve difficult and sometimes unpopular choices. All of this means that there’s much more work to be done.

RUSH: Oh, yeah, so things are getting better out there, ha-ha, but not now. Thanks, Norman, for the phone call.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This