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RUSH: Andrew, he’s 20 years old from Austin, Texas. Andrew, great to have you here. Welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, it is a distinct pleasure. I’ll tell you what, let’s get some experts together, we’ll go on that teaching tour, I’ll be your emcee. I have a couple questions for you. First off, I want to know, we’ve been talking about President Obama, how he is trying to nationalize a lot of the private sector, and I want to know your opinion on what you think his endgame is, what is his eventual goal? I mean, do you think he wants to be like Mark Steyn said, the dictator for life of the weak —

RUSH: No, dictator for life for a week?

CALLER: This weak’s dictator for life, I think is what Mark said.

RUSH: Well, it’s tough to know what the endgame is. All I know is I don’t want to be alive if he accomplishes it. I don’t want to be around when it happens. I don’t think Obama himself can pull off his endgame. It’s gonna take longer than he’s got, unless of course we change the term limits on presidents and allow three terms or what have you. But in practical terms, I keep repeating this because I guess it’s necessary, it works, the way to understand Barack Obama is, and you’re 20, so it may not have as much resonance with you as somebody who is a little older and has been working for a long time, but he wants to return the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners. He’s a redistributionist. He wants to punish achievement. He wants to disincentivize achievement. He doesn’t even want you trying to achieve the best, because he doesn’t want there to be great disparities in the outcomes people experience in life. He’s really looking for the government, one that he controls to be the primary mover in as many lives as possible.

CALLER: Of course.

RUSH: He looks at this country as something unjust and immoral, and he’s gotta fix it. It’s been unjust and immoral for all of these years until he was elected. But it has taken advantage of little people and minorities and so forth, and he’s gonna return the nation to those people who he thinks built it, who he thinks made it great, but have had everything they’ve ever worked for stolen from or they were never paid for it in the first place, so he’s robbed Peter to pay Paul.

CALLER: Well, you know, I’m not very old, but I have a lot of dreams and plans for my life, and I know if Obama gets his way then I won’t be able to do a lot of that, so I’m pretty pissed off —

RUSH: Well, he’s defining prosperity down. Look, with the tax rate that you are facing now, just to pay for what he’s printed or borrowed for all of his stimulus spending and budget spending, plus the problems of Medicare and Medicaid, you and people who are younger than you are going to be working first and foremost for the government for most of the year in order to allow them to fund what they’re doing. Obama’s one of these people that believes that government programs, government size, government engagement is what has and will make a great country, not the individuals. He doesn’t have a lot of faith in individuals. Liberals don’t. They have contempt for average people. Liberals must look at average people as incompetent, and, in the process, in so doing, they credit themselves with needing power. Look, they really do look at themselves as best and brightest. They’re smarter, they’re better people, their DNA is better than yours. Their pedigree is better than yours, they are better people. They look down on you. They have an arrogance and a condescension towards average people, and their belief is that you can’t do as well for yourself as they can do for you. And in the process, what they end up doing is creating an ever-expanding army of voters that will continue to reelect them in the hope that the spoils will continue to come, and that they will have eternal power, so forth.

I think the guy’s got a chip on his shoulder. If you listen to Barack Obama and his wife, I think there’s some genuine anger over this nation, its history that is guiding him and energizing him along the way in his policies now. The thing I wonder about, as all this happens, is I wonder — and it’s a serious question — I’m wondering just how many average, everyday Democrats actually understand what he’s doing and actually agree with it. Now, I know the fringe lunatic base has an abject hatred and distrust and dislike for this country, and they relish any policy that they think is gonna get even with people that they think have unfairly acquired what they have or just people they don’t like. But average, ordinary run-of-the-mill Democrats, I’m wondering how many of them, behind closed doors are beginning to ask, ‘Well, what the hell did we do?’ I don’t know how many average, run-of-the-mill Democrats actually think that the United Auto Workers ought to own 55% of Chrysler. I’m not sure. I don’t know how many average, run-of-the-mill Democrats want to look at every business in the private sector as an enemy of America, as Obama does.

I know that Democrats and liberals, average, ordinary people have become hugely partisan. Our country is very divided. They have had their hatred for George Bush and Republicans ginned up, fortified, and fueled for the last seven years, ever since the Florida 2000 outcome. So I have no doubt that there is a visceral, almost an uncontrollable emotional rage and hatred they have for their political enemies. That being said, I don’t know how many of them actually want a totalitarian, authoritarian government under which they, too, are going to live. There are a lot of wealthy Democrats. There are millions of prosperous Democrats in all walks of life, and some of them are very hard workers, like everybody else, and they’re gonna get soaked as well here. I’m not talking about the elites within Obama’s circle, the political class, the elected political class, the elected elites, the think tank elites, the people in the ivory campus towers and so forth. I’m just talking about the average Democrat in Naperville, Illinois, the average Democrat in St. Louis, Missouri. I’ll exempt the average Democrats in San Francisco. They probably do want Obama to succeed at virtually everything he’s doing.

But I have to think that there are a lot of people who are privately — they would never say so publicly yet, it’s only been a hundred days, won’t say so publicly — but there are plenty of them that do like seeing ACORN protest AIG execs. There’s a bunch of pent-up rage the Democrats have fueled for years, class envy and all this, hatred of executives and so forth, Wall Street and so forth. But I don’t know how many Democrats really, really — I could be dead wrong about this, too — I don’t know how many Democrats really, really like — because a lot of Democrats are vets, a lot of Democrats served in the military. I don’t know how many of them actually like their president apologizing to Europe. Do you realize there are some Democrats in their sixties and seventies, eighties, who are fully aware that we rebuilt that continent twice, and we have a president running around now apologizing for the arrogance of the United States?

I’m telling you, there are some people who I think maybe in the campaign didn’t see this. There was so much hatred for Bush, the belief that the country had never been worse than it was in the eight years of Bush, that any change would be better. But as this goes on, and if Obama remains as singularly focused and fortified on this anti-American prosperity agenda that he’s got, at some point some people are going to wake and up say, ‘I don’t hate my country this much. I don’t think my country is this unjust. I don’t think this country deserves to be torn down and rebuilt.’ I’m not relying on it, I’m not sitting here hoping, all of this is because faith I genuinely have in genuine Americans. So whatever his endgame is, I do know this: It’s about him. It’s about him and whoever his close circle of friends are. It’s not about you. It’s not about the best way of life for you. It’s about him. This is about settling scores, this is about fulfilling the dreams of people who shaped his mind when he was a young boy, all the way through college, and we know who those people were, and in some cases are. So it just remains to be seen how much he’s going to get away with, and only time will tell. But because I happen to believe all this is true, this is even more of a reason to stand up and oppose this.

The teaching tour, the reminder tour, whatever. ‘Cause I guarantee you, as more time goes on, more doubts are going to crop up in a lot of people’s minds, and somebody better be out there feeding those doubts and confirming those doubts and giving people reason to believe those doubts are true. Because the people of this country still — and this is what I hope we don’t lose — the people of this country still, whether they’re misguided or not, get what they want in the end. They may not get it every election, but things even out. The American people did not want Republicans running this country after eight years ’cause they had been convinced that this was the worst eight years in the nation’s history, a successful demonizing campaign from the press and the Democrat Party. Now, we got just the opposite. Now we got hero worship. Now we got the press saying we’ve never had anybody this good, never had anybody this magnificent, and so forth, never had anybody like this. It’s always going to be a tough thing to battle, but you have to battle it. And when there’s the germ of doubt, and when you know it’s there, you gotta amplify it, you gotta give people reasons to confirm their doubt. So that’s why you stand up and that’s why you fight this and that’s why you teach and that’s why you remind, whatever you want to do. This is why you basically go out and remind people of philosophies, policies, and so forth ’cause it’s all going to matter to more and more people as time goes on.

At some point, if we keep losing 600,000 jobs, at some point, that ain’t George Bush’s fault. It’s not his fault now. At some point this is going to have to be tied to Obama, his policies and the fact that everything he’s tried to fix is broken worse than when he took office. Are you better off now than you were a hundred days ago? The odds are, no. But they promised immediate fixes and they’re out there singing the praises how well they’re doing. There ought to be some sign here. There ought to be some sign things are coming back. And by the way, the housing market, there was news yesterday, ‘Yeah, we might have bottomed out, housing market coming back.’ I was reading somewhere today, it may be a generation before housing prices recover. With all of the defaults and all of the foreclosures and all the late payments on mortgages and all this, to expect a bottoming out on this any time soon is unrealistic. And I told the people at Heritage last night, the more chaos, the most unrest, the more angst the better it is for Obama and his people, because it gives him even more opportunities: ‘Okay, let me fix it. You know I love you, you know I care about you, you know we have hope and change. We know we’ve had a mess the last eight years, let me fix it. It isn’t going to happen soon, but I’m going to fix it, I love you,’ blah, blah, blah. People: ‘Okay, go ahead and fix it,’ when there’s a crisis. And there’s a crisis three or four times a day now.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Jack in Southborough, Massachusetts. Hello.

CALLER: Yes, Rush. First of all, calling you is part of my apology tour, and I am apologizing for my fellow Americans who voted for Obama. And I wanted to also mention that we are now May 5th, and I would have expected some progress in the unemployment numbers at this point. Obama was elected in November, he has a full Democrat Congress to pass whatever he wanted, and these unemployment numbers should have started taking a little bit of a turn to the positive. Yet it seems they are continue to be in the negative and getting worse.

RUSH: Did you vote for Obama?

CALLER: Certainly not. But, I still expected him, as a Democrat, supposedly helping working people to try to make the working environment more prosperous so people could go to work.

RUSH: If you didn’t vote for Obama, how can you apologize for people that did?

CALLER: Well, you know, we’re apologizing for the United States which freed people in Europe —

RUSH: Well, yeah, that’s true. That’s a good point.

CALLER: — which helped poor people all over the world.

RUSH: Touche!

CALLER: When I was traveling in Zambia, my tour guide told me if it wasn’t for food from the United States, he’d be dead today. That’s what he told me. All right? So if he’s apologizing, I have to apologize for my fellow Americans who voted for this administration.

RUSH: Well, okay. I understand it now. But look it, he passed a stimulus bill. That was supposed to be ‘shovel-ready’ jobs! Remember the stimulus bill that was going to cause Caterpillar to start hiring people back. They continue to lay people off. This is my point. This is my point! Obama is not ‘fixing’ anything he’s put his hands on. Whatever Obama is trying to fix is getting worse, folks, but everybody still loves him. It’s just been a hundred or so days. So it’s gonna take some time. And I know a lot of people are impatient. But it’s unrealistic to think that any new administration is going to bomb out in three months. That just doesn’t happen. I don’t care which one it is. Even Richard Nixon, as despised as he was, did not bomb out in the first hundred days. They tried to make it happen, but they weren’t able to pull it off.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I keep getting phone calls from some of you and e-mails: ‘Rush, Obama, why hasn’t he created jobs, the car companies, Obama –‘ you have to understand, he doesn’t want to fix anything. He’s trying to remake everything. Just listen to what he says. He wants to remake everything, and he wants to make as much of the private sector as he can become part of government. He wants the government involved officially, equity, whatever, asset-wise, in as much of the private sector as he can. I’ll give you an example. I fully expect many of you will not want to believe this and may in fact start shouting at your radios when I tell you this. We’ve all heard that Thomas Lauria, the lawyer for the hedge fund that held out for a better deal, didn’t even actually hold out, they just offered a price, a negotiation to go along with the Chrysler situation. Perella Weinberg Partners, they were getting two things. They were getting death threats and that the White House, according to Lauria, had threatened his clients to sic the White House press corps on them and ruin their reputations.

Now, the White House came out quickly and denied this. Lauria, in his refusal to comment, gave the impression that ‘Hey, it did happen, I’m just not going to say any more, my law firm asked me to back off on this, but if you keep digging the truth is going to come out.’ He’s warning everybody, if you don’t want to know the truth, let it go. But the truth is Obama loves the fact that two things are happening. He loves the fact that they’re getting death threats, and he loves the fact that people think that he might have been willing to sic the press corps on a private sector firm to ruin their reputation. Don’t forget, it was Barack Obama, when he called the bank CEOs up to the White House, to tell ’em what-for and how come and why, who said to them, ‘I’m the only one standing between you and the pitchforks.’ Barack Obama said to the CEOs of these banks that took TARP money, ‘I’m the only one standing between you and the pitchforks,’ meaning the angry mob. The implication is, if you don’t have me on your side, the angry mob’s coming for you. I’m the only one that can stop the angry mob.

See, when you have Chicago thug politics, the threat of intimidation, which creates a fear that causes people to shut up and not oppose you, is exactly what you want. That’s the outcome. So he’s not interested in fixing anything. He’s interested in taking over as much of it as he can, and in order for that to happen, it has to not get fixed. As long as his popularity numbers remain high, personal approval numbers, then he’ll have the freedom to tell the American people, ‘Well, I’m going to fix this, I’m doing it for you. We’re going to remake America. We’re going to make sure this never happens again.’ While not solving this at all, you’re supposed to take it on faith that however bad this is, it’s going to get fixed, it ain’t going to happen again, but it’s not going to get fixed, not any time soon. So secretly Rahm Emanuel and the boys, James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, these guys on the early morning phone call, they love it when news gets out that they were going to sic the White House press corps. They’ll act offended, they’ll act like they didn’t do it, but they know it’s true and they know that every other business is going to see this.

They’ve already scared CEOs into parking their jets. The private jet industry is in trouble. They’ve already scared people into not going to Las Vegas. Obama said the days of corporate execs getting on airplanes and flying to Vegas are over. Steve Wynn, Wynn Resorts, reported a first quarter loss. Occupancy rates, money in the casino all throughout Vegas are down. The hospitality business is in the tank. One word from Obama could fix this. ‘I think we need to revive the hospitality business. If you have a jet, if you want to go to Las Vegas I think you should go.’ No, the last word on Obama was, days of people who have money flying to Vegas for a good time are over. So, trust me. The fact that this bunch, Perella Weinberg Partners, getting death threats, my God, so did the AIG people. And guess who’s waiting on the on-deck circle for their deal? The GM bondholders. Do you think after all this the GM bondholders are going to do anything other than roll over and let Obama have it the way he wants it?

You gotta understand what this is about. You gotta understand how thugs work. Just listen to what he says. ‘If I could push a button, fix that, I wish I could.’ Well, he’s trying to give himself the button, and he’s pushing it. If some inconsequential rich guys at Perella Weinberg Partners get a death threat, good, let ’em find out what it’s like to live in the inner city. Let ’em find out what it’s like to live under the threat of crime every day like most Americans have. This is about getting even with people, folks. And, I guarantee you, they go up to the residence at night or wherever they have their meetings, they’re scared to death of us, they smile. ‘Cause I guarantee you, look, I know human nature, and I know how immersed in this God-awful concept of PR and imaging American businesses are. And if an American business or industry believes that its only way of staying afloat is a marketing and imaging campaign, and if they then believe the White House can come along and destroy it, they’ll shut up, they’ll be compliant and they’ll go along. So the White House is not embarrassed over any of this. They’ll deny it publicly, and they’ll say, this never happened, and they’ll put the clamps on Lauria so he doesn’t repeat it. But even that is a show of the thug power that they’ve got and that they’re willing to use.

When Obama figures he’s cut the private sector down to size, when he figures he’s cut Wall Street or whoever he thinks the villains in the United States of America are, when he’s cut them down to size, he’s going to aim for others. You could be next, or your industry or your company or your business could be next. And all of it will be done for the little guy, because there are far more little guys than there are big guys. An army of little guys who want to get even and who love the fact that Obama’s their champion is enough to make the big guys cower in fear. Particularly if they’re all dependent on marketing and imaging and PR, and they know that can be destroyed with one order from Obama or that idiot Robert Gibbs or whoever in the White House to just two or three members of the press corps. I mean, for crying out loud, if they can get a story, breaking news, MSNBC, that Obama and Biden having a burger in Arlington is bringing the economy back, think how easy it would be to get a story that your industry is destroying America and has to be wiped out.

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