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RUSH: This is Godfrey in Austin, Texas. Hi, Godfrey, nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Yeah, thanks for letting me be on your show. I’m a Democrat and I was just looking up some information here. The Congressional Research Service says the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is gonna cost us over $1 trillion. And President Bush started those wars. Instead of asking the public to make sacrifices, he cut taxes.

RUSH: Wait a minute. Bush didn’t start the wars. Al-Qaeda started the wars. We were attacked and for repeated times. That was the tail end of our being attacked and we finally got some guts and did something about it. Saddam Hussein had violated 14 UN resolutions to disarm and stop his weapons of mass destruction program. But we didn’t start any wars.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: You have forgotten we were attacked. By the way, that number, the trillion dollars, that’s a jimmied number so that Obama’s health care number of $898 billion can magically be said to cost less than these two unjust wars that Bush started and didn’t ask any sacrifice for. What kind of sacrifice were you prepared to make, sir?

CALLER: Well, that information actually was published by Bruce Bartlett, who was an advisor to the Republican Party and Bush, so he’s one of your people that stated that. And like I said, the fact of the matter is, you know, cutting taxes at a time of war has never been done in American history. And the idiocy of the Republican Party is, instead of — you’re screaming around, screaming and talking about a president that’s trying to spend money on a decent health care program, that to me is where the idiocy is, sir.

RUSH: Well —

CALLER: That to me is where it is.

RUSH: I really don’t blame you for thinking the way you think, as corrupted as your mind has become by whoever has been responsible for educating you.

CALLER: I’m just getting the information from your Republican source here, Bruce Bartlett. He’s one of your people. You can go to Forbes.com and see the information.

RUSH: I don’t have people. Bruce might be one of mine, but I’m not one of his.

CALLER: Oh, okay.

RUSH: How that works.

CALLER: All right.

RUSH: Now, every group of people has its people that deviate from whatever the perceived norm is, but you say that taxes have never been cut during time of war.

CALLER: In American history, sir. Look it up in the record books. It’s a fact.

RUSH: That’s not my question for you.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: My question to you is, I want to know, you personally, what is your knee-jerk reaction that causes opposition to tax cuts? What is the problem you have with tax cuts? And the second question, how can you look at this abomination of a health care bill and think that it’s actually about compassionately providing health insurance to people that don’t have it? It’s not what it’s about. I don’t understand people who hear tax cuts and get mad. I don’t understand it.

CALLER: Well, the fact of the way it is, you gotta have a way to finance a war. That’s a fact. And you guys didn’t have a way to finance the wars when you got us into it. That’s the Republican Party’s cross to bear and that will go down in history.

RUSH: Well, would you agree with the concept that you cut taxes in a recession if you don’t like cutting taxes in a war?

CALLER: Would I agree with that concept? The fact of the matter is, here we are $1 trillion later, and you guys are screaming about money now on somebody that’s trying to develop a health care program. I’m a cancer survivor, sir. I’m a cancer survivor.

RUSH: Congratulations, sir.

CALLER: Yeah, and all I did was move from one state to another.

RUSH: President Obama is seeking to destroy the American health care system and the American private sector. President Obama has spent more in one year than George Bush deficits added up over all eight. Now, those are facts.

CALLER: I’ll tell you another fact. We had a budget surplus before Bush came into office.

RUSH: No, we did not. Again, that was a massaged figure from the Clinton Commerce Department. There was no surplus. What was the term they had for it, Snerdley, the peace dividend? There was no peace dividend. The federal budget has never been smaller one year than it was the year before. The national debt has never gone down. And if there was a surplus anywhere, it’s been spent ten times over. Look, you and I are going to be at loggerheads all over the place because you have Bush Derangement Syndrome, and you have the belief that the only bad money spent by government is money spent to defend the country after it’s been attacked. You seem to be in favor of all kinds of wasteful, redundant social spending, and you fall prey to the well-articulated crap put out by the left that it’s all for compassion. You’re a citizen, and you sound like a good guy, but we can’t count on you. You’re lost, you’re gone. So people like me will try to save the country for you, because left to your own devices you would help facilitate its destruction, at least as we know it. But we’ll try to save it for you, sir, whether you ever thank us or not.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: All right, you know, we have liberals that call this show now and then. And, by the way, every time — what would you say the percentage of liberals who call here that you put up? It’s very high, right? You put up — 95% of them get on. We don’t get that many, but we don’t limit ’em. We certainly do not — we move ’em to the front of the line. That’s a policy that we put in place waaaay back there in the late eighties when the first round of criticism — ‘Limbaugh never takes calls from people who disagree with him.’ We do it all the time when they call. Generally what happens is within 30 seconds they descend into name-calling and we just have to get rid of them. They can’t stay on topic or anything of the sort. But every time they do call, it’s generally the result of some sort of… Well, we call them ‘seminar callers,’ but there’s — it’s a movement. Somebody on some website sends out marching orders: ‘Okay, here’s what we need to say about health care versus war versus taxes. You guys need to flood the talk shows with this.’

So we got our obligatory call today about taxes and war. Now, the latest talking point, this whole business that Bush did not ask people to sacrifice, Bush ran up a trillion dollars worth of debt in Iraq and Afghanistan and didn’t ask anybody to sacrifice and pay for it and so forth, and now everybody’s saying that health care, which is of noble, compassionate for American idea, has to be paid for. The left is trying to make us think that we were immoral and unjust spending all that money, and losing all those lives, for something that was irrelevant and made no difference, it wasn’t paid for, and now here comes the Wondrous One, Obama The Messiah, the Most Merciful, who just wants every American to have health care and to never get sick. And if he gets sick, he gets well, and you idiots on the right, you are making it sound like he doesn’t pay for it, it’s going to ruin the deficit and so forth and it was your wars… That’s the talking point. And its origins are from the New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman.

Here’s what he wrote November 29th. ‘This is a lot of money’ — actually, he said it on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. ‘This is a lot of money. And the point is, we should have been paying for these wars to begin with, right from the beginning. I mean, this was, if you want to talk firsts for Bush, this was the first time in American history that a president took us into war and cut taxes.’ Now, that was probably cribbed from the Urban Institute study, war and tax. See, the left is — they’re linked together. All of which was just used as an argument for a new war tax. Who was it, was it Baucus who put that out there? Who, Obey? Yeah. Yeah, David Obey. David Obey in the House. A war tax. A war tax. But the guy who called here neglected to mention that there were no major tax cuts during a time of war, but that’s not even true, because Kennedy and Johnson cut taxes in 1964 during the Vietnam War. Johnson eventually raised them again. And look, we fought a Cold War. Now, I don’t know with the Soviet Union, that went on for years, folks, and it cost a lot of money, the nuke buildup, and Reagan cut taxes in the Cold War. So, once again, it’s a false choice, a flawed premise that relies on hatred of George W. Bush in order for it to work. And as we can see as we go through the Stack of Stuff here, that’s getting harder and harder and harder for Obama to continue to sell.

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