RUSH: I think what’s going on here is the liberals are ‘hiding the decline’ in all of these surveys they’re taking. Seventy-five percent say the stimulus is not working for the middle class (it’s not working for anybody) and they report it as ‘25% say it is working.’ And they say ‘seven-out-of-ten’ think it’s good the Democrats lost their supermajority, rather than say 70%. They’re hiding the decline just like they did in the global warming hoax, which now has been doubled down on. Have you heard about the guy at the IPCC? Pachauri, I think, is his name. They’ve been totally exposed again on the melting glaciers of the Himalayas — totally, totally exposed. The whole thing is just an outright — and always has been — hoax. It’s always been a political movement. Just like everything the liberals do, it is designed to tug your heartstrings, to make you feel guilty, to get you to go along with tax increase.
‘You’re destroying the planet!’ and this is how you get your mind right. This is how you say you’re sorry. You let people go ahead and grow governments around the world and tax you and roll back your lifestyle, all for the purposes of empowering them. I mean, this has been an incredible 12 months, just an incredible 12 months — and here, from the disappointed Associated Press: ‘With his prospects for another term brightening, Ben Bernanke will lead the Federal Reserve this year in pulling back the stimulus money it pumped out to fight the financial crisis that erupted in his first term. The challenge will be how and when to do so. At their first meeting of the year, Fed policymakers are likely weighing such matters, including which tools to use. The officials began meeting Tuesday and will issue a policy statement Wednesday. It’s not known whether they will signal their timing and strategy to reverse course. …
‘With the worst of the financial crisis over…’ Not according to my stack! Foreclosures continue. New home starts are down. Three different foreclosure programs designed to help people are failing. In (I think it’s Kentucky or Tennessee) the unemployment bottleneck is so bad that people cannot get on the phone, can’t connect with a human being to renew their unemployment benefits. Everybody is just swamped, and we’ve got a guy who’s totally enamored of process. You know who else loved process? Michael Dukakis. I remember him discussing that in the presidential campaign of 1988, the year this program de-buted (‘debuted,’ for those of you in Rio Linda). Dukakis said, ‘I love policy. I love the process. I love the process of making policy.’ Obama does, too, and Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter loved process, and this is turning into Jimmy Carter 2. It’s his second term, only worse. So the Fed is considering ‘stimulus exit strategy.’
I don’t know what stimulus this is, but… ‘With the worst of the financial crisis over, the Fed is gradually moving to remove some of the stimulus money before it can trigger inflation. Some analysts think the Fed might bump up the rate it charges banks for emergency loans.’ Now, remember the Fed loaned $2 trillion to people and still hasn’t told us who got it. Is that the money they’re talking about or are they talking about Obama’s stimulus? In any case: If it’s Obama’s stimulus, does it mean it failed? If they’re worried about it causing inflation, does it mean that it failed? Look, I don’t mean to depress you here, folks, but you have to know the reality of Obama’s policies. You have to know what liberalism will do. You have to know what it will do every time it’s tried so you never give it a chance again at the ballot box.
‘Sales of New Homes Sink 7.6% Last Month, Worse than Expected — December results in the weakest year on record.’ How can this be? How can the wizards of smart at AP be shocked again? Did they really believe all the government involvement was going to help the housing market? The answer is: Yes, because these people place all of their hope and all of their faith in government. They really do. ‘New home sales unexpectedly fell 7.6 percent last month, capping the industry’s weakest year on record. … The results were the weakest since March and indicated demand remains sluggish despite newly expanded tax incentives to spur sales. … Only 374,000 homes were sold last year, down 23 percent from a year earlier and the weakest year on record dating back to 1963,’ and staying on the same basic line here, this is the MSNBC.com:
‘Flaws Plague Foreclosure Relief Program.’ Do you realize nothing, nothing he has done is working? Nothing! Now, from his standpoint, it might be working. I still firmly believe that all of this was to create this kind of chaos and to create the demand for more government. It’s backfired on him. I think what he really wanted to do here was just totally get as many people on the welfare rolls as possible (Cloward-Piven) and empower himself at the Democrat Party, empower in perpetuity, but it’s backfired because he’s misread the American people. The American people do not want to be wards of the state and they don’t want their country to be a failure, and they don’t want to be having their president run around the world and apologize for things we’ve done. They don’t want terrorists being given Miranda rights.
They don’t want terrorists being given US constitutional rights the same as if they were US citizens. They don’t want show trials of terrorists beating up their own country at a cost of security alone of $200 million a year. They do not want what Obama is. They do not want anything to do with his ideology or his policies, and the things that… If I ran the Republican Party, what I would be having them do is say, ‘Look, Obama’s no different than Barney Frank, no different than Harry Reid, no different than Nancy Pelosi, no different than John Kerry, no different than Algore, no different than Clinton. It doesn’t matter which one of these people you elect. Obama may be the most radical of all of them but they all are liberals and liberalism is this! Liberalism is failure of capitalism; it is failure of freedom. Liberalism is outright failure of prosperity.’ It’s right there for everybody to see now, as clear as it’s ever been, and the Republican Party ought to be pointing this out. But I’m sure that that would be a little too controversial, a little too mean-spirited. I’m sure that moderates in our party wouldn’t appreciate that kind of criticism. In fact, ladies and gentlemen — sound bites four and five, Mike — this is last Sunday afternoon, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. During the panel discussion he had this exchange with the New York Times book review editor and the author Sam Tanenhaus about conservatism.
ZAKARIA: Even though there’s a political rival of conservatism, you don’t quite see an intellectual reliever. There are… you know, the William Buckleys and Irving Kristols of the world have yielded to the Rush Limbaughs.
TANENHAUS: There were a number of books about a possible Republican and conservative revival. David Frum wrote one, [and] Ross Douthat, and Michael Gerson wrote one. And they all accepted that there was a major role for government to play. They were kind of accepting what seemed to be the shift in the inevitable interrelation between government and society. Those ideas have not been picked up —
ZAKARIA: Mmm-hmm.
TANENHAUS: — at all, as far as I can tell, by the movement on the right.
ZAKARIA: Right.
RUSH: Yeah, damn right, and they won’t be! What do you think the hell is failing here, Mr. Tanenhaus? How many people read Frum’s and Brooks’ books? You could probably count ’em on one hand. This is absurd. Last week, maybe the week prior, I spent a lot of time on this program excoriating these people. Remember, these were the people that said Reagan’s era was over and that we had to go get moderates to win. This is in the aftermath of Scott Brown’s election. ‘Yeah, the American people want higher taxes. They want a bigger government. They want a government more involved in their lives.’ And Tanenhaus says, ‘I don’t see the right picking this up.’ Why should we pick it up? It’s failing to the max as the Democrats try it! Let’s go ahead and play number five. Fareed Zakaria next talks to Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, who said this about conservatism and recent elections…
NOONAN: Purism took a hit in New Jersey and Virginia, in Massachusetts. They voted for Republicans who are conservative economically but are very non-snarling, who are not guys who you can look at and say, ‘That is an ideologue.’ I interviewed Scott Brown — the senator-elect, I guess, from Massachusetts — two days ago. The first thing he did was compliment Obama. Something new is going on. It is a certain… It’s a growing pragmatism among the tea party people who voted in Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts for guys they were not 100% on the page with.
RUSH: You hear that, the ‘non-snarling Republicans’? There’s ‘something new … going on’ out there? Scott Brown actually complimented Obama? The ‘growing pragmatism among the tea party people who voted in Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts for guys they were not 100% on the page with’? Yeah, well, they’re 100% on the page opposing Obama — 150% on page opposing Obama — and all they had to hear from Brown was he’s the 41st vote against health care. I mean, that’s ball game, Peggy. That’s the end of this country as we know it if that debacle had passed. So at the end of his program Zakaria makes a commentary, and it’s to us Republicans, and he warns us to forget Massachusetts.
ZAKARIA: That Tanenhaus’ premise is compelling is not so easy to refute. Today’s conservative movement, he says, is dying because it is harshly ideological; very different from the grounded, philosophical movement of the past in which there were great thinkers like William F. Buckley, Irving Kristol, those were the people who personified the right. Today, Rush Limbaugh speaks for the movement. Tanenhaus argues that right now, conservatism serves as a kind of movement of obstruction, recrimination that does not offer a thought-out set of ideas; nothing voters will hold onto in the long run. So despite the Massachusetts message, I think it’s a, uh, interesting book to read.
RUSH: And there you have elitism and out-of-touchness unmasked and on parade. No ideas on this program. No ideas from Mark Levin’s book. No ideas in any of the movement conservative people here. We’re too ideological. We’re dying? There is an ascendancy going on, and it’s ‘harshly ideological.’ Of course the left, you see, is not ‘harshly ideological.’ ‘No, no, no! Obama is not ideological.’ This is the point. Obama is. They all are. Liberalism is ideological. It is governed by it; it is propelled by it. That’s all it is. It’s not pragmatism; it’s not compassion. It’s not love and tolerance and all that. It is a destroyer of freedom.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, these clips from Fareed Zakaria and Peggy Noonan, they’re hilarious, they’re actually hilarious. You have elitism on parade, you have a bunch of strident ideologues who, because of their manner of speaking, think that they are not, and they convince you that they are not and that they are pragmatic and practical and thoughtful and very, very, very intellectual, smarter than the rest. And of course we Neanderthals on the right, no ideas here. How can you speak of ideas, as I do, and not be an ideologue? An ideologue for liberty is an ideologue for free society. That’s a good ideologue. I — we — are great ideologues. It doesn’t mean we agree with all details on all points. It doesn’t mean we’re closed-minded. It doesn’t mean that we’re narrow-minded, but it means we agree in the natural rights of man, and an ideologue on the left means promoting one or more forms of tyranny. It’s the opposite of promoting liberty. And so it’s an ideology to be rejected and detested, and it’s on parade, unfettered right now. In fact, they’re starting with the State of Obama speech tonight, they’re going to do their best to say that they’re moving in a different direction, going to be populist now, going to bash the banks.