I have a network of spies throughout the country that are going to inform me whenever their insurance premiums go up from this day forward ’cause we’ve been told the insurance premiums are going to go down $2,500 per person, per family, whatever it is. So we’ll keep track of this. We’re not gonna present it as sob stories. See, that’s the other thing that I wanted to get to. In reading some of these Internet things last night, I did something I very seldom do. I always read the stories, but I never read the comments. I never read the comments that people leave ’cause it’s kooks. But last night I did, and something struck me. In every comment to this health care story, whatever the story was, didn’t matter, the story is all about passage and all this, but whatever the comments were, they ran only two ways. One of the threads from conservatives was all based on sadness over what this will do to the country. Without exception, I mean you might have had some caustic comments about Obama and so forth, but it was all: ‘The reason we oppose this is because we have a deep love and understanding for our country, for the United States of America.’
The people who left comments supporting this exhibited no love whatsoever, and they didn’t even talk about country. They didn’t say what a great day for America this is. Every comment was, ‘Beat your ass, how does it feel today? You moving to Costa Rica?’ or whatever it is. Whatever bad comment was left for the person who wrote: ‘This is a bad day for the country, we really fear for the country,’ the snarky comment in return to that was, ‘How does it feel to lose? We love beating you people, we love it, you can stop gloating.’ There was no love. I know I’ve said this before. There’s no love on the left. There’s no love of country. If anything, there is a dislike of it to whatever degrees, and this adds to the pain we all feel when we realize that a certain percentage of the population has no love for the country, and as such, it’s not possible for them to see what kind of damage this is going to do. And then we realize, take it even a step further, that some of these people look at this as Christmas. They think no more health care expenses for them. They totally misunderstand what’s happened here because they believe their lying leaders and they are fully prepared to just go to the hospital and not to pay for it, or get an insurance policy and only have to pay a copay.
There’s a striking ignorance on the left of basic economics, they have no understanding of it. And there’s also no love. I think you all will agree with me that the reason that we oppose this is not ’cause we hate Obama. We might be afraid. We might be afraid of what Obama is doing, and we might be afraid of the inability to stop it, but it’s all based on love, it’s all based on love for the country and love for our fellow citizens and love for children and grandchildren. We want to pass a legacy on that we inherited when we were born, raised, and grew up. And that legacy is American exceptionalism, the opportunity to be the best you can be with as few shackles and obstacles in the way as possible. We love the concept of a limited government. For example, there’s a story today, and I had two reactions to this. You know, Fargo, North Dakota, Red River, they flood every year, and they need $1.3 billion to build a 36-mile-long flood wall, essentially. And the first reaction, ‘How come everybody wants billions of dollars? If a river floods every year, why the hell don’t you move?’ But that’s not the correct reaction. The correct reaction is, ‘That’s the kind of expenditure that we think is okay for government, $1.6 billion to protect people, to build a flood wall or what have you.’ Not to tell them how to build it, not to tell them where they have to live, not to put a bunch of demands and mandates on it and so forth.
Our opposition to this is based on love. The opponents that we have are gleeful, not because of whatever they think is marvelous that’s going to happen to the country, they’re gleeful because we lost. In fact, the country could go to hell in a handbasket as long as it did so with us being defeated, and this is what we don’t understand. I think some of us more and more are coming to understand it, but there’s a striking contrast between the two groups of people in this country, left and right, who are seeking to advance their vision. And it’s very important to understand that one vision is rooted in hate, not just for us, but large elements of the country as it was founded. There’s no love. These people today at the Star Wars bar scene signing ceremony, you know, Obama gave ’em a bunch of false promises, things that are going to happen this year, and with the assumption it’s not going to cost anybody anything. Insurance companies are not regulated until four years from now, so if they’re told that from this day forward they have to cover people’s preexisting conditions, and if they are told that they have to insure children up to age 26 on their parents’ policies, sorry, enter basic economics.
Folks, let me ask you a question. What is it that determines the price of insurance? Let’s talk about health insurance specifically. What is it that determines the cost, the price of health insurance? The cost of health care expenses. If you’re an insurance company and you have a pool of customers and you’re going to insure them for whatever, your premiums are going to be based on what you are going to have pay when you have a claim, and what you’re going to have to pay is based on what the expenses in the health care system are. I’m sorry, folks, they’re not going down any time you add 32 million new people, any time you add all these preexisting conditions, and you’re gonna make the insurance companies handle this, and you’re gonna exempt people up to $88,000 a year from paying for it, I’m sorry, somebody is going to pay for it and it isn’t going to be cheaper for them, and health care expenses are not going down, so there’s no way premiums can go down, not under these circumstances. But none of this matters.
None of the reality of the economics matters here to the people who are for this. Because in large part the people who are for it don’t think they’re going to have to pay for it. And that’s where they’re sadly mistaken because every American is going to see his withholding get large, every American is going to see the net in the pay stub or the automatic deposit every week or two weeks, however you get paid, shrink, that is if you have a job. And that is if you’re able to stay in your home. Home sales declined for the third straight month today. Well, Obama did say we’re gonna get raises, but that’s because we’re going to have $2,500 cheaper premiums every year. Well, he actually said 3,000%. Of course, they went out and said that was a misspeak, he meant $3,000, not 3,000%. It wasn’t a misspeak. He said it I don’t know how many times. It was designed to create the effect that it did among the ignorant and the people paying scant attention to this.
Anyway, I have to take a break here, folks, but this love versus hate business is one of the reasons why there’s no meeting these people in common ground. There’s no compromise on love and hate. How do we compromise with these people by, ‘Yeah, you know, we’ll agree with you to dislike or hate some of the country if you will agree to love some of us.’ I don’t want to run around hating everybody. I don’t want to run around hating anything. But they do, it’s what energizes them, and they don’t care the damage that’s caused in the process. I’ll tell you, I’m going to be very honest. I largely blame myself for this. I do, I’ll tell you why I think I’m responsible for this, this partisan divide. It’s a good thing, don’t misunderstand, but I’m responsible for it, and I’ll tell you how when we come back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: That’s right, Snerdley. We criticize liberals because we love our country and we fear for it, and we fear what the Obama left has in store for it — and make no mistake, this is not a revision of the health insurance industry that was just signed into law today. This was the first step of a government takeover of the entire health care system, including insurance. That’s what has happened here. Now, these people on the left, they attack us because they hate us. Period. There’s no love whatsoever animating liberals, liberalism, people on the left. They simply seek to eliminate all opposition and they don’t have a morally superior vision of anything. Nobody with hate in their heart can. They claim to be morally superior, but there’s no way they can be with strict definitions of the word. They are singularly focused on the elimination of all opposition. Now, our principled opposition frightens them because it makes them face their own immorality and lawlessness, and they turn that around on us.
Now, I said I’m responsible for this, and here’s why I think that I am. Very simply, I am the reason there is an alternative media. Prior to 1988, they didn’t have any opposition. They pretty much, in the media, were able to create whatever fiction, premise, template, storyline they wanted — and the only opposition to it was in obscure magazines, not widely read, and in various think tanks and so forth who put out policy papers, position papers. You had Reagan who was able to overcome it without a media and Barry Goldwater, who was not. But Reagan was an isolated four years, eight years, and you see how they reacted then. I mean, they hated Nixon. But they were able to get away with that hate without any opposition. When Reagan came along, the personal hatred for Reagan really skyrocketed, and anything that he was doing…
I mean, the things that they’re saying about conservatives today are really not that different than what they said about Reagan. But today there’s an answer to it. Today there’s an echo chamber and they now no longer have their monopoly and they don’t get away with it. They always have to explain themselves and answer for it, and their organs, their media organs are losing: Viewers, readers, advertising revenue, and thus money. Our media is not. Our media is just the opposite. I think the basic tendency — because liberals are who they are — the basic ingredient of hate was always there, but it didn’t need to surface. I mean, after all, we had guys like Bob Michel who led the House on the Republican side. He was content to be there with 130 seats, and if the Democrats didn’t let him into committee meetings, that’s fine.
He’d go play golf. As long as Tip O’Neill was fine to him now and then everything was fine and hunky-dory. The Republicans knew their role. The Republicans knew that they were a minority and to ever be minority and just be friendly. Go along and let the left have whatever they wanted. Reagan came along and that was the beginning of a challenge to the FDR style of being able to get away with anything they wanted under the false notion that they were compassionate. Now what’s been revealed is that there’s no compassion guiding these people. There’s nothing but pure hatred. And the reason is that they’ve lost their monopoly and there’s an opposition to deal with, and they have been exposed. And they’ve been shown for who they really are.
Now, all I’m doing here is explaining their attitude in an attempt here to try to explain why working with them is not the point. We ought to have the same attitude they do. That is just eliminate them as opposition. Get them to be so small and so ineffective that they cannot stop us. But we love, and one of the problems with loving is you want to be loved in return. You want to get along. And that’s where this whole notion of bipartisan comes from. It also stems, I think, from an inferiority complex that developed among Republicans (and even conservatives, for a while) from being in the woods for 40 years. Once you’re in the minority for 40 years, once you’re used to losing — once you’re used to that — it’s tough to all of a sudden transition to a proper attitude of leading.
I once heard Oprah Winfrey say, in response to some question from a media person, ‘No, I don’t have any guilt over my success. I’m not one of these people who think that I don’t deserve this and I’m going to act in a way that will result in my losing it because I don’t deserve it.’ But Republicans were in the woods and for so long that even when they got the majority they thought, ‘Ah, this just doesn’t feel right. I dunno. Maybe we really don’t deserve this.’ That wasn’t totally it, put it was partly it — and, as such, they weren’t prepared for the vicious, vicious return-volley of fire from the Democrats once they lost the House and Clinton wins the White House and the budget battle of ’95 and all these things ensue. Then when we have won the presidency, it has not been with the same mind-set is theirs. Their mind-set is to forever alter the country.
We have not looked at that as something that is a requirement because — until now, until this moment — not a lot of Republicans thought the country’s fate was at stake, especially inside-the-Beltway Republicans. But that’s all changing now. So there’s a silver lining to all this. But the bottom line is that there is genuine, pure hatred. There is no love. There is not one single thing. You don’t see it. I’ve got a story coming up: ‘Just Who Have the Democrats ‘Defeated’ by Passing Obamacare?’ It’s Joseph Ashby at The American Thinker and there’s a New York Times story: ‘Big Win for Obama, but at What Cost?’ Victory, defeating us. Really, the left is celebrating today, not because of the good they’ve done for the country. That’s what they say publicly. They’re celebrating, and they did this signing ceremony when they did it, as a cramdown. In our faces. They get more joy defeating us than they do passing their legislation, and they don’t care what happens to the country as a result of it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, don’t forget, ladies and gentlemen, lurking out there is Obama’s deficit-reduction commission featuring, of course, ‘Irksome’ Bowles and Alan ‘Babe’ Simpson, and these guys are going to be coming back in December with their recommendations on ‘deficit reduction.’ What do you bet…? What do you bet that one of the things that is going to happen is the proposal of a value-added tax, a tax at every stage from production to sale of a good or service, much like they have in the UK? You think taxes are going down? (laughing) Anybody who buys that is just stupid. There’s no other way to describe it. They’re just stupid. Now, let me give you the costs of Medicare. Medicare was said to cost… Let’s see, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Medicare was going to cost something like $8 billion through 1990, 1965 to 1990. It was going to cost 8 or $12 billion. I thought I had the figure front of me but I don’t. I’ll get it in just a second.
But instead, the costs of Medicare doubled every four-year years. Oh! Medicaid was part of the Medicare signing ceremony but nobody knew it. We listened to Pelosi: We gotta pass the bill to find out what’s in it. What other tricks are in this but we don’t know about? It’s practically 3,000 pages. We can’t possibly know everything that’s in it. So there are some surprises coming. But the ‘costs of Medicare doubled every four years between 1966 and 1980. According to the 2004 ‘Green Book’ of the House Ways and Means Committee, Medicare expenditures from the American government were $256.8 billion in fiscal year 2002.’ The original cost projection was… In fact, let me find it right now. Let’s see. Da-da-da-da. It was $3 billion. At the start in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. Medicare cost $3 billion. That’s what they projected.
Now, of course, ‘Medicare spending is growing steadily in both absolute terms and as a percentage of the federal budget. Total Medicare spending reached $440 billion for fiscal year 2007 or 16% of all federal spending and grew to $599 billion in 2008 which was 20% of federal spending. The only larger categories of federal spending are Social Security and defense,’ which is going to get lopped. At some point they’re going to go after the defense budget because this is what Obama is about, really. He refused to take pictures with Bibi Netanyahu today. He refused to pose for pictures with Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, ostensibly one of our allies. Hillary went over to AIPAC and made a speech yesterday, and she just dumped on Israel. She basically gave a speech outlining US Middle East policy, essentially saying that Israel is the problem.
She said this to AIPAC, and Netanyahu stood up and fired right back at her and said, ‘Well, Jerusalem is not a settlement. Jerusalem is our capital.’ So we have now succeeded in alienating the only real democracy in the Middle East, the only ally we have. We have a president of the United States who refuses to appear in photographs with the prime minister after summoning him here to dress him down about these 1,600 settlements which are not a violation of anything, by the way. It’s a nasty scene. It is a dirty, dirty, nasty scene.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Joseph Ashby in the American Thinker: ‘This morning’s LA Times stumbled upon a remarkable point in its coverage of the health care bill. In a Drudge-linked article entitled ‘After healthcare vote, Democrats turn to damage control.’ The first line of the piece reads: ‘Democrats may feel today as though they just fought — and won — the equivalent of a 100-year war.’ This sentiment echoes one of the talking points among Democrats over the final days of the health care debate. ‘Teddy Roosevelt knew (passing universal health care) was right,’ thundered President Barack Obama at a Fairfax, Virginia rally last week.
‘Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s repeated ‘one-day-closer’ mantra tells us that the Democrats believe they have in fact won a ‘100-year’ clash. But if the Democrats were waging war, who were they fighting? If Obama and Pelosi won, who did they defeat? There are certainly the public enemies — insurance companies, doctors who saw off limbs and rip out tonsils to get fatter reimbursements — but the real reason socialized medicine has never passed is because the public has rejected it each time it is proposed. Perhaps Obama, Pelosi and the others have won a war, but if that’s true,’ and if that’s how they feel and that’s how they are acting by the way, ‘it is the citizens of this country who they fought against; it is the American people who they have conquered.’
Obama and Pelosi are the first to do it and they’re running around patting themselves on the back. Don’t tell me these people are possessed with any love for anything, and here in the New York Times today, ‘Big Win for Obama, but at What Cost?’ and here’s an interesting quote from this piece: ‘For that lesson in governing, Mr. Obama paid a heavy price. He nearly lost the health care debate, and pulled out victory only after deferring nearly every other priority and stumping with a passion he had not shown since his campaign. His winning argument, in the end, was that while the political result could run against him — and other Democrats — remaking health care was a keystone of his ‘Change You Can Believe In’ credo.’ His winning argument in the end was that while the political result…? He didn’t win an argument!
There’s no way it can be said that Obama did anything great here. I know they’re praising him for not fading away and for sticking to it and so forth, but he didn’t win anything. He’s come to divide and conquer. He had to overcome opposition, and he did not overcome the opposition. The opposition is still there and it’s growing. He didn’t persuade anybody. The more he spoke, the greater the opposition to the plan became. So I’m all for it. If they want to send him out to Iowa City on Thursday, if they want to send him out to try to now sell this, why, have at it! Have at it. He was lying when he was out there telling people what was in this when it wasn’t, trying to get their support. Now he’s going to go out and do what? Tell people what’s in it? We got a taste of it at his signing ceremony today when he talked about all the great new benefits that are going to kick in this year.
And they may well kick in, but what he didn’t say was how much it’s going to start costing everybody immediately, insurance premiums. There’s no way they will not go up. They’re not mandated yet. The insurance companies are not yet under the control of the federal government. Obama can’t say, ‘You keep your rates the same.’ That’s coming but they’re going to go up. Folks, Obama wants premiums to go up! We talk about love and compassion. People think that people and the Democrat Party and the left have compassion for the American people and this is rooted in it. Take a look at what Democrat social programs have done. Take a look at havoc and the destruction among the people they have targeted as ‘beneficiaries.’ Don’t take it from me. Take it from several black Americans.
American welfare plans, the welfare state has largely destroyed the black family. There’s nothing wrong with the black culture. It’s the fact that the Democrat Party has sought to make them entirely dependent, and so they became de facto fathers, to mothers with no husbands around. That didn’t matter. The government will provide what the father should be, and the father was content to run around and not have to accept the responsibility. This happens, by the way, throughout all races. But this is something that the Democrat legislation actually brought about, and it’s headed for all of us now because they don’t care what pain and suffering they’ve caused poor black people in this country. All they care about is that they are forever dependent on them. There’s not love in that and there’s no compassion in that. It’s the exact opposite. There is contempt and resentment and a total lack of caring about their general welfare.
And it’s not just minority communities. It’s all of us who are now targeted in much the same way, and that’s why we fear. We fear for the country. We fear for the people. You know, I’ve said it throughout my entire career: We conservatives love people. We want the best for everybody! We want a country where anybody who wants to be the best they can be can go for it. We don’t want a country where people think that there’s no hope, that there’s no chance, that the only thing going for them is maybe somebody in government cares about them. That is reprehensible to us. That is an attack on human dignity and humanity itself, under the guise of compassion. When in fact what they really want to do is act on their hatred for their opposition. ‘Big Win for Obama, but at What Cost?’ His ‘winning argument’? Did Obama really have winning argument?
You had Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel running around with baseball bats and overflowing purse and back pocket filled with bribe money. Obama was able to bully and buy the already true believers in Congress into voting for his health care plan. He didn’t ‘win’ them with his argument. They were already on board. All he did was hit ’em over the head until he cried ‘uncle.’ But outside of Washington, DC, outside of the political class, Obama’s argument was, and continues to be a loser, and the opposition to it is growing. Obama gave a major speech weekly, over 400 of them, I think, for over a year — and we never once came close to buying his argument. Americans hate this! Americans instinctively understand that this is going to cause great harm to the country and ultimately for their kids and their grandkids.
We have acted on our dislike for this. We have voted against it, we have expressed dislike for this horrible bill. People in Massachusetts even elected a Republican for Ted Kennedy’s seat in order to show how much they didn’t want any part of this because they’re already living a miniature version of it in their state. So Obama didn’t ‘win’ an argument here when it comes to the actual constituency he represents, the American people. He lost it. There’s no greatness in Obama. What there is in Obama is a contempt for anybody who opposes him and he’s going to ram down his agenda and change this country to what he wants it to be regardless. I was thinking today how quickly George W. Bush’s Social Security reform bit the dust in 2005. It bit the dust in 2005 because the Democrats successfully lobbied against it. They had their media with them, and they convinced senior citizens that they were going to lose all their money in the stock market.
And the Bush administration didn’t have a good counter for it. It was a really a great plan, something that has to be done, too, and the plan was actually very good. But look how quickly Bush gave up on it when the public was not for it. He gave up on it. Bush was not Obama. Bush did not say, ‘This is good for you! I’m doing this to help you and to save your future and everybody in your family’s future. We can’t afford what we’re spending on this anymore. If you’re a certain age you’re going to be exempt from this. You won’t have to do this but we gotta start somewhere reforming it. It’s for the good of the country.’ Bush didn’t say that, didn’t say it that forcefully. So we listened to the opposition falsely generated, trumped up on lies. Our opposition is based on truth. They hate us for telling the truth about them. So the objective is: ‘You have the audacity to stand up against us? You have the audacity to oppose us? Well, all right, fine! Take this. Open your mouth,’ and they ram whatever they have in their hand right down our throats, in this case the health care bill.