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RUSH: I got back relatively early. We landed around one o’clock, 12:30, one o’clock. Yes. Oh, normal night, normal night. Not later than usual. Well, nice of you to join us. Snerdley just sat down. So I guess that means we are ready to go.

We are one day away from our annual radio Cure-A-Thon for the blood cancers, leukemia and lymphoma. Big day tomorrow. It’s our 21st Annual Leukemia-Lymphoma Cure-A-Thon tomorrow. Every year, all of you in the audience literally stun and amaze us with your donations, your generosity. So we’re looking forward to it tomorrow. And as a programming reminder: Donald Trump will be here in the second hour to kick it off right as the second hour starts.

Anyway, great to have you here. Telephone number is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com. All right.

You know, Obama’s speech yesterday was taking place while the program was unfolding and I got so disgusted with it I stopped carrying it, as you well know. It turns out that I was entirely warranted in dispatching it. It was a disgusting display. It was in no way presidential. This is what we’re up against. He invites Ryan and a couple other Republican leaders up there to sit in the front row, and then proceeds to insult ’em. Now, I’m gonna tell you, the real reason he did it. There are two real reasons he did it. One is he’s not this cool, calm, collected guy. He just, folks, umm… He’s not a good guy. You hear people say, “He’s such good guy.” Obama’s not a good guy. He’s a mean, vindictive little guy. He’s very cold.

The second thing he was doing yesterday was shoring up his base. I kid you not. There are a lot of factors that went into the makeup of the type of speech Obama gave yesterday. But certainly in the mix is the fact of who his base is. His base is made up of people even more vile than he is. I mean, you’ve got the genuine… I mean, a lot of it is just walking human debris on the Democrat base side, and they’ve gotta be stoked. And you can go through earlier this week and all of last week when the Drive-Bys had a whole series of stories about how the left is not happy with Obama. He’s moderating too much for ’em. You look at the all the stuff: Gitmo still open. We’re at war as much if not more.

He extended the Bush tax cuts last December. That bunch of people, those savages that make up the Obama base, are fit to be tied. He had to get ’em back, and the one way to do it is to go out and savage us. That’s what they love. That’s what they get off on. That is their orgasm (’cause these people can’t find willing mates). So their orgasm is for Obama and Democrat Party leaders to really take it to us. So that’s one of the things was that involved what he was doing. The second aspect is it’s just his nature. That’s just who he is: Community organizer, agitator. There was nothing presidential. I told you the day before he was gonna come lie to you; he was gonna give a campaign speech, campaign kickoff speech.

There was certainly nothing presidential about it — and, of course, the final authority on all this, Charles Krauthammer, as everybody acknowledges, called it a “disgrace,” which it was. Paul Ryan was on my buddy Levin’s show last night, and he was great. He’s been on television this morning reacting to Obama’s speech. We have audio sound bites of that. But, remember, let’s go back and listen to Obama from last December. This is December the 17th — and, remember, every Obama statement has an expiration date. This is after the lame duck session and they had agreed to extend the Bush tax rates. Now, you remember, that act alone caused the loincloths of the savages at Obama’s base to slip and begin to fall down.

They were just beside themselves. This is not what they elected. Some of you were mad at the Republican leadership in the House. Well, these guys are angry at Obama. They think that he’s betraying them. So here you have Obama. This is what he said on December 17th, not that long ago, about the Bush tax cuts — and, remember, yesterday he came out and he just excoriated them. He characterized people who achieve and earn and who get these tax cuts — tax rates, whatever — as baby killers. They’re elderly killers; they’re going to starve children. There was no pretense of that speech yesterday being presidential. But let’s see, now. This is April. So you got March, February… Four months ago. Four, maybe five, months ago.

OBAMA DECEMBER 17, 2010: Tax rates for every American were poised to automatically increase on January 1st — and if that had come to pass, the average middle class family would have had to pay an extra $3,000 in taxes next year. That wouldn’t have just been a blow to them. It would have been a blow to our economy, just as we’re climbing out of a devastating recession. I refuse to let that happen.

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah, okay.

OBAMA DECEMBER 17, 2010: Because we acted, it’s not going to.

RUSH: Right, right, right.

OBAMA DECEMBER 17, 2010: In fact, not only will middle class Americans avoid a tax increase, but tens of millions of Americans will start the New Year off right by opening their first paycheck to see that it’s actually larger than the one they get right now.

RUSH: Okay, so four or five months ago there he is taking credit for a tax cut — and, remember, back then we made a point (semantics) that the media was portraying it as a tax cut when it wasn’t. It was simply the extension of existing tax rates. But they were so eager, so eager to give Obama credit for a tax cut. Why? Well, they had lost the debate. Tax cuts… Let’s put it this way. Raising taxes, everybody agreed (except Obama’s lunatic base) would choke off whatever chance there would be of an economic recovery. But now, four months later, that’s all out the window. It’s all gone. That didn’t matter. The statement had an expiration date and it didn’t apply.

No either he doesn’t care whether we remember it, or he doesn’t remember that he said it, or it doesn’t matter to anybody at the regime that he said it because only what he said yesterday doesn’t matter. Only what’s said today is relevant. USA Today: Obama said, “I refuse to renew Bush tax cuts for rich. We can’t afford a trillion dollars in tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire.” So he’s willing to do whatever damage he can to the economic recovery. The AP has an analysis. Now, you all heard the speech, or you’ve heard about it, and you know full well that raising taxes was a focal point, correct?

Am I right? (It’s a redundant question.) Here’s the headline: “Obama Tiptoes on Proposed Tax Increases.” Tiptoes? AP: Tiptoes. (laughing) That’s right. Krauthammer “Krauthammered” Obama. When Krauthammer “Krauthammers” ya, it carries a lot of weight, because people wait for what Krauthammer’s gonna say. Here’s Obama. This is this morning in Washington, a meeting with the White House deficit commission co-chairs Irksome Bowles and former Senator Alan “Diddle the Secretary” Simpson, speaking to reporters about the meeting…

OBAMA: Yesterday I laid out a plan to cut $4 trillion from our deficit. It is a balanced plan that asks for shared sacrifice in order to provide shared opportunity for all Americans. It is important that we put everything on the table. Uhhh, these gentlemen share the view that we can’t except anybody from these efforts.

RUSH: Right.

OBAMA: Thaaaaat it’s not appropriate for us t’ask for sacrifices from everybody except for the 2% of Americans who are doing their best.

RUSH: The thing about this: This guy is so easy now. This guy was all predictable. In fact, I did predict it last year. This was going to happen as a result of Obama going for the extension of the tax rates. That is part of the campaign. It wouldn’t be long before he comes back and starts demagoguing the rich and ridiculing them, after having said that we need to extend their tax rates in order to prolong the economic recovery. Now, as always happens — as always happens; I’ve got a couple, maybe three examples here in my stack — when Obama calls for tax increases, we start getting articles about polls that show most Americans want their taxes raised.

It’s just amazing. Back when Clinton was lying every other sentence, we got stories on how it’s good for you. A white lie is actually good for a family. Spare people’s feelings. Little white lies actually help promote the concept of happiness and so forth. So here’s Obama raising taxes and I got stories: Yeah, it’s amazing, 57% of the American people it’s a good idea! Just like that. Americans want their taxes raised. What’s funny is that Obama doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t believe that people want their taxes raised. He made a joke about it in the speech, and yet his minions in the media go ahead and run the story for him based on a fake poll.

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, has a fine paragraph to open his analysis of this. This is really, really good: “The president gave the sort of scare speech he not long ago warned against, and blasted the income-tax rates he not long ago agreed were necessary — in a context in which he has just presented a budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit of the sort he now says is unsustainable, and has warned about recklessly voting against raising the debt ceiling in a fashion that he himself had once done, in a larger landscape in which he had once damned attacking Middle East countries in optional wars, Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, intercepts, wiretaps, Predators, and leaving troops in Iraq, and then embraced or expanded all that and more (this list is infinite and includes everything from drilling to campaign financing to earmarks).”

Whatever he says, he’ll change it on a dime. “These weird about-faces raise interesting questions that transcend the current politics of the deficit: a) Has Obama in his past careers never been called to account and so reached a point where simply being Obama means that we are not supposed to apply standards of accuracy, memory, and consistency to him in the way we do to all others? b) Or does an absent-minded Obama carelessly make up things up ad hoc as he goes along, forgetting what he said earlier, but secure that his hope-and-change delivery of the moment will so mesmerize the audience that no one will remember or care if at times he ends up saying exactly the opposite of what he had said earlier?

“c) Or is he so blatantly partisan a politician that he has no principles at all and knowingly says things that are aimed at appealing to 51 percent of the public at any given moment, and therefore will always change with public opinion? d) Or is he so cynical that he understands campaign rhetoric has nothing to do with actual governance, and so he is allowed to say something that he knows in advance that he is not bound to follow? e) Or is he so bored with the trying job that he feels no responsibility to offer reliable, consistent governance, and so rashly throws things out and then hastens back to the more enjoyable PR aspects of the office?”

This is Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online desperately trying to explain this, ’cause it is puerile. It is infantile, it is incoherent, it’s immature, it’s childish. It’s certainly not presidential.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Lynchburg, Virginia. Peter, I appreciate your patience. Thank you for waiting, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you, sir. That AP story yesterday or today about the speech that Obama had to “tiptoe” around the tax increase —

RUSH: Yes, isn’t that amazing? AP, he had to tiptoe around the tax increase.

CALLER: I think perhaps he was doing that to keep from waking up Joe Biden. Biden looked like he was trying out for an air traffic controlling job yesterday.

RUSH: Well, he is in charge of them. Maybe doing some research —

CALLER: Yeah, I think so.

RUSH: — on the job, Biden? Yeah.

CALLER: You know, I heard you say that Obama could not have given that speech at a primetime venue. And I think you’re absolutely right about that. Most of the working class people at two o’clock in the afternoon yesterday were doing their jobs, I’m sure, and had little if no time to at least digest what he had said.

RUSH: No, that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean it in terms of available audience. If that were true, we know that the available audience between noon and three eastern, for example, is one of the factors — if I may go a little inside baseball — that shocked the early critics of this program. Radio is like any other business. Television has its primetime, and radio has its primetime. Snerdley, let’s see how much you know. What is radio’s primetime? Morning drive, six to nine a.m., that’s primetime in radio, theoretically.

On the stations I’m on, primetime is noon to three eastern. Afternoon drive is number two. Afternoon drive’s the second primetime. In television, primetime is 8 to 11 p.m. Eastern (7 to 10 central). That’s just the way it is. In the early days of this program — and, in fact, even before this program — it was thought that the middle of the day was the absolute worst time to be an advertiser on radio because the only people listening were people who have no jobs, and what could they afford to buy? You know, what sponsor could they frequent? Well, that’s just another of the bits of conventional wisdom that we have stood on its head.

Obviously that’s not the case, otherwise this program wouldn’t be the success that it is. So I wasn’t talking about available audience. I’m talking about attitude and tone: A president making a primetime speech that serious, a president talking to the country at night (even if it is from a university, George Washington University or some other venue other than the Oval Orifice), that’s serious time. What I meant by you couldn’t have given that speech at night was it wasn’t serious. It had no gravitas. It was a campaign speech, and the networks are not gonna give up primetime for a campaign speech.

Not now. They will later on depending on how close the Republican nominee is getting to Obama. I was simply talking about the speech itself, how unserious it was. Obama did not want to give that speech at night. Obama did not even want to give that speech yesterday to adults. He chose to give it to a bunch of young skulls full of mush at an institution for higher learning, and he relied on the Drive-By Media to report it by virtue of sound bites or YouTube clips, snips, or what have you. That was not a serious speech. In fact, there was another little hidden purpose of that speech: The invitations to Ryan and the other Republicans, that was a personal bitch slap, that speech yesterday. To have Ryan up there sitting in the front row and to give that speech was primo, primo insult — and that was another reason for it.

But a serious speech? No, it wasn’t.

END TRANSCRIPT

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