RUSH: Have you seen…? There’s another Democrat. I find this… I don’t know. It kind of ticks me off actually, but it’s amusing. Another Democrat, another prominent Democrat senator has come out and said (summarized), “You know, we shouldn’t have done Obamacare. The timing was wrong. We should have focused on jobs. We should have focused on the economy. It was an absolute mess.
“We shouldn’t have done it. It was a mistake. It’s not working right.”
The first one was Chuck Schumer. From The Hill: “Sen. Tom Harkin, one of the co-authors of the Affordable Care Act, now thinks Democrats may have been better off not passing it at all and holding out for a better bill. [He] chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, laments the complexity of [it]. He wonders in hindsight whether the law was made overly complicated to satisfy the political concerns of a few Democratic centrists who have since left Congress.
“‘We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified health care, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn’t do it,’ Harkin told The Hill. ‘So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all. What we did is we muddled through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and still rewards the insurance companies extensively,’ he added.” Now, can I translate this for you?
This one’s in TheHill.com. What this means, first Schumer and now Tom Harkin, and there’s gonna be more, they know that the worst is yet to come. Schumer is in a preemptive mode to protect Hillary. That’s why he’s doing it. There’s a story; I think it’s the Washington Post again. It may be the New York Times. It’s the New York Times. “Is Obamacare destroying the Democrat Party?” It’s Thomas B. Edsall, and his contention is it is because it’s destroying the middle class and white Americans.
He’s the guy who wrote the piece in November of 2011 describing Obama’s reelection strategy as discarding white, working-class families. So Edsall is feeling bad about that, but everybody knows this is an outrage and an utter disaster, and now Democrats — and Harkin is retiring. But they’re now starting to say, “It’s a mistake. We shouldn’t have ever done it!” But as far as I’m concerned: Too little, too late. Don’t cry on our shoulders.
You guys are the ones that made this happen. You didn’t read it. Pelosi told us all, we had to pass it to find out what was in it! You wouldn’t give us the public option, you wouldn’t do anything. You wouldn’t guys didn’t do any hearings. You knew exactly what was in this bill; you wrote it, Senator Harkin! This is… You know, it’s not “treasonous,” as somebody suggested to me, but, folks, this is just… I don’t know what it is.
But they knew.
They knew it was an utter disaster, and for these people who benefited from it to now come out and tell us they should have never done it, or not that they shouldn’t have. They’re passing the buck. “Democrats. They should never have done it. We shouldn’t have done this. This health care law’s really complicated.” What this means is they know the worst is yet to come. They know that individuals are being shocked by the increase in premiums and deductibles.
They know.
They can read the stories in the news.
They know that people are now choosing to avoid going to the doctor because they can’t afford it. They know that people are going to be paying higher taxes and forgoing insurance because it is unaffordable. This promise of utopian single-payer health care is here, and it’s another lie, and it is a disaster in the making, and they know that we are now at that very important moment of full implementation when the full nature of the disaster of this bill is about to hit people.
That’s what they know, and they are trying to get out in front of it so that in whatever case and for whatever reason, they can be on record as saying, “Yeah, I know we shouldn’t have done it. Aw, gee.” They’re trying to insulate themselves as any damage as Democrats who voted for it. It’s one thing to say, “You know, we should have done it differently. We should have.” But they’re not saying that.
They’re saying we shouldn’t have done it, period. Both of them. Schumer and Harkin are both saying, “You know what? We shouldn’t have done it. We shouldn’t have waited. We should have done the economy first. This was a mess. We shouldn’t have done it.” They know, and therefore you had better be clued in how bad this is gonna be. They are the canaries in the coal mine here. I don’t know what Harkin’s future gambit is, but I know that Schumer still has political aspirations, and they’re tied to Hillary.
(interruption) Well, no, it… (interruption) I think they are bombshells, both of them, but they’re not being reported as bombshells. TheHill.com has Harkin’s. Schumer was a one-day story and forgotten. I mean, until I just mentioned it you didn’t even know that Harkin had said it. So this is the second one now. I guarantee you if Mary Landrieu, has to say it, she’ll say it, and if Dianne Feinstein has to… There’s gonna be more, ‘ause folks it is exactly as bad as all of us tried to warn everybody.
I mean, you do. You in this audience knew how bad it was and I’m sure you were trying to warn your friends and people you worked with and some of them didn’t want to listen to you. It’s as bad if not worse. That’s what this means. (interruption) Well, I don’t… (interruption) This last election? (interruption) Oh, I’m sure they do. I’m sure they think part of the election results are because of Obamacare, and they are!
The last election meant that. It was a landslide defeat. If you gonna be honest, the only way to interpret this election is the American people standing up and yelling, “Stop! Stop amnesty, stop Obamacare, stop Obama, stop the Democrats! This is the wrong direction, and we don’t want to go on this road anymore.” That’s what the election meant. Everything on that road, stop! I don’t care if it’s a stimulus, if it’s Obamacare, amnesty, whatever it is.
People stood up and they went and voted. The message is, “Stop,” and the Republicans don’t want to stop it. So they’re hiding behind, “Well, we’re get blamed for government shutdown,” or “We can’t just do a continuing resolution for this month! We gotta go ahead and do the budget for all of next year. My God, we’ll get creamed ’cause that will lead to a government shutdown if we don’t let Harry Reid do it the way he wants to do it.
“So we’ll get creamed!” They don’t want to stop any of it or they don’t want it badly enough. There’s no other logical explanation. These are adults. They’re not… They can’t possibly really be this afraid, frightened of a couple of weeks’ polling results on a so-called mythical government shutdown.
Anyway, let me grab a phone call. If I don’t get to the phones here, I’m so wound up, I might not get to ’em the rest of the day. People have been patiently waiting, and I have a lot of guilt over that. Appreciation, too.