You know, these vote counts, these whip counts, they’re all over the place. You got Democrat leaders saying, ‘We’re five votes short.’ CNN says they’re 12 votes short of passing the Senate bill. Ace of Spades, a website, they claim that Pelosi only has 192 votes, that she’s 24 short and that there are 26 ‘maybes’ left. And of the ‘maybes’ there are ten who voted ‘yes’ the first time but have refused to commit to voting the same way this time. They are named here, and there are 16 who voted ‘no’ the first time who could be victims of Rahm-in-the-locker-room-with-the-lead-pipe bullying or Cornhusker kickback bribery because they haven’t declared yet what they plan to do. Jason Altmire, Pennsylvania, is one of those. I’ve got a list of some of these guys, their addresses in Washington and their phone numbers in Washington. Including fax.
Now, if I can verify this, then we’ll put it up at RushLimbaugh.com. But I don’t have 26 of them here. I’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I know there are more than eight. So I need to check. A staffer sent me this, and staffers all assume I’m brilliant. They think I’m going to understand everything they send me without any explanation. But I’m curious, I always have questions: Who are these eight? Why just these eight? I know there are many more than these eight. I’ll get all that data, and we’ll go from there. Now, this Ace of Spades — and put Stupak in there. Stupak says that she’s at 200 votes, which is 16 short. Now, let me again rely on my common sense and instincts and my well-known, superior, critical thinking abilities. It’s been a year. They have not been able to get this done. They really haven’t been close. We thought they were close, then the Scott Brown election took place, but they really haven’t been close in the traditional, required-by-the-Constitution way of passing a bill.
The House and the Senate have been far apart. It doesn’t matter where the Republicans are on this. They’re all united against it. They can’t stop it, except in the Senate now with their numbers. So we’ve been hearing for a year, ‘The endgame is near! We’re very close. We’re very, very close.’ I’ve resisted saying what I really think about this very much, because I don’t want to fall prey to my own wishful thinking compromising my objectivity. My wishful thinking is that this thing goes down a pile of dust and we never see or hear from it again, and I don’t want that desire to pollute or corrupt my actual thinking on this. I’ll just tell you: My actual thinking on this for the longest time has been that they were never close. Five votes? No way they’re that close. They coulda found five votes by now. It took ’em, what, 48 minutes with Kucinich on Air Force One?
That’s how long the flight was from Washington to Cleveland: 48 minutes. That’s all it took ’em to get Kucinich. I mean, if it were just five (it’s gotta be more than five) they coulda had this wrapped up. They can’t even get this Slaughter solution reconciliation bill written. That’s not even written! And they’re talking about having the final vote here Saturday. The only thing they’ve got right now to vote on is the Senate bill, and they despise that in the House. So I see the Ace of Spades thing that shows Pelosi is 24 short. She’s got 192 votes and there are 26 ‘maybes.’ Now, the way they’re looking at it at Ace of Spades — and I’m not holding them out as having a better count than anybody else does. They’re just an example to look at here. But if they’re right, if she’s 24 short and therefore needs 24 and there are 26 ‘maybes,’ that means she needs 24 of the 26 ‘maybes’ to say ‘yes.’
Now, that makes sense that they’re having trouble getting that many to switch. If it were just four or five, this would have been done. They’d have plenty to bully, plenty to bribe, plenty to pay. I’ve always thought and I’ve always believed — especially when we’re dealing with Democrat leaders in the media — that what they’re saying is what they want us to believe but it really isn’t the truth. How often is that accurate about any news story? I’m not saying that to make everybody exhale and breathe a sigh of relief, because I want you to keep pounding those numbers, and I want you to keep thinking that they’re just one vote short. But in the back of my mind it’s been gnawing at me. Folks, there’s another reason. I know that we have the most radical leftists running the Democrat Party than ever before in our history.
We now know that the people who are running the Democrat Party have decided they’re going to run it on the basis that this is a majority leftist country, and they’re going to approach it that way. They’re going to identify themselves that way. But we have seen for the past year: This is a conservative country. You can look at it by polling data, self-identification polls. You can look at it by how issue by issue Obama is doing. You can look at it and judge the reaction to the biggest socialist attempt in this country’s history. You can see nobody wants it. It has no majority appeal, not even close to majority appeal. So in my mind… Now, this is a little Pollyannaish, and I will admit this, but I can’t get my arms around the fact that we’re three days away from the United States of America being over as we’ve all known it.
I have not lost that much faith in the people who work in Washington, DC. I know we got a big, bad bunch of them but I don’t think they’re the majority yet. They’re trying to pretend that they are, but if they were, this would have been done last year, last August. I admit this is Pollyannaish. And this view is not clouding my objectivity. I know, and I’ve led the train on this, the risks that we face. I know the horror show that awaits us. I know exactly who these people are and what their objectives are, and they do want to remake this country. They want to overthrow it, take it down and rebuild it in their own leftist, socialist image — and I know they’re in the process of doing it. Obama, if he can’t get it done through Congress, he’ll go to the EPA. If he can’t get cap-and-trade legislation, have the EPA do it by fiat.
I mean, this is banana republic kind of stuff. I know what they’re doing. I’m just saying — and I’ve always believed this and I’ve always told you — the people of this country always triumph. They always, in the end, get what they want. And there have been numerous attempts to take this country in a radically different direction. They have, in some ways, succeeded for a time. And then the American people get rid of the people who tried it. FDR? He got away with a lot. We’re still living with some of the disasters that he created. But I just don’t believe that here we are in 2010 and in three days, the United States of America ceases to be a representative republic and turns into a veritable tyrannical dictatorship, which is essentially what’s going to happen if this health care bill passes. And if it does pass, the American people aren’t going to put up with it. They aren’t going to comply. We’re still the United States of America, and we are still the United States of America because it’s the people who make this country work
It’s the people who have defined its greatness. Behaving and performing because of the freedoms and liberties that we acknowledge we are born with in our founding documents — and those are under assault, too. I’m under no illusions of the heavyweight assault here, but I just… It’s like I didn’t have the guts to say this guy driving his Prius the other day was a fraud, but something told me: ‘This is not right. All of this is on TV, in the midst of all of these recalls, and here we got a guy who wants to be a reality TV ‘star’? It’s the balloon boy all over again.’ But I didn’t say it, and I told you I regretted not saying it. Probably a lot of other people did. Regardless, I could well be wrong about this. I could be wrong on the vote count. I could be wrong. They might be closer than I think. I just think if they were, that would have been done. (interruption) Yeah! (interruption) Snerdley, yes. Of course I’m holding out hope, genuine hope here! Damn right. I’m trying to mobilize the hope.