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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: The president this morning in Washington talking about the jobs report.

OBAMA: I am open to any idea, any proposal, any way we can get the economy growing faster so the people who need work can find it faster. This includes tax breaks for small businesses, by deferring taxes on new equipment so that they’ve got an incentive to expand and hirer.

RUSH: Doesn’t mean anything.

OBAMA: As well as tax cuts to make it cheaper for entrepreneurs to start companies.

RUSH: That’s irrelevant.

OBAMA: This includes building new infrastructure, from high speed trains to high speed Internet so that our economy can run faster and smarter.

RUSH: This is BS.

OBAMA: This includes promoting research and innovation and creating incentives in growth sectors like the clean energy economy and it certainly includes keeping tax rates low for middle-class families.

RUSH: So here’s Obama saying he’s open to any idea to get the economy growing faster except, of course, the ideas that actually work. I mean this is all gobbledygook, deferring taxes on new equipment so they can get an incentive to expand and hirer. They want customers. They don’t want to borrow money. They need customers. They need people working. Small business needs customers; they need sales; they need people with jobs and income to spend. Tax cuts to make it cheaper for entrepreneurs to start — what tax cuts? Nobody is proposing a tax cut anywhere, especially not the Democrats. Building new infrastructure? We’re going to have a tax cut so business can build new infrastructure, high-speed trains to high-speed Internet? We’re gonna have tax cuts so that businesses can build high-speed trains? High-speed Internet? Research and innovation? This is sophistry. This is idiocy, plain and simple — and it’s totally irrelevant. Now, I want to take a break here, because all of a sudden this compromise talk is taking a new direction, and I want to remind you what I said about all this earlier this week and point out some examples of what I meant when I said, ‘It’s the losers who compromise, not the winners.’

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Check this e-mail. Dear Rush: ‘It’s your fault we didn’t win the Senate and win bigger elsewhere because you wasted so much time talking football. If you took your position more seriously we could have won big.’ I kid you not. (interruption) Yeah, his name’s here. I’m not gonna embarrass him by saying his name. You’d be surprised this is not a minority opinion. No, no, I kid you not, you would not believe the number of e-mails I’ve received all week. It was my fault we didn’t win the Senate. If I had spent less time talking football and all this other stuff, the Golf Channel, the Haney Project, if I’d spent less time talking about it, spent more time talking about the issues, then we would have won the Senate. I kid you not. This is why I always say why that if I didn’t have the strong sense of self that I’ve got, if I were totally dependent on what people think of me to be happy, I would be a basket case and I would have been a basket case for years.

Here is going back in time what I said on this program yesterday about compromise.

RUSH ARCHIVE: What is this obsession that we, the winners, have to compromise with the losers? When did that happen? Let’s go back to World War II. It’s MacArthur and the Japanese on the USS Missouri. The last time I looked, the conditions of surrender were offered the Japanese and they had to sign it and that was it. I don’t think MacArthur asked the Japanese what we, the United States, had to do. Where was the compromise with the Japanese? Where was the compromise with the Germans in World War II? ‘Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Limbaugh, are you comparing the Democrat Party to the Japanese and the axis powers in World War II?’ What if I am? We did give the Russians Eastern Europe. We compromised with the Russians after World War II and what did we get? A Cold War and starvation and mass murder. So, yeah, we’re not interested in compromising with the left, and, as winners, you don’t compromise with losers. It’s the other way around.

RUSH: The State-Controlled Media is just depressed and angry. They can’t handle the fact that they’re gonna have to deal with the Tea Party now. Here’s a media montage on compromise.

TODD: The American people want bipartisan compromise.

TAPPER: It appears confrontation will trump compromise.

BAIER: There’s no compromise.

MEACHAM: Compromise. That’s a dirty word.

BRZEZINSKI: Doesn’t seem like a lot of room for compromise.

WOODWARD: …to compromise.

SCARBOROUGH: I’m not gonna compromise.

OLBERMANN: A tactic the Tea Party hates: Com-pro-mise.

RUSH: Now, they’re so upset about this because these people, in their minds, never lose. They’ve lost the election, but they want to try to enforce and pressure the winners inside the Beltway to compromise with the losers so that they will not be criticized, so that we’ll love you, so that we’ll write nice things about you in our newspapers and our network news anchors that nobody watches will also say good things about you. I have said that there will be gridlock and that gridlock is good, especially now. Gridlock: When you have an administration hell-bent on destroying the nation’s economy, there’s nothing better in the world than stopping that. If gridlock is the way you do it, fine and dandy. People respond to me without mentioning my name. There are news columns, articles all over the place today about how gridlock is bad, gridlock is bad and not compromising is bad, and I know these people are reacting to me. But they don’t mention my name. They just want to ignore it, and others are deciding there have been times where losers and winners have compromised.

I’ll give you an example. In 1980, Ronaldus Magnus wiped the floor with Jimmy Carter. At the end of the 1980 presidential election, Ronaldus Magnus and the Republicans had the White House, but they did not have Congress — and Ronaldus Magnus did not have a media. There was no conservative media. He had ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, you name it. National Review was the only media publication that was at all oriented towards supporting Ronaldus Magnus, and yet Ronaldus Magnus secured massive income tax rate reductions across the board. The top marginal rate when Ronaldus Magnus took office was 70%, folks. When he left office, the top marginal rate was 28%. Ronaldus Magnus did this alone.

Now, who compromised?

Ronaldus Magnus won in a 49-state landslide. Tip O’Neill was the Speaker of the House and every day Tip O’Neill was insulting Ronaldus Magnus as a dunce — amiable, but nevertheless a dunce. The Republicans were talking about what a stupid idiot Reagan was, and yet one man succeeded in an initial round of major tax cuts who compromised. Tip O’Neill and the Democrats compromised, and what were they? They were the losers. In terms of presidential politics, they had lost. Jimmy Carter lost. They might have won reelection in the House and the Senate and they might have controlled both, but who compromised? Reagan didn’t compromise on anything. He was the winner. The people who had a majority in the House against him. Now, that kind of compromise we’re all for. I’m not against that at all, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One other thing about Ronaldus Magnus and compromise. When Ronaldus Magnus came into office, the American economic growth rate was 1.7%. That was the GDP: 1.7%. Two years later, by 1983 — and, remember, we had a very bad, steep recession in 1982. Listen to these numbers. Gross domestic product when Ronaldus Magnus came into office was 1.7%. By 1983 it was 10.9%. That is real economic growth. What was the centerpiece? It was tax cuts. And yet people still try to tell us that cutting taxes will only move the economy backwards. All this talk about whether or not to sunset the Bush tax cuts? Let me tell you something, folks. If tax increases actually grew the economy, there wouldn’t be any talk whatsoever of extending the Bush tax cuts. They’d be over. We would have ended those Bush tax cuts years ago, and we would have raised taxes. The Democrats want us to believe that raising taxes and raising spending is what ignites an economy. Well, it doesn’t, and we all know it, and there are many different ways you can find proof of it, but one of the ways is this: ‘If we had simply raised taxes when Obama came into office, why, we’d be out of the problem now.’

If tax cuts are bad, why not tax General Motors? Why are we giving them an exemption on all income taxes for the foreseeable future? Well, we know why. We’re trying to get their IPO price up. We’re trying to make their financial position better by letting them keep more of what they supposedly earn at General Motors. So what’s good for Obama Motors ought to be good for America. But, oh, no! No, it’s not because we’re really not, even now — on the Democrat Party side of things, we’re not — talking about economic growth. I don’t care what Obama says today, what he said yesterday, what he said after the election. He’s not talking about economic growth. That is not what they desire. I don’t care how it sounds. I don’t care what he says today or yesterday when he comes out, makes speeches about working together now to get the economy on track. There are ways to do it, proven ways to do it, noncontroversial ways to do it. He’s not interested. Not happening. And I’m not through with compromise. Let’s go back. June 18th, 2009, in Washington, at the White House the press secretary, Robert ‘Fibbs’ held his daily briefing, and among other things, said this.

GIBBS: I think we’ve had a debate about individual policies. We had that debate in particular, we kept score last November, and we won.

RUSH: Right. There’s not gonna be any compromise. ‘We won.’ Obama said the same thing, early in 2009, in that joint legislative leadership meeting he convened at the White House. The Republicans in that meeting talked about maybe the possibility of cutting taxes. ‘No, no, no, no. I won. You can talk about it all you want, but I won,’ and the press was not urging Obama to compromise. The press was not urging Gibbs to compromise. The press was not urging any Democrat to compromise. It’s always the Republicans, even after winning, who are told, ‘You know, you guys better compromise,’ because they’re not happy with the victory. It’s just simple to see. It is what it is. But this is the kind of stuff that ends up co-opting our guys, this relentless assault. You better compromise or you’re gonna be called X. You better compromise or we’re gonna rip you over the coals, and far too many times in the recent past, not even the recent past, our guys have succumbed to it. Here’s Barney Frank, January 28, 2009. On Larry King Live, the fill-in host was John King. He said to Barney Frank, ‘If you don’t have Republicans and conservative Democrats on board with what you want to do, can you have a bipartisan Washington?’

FRANK: We’ve seen this before, but it does also say elections matter. A different philosophy won. We now differ. The electorate has said, ‘No, we want to go a different way and that’s what we’re doing.’

RUSH: Did you understand that? Kind of? It still needs to be translated. Okay, the question was, ‘If you don’t have Republicans and conservative Democrats, can you have a bipartisan Washington?’ Barney Frank said (impression), ‘We’ve seen this before, but it does also say elections matter. A different philosophy won. We now differ. The electorate has said, ‘No, we want to go a different way and that’s what we’re doing.” So Fibbs, Obama, and Barney Frank: No compromise. The electorate said we want to do it your way. No compromise.

And now we’ve had the election, the American people have declared that the Obama, Barney Frank, and Fibbs way was dead wrong, and still the media is asking of us, ‘Are you ready to compromise now?’ Obama at the health care summit in Baltimore with GOP leaders said if they couldn’t work something out, ‘The voters would decide who is right or wrong. ‘ Obama said, ‘That’s what elections are for.’ Well, we’ve had the elections, and the electorate said, by declaration, that Obama was dead wrong — and so now we’re supposed to compromise.

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