RUSH: To Greenville, South Carolina. This is Brooks. Welcome, sir, nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s good to talk to you.
RUSH: I appreciate that.
CALLER: I just want to say I was pleased to hear the influence that you still have over your audience, as evidenced today with the book sales. I have to say when I was in high school, the textbook that I read actually cited you as being influential in, I believe it was one of the Reagan elections, and this was just proof.
RUSH: Well, you know, back then, the Drive-Bys were not afraid, nor textbook writers, to refer to me as influential, but now that I’ve become so effective, I’m a hatemonger, I’m a bigot, I’m a racist, and they despise the fact that I’m influential. But that’s the league I play in, and I can handle it. I appreciate your nice words.
CALLER: Well, here’s my question. Do you really think — or what is your opinion, rather — on Hillary’s unveiling of her health care plan on Monday? Do you think it will cover up for what she said about Petraeus?
RUSH: No. She doesn’t have to cover up for what she said about Petraeus, because nobody is holding her to account for it in the Drive-By Media. MoveOn.org is Hillary. Hillary is MoveOn.org. Nobody’s going to ask her to change her statement. Rudy is, but the Drive-Bys are not going to keep pounding away on this. Now, let me talk about this a minute since you bring it up. She is planning to roll out the rest of her health care plan Monday in a speech in Des Moines, and she says that this will be rounding out a policy proposal that’s been in the works for months. She has given few clues as to how her policy will differ from those already introduced by Senator Barack Ubama and former Senator, the Breck Girl. She has hinted that she will address questions about her approach to the lobbying industry, attacked by her rivals as being too weak. She said, ‘I intend to dramatically rein in the influence of the insurance companies,’ during a forum hosted by Yahoo, Slate, and the Huffpo on Wednesday, ‘because, frankly, I think they have worked to the detriment of our economy and our health care system.’ Oh, really? Of course they are. She’s taken money from all of them, every damn one of them. She’s taken money from all of them, but they’re working as a detriment.
See, liberals, my friends, in their own mind are never, ever responsible for anything that goes wrong. They’re never, ever a detriment to our economy; they’re never a detriment to our society; liberals are not a detriment to our health care. No, it’s only the people in those businesses who are. Isn’t that amazing? Only the people in these businesses are detriments to the country. Why, the government and those of us big, wonderful, good people who run the government, why, we are never a detriment. Now, this is go-round number two for Mrs. Clinton, because she bollixed the first effort in 1993. Listen to the way Anne Kornblut of the Washington Post described it. Read this sentence: ‘Clinton, whose unsuccessful attempt to overhaul the health care system in the early nineties, led to her being criticized as a fan of big government.’ So that’s just what the critics say, right, Ms. Kornblut? How about the fact she is a fan of big government? She is big government! It’s not just what the critics say. Anyway, goes on to say here that Mrs. Clinton has tried to turn the botched effort into a plus. ‘She often says on the campaign trail that she at least has tried to fix health care and has the scars to prove it, but her opponents are gearing up to undercut her message by pointing out that her failure during her husband’s administration ultimately set back the movement for health care overhaul and by arguing that she’s done little to remedy it while in the Senate.’
That’s pretty close to accurate. She did botch it, she hasn’t done much about it since, and I think one of the things that was heartwarming about the nineties, folks, is when people found out what this plan of hers was, they wanted no part of it. It wasn’t just socialistic, it was an abomination. It was going to tell doctors where they could and couldn’t practice. It was going to assign doctors what specialties they could study in medical school and thus go into. You talk about socialistic overreach, it was abhorrent, and people found out about it and wanted literally no part of it. Of course, this always shocks the libs when they find out that when people really are educated on how big government they are, they don’t want any part of it. The same thing is going to have to happen here. I don’t know what her plans are going to say and I don’t know how she’s going to mask it, but I just can’t believe at this early stage she’s going to be totally up front and honest about it and allow people to go out there and cherry-pick the thing. Even if she does come out with a wholly open and honest plan, remember, this is a plan designed to get her elected and probably will differ greatly from the real plan that would be implemented should she be elected president.