RUSH: I want to delve a little deeper into the economy. Over the weekend I was doing a lot of thinking about some of the sound bites we played on Friday with Obama, and I finally saw the video of those sound bites where he was asked by Maria Bartiromo at CNBC about the capital gains rate, and he said, (paraphrasing) ‘Oh, yeah, we gotta increase that at least to 25%, maybe even 30%. Warren Buffett, yeah, Warren Buffett said it would be fine.’ I finally saw the video of this, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His eyes glaze; he has no clue. He does not know what he talks about, particularly when it comes to matters of the economy. Now, we are in a very, very precarious economic circumstance, largely because of the public mindset about it. It’s not as bad as people think, but that doesn’t matter. If they think it’s bad, they’re going to act as though it’s bad, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We do have problems with the banks being overextended on loans and they’re very highly leveraged, and now they’re having to deleverage, and that’s causing all kinds of problems. The absolute worst thing, folks, that could happen to the United States of America in 2009 is if either one of these three, if they happen to get elected — and one of them is going to — raises taxes of any kind, capital gains or any other — it would just be devastating, it would destroy an economy that’s already in problems — not destroy, but it would be painful, you want to talk about 1973, ’75 again, you want to talk about the 1976 to ’79 period with Jimmy Carter, we could face it, if the wrong people get hold of our economy and start raising taxes under the traditional liberal premise of fairness.
Now, one of the phrases that you hear me use constantly: ‘people who make the country work.’ Let me condense that to something narrower. The people who make the country work are the people that are traditionally called ‘the little guys.’ Corporate America does not hire a majority of people in this country. Small business does. By small business, I’m talking about people that may have six employees, ten employees, 20, 25. You have the little guy who is the employee of a small business, you have the mid-little guy who is the small business owner, and he is often confused with the rich and the powerful and the corporate elites. This is a guy or a family, a woman, this is a person who files their personal income tax return as a Subchapter S corporation to take advantage of personal income tax rates as opposed to corporate. Here’s the thing to keep in mind about this. The Democrats and liberals, as they always do, will kill, will harm severely the very people they claim to care for and help. It goes back to the old class envy thing that we’ve discussed and that you’re very well aware of on this program, ‘the rich are not paying their fair share. We’ve gotta raise taxes on the rich.’ Even though it does not benefit and actually harms the little guy and the mid-little guy, the little guy and the mid-little guy have been trained, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you stick it to ’em so they understand the same pain I’m having. You stick it to ’em,’ even though it doesn’t do anything for them.
The people whose tax rates are being talked about being increased, they’ll find a way to deal with it. They always have, always will. One of the ways they deal with it, if you’re a mid-little guy and a small business owner, and your capital gains rate gets raised and your personal income rate goes up, well, you’re not sitting on just a bottomless pool of money in your business that you’re not using. Odds are that a lot of little guys are going to get laid off, a lot of little guys who are the intended beneficiaries of a so-called tax increase plan based on fairness are the people who first suffer by losing their jobs. That is why it is key. Once we get down to the general election, it is key, because Senator McCain is our nominee, and like it or not, that’s the reality we have to deal with. Now, Senator McCain says and does a lot of things that we find objectionable and we have problems with, but he has committed to making the Bush tax cuts permanent and to not raising taxes other than his global warming carbon cap trading — it’s a debacle. We may be screwed anyway. But the bottom line is, that’s the one thing, given the economy and where we’re headed — of course he’s okay on the war. But given the economy — I guess you could say Supreme Court judges as well, but that’s something you gotta sign a blood oath on that. Senator McCain has got to sign a blood oath to supporters on that.
He has to promise that even if Mars collides with Earth, he will not raise taxes, no matter what happens he will not raise taxes. That’s something that people in his inner circle are going to have to work with him on because you look at what’s happening with the banks, you look at the Federal Reserve now talking about taking over the credit markets with more and more regulation. This is not the way to solve the problem that we’re in the midst of. This is the way the Japanese did it back in 1980, it took ’em ten years to get out of their mess, and they’re still not totally out of it. Markets work, people don’t have the patience to let markets work. Hell, there’s a story in the stack here that retailers are fed up with the high rates that credit cards are charging, the service charges, and they want the federal government to set a limit on what the service charges on credit cards can be. Now, they may be too high, but having the government move in and by congressional fiat have credit card rates regulated by the federal government, I mean, this is just more and more handing over of the private sector and the free market to the government to regulate, and again I ask, would somebody point to me where the government does a good job of any of this kind of thing to recommend putting them in charge of even more?
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RUSH: No, I think that’s right. As I sit here now, ladies and gentlemen, I think we had better prepare ourselves for the likelihood — of course nothing is guaranteed right now, but we need to prepare ourselves for the likelihood — that John McCain will be the next president of the United States. It’s a long shot that Mrs. Clinton’s going to get the nomination, but we want her to hang in and give it every shot she’s got. But Obama is in the process of McGoverning himself. He’s in the process of it. McCain might just walk away with this election for a host of reasons. Now, again, this is just the end of March, early April, and anything can change here. I’m speaking with a snapshot of the situation as the exists today. The McCain camp is actively now courting Democrats and independents to vote for him, and there are some that will just on general principle because they like McCain’s liberal Democrat policies, those of his policies that dovetail with liberal Democrats. But there’s going to be a lot of people angry at the end of this whole Democrat process, who are either going to vote for McCain or sit at home. Those left.
Obama is… I mean, Operation Chaos is working, folks. We’re finding out more about Obama and his lack of knowledge; his ultrapure, 100% liberalism, his insincerity. The way he is treating his grandmother is outrageous. There’s a story in the Honolulu newspaper over the weekend about what a great woman this woman is. She was a pioneer for women in the banking industry, of all things, in Hawaii, and he’s treating her as no different than your average Deliverance white racist pig! These kinds of things register with people. They matter with people. And the Jeremiah Wright business? Now, he’s gained ten points over Hillary since the Jeremiah Wright news came out. Now, people ask, ‘How can that be? How can he be up by ten over Hillary even after the Jeremiah Wright business?’ Well, we’ll try to explain that. We’re talking Democrats here, and we’re talking a lot of defections coming from the Clinton camp.
Hillary hasn’t done any better. She’s out there… Frank Rich had a piece in the New York Times today: Why in the world would she continue to lie? Why would such an intelligent woman continue to tell a lie about snipper fire in Bosnia when everybody has proven it wasn’t true, with video and everything else? Well, hey, Mr. Rich, did you ever stop to think that what we got in the early nineties might be true? She’s not that smart! If you take a look and just examine and get rid of your cliches and images about bright women who come out of Ivy League schools in the Northeast, she may not be that bright. Or she may just be arrogant and condescending to the point she thinks that she could withstand it like they did stuff in the nineties. Regardless, it isn’t very smart. So she’s hurting herself, too. So McCain, a snapshot right now, looks like he could handily defeat either of these two people — and I gotta tell you: The Democrats know it.
Operation Chaos has ’em teed off, and they also were teed off because they had themselves already in the White House. So they’re going to try to make McCain into Bush III. They’re going to go out there and they’re going to do everything they can to try to position McCain as a conservative. McCain’s got a challenge, and he and his campaign people have a real decision to make. He’s got two options. He can go for victory by continuing to be seen as a ‘moderate’ and as a ‘maverick,’ and as seeking votes from the other party and from moderates and from independents. Or he can, as some suggest he needs to do, secure his base, i.e., go for conservatives who are… Every time he opens his mouth they get madder at him, like that world affairs speech. They just get angrier and angrier. And then our old buddy Mort Kondracke on the Fox News Channel on Saturday with the Beltway Boys…
I think Mort’s tweaking me. Mort suggesting that if McCain really wanted to wrap this up, he could choose Christie Todd Whitman to be his vice presidential running mate. Christie Todd Whitman has been so ostracized from the party, she wrote a book called, Hey, I’m a Republican, Too, or, Hey, It’s My Party, Too, or whatever. So his options are to continue to do what he’s doing and go get the Democrats and the moderates, or change field and go try to solidify the Republican base. If he does that, then the Democrats are going to say, ‘See? He’s just a conservative! He’s just Bush III,’ which McCain does not want to be seen as Bush III, nor does he want to be seen as a conservative. That’s rather obvious. So if he goes the route he’s going now, the Republican Party is going to change. It’s going to grow and swell, at least the numbers of votes, with liberals and Democrats becoming members and people are going to say, ‘See…?’ Well, wait for the conclusion after this.
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RUSH: Let me start this again, and I’ll make it very brief. McCain’s got two options because the Democrats, Operation Chaos, they’re imploding. He can beat either one of those two. Got the Democrats burned, they are fit to be tied, they thought the White House was theirs, Operation Chaos tearing them apart. They were hoping to hide. Liberals have to hide who they are. Operation Chaos is causing all kinds of things to be learned about both Hillary and Obama. We would not have learned half of what we know about them or even less had there not been Operation Chaos. So McCain, in a snapshot today, McCain’s it, and he could be a big winner, and his options are to continue to pursue liberals and moderates and independents. In other words, he thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt II; he’s not. And he’s not Bush III, either. Just continue to position himself as Gerald Ford II and go get the liberals and the independents and the moderates, or he can try to solidify the base and get Republican conservatives who are upset with him right now and who get more so every time he makes a speech. So if he does that, if he solidifies the base and makes a move from this point forward, then the Democrats are going to point fingers and say, ‘See, he’s just a conservative. He’s just been hiding it, but he’s really a conservative, he’s no different than a Bush III, no different than Reagan, he’s just a conservative,’ and they’ll do that to try to rally independents and Democrats to come back home away from McCain.
So the odds are that McCain is not going to make a huge public effort to solidify the Republican base and he’s going to try to win this by taking advantage of the absolute chaos that has befallen the Democrat Party: recalcitrant, angry liberals and Democrats fed up with what’s happening to both Obama and Hillary will look to McCain, who’s not that bad an option for them, in terms of policy, in terms of things that he has authored and cosponsored in terms of legislation. So, snapshot as of today, let’s pretend the election is today, and that McCain wins it and he wins it with a sizable margin, and he does so by attracting Democrats, liberals, and independents to his otherwise Republican coalition. Do you know what’s going to happen then folks? I’m not trying to depress you; I’m trying to prepare you. You know what I’m going to say, Brian? You know what’s going to happen then? We are going to have a revival of the whole notion that Rockefeller Republicans, that country club blue-blood Republicans are the way to go and the way to get victories, that conservatism, the conservatism of Reagan is dead. Look, the Republicans will say, we just won big. We won big against two people that were figured to be unbeatable, Obama and Hillary, we’ve won this, and how did we do it? We did it by going out and getting liberals and independents and Democrats. Then we conservatives are going to be essentially — I mean, it’s going to revitalize our movement, it is going to energize our movement after it depresses some people.
But a movement needs a party, and if this thing plays out as I see it now, the Rockefeller Republicans may think that they have wrested control — by Rockefeller Republicans I mean, there is no conservative. There really weren’t ever any conservatives. Reagan really wasn’t a conservative, they say. We’re all moderates. We are moderate centrists that sometimes lean to the right. That is how they want the party to be ID’d. And if McCain is indeed victorious this way — that’s why I told you way, way back, the party is going to be redefined. The party is going to change for quite a long time if this all shakes out the way it appears to be shaking out, and part of this is the fact that I’m confident Hillary could not beat McCain, and I’m even more so that Obama can’t. I think Democrats are starting to realize this now, and that’s why they’re trying to get Hillary to get out of there because they want all this negative stuff, from the Jeremiah Wright — we’re now discovering that Obama, who’s been trying to hide his liberalism — we can’t say his middle name, we can’t say that he’s a liberal, we found out now that on a questionnaire that he filled out in 1996, he actually authored and signed on to a bunch of pure far-left socialist policies. He is what he is. Liberals are liberals, and they do everything they can to deny it, including not let you call ’em that. They want to be called progressives. They know they can’t win national elections, being honest and being who they are. That’s one of the great things about Operation Chaos. Operation Chaos is bringing who they really are to the front for everyone to see.
Let’s go to the audio sound bites and illustrate this a little bit. Operation Chaos, CNN’s Larry King Alive on Friday night. He spoke with radio host Stephanie Miller. I love it when Larry King does talk radio hosts. He gets people that have no audience, I mean relatively speaking. He goes out and gets talk show hosts with relatively no audience and asks some questions. He asks Stephanie Miller, ‘A massive turnout in Pennsylvania means what, Stephanie, if that happens?’
MILLER: It’s hard to tell with Rush Limbaugh monkeying with things, but I —
KING: What’s he doing?
MILLER: He’s telling his listeners to vote for Hillary to keep this going, to keep the chaos going, because I think they want to run against Hillary because she has much higher negatives if you look at any poll.
KING: In other words, don’t care about your country?
MILLER: Yeah.
RUSH: (laughing) Larry King says, ‘In other words, don’t care about your country?’ Larry, Larry, dear, sweet Larry, who attends his eight-year-old son’s Little League baseball games. In fact, Cindy Adams reported today in the New York Post that Larry King got into an argument with an umpire over a bad call with his eight-year-old. He got thrown out and has been relegated to the center field bleachers from now on to watch his son play. That’s what Cindy Adams reported. Anyway, so, ‘In other words, don’t care about your country?’ This is all about the country, Larry. It’s all about saving it. It’s all about saving it from the disaster that would be Hillary or Obama. This is not about getting Hillary nominated. This is about utter chaos. This is about the Democrat Party essentially eliminating itself as a viable opponent in this election. You may be saying, ‘Rush, after all you just said about McCain, why are you doing this? Don’t you think it would be better maybe to lose? If the country is going to go to hell, don’t you think it would be better to lose and let the Democrats take the credit for it?’ Now, I know there’s some thinking about that. In other words, it took a Jimmy Carter to give us a Ronald Reagan, but you can’t run the risk that you’re only going to end up with a one-year Democrat presidency, it’s going to be a disaster. It’s never wise to lose on purpose, but here’s where it boils down to.
It’s going to boil down to a single issue or two, and that is the economy, and I’m telling you, if these Democrats get elected, either of them, it doesn’t matter, and they do half of what they’re promising in terms of tax increases and reining in corporate profits, it’s going to be, with everything else going on in the credit markets, the mortgage crisis, more and more regulation of the whole credit markets, it’s going to be an absolute disaster. The people that make this country work are going to be hurt beyond our ability to describe it, and those very people are the ones who think that raising taxes is going to benefit them because they’ve been trained to feel good when they think somebody that has more money than they have feels a little pain. Senator McCain is on record as saying he’s going to extend the Bush tax cuts and that he’s not going to raise taxes, with one caveat. If he actually does move forward on his global warming bill, that’s going to raise taxes. Well, it’s going to raise costs, it’s going to raise the costs that corporations face to do business, which when those get passed on, it’s going to be massive costs. So there’s a little offset there.
But look at the three candidates that we got to choose from here — McCain, Obama, and Hillary — the only one that we even stand a halfway decent chance of limiting this economic downturn and, by the way, turning it around very rapidly is McCain. But I’m going to be very careful saying this, because if I say this kind of thing too often and too frequently, the liberal Democrats and independents who are in favor of McCain might not like to be reminded that he’s promised not to raise taxes and make the Bush tax cuts permanent. This is how I could hurt him, by helping him. Well, not helping him. It’s a tightrope your host has to walk here, folks. If anybody can do it, I can do it. But I’m just laying this out for you as I have assessed the situation as of today. It could change tomorrow, because who knows. Everybody knows that the unexpected happens regularly in politics. Caveat, snapshot as of today, a month from now I could have an entirely different view of this, and if I do, I’ll, of course, share it with you.
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RUSH: This is Buyar in New York City. Buyar, thank you for waiting, and welcome to the program, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. This is any first time and I’m glad because I’m disgusted with CNN and many other outlets. I’m a journalist myself, by profession, and I’m writing a book about Second World War, and I came to this country in 1989. I’m a Democrat, but I’m against withdrawal from Iraq, and you can call me a conservative Democrat right now.
RUSH: You’re from Iraq. You are a Democrat. You say you’re a conservative Democrat right now?
CALLER: Yes, sir, and the way that these so-called mainstream media has been trying to push Obama is just disgusting, and also I think that the —
RUSH: So you support Hillary?
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: What’s going to happen when they — if they — throw her overboard, if she ends up, you know, being treated like a girl and with disrespect and so forth? What are you going to do?
CALLER: Well, I’m going to tell you, Rush. McCain is going to carry by double-digit margin New York State.
RUSH: I knew it. I knew it. Buyar, thank you for confirming my instincts, which have yet to fail me. If Hillary’s tossed, McCain is going to get his vote and a lot of other Hillary voters.
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RUSH: All right, first hour, as always, is about this time, is over. But there are two more to go, ladies and gentlemen. Fastest three hours in media, more fun here than you’re going to have anywhere else today.
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RUSH: Al in Maywood, Illinois, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, free Rush Limbaugh dittos.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: Rush, Maywood is outside Chicago in the state of Illinois. You know, the people of Illinois do not know Obama very well. He was only in the legislature for a very short time. I have an advantage, though. I have a friend who is a former head of the department of the state government and a former legislator, another gentleman who is a former legislator. The legislator is a Republican. The Democrat is a former department head. Both, in a conversation with me, told me two things. Obama is a nice guy, but he’s very, very far to the left. The Republican legislator told me that he’s probably so far to the left, he’s the most liberal legislator in the history of Illinois legislators.
RUSH: Now, that’s saying something.
CALLER: And we’ve had some very liberal legislators.
RUSH: That would be saying something.
CALLER: Well, he is. You know, he’s rated as the number one most liberal senator. I mean, when you’re to the left of Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton is to the left of Stalin, I think you’re really very ultra-liberal. And again, the entire nation is not aware — and I’m talking from legislators who served with Obama, who know who he is philosophically, that he is an extremely left-wing politician.
RUSH: Well, I think this is going to come out. Al, thanks very much for the phone call. I want to go back and make a point here, because a lot of people — I have not meant to depress you today, it’s a reality check of what the Republican Party is headed for if Senator McCain campaigns as we expect him to. Now, let me go back to the part where, you know, play these Morton Kondracke sound bites and he talked about the way McCain is going to have a different tone than the first Bush. I don’t know, the Bush administration’s new tone in the first term, I don’t know how McCain can outdo that, letting Ted Kennedy write the education bill and all that. But anyway, all these Republicans, these moderate Rockefeller Republicans, they’re just going to go nuts with glee and joy if indeed McCain beats Obama big time and does so by attracting moderates and independents and liberals and Democrats to vote Republican. And they’re going to say, ‘See? See? There really isn’t any conservatism. Reagan wasn’t really a conservative. There are moderate centrists, and that’s what this party needs to always be; that’s how this party will win.’
Now, I normally, only in jest, start bragging. But in this case if my reality check proves out and if indeed my scenario proves to be the case, that McCain wins and wins big over Obama and does so by attracting liberal Democrats and independents and all that, there’s going to be one factor that nobody will concede nor admit to on the Republican side. That will be Operation Chaos. Operation Chaos was the brainchild, the brilliantly conceived and so far flawlessly executed strategy of the nation’s leading conservative media voice. Were it not therefore for the conservatives in this country acting as operatives, Operation Chaos, the Democrat Party would not have been exposed like it’s being exposed today, both Obama and Hillary. So while McCain and these conservative elites in the media, in Washington and New York, pat themselves on the back for redefining the party and say, ‘See, this is how you win. You don’t win with conservatism, you don’t win with right-wingers, you win with centrists and liberals and moderates and you put together a great coalition.’ The fact is it would never have happened, if it does happen, if the Republican Party had been left to its own devices because the Republican Party, as of now, is not willing to go after either Hillary or Obama. They are scared to death to do it. They’re sitting around and letting us do it for them. They would not do it.
If it were not for us and Operation Chaos and a lot of other conservatives continually exposing for the American people the pure ultra-liberalism of Obama and all the other defects that both Hillary and Obama possess, making it much more attractive for people to vote Republican, if it weren’t for us doing this, then there’s no guarantee that the snapshot that I see today of McCain winning would come true. The Republican Party is not on the field. The Republican Party’s taken a day off, they’ve taken a month off, they’re letting everybody else do their dirty work and exposing the Democrats and the liberals, and we’re happy to do it because, as conservatives, we want them to lose. We want liberals to lose. We don’t want our taxes raised. We don’t want our national security threatened; we don’t want it imperiled. We don’t want our borders wide open. Still iffy. We don’t want anything of what the left offers. We see their track record, we see the history; it’s disaster, especially in the current economic climate.
So, you just keep in mind that if that scenario comes to pass and after the election Obama is defeated handily by McCain and the Republicans start saying, ‘See? See? See? This is how you do it. We don’t need those right-wingers. We don’t need the evangelicals. We need independents and moderates.’ We will be here to remind them that, had it not been for us exposing who these liberals really are, because if you’re trying to attract liberals, McCain’s not going to go out and attack liberals. All these right wing so-called conservative media elites, they’re not going to attack liberals, they’re not going to expose them, or moderates, because they’re trying to attract them. We are. If it hadn’t been for that — I’m looking down the road — left to these people who support McCain and his campaign and the RNC, they wouldn’t win. So my point is, they will be wrong when they say conservatism doesn’t matter, there are no right-wingers, we don’t need conservatives in the Republican Party to win, they will be wrong. If they do win, as I have laid out, it would not have been possible without conservatives.