RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, in a manner of speaking, on the floor of the Senate just now, I, your host, have been partially blamed for the housing crisis and the financial credit crunch. They have moved on from blaming George W. Bush to blaming me. Senator Dick Durbin.
DURBIN: We adopted the mentality that was dominant in this city for so long that first get government off my back, government is my enemy, deregulate. You know, that was a pretty popular mantra around here 10 or 15 years ago, and in fact a lot of people laughed about it, and even people like the venerable, wise critic Rush Limbaugh said, ‘You know, if we closed down the federal government, no one would even notice.’ Well, he was wrong when he said it, and he certainly would be wrong today.
RUSH: What is he talking about? I can only assume that he is linking me now to the push for deregulation that led to what he thinks caused the crisis in the mortgage business, right, and now all these investment houses on Wall Street being threatened? Look, the bottom line again is there is no deregulation! The people that were in charge of regulating these places were Democrats like Dick Durbin, and they destroyed the mortgage business. Deregulation didn’t. The Clinton years demanding certain loans be made was overregulation. It was the government regulating lenders saying, ‘You gotta do this and you gotta loan to people that can’t pay it back,’ and so forth. I get lumped into this with my support for the government shut down, said nobody would notice? I didn’t say nobody would notice, I said we’d all celebrate like we’re getting on a cruise ship and leaving out for a little cruise here. The only guy I know that got really upset about it was the guy in charge of the sleigh rides at Jellystone Park. CNN found that guy, he was in bad shape because his sleigh ride concession got shut down, being paid for by the government. That was all a scam, government shutdown, to try to link the government shutdown to this?
Dick Durbin, the guy who compared our troops to Nazi thugs, forced to apologize for this, Dick Durbin, who had more enmity for our troops than he did for the enemy. And Dick Durbin, one of the chief backers, mentors, and sponsors of The Messiah, that would be Barack Obama. By the way, while we’re on this subject, grab sound bite 10 and 11. Here’s a Biden. This is on the Early Show today with Maggie Rodriguez, who asked, ‘Let me ask you finally, Senator Biden, what do you say to a voter who wonders, if given the severity of the crisis right now, whether it’s the right time to put their faith in a president that has no executive experience and just a handful of years in the Senate?’ Question about Obama there.
BIDEN: My Lord, take a look at what — who got us in this hole, whose policies? This has been a Republican philosophy of letting Wall Street do what they want and the middle class be damned. (rimshot) It’s about time we change it. (rimshot) If I sound like I’m angry, I am fighting mad for middle-class people who have been scapegoat of this economy because of the policies of the McCains and the Bushes. (rimshot)
RUSH: The McCains and the Bushes. This is just absurd. It’s exactly opposite this, and McCain answered this today on the Today Show. Matt Lauer said, ‘Fundamentally speaking, isn’t there something wrong with the fundamentals right now that’s causing these nightmares?’
MCCAIN: There’s nothing wrong with the workers of America. I believe that they are the fundamentals. You may not; others may not. I think that the worker of America is the reason why we’ve been the preeminent economy in the world for a long, long period of time. America is in crisis today because of greed, excess, and corruption, and people walking away with pay packages for failed enterprises and inside the Beltway old boy network that led to the kind of corruption that we’ve seen and the patchwork quilt, the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies, which has never been reformed. We need a 9/11 Commission, and we need a commission to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
RUSH: No, we don’t. We need prosecutors, we need special prosecutors. We need a down-home, old-fashioned legal investigation from the Justice Department or something to find out what went wrong here at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac. See, these guys want to lay this off on Wall Street because they think Wall Street is a big Republican firm. Goldman Sachs, run by Democrats. Most of these Wall Street firms are run by Democrats. Everybody forgets this. Liberal Democrats. You got some Republicans up there, but most of them are in the private sector and business. These guys are leeches trying to live off what other people make, taking fees for investing their clients’ money into things. They’re leeches. They’re typical liberal Democrats, making it off other people’s money. Somebody does need to have a serious investigation into not the regulatory, the alphabet soup of regulatory, we need to find out, investigate how it is that the Democrat Party came to totally take over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and turn them into political operations, when their purpose was to somehow deal with the mortgage — You can’t leave Pelosi out of this. Last night on CNBC’s Crisis on Wall Street, Nancy Pelosi, ‘Does your party deserve some of the responsibility here?’
PELOSI: No. John McCain said that this is a result of overregulation by the Democrats in Congress. Either he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or he’s misrepresenting the facts as he knows them, but it’s simply not true. In fact, we passed legislation in the nineties that would have held this administration in good stead. They cannot put this at our doorstep. This is all about the mismanagement of the Bush administration, mismanagement of the economy, mismanaging of housing crisis, mismanaging of our energy challenges, mismanagement across the board.
RUSH: This woman, she’s more of an empty suit than Obama. Their combined intelligence, their combined knowledge, the ability to express it, you could put in a thimble. This is just laughable. This is so stock. This is so simplistic. These are somewhat complex things that have happened, but they’re not that complex. But the whole Obama campaign, the whole Democrat playbook is simplistic. Got a financial problem on Wall Street, blame Bush, gas prices, blame Bush, health care, blame insurance companies, gasoline prices, blame Big Oil. Ms. Pelosi, you people are so, so, so predictable. You’re not even exciting anymore. It’s getting boring having to cover Nancy Pelosi.