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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I’m going to tell you why we’re having fun here, because we’re getting the truth out. This is a program exclusively devoted to the truth, a relentless, unstoppable pursuit of the truth. I don’t say this bragging even though I can because it ain’t bragging if you can do it.

I’m watching everywhere, there’s one exception, there’s a couple people on Fox and one person on CNBC that’s getting this right. Other than that, this program and other similar programs on talk radio are the only place you can go to get the truth about what is happening here, what precipitated this, what caused it, and what the solutions are and what happened yesterday in the bailout vote. That’s why we’re having fun. I am jazzed here to be able to provide the truth to people, which is what we always do, and it’s frustrating, but it’s also comical to watch these so-called wizards of smart, the so-called elite media, they’re not elite in


any way you would define it, except a superiorist attitude. They’re not elite in social standing, not elite in income, they’re not elite in job status, they’re not elites, period. But they are all on the same page and they are all blinded. They have blinders on. They are not interested in truth. Truth eludes them because they don’t seek it. The truth is not even afraid of these guys, in the Drive-Bys, because they’re not trying to find truth. By the way, here’s the phone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882 is the number. And if you want to go e-mail, it’s ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

Here’s another reason why I’m having fun. As I alluded briefly in the previous hour, do you all understand the glorious opportunity this whole thing presents conservatism? We’re just absent a conservative leader, but we’ve got the greatest opportunity we’re going to have in I don’t know how long. Every disaster, every aspect of this disaster can be laid at the feet of liberalism. The blame, we can show how this has happened time and time again, every time liberalism has unchecked power and unchecked control to assert itself, people are feeling miserably, in terms of economics, they are feeling the crisis. They’re being told in the Drive-Bys it’s the Republicans’ fault. It’s liberalism’s fault. If there’s somebody out there who could make this case, we could wipe out Obama in a landslide; we could retake the House and retake the Senate. It’s just sitting there. It’s like Allstate, we’re in good hands here. It’s right in the middle of our hands here, and yet our presidential nominee is out there saying, bipartisanship is tough. Bipartisanship isn’t tough. Bipartisanship is gutless.

Bipartisanship is just like liberalism; it’s the most gutless choice you can make. What’s tough is standing on and for your principles when you and they are under assault. That’s what’s hard. That’s what’s challenging. Bipartisanship is easy. You simply compromise part of what you believe to go along with people who want to destroy you and say, ‘Look at me. I can get along with the other side.’ I could do that 25 times a day. We all could. That doesn’t take any effort, just like it doesn’t take any effort to be liberal. Now, I want to explain something I said in a previous hour. In talking about the blame game here, because I sit here and I smile at the opportunity it presents me. I still cringe at part of it, though. So much of the so-called conservative media is out there saying, with their hands wringing, ‘Both sides are at fault. This is a bipartisan problem. Both sides have nothing to be proud of today.’ Wrong. Both sides are not at fault. Both sides are not to blame. I’ll give you the names and you tell me what their ideology is. Barney Frank, Franklin Raines, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Jamie Gorelick, Jim Johnson, Janet Reno, Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid. Tell me, are any of them Republicans? Any of them Democrats? Yeah. Are any of them liberals? Are any of them conservatives?


There’s one ideology here that’s to blame here, and in the last hour I said the only thing that the Republicans screwed up was when they conducted oversight hearings in 2004 where the regulator came in and spelled out the problems. Four years ago at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Republicans didn’t do anything about it. Well, here’s why. As was pointed out yesterday, this whole subprime thing and the whole concept of lending to people who never, ever stood a chance of paying back the loans over the turn of the loan, it’s a racial thing, it’s a minority thing. You listen to what Barney Frank was saying yesterday and Maxine Waters and Lacy Clay, the things we pointed out they said four years ago. It’s clear what this was about. The liberals use race to get away with everything because it stifles any legitimate criticism. Imagine, 2004, if those hearings had occurred and the Republicans said, okay, we’re going to clean this mess up, we’re going to shut this down and Franklin Raines is gone, we’re going to do this, that, and the other thing, we’re going to straighten this out, you know what would have happened?

Barney Frank, Lacy Clay, Maxine Waters, would have brought into the committee room an endless parade of minorities looking as bedraggled and near homeless as they could make ’em, and they’d be blaming Chris Shays and all these other Republicans on that committee for throwing these people out of their homes. The Republicans knew that, and so they said, ‘There’s no reason to tackle this. We’ll be defeated in our own reelection.’ So this whole business of pandering to minorities, affordable housing, meaning they get a house without being able to pay for it or even having to pay for it, shuts off any attempt to correct it. This is a stratagem that the left uses constantly and frequently. It’s on display now in the presidential campaign. If Barack Obama loses it’s strictly because he’s black. It’s not because his policies are reckless and dangerous, not because he’s incompetent, it’s not because his associations and he, likely, are nothing but extreme radical leftists who want to remake this country as socialist, oh, no, no, no, wouldn’t have anything to do with that. It’s just because this country is racist and black.

Now, I’ve checked the e-mails. People disagree with me, I understand this. Well, no, I don’t understand it. After 20 years plus, I don’t understand how anybody would disagree with me on anything. You always know that at the end of the day I’m proven right on this stuff. So I mentioned yesterday that the Pelosi Democrat Congress got exactly what she wanted. She wanted this bill defeated and she wanted the media blaming Republicans for it, and Barney Frank and the guys went out there on cue, blamed Republicans, blamed McCain, the AP today with the big story, bailout failure lends credence to McCain’s incompetence. He flew into Washington, couldn’t get it done, it’s a Republican problem, they got exactly what they wanted. They got Armageddon, they got crisis, they got destruction, they’ve got Great Depression 2, and they’ve got the media out there running interference for them claiming it’s a Republican problem. This is election-year politics.

New York Times today: ”Lawmakers Grope for Resolution as They Attempt to Avoid Economic Calamity’ — In the end, only 65 Republicans — just one-third of those voting — backed the plan despite personal pleas from President Bush and encouragement from their presidential nominee, Senator John McCain. By contrast, 140 Democrats, or 60 percent, voted in favor.’ Well, that’s not the story. The story is that 40% of Democrats voted against it. Not the percentage of Democrats that voted for it. Forty percent of Democrats voted against the bill and the Republicans saw that happening, and a lot of these Democrats voting against it are in highly contested reelection races in their districts. When the Republicans saw these guys voting against it, they knew full well what was going on. Democrats can go out and campaign for reelection, ‘I voted against that bill, you know it, I know it. You weren’t for it. I heard what you said, reelect me.’ And then it even says, ‘People’s reelections played into this to a much larger degree than I would have imagined,’ said Representative Deborah Pryce, a former member of the Republican leadership who is retiring. They saw it. They saw that reelection was what this is about.

Why should the Republicans put their necks in the noose for this when the Democrats, in tight races, were going to vote against it in order to get reelected? And why were they going to vote against it in order to get reelected? Because they knew even in Democrat districts their constituents were mightily opposed to this. So they saw what was coming. Also, from The Prowler today at the American Spectator: ‘House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered her Majority Whip, Jim Clyburn, to essentially not do his job in the run-up to the vote on Monday for the negotiated Wall Street bailout plan, according to House Democrat leadership aides. ‘Clyburn was not whipping the votes you would have expected him to, in part because he was uncomfortable doing it, in part because we didn’t want the push for votes to be successful,’ says one leadership aide. ‘All we needed was enough to potentially get us over the finish line, but we wanted the Republicans to be the ones to do it. This was not going to be a Democrat-passed bill if the Speaker had anything to say about it,” quote, unquote, Democrat leadership aide. This was not going to be and it never was going to be a Democrat passed bill.

They were going to hang this around the Republicans’ necks just like they attempted to lose in Iraq and hang that around Bush’s neck. ‘During the floor vote, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Democrat Conference chair Rahm Emanuel could be seen monitoring the vote on the floor, and gauging whether or not more Democrat votes were needed. Clyburn had expressed concerns, says the leadership aide, of being asked to press members of the Black and Hispanic caucuses on a bill he was certain those constituencies would not want passed.’ Do you realize the Congressional Black Caucus voted against this? ”It worked out, because we didn’t have a dog in this fight. We negotiated. We gave the White House a bill. It was up to the Republicans to get the 100 plus votes they needed and they couldn’t do it,’ said another Democrat leadership aide. Emanuel, who served as a board member for Freddie Mac, one of the agencies that precipitated the economic crisis the nation now finds itself in, had no misgivings about taking a leadership role in tanking the bill. ‘He was cheerleading us along, mothering the votes,’ says the aide. ‘We wanted enough to put the pressure on the Republicans and Congressman Emanuel was charged with making it close enough. He did a great job.” They just fell a little short.

So contrary to everybody badgering the Republicans for saying they got upset and changed their vote because of Pelosi’s speech, that may be what they said, but that’s not what changed their votes. They simply were paying attention. They were simply paying attention to what the Democrats were doing on the House floor, how they were voting, and they saw what was coming. They saw this whole thing was going to be hung around their neck. Everybody up there knew that 80% of the American people wanted no part of. That’s why Pelosi wanted to hang it around the Republicans’ neck if she could. Now, regardless of what CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post might say about yesterday’s vote, the Democrat leadership knew exactly where they were. They knew the math just didn’t add up. They went ahead and they held the vote. The Dow plunged 778 points, some members of the majority have gone around saying that the Democrat leadership was being a little less than honest about how many votes they had. They knew their count and where we were, and knew it wasn’t enough.

This is an indictment. They knew they were going to lose. They knew, and they still went ahead, Pelosi did, and trashed the market with this. Here are some vote tallies that are interesting. ‘The number of additional votes needed to pass the bailout was not many. They needed 12. The number of Democrats on Barney Frank’s committee who voted ‘no,’ 12. The number of Democrats total who voted ‘no’ on the plan, 95.’ Had Barney Frank been able to get his committee members to vote or Pelosi, the Democrats, or had Barack Obama bothered to pick up the phone and support the plan that he said he favored, it would have been passed. ‘Aides to Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure.’ Democrats had the votes to make this pass. They didn’t want it to pass with their votes being the majority. They wanted to hang this around the necks of the Republicans.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: John Boehner, the House Republican leader, put out a statement today. ‘The presidential candidates’ support for increasing the FDIC cap is welcome news. Increasing the FDIC cap is a proposal put on the table by Roy Blunt and House Republicans but ruled out by Democrats during the negotiations that led to yesterday’s unsuccessful vote.’ So what Boehner is saying here, is, ‘Hey. We tried, we tried to up the FDIC insurance cap from a hundred grand to 250, but the Democrats said, ‘No, wouldn’t let it be part of the bill.” So today Obama is out claiming it’s his idea and wants it in the next bill, wants the president to do it, and McCain’s out there saying it’s his idea, too, when it was the Republicans’ idea, and it was thrown out by the Democrats. Interesting piece from The Politico, by the way.

Who wrote this? I want to make sure I properly credit them. Ben Smith and Glenn Thrush. ‘Meanwhile, neither [presidential] candidate appears to have fully grappled with the force that brought the House bill down: its deep unpopularity. Many of the ‘no’ voters are members of both parties facing tough reelection campaigns, and many challengers [of these guys] announced they would vote no in the hope of drawing a contrast with a threatened incumbent. The two presidential candidates have signaled they would support a compromise, though neither formally signed on to the House bill.’ Boy, there’s so much profundity in the news today! ‘[N]either candidate appears to have fully grappled with the force that brought the House bill down: its deep unpopularity.’ That’s just a side light. That’s a, ‘Eh, no big deal. So the public doesn’t want it. Screw them! What do they know? Is the attitude of Washington on this,’ and they failed to grapple. McCain being out there talking about bipartisanship is a tough thing. Ugh.

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