RUSH: So the Democrats preach for 18 months that the economy is in a depression. They actually try to destroy the economy with their left-wing policies. Don’t forget this. You know, people are out there saying, ‘Rush, it’s very important to tell people about Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, but it’s the economy. The economy is all people care about right now.’ These two things are linked, ladies and gentlemen. You cannot separate Obama’s alliances with socialist leftists and say it has nothing to do with the economy. Critics are wrong that Ayers has nothing to do with the economy.
Stanley Kurtz made the point on Fox this morning that Ayers and Obama, that alliance included the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. They funneled more than $100 million to community organizers, including ACORN, which is very much at the core of this financial mess, pressuring banks to loan to noncreditworthy borrowers. The story is the hundred million dollars to the Annenberg Challenge was designed to change the focus of education, but it just didn’t work out. Anyway, Obama was given 100 to $150 million with Bill Ayers to have dramatic changes, and they’re playing it down. I’ll tell you what, it’s been hilarious to see all these leftists today warning that McCain-Palin attacks are going to hurt McCain. I have stories all over the place here, ‘You know, these attacks that McCain’s getting into now on Obama and Palin and her attacks, why, this is just going to hurt ’em.’
Really? If it was going to hurt ’em you’d be encouraging them, Drive-Bys, to continue these attacks. Here is the thing. Here’s what’s going on. This again is why Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and all these people are important. The Drive-By Media has done everything it can to keep Obama in a cocoon. They’ve got his wife taped up in a closet somewhere with tape over her mouth. Biden is off the campaign trail with a sick mother-in-law. They’re taking all the people that are gaffe prone or that hate the country and make it obvious they’re just angry and filled with rage, and they’re silenced. We can’t find Obama. It’s typical of what liberal guys do it their wives. They shut ’em up when they get too noisy, when they get too vocal. Just hide them away someplace and present a picture, ‘Aw, she with the kids.’ Oh, yeah? She’s with the kids who are seven and ten who go to school with Ayers’ kids who are 29 and 30? Right. They have a little birthday party sometime this afternoon, right? So this is incredibly important, and more and more people are tuning in and paying attention to these questions, as you get closer and closer to the election. Here’s Sarah Palin. We have her today. She was in Jacksonville, and yesterday morning in Clearwater, Florida. Here’s her great line on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bouncing off Obama and his claim, he didn’t know Ayers was a terrorist.
PALIN: Since he got called out on his plans to meet unconditionally with terror state leaders like Ahmadinejad, will he now claim that he was unaware of his radical background?
AUDIENCE: No! (cheering and applause)
RUSH: I wonder, folks, what the polls would show if Palin were a distinct answer option to the question, ‘Who are you voting for?’ How many of you in this audience are going to vote for McCain simply because you can vote for Sarah Palin? How many of you are actually voting for Palin? How many of you have decided you are not going to sit this out, but you’re now energized and you are going to vote, because you’re either voting against Obama or you’re voting for Sarah Palin? I’ll bet if they asked that question, people would be stunned at the answer. And I’ll be honest, I myself, ladies and gentlemen, for the sake of effectiveness have pondered the notion of portraying, presenting this election as Palin versus Obama, because the contrast is distinct. She is on fire. Here she hammers Obama on Ayers yesterday in Clearwater, Florida.
PALIN: One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers. And according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist, and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our US capitol,’ and then there’s even more to the story. Barack Obama says that Ayers was just someone in the neighborhood, but that’s less than truthful. His own top advisors said that they were quote ‘certainly friendly.’ In fact Obama held one of his first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers’ living room, and they worked together on various projects in Chicago.
RUSH: And she continued.
PALIN: These are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes.
AUDIENCE: No!
PALIN: Remember, that’s what Joe Biden had said. And I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America: as the greatest source for good in this world! I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.
RUSH: Amen! Bullseye! That’s why this is important. Obama’s alliances — not associations — are with people who do not like this country. They are the ones who have mentored him. And if you think that that’s not relevant to the economy, take a look at what people think the US economy should be, people like Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. It should be one of central planning, the government doling out everything to everybody according to its own definition, usually based on ‘fairness.’ You know that fairness is one of the liberal foundation building blocks, the reason they say they’re doing everything. The subprime mortgage crisis was all brought about by the concept of fairness, the Democrats thinking, ‘It’s not fair that poor people who can’t afford homes don’t have them.’
And so they set about long ago to rectify the situation, to put people who have no business owning a home because they can’t pay for one nevertheless being given mortgages that are today worthless, and then those same people in the interests of fairness forcing lending institutions to invest in these subprime loans — and the lending institutions knew they were worthless, and so they had to start packaging them and selling them around to each other as assets. So All these financial institutions — to keep the government off their back and trying to turn these worthless assets into something — were packaging them and selling them, hoping that somewhere down the road that the housing bubble would continue, the prices would continue to rise and at some point these mortgages would be worth something somehow; if not mortgages, as securities.
None of it happened because the price of housing plummeted. Well, it wasn’t gonna work because it was all a fraud to begin with, it was impossible. It was not possible for this to work. Obama’s fingerprints are all over this. He was working with ACORN and the people who pressured Congress — well, they pressured the Democrats in Congress — and pressured the lending institutions to make this happen. And Barney Frank knows what’s up, and Barney Frank’s out there now saying that the attacks on all this are just racism. Republican racists are now making these attacks. Barney Frank and the leftists believe it’s totally appropriate for people who can’t afford homes to live in them as long as they’re paid for by you and me. It’s not fair that you and I have homes and they don’t, and so they’re going to see that people have homes.
It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of the liberal concept of ‘fairness’ in being a motivation for what they do. And, of course, who’s opposed to fairness? It’s sort of like the environmentalist wackos claim all they’re doing is trying to get clean water and clean air and save the planet. Well, who wants dirty water? Who wants dirty air? Who wants a destroyed planet? Nobody does! By the same token, they’re out there saying, ‘It’s only fair that the rich pay more taxes. It’s only fair that CEOs only be able to make so much. It’s only fair that some people get thrown in jail for…’ Of course, who’s opposed to fairness? So this is just one of the many tricks that is being used. But what you have to remember is that their definition of fairness is not yours. Their definition of fairness is most of the country getting screwed in order for liberals to continue to make more and more Americans dependent on government for their daily existence.
Be right back and continue.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: As I say, the Democrats preached for 18 months the economy is in a depression; they actually tried to destroy the economy with their left-wing policies; they have tried to destroy the economy in your mind. They have been working to create a psychological recession, slash, depression, for years. They succeed in driving the economy into a precipitous gulch, and now they blame it on the Republicans. They tried to lose the war for years hoping to use that as a political issue, but we’re winning, so they dropped that immediately. This is why all of this is terribly and crucially important, ladies and gentlemen. We have an entire political party and left-wing ideological apparatus that’s already trying to destroy the country, even before they get into power! Imagine what they will do if they succeed. For six years they have tried to make you think your country is not what it should be or can be and its greatest days are behind us and because of that we need significant change, not to revive the greatness of America from what they say is the past, we need to rebuild it, we need to change it, because it can’t be what it was.
They’re already in the process of trying to destroy as much of this country as they can, great institutions like our economy and the military. And of course, when you attack the president the way they have attacked the president all of these years, it has the effect of eroding confidence in all authority, everywhere down the line, and they haven’t cared about that. That’s been part of their grand design as well. They want you having as little faith in your own country as they profess to have. They are in the process of destroying the country even before they get their hands on it. Now, Obama, he says that he didn’t know his pastor of 20 years was a racist, an anti-Semitic Marxist. He didn’t know that Bill Ayers was a domestic terrorist. And yet, Obama wrote a review of a book by Bill Ayers in 1997. Barack Obama, state senator, ‘A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, by William Ayers. A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.’ Chicago Tribune, December 21st, 1997. Obama reviewed a book by Ayers.
As recently as 2007, Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn are easily seen on videotape trashing capitalism, trashing the American way of life. As recently as last year, and Obama doesn’t know this? He didn’t know that Ayers was a domestic terrorist while he’s writing books or reviews of Ayers books. He didn’t know that Tony Rezko was a crook. Poor Barack Obama, why, he just didn’t know, as, of course, he doesn’t know that his campaign has taken in an estimated $34 million from foreign donors, including from the Middle East. He doesn’t know that ACORN is registering homeless people and others to vote. He just doesn’t know. Poor guy. Look at all the people keeping the truth from him. But Obama does know that if only the US military had adopted his strategy for Iraq, there would have been peace long ago. If only the US military had adopted his military strategy, the Taliban would already have been defeated in Afghanistan. If only the president had adopted his massive tax increases, his massive spending increases, massive nationalization of health care, massive redistribution of wealth plans, why, if the president had only listened to what Obama claims he does know, the economy, why, we’d be chugging along here without a hitch.
You see, folks, there is a pattern here with Obama. Those things for which he has had no responsibility and no experience and no record, he’s got all the answers on those. Those things for which he actually has a record, actually has hands-on responsibility, like his past alliances and his donors, why, he can’t be expected to know all those things. He’s too busy knowing what to do in Iraq and Afghanistan with the economy and all that. He’s too busy warning people, yeah, he’s been warning for the last two years about subprime, he’s been warning us about how to do things right, but the things that he touches, he doesn’t know anything about. Says he wants transparency in government, but he won’t release his school records, his medical records, his legislative records, and his records with Ayers. All this matters.