RUSH: Howard Dean says America has had enough capitalism. This is Howard Dean, it was last Thursday on CNBC’s power lunch. He was on with Jason Lewis, who said, ‘I think the vast majority of Americans are tired of substituting bailouts for bankruptcy. They understand that politicians invest for a political return, not an economic return. That’s the difference between politicians and capitalists, and we need to get a little bit more capitalism back in the economy.’
DEAN: I think we had quite enough capitalism the last eight years. I think we need some regulation now.
RUSH: You know it is becoming more and more apparent to me. I guess I was a little blind not to have seen this all during these past eight years. I know there was Bush hatred, and I know that there was a desire expressed by Democrats and the left for us to lose in Iraq. It was more than a desire. Harry Reid was actually out there saying that America had lost. I know that there were attempts made to convince the American people that the US economy was in recession all of those eight years. But it wasn’t in recession. The economy was gangbusters. We were adding new jobs left and right. Coming out of the mild recession of 2000, then the attacks of 9/11, the economy was booming under George W. Bush. It was only in the last year that some of these things, the bank blackouts and all that became obvious. Now, Bush got crazy in government spending and so forth, but the country was not a disaster. But for all of those eight years, the Democrats just harped on how rotten this country was, and I guess I, for one, thought that most Americans did not want to think of their country that way, that they did not really think it was in that bad a shape.
I know that Bush was not popular, and I know that he was despised, I know how the Democrats did that, and they were helped by the fact that Bush wouldn’t defend himself against any of these things. But I have to tell you that I am shocked and surprised that as a by-product of those eight years of constant nipping at Bush’s heels, that the end result would be that the American way of life was over, that American capitalism, that individual liberty, that American exceptionalism, that the principles of our founding also had been decided to have been failures. So here’s Howard Dean saying, ‘We’ve had enough capitalism in the last eight years. We need some regulation now.’ We’ve had capitalism our whole life. There have been some temporary interruptions, New Deal and so forth, but we came outta New Deal, World War II, and we became a capitalist boom nation and it’s just mind-boggling now to hear that we’ve had enough capitalism. There’s a genuine dislike for this country and a genuine preference for it to be transformed into something else, certainly by a lot of Democrats. I don’t know how many of the American people are really caught up into all this in terms of meaning, if they even understand what’s going on right before their very eyes.
My hope is that not nearly as many understand it and support it as appears to be the case.