RUSH: We now go to Yakima, Washington, this is Andrew. Andrew, how long have you lived in Yakima Washington.
CALLER: I’ve lived here my entire life, I’m 31 years old.
RUSH: Thirty-one-years old, you’re right on the cusp, let’s see —
CALLER: I was born in ’78, March 9th, the day you started losing weight.
RUSH: Yeah, you might be a little young. There’s something that Yakima, Washington, was the first at in this country ever, something that happened in Yakima, Washington, did it before anybody else did, and it’s pretty common now all over the country. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?
CALLER: Not a clue.
RUSH: Yakima, Washington, was the first community to put 90-gallon trash cans on wheels for your home so you fill up your 90-gallon trash can and you roll it out there in the driveway and the sanitation people come pick it up. Up ’til that time the largest trash can ever used was like 30 gallons, and this had the lid on the wheels, Yakima, Washington, was the first to break the garbage can size barrier.
CALLER: Very nice.
RUSH: I can tell you’re really proud of that.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: I just wanted to mention that to you. I know that’s not why you called. What is your question?
CALLER: I’d like to make a statement and then I have a couple elaborations. The first is I believe that the Democrats have to be most concerned about losing their fringe base. And let me elaborate. First, Republicans lost of support of staunch conservatives by not being able to enact a conservative agenda and then finally by behaving like liberals. And then the Blue Dogs have to be concerned whether or not they pass the health care bill ’cause if they pass it they lose support of their constituents, and if they don’t pass it, they lose support of their base.
RUSH: Ah, ah, ah. That’s close. You’re right on the first count. If they vote against the health care bill, they satisfy their base, meaning their constituents. If they go along with this health care bill, their constituents — or their base, if they go along with the health care bill — it’s the other way around. If they vote against the health care bill, they have made angry Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel, who will see to it they don’t get any reelection money and no committee assignments, nothing of any kind of stature in the House. They have a tremendous problem, the Blue Dogs, what do they do, and the question is who are they going to be most afraid of, their voters or Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel?
CALLER: I’m not sure it matters.
RUSH: Well, it does to them because politician’s first job is to get reelected. If they go against the leadership, the leadership can make sure they don’t get reelected.
CALLER: But so can the constituents —
RUSH: If they go against their constituents, their constituents can make sure they won’t be elected. But Pelosi and Reid can say, ‘No, no, we’ll send ACORN in there, we’ll have enough voter fraud, we’ll run enough commercials that your constituents won’t matter.’ That’s what they’re going to be told.
CALLER: At the end of the day they’re just Democrats.
RUSH: Well, yes, I say that to a Republican audience, here a conservative audience, at the end of the day they are Democrats, but they’re trying to craft this image that they’re fiscally responsible, that they’re conservative in that way because their voters are. If they vote for this thing they can no longer claim fiscal responsibility, they’re just as anybody else. But you did hit on something and it illustrates the big difference in the House and the Senate. Nancy Pelosi, like she’s out there saying, ‘I don’t care what Obama says about a public option. The public option is going to be in the health care bill.’ Let me find the bite.
PELOSI: I agree with the president that the public option was the best way to keep the insurance companies honest. Let me say it another way. There’s no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option.
RUSH: That’s it. No way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option, because of her fringe base. The lunatic fringe base and the Democrat Party, they’re already upset. They’re upset that Obama is still spying on Americans; they’re upset we haven’t closed Gitmo; they’re upset we’re still in Iraq; they’re upset we’re still in Afghanistan. They’re upset over this public option business. When Sebelius went out there and took it off the table there was an eruption on the kook left websites. Remember I told you I went to Democrat Underground and every other word was the F-bomb and they’re saying, ‘My gosh, we have the White House; we have the Congress, the House and the Senate, why the hell can’t we get anything done?’ The House is as radical fringe left as what you’ll find down in Venezuela but it’s not that way in the Senate. So Pelosi has to pass this bill with the public option in it. This is no head fake from her. This is pedal to the metal. The public option is going forward because Pelosi is driving the bus.
Harry Reid, on the other hand, has got a reelection campaign of his own in 2010. He’s in trouble, and the public option is not something his constituents want. So he’s not nearly as pedal to the metal on this as Pelosi is. This is going to be an interesting conference fight when they get there because Obama’s going to win this, there will be a public option because there’s no reason to reform health care from their perspective if there’s not. But the public option is not an option the public wants or needs. It’s the government option. Public option equals government option and there’s no other way to look at it. This is the Pelosi-Obama campaign. Pelosi’s made her intentions clear. Obama has the luxury of pretending the government option isn’t that big a deal to him. To Obama getting the public option isn’t everything it is the only thing but he can go out there and act like it doesn’t really matter that much to him. Pelosi can’t. Pelosi has to act like it’s the only thing.
Now, once it gets through the House, Obama and the State-Controlled Media will move heaven and earth to get it passed through the Senate. It could destroy Harry Reid but he’s too weak to put up a fight. Reid is expendable. They can find some other soft-spoken little nerd to run the Democrats in the House. And this is killing Hillary. This is killing her because she could have been the next Senate majority leader if she’d have stayed there. Now she’s been dispatched to where? Nairobi and Kenya. Her job now is to run around and kiss the graves of all of Obama’s dead relatives while Bill’s out there securing freedom for Algore journalists from the little pot-bellied dictator in North Korea, Kim Pyongyang or whatever his name is. To add insult to injury, Reid’s in trouble, the public option is his problem and therefore he’s expendable. So the mother of all political battles lies ahead. The statists want a war, and a war is what they’re going to get.
General Patton said, ‘Pressure makes diamonds.’ Pressure also crushes the weak and the unworthy. And this is a country of the people, by the people, for the people. The people of this country are the diamonds. The statists are not. When you say that they’re playing to their base that is true, the fringe base, Pelosi has to play to it plus she is one of those kooks. I mean it’s not as though she’s doing something she doesn’t want to do. Now, you know, we gave you a detailed subscription and analysis of the problems that Obama has, his plummeting poll numbers, he’s now below 50% in terms of people having faith or trust in him, and the Drive-By Media is all concerned, ‘Oh, no, no, no, is he really human after all?’ They’re actually asking that question, ‘Is he human.?’ In fact, let me find the bite of that. Stick with me on this. I know it’s coming up soon. I saw it here back in the end. It might have been Lesley Stahl that asked that, but they are asking it.
In the meantime, Joe Conason, who is lunatic fringe angry typical ultraradical leftist, has a column and I want to read to you a portion of what Conason has written: ‘Every mistake made by the Obama White House in the pursuit of health care reform can be traced to the political style and ideological prejudices of Emanuel.’ Now, we look at Rahm Emanuel, and we see this knife-throwing, dead-fish-sending, former ballerina who just goes for the jugular. Joe Conason is upset because he sees Rahm Emanuel catering to conservatives. Listen to this. ‘Every mistake made by the Obama White House in the pursuit of health care reform can be traced to the political style and ideological prejudices of Emanuel, who has sought to intimidate progressives and empower conservatives, always in the name of winning elections and ‘getting things done.”
Now, let me ask you a question. For those of you up to speed on Rahm Emanuel, is anything he’s doing look to you like patronizing us? Empowering conservatives? Is Rahm Emanuel doing one thing to empower conservatives? Rahm Emanuel is leading the charge to destroy conservatives and Republicans, and yet here’s this fringe ultraleft radical Conason, he sees Emanuel as being tough on the progressives, the libs, and kowtowing to conservatives. ‘Although few Democrats trusted Emanuel to hold true to principle, many hoped that he would get things done — and that those things would reflect the progressive outlook of his boss rather than the attitude of accommodation he picked up on Capitol Hill.’ So the kook fringe in the Democrat Party looks at Rahm Emanuel as a softy.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s more evidence of a civil war that is brewing. The civil war is the fringe left angry at Obama making deals with Big Pharma, and Rahm Emanuel supposedly demanding bipartisanship, trying to get Republicans and the Blue Dog conservative Democrats (so-called) on board, trying to get Republicans in the Senate. The fringe left is all upset about this. They say, ‘Just do it! We don’t need the Republicans,’ and they’re right, by the way, about that. The reason that Obama and some Democrats want Republicans to go along with this is so that they can share the blame when all hell breaks loose when this thing actually is enacted. Now, Paul Krugman, who is an economist and a columnist at the New York Times, is unhappy with the Bamster.
Krugman is one of these guys Obama is talking about in August, ‘all wee-weed up’ in the Beltway. According to Bob Gibbs, the spokesman for Obama, Paul Krugman’s a bed wetter. When Krugman starts writing like this, there is trouble there. The title of this is: ‘Obama’s Trust Problem — According to news reports, the Obama administration … is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives,’ liberals. ‘Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise. A backlash in the progressive base…’ Liberal base. You know, he keeps using the word ‘progressive’ here, and it’s ‘liberal, statist, socialist.’
There’s nothing ‘progressive’ about these people. They want to take us back to the Stone Age. Environment policy, this health care policy, what kind of cars we drive. They want to take us back to the relative Stone Age. So they’re not progressives. ‘A backlash in the [liberal] base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months.’ A backlash in the liberal base has been building for months. ‘The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach.
‘The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards [The Breck Girl] during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health care plan,’ and, yes, not that they wouldn’t have come up with it on their own, but we really do owe this current iteration of public option health care to John Edwards. What a legacy! ‘One purpose of the public option is to save money.’ (groans) Be careful, Paul, you’re putting a lie to Obama’s death panels here. ‘Experience with Medicare suggests that a government-run plan would have lower costs than private insurers…’ It does? I thought Medicare was going broke! What am I missing? I feel like on a different planet from Barney Frank.
‘Experience with Medicare suggests that a government-run plan would have lower costs than private insurers; in addition, it would introduce more competition and keep premiums down.’ It would do no such thing. It would wipe out the private sector. These people are some of the smartest stupid people, the Ivy League grads. ‘And let’s be clear,’ writes the ferret-like Paul Krugman, ‘the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham.’ Now, I understand why they’re mad. I understand why they’re mad because here’s Obama, he sends Sebelius out, ‘Eh, public option not that big a deal,’ and the left has a cow. Obama goes out, ‘Ahh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The public option, it’s in there.’ Then he says, ‘Well, it’s not the centerpiece.’ The left goes ballistic again. ‘What do you mean, not the centerpiece? Of course it’s the centerpiece!’
Then Obama says, ‘Well, maybe we don’t do the public option. Maybe we do co-ops,’ and they go ballistic again, and that’s what Krugman here is saying is a sham. He’s saying, ‘That’s not just my opinion; it’s what the market says: stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan.’ Now, see, this is another thing. When shares of stock go up, liberals get livid. When companies become more valuable, liberals get livid. ‘Until the idea of the public option came along, a significant faction within the party rejected anything short of true single-payer, Medicare-for-all reform, viewing anything less as perpetuating the flaws of our current system,’ which is Medicare! (laughing)
Why would you take a program that’s nearly bankrupt and say, ‘This is the foundation for expanding’? At any rate, I deep digressing, because every sentence here demands digression. ‘The public option,’ he says, ‘which would force insurance companies to prove their usefulness or fade away, settled some of those qualms. That said, it’s possible to have universal coverage without a public option — several European nations do it — and some who want a public option might be willing to forgo it if they had confidence in the overall health care strategy. Unfortunately, the president’s behavior in office has undermined that confidence. On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure [liberals] thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat who talks of ‘bending the curve’ but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform.
‘Mr. Obama’s explanations of his plan have gotten clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula; his speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee. Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed [liberals] with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy. And then there’s the matter of the banks.’ Krugman writes: ‘I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money.
‘When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters. So there’s a growing sense among [liberals] that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar. Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted. But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and [liberals] increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will ‘pull the plug on grandma,’ and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.
‘It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased…’ (snorts) This is mind-boggling. Obama is not trying to ‘appease’ anybody! He’s sending out thugs to beat up people at town hall meetings. He’s calling them unruly mobs. He had a snitch website run out of the administration. ‘Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable. So [liberals] are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.’ We’ve got the most leftist, radical president in our history behaving as a leftist radical, and the other leftist radicals think they’ve been punked.
Probably they don’t like being called bed wetters. I guess it’s a purity test. But remember the interesting thing: they don’t want Obama working with Republicans. These are the same people that were demanding bipartisanship all through the Bush administration. Even, remember, early on, we kept hearing from the Democrats, ‘The power of the minority! We must rely on the power of the minority! We gotta have bipartisanship.’ Now they want no part of bipartisanship, and the myth is that Obama’s trying to get some. Back to Joe Conason, who is upset at Rahm Emanuel. He has another piece at Salon.com. ‘Now More Than Ever Bipartisanship is For Suckers.’ Remember how they had to share power with Bush as a minority? We had to share power. It was only the right thing to do for democracy.
Conason says, ‘Republicans want Obama to fail. He needs to stop seeking consensus, because it makes him look weak. … Whether there was ever any prospect of significant Republican support for Obama’s recovery and reform agenda is a moot point. Certainly, the potential for obstruction and worse, in a party dominated by Rush Limbaugh and William Kristol…’ and then later on: ‘Even John McCain, the Republican who could truthfully boast of working with Democrats on serious legislation, and often did during his presidential campaign, now indulges in sourly partisan posturing.’ My gosh, they feel like McCain has done a Brutus on them! McCain’s now a traitor. We had the story yesterday (which I thought was laughable) McCain is now seen voting with his party. It was a news flash; it was a bulletin.
McCain now voting with Republicans! He’s a double agent, now we got Joe Conason upset that McCain is actually voting with the Republicans, upset… It’s Twilight Zone. It doesn’t matter. I’ll take it. When Krugman and these guys start talking about Obama having lost trust, when the kook fringe base starts getting mad at you, that’s not good for you if you are also a kook fringe kind of politician, which most of the Democrat leadership is. So it’s amazing to listen to these people. They actually think that Obama and Rahm Emanuel are going out of their way to incorporate us in their plans! Meanwhile, Obama goes on radio and television starts talking about ‘this one lone voice,’ meaning me, that’s shouting out all the civil and polite discourse out there.
So, bottom line: keep the pressure on. Keep showing up at the town meetings. It’s not time to get giddy. We haven’t won anything. They can still pull this off.