RUSH: You know, Harry Reid yesterday refers to Republicans who are blocking health care in the Senate as reminiscent of slave owners and Republicans who fought civil rights legislation and fought to 
maintain slavery. Of course, he’s entirely wrong historically. It was — slavery, it was a civil war, it was all that gave birth to the Republican Party. It was the Democrat Party which stood in the way of civil rights legislation, all the Southern Democrats!
But here’s what I’m thinking. On Sunday Obama visits Harry Reid, goes up there, turns off his NFL games on Sunday, heads up to the Senate to, quote, unquote, save health care negotiations, gives Harry Reid a pep talk. On Monday Harry Reid plays the race card. Now, question: Does Dingy Harry, the incredibly shrinking senator, have the spine to say something so disgusting on his own, or was he just following orders? ‘Cause I guarantee you, had Obama said something like that, I would not have been surprised. I think Obama believes stuff like that. I think it’s what animates him. But Harry Reid just does and says stupid things. Now, you tell me, is this a sign of confidence or is it a sign of desperation with Harry Reid coming out, whether he’s following Obama’s marching orders on that or not? I seem to recall, ladies and gentlemen, somebody warning the American people before the election that racism and related things would only increase in intensity, not decrease because of this.
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RUSH: This is Jeff in Youngstown, Ohio, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. I’ve been with you since the beginning. The hypocrisy of Harry Reid when his party presided over everything that has destroyed the black community, to use slavery as a ploy to say that we need to pass this health care, guess what? They’re going to require you to have health care, and a lot of people it’s going to hurt is going to be African-American people that are laborers, that are low cost labor people, that are small business people, because, guess what? They’re going to be required to spend so much of their income on a premium that they’re not going to be able to afford. This is not coming to you free. This is going to cost you. And then somebody to use slavery on top of that and say that, you know, that this is what, you know, it’s the same thing, they said let’s wait. No, we’re not saying let’s wait, we’re saying what you’re doing is foolish here. This is ridiculous. And you’re going to hurt a whole lot of people, and I hope that people look at this, and cap and trade, and what they just came up with yesterday, that carbon dioxide, which we all breathe out, is a poisonous gas, so what’s going to happen, Rush? They can then control the population, because too many people breathe out carbon dioxide, they can control big business, they will control every job in the world ’cause they destroy this economy and make us just as even with the rest of the world so they don’t feel guilty or they think they have accomplished their case. I can’t take it. I really can’t take it. And I don’t know why people, more people, 47% is way too high of an approval rating.
RUSH: Hang in there, Jeff, my man.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: I saw no need to interrupt you because you got a gold star. That was a great call. I’m out of time but that 47% will continue to shrink. People are waking up.
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RUSH: Folks, I want to expand a little bit on the comments we just had from Jeff in Youngstown, Ohio, about Harry Reid and slavery, because it really is an abomination. Among the Democrats who voted to continue delaying the civil rights bill was Senator Robert Byrd, who personally filibustered it for 14 hours. Historians note that ‘it was Southern Democrats who mounted an 83-day filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. The final vote to cut off debate saw 29 Senators in opposition, 80% of them Democrats. Among those voting to block the civil rights bill was West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who personally filibustered the bill for 14 hours. The next year he also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Mr. Byrd still sits in the Senate, and indeed preceded Mr. Reid as his party’s majority leader until he stepped down from that role in 1989.’
For Harry Reid to say that Republicans obstructing the health care bill is no different than Republicans who tried to maintain slavery is just… I asked earlier if Obama put this thought in his head at the pep rally Obama held for these guys up on the Capitol Hill in the Senate on Sunday. Albert Gore Sr. was a huge anti-civil rights guy. J. William Fulbright, who was Bill Clinton’s mentor in Arkansas, huge, all of these Southern Democrats. Strom Thurmond was a Democrat back then, he opposed it, all of these people opposed the civil rights movement, Lester Maddox, Democrat, Bull Connor. Had it not been for Republicans in the Senate, a greater percentage of Republicans in the Senate voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats did. But as John Fund points out today: ‘The final reason Mr. Reid’s comments were so inapt and offensive is that the battles for women’s suffrage and civil rights he referred to were about expanding freedom. That’s not what the 2,074-page health care bill being debated in the Senate today does.’ It restricts freedom.
The Senate health care bill creates ‘118 new regulatory boards and commissions,’ new bureaucracies that will dictate the entire scope of health care. Fighting government controlled health care, the most personal of issues to many people, can more properly be construed to be as a fight for freedom, not against it. So Harry Reid is so off the wall and so inept and so wrong about this. This is the kind of stuff that smacks of desperation ’cause the real problem Reid has is his own party, right now he’s four votes short of the 60 that he needs, and they’re putting out this news, again another hoax, that everything’s hunky-dory, that the tone’s changed and we’re moving in the right direction. They’re trying to distract us with public option this, public option that. It’s all a public option. It’s all about the federal government controlling every aspect of every human being’s life in this country. That’s what this bill is about, with health care and costs as the mechanism to achieve that goal. This is the way totalitarian systems seek to cement their power. They’ve all tried it with health care. The Nazis did it long before the holocaust. We hear about the great health care in Cuba, do we not? Health care’s greater everywhere in the world but here. Right?
I tell you, the only thing going on in the Senate that distresses me, and I’ve been told I’m wrong about it, I read a quote from Senator Kyl who said, (paraphrasing) ‘We’re not trying to slow things down here, we’re offering amendments and we don’t want to be seen as obstructionist because we want the independent vote.’ The independents are moving to Republicans anyway right now. This must be stopped. Now, we got a call from Mitch McConnell’s office yesterday saying that Kyl doesn’t speak for the leadership and we are trying to stop this thing. McConnell’s office called H.R. and H.R. dutifully reported back to me. Because it would do no good for H.R. to know it and then not tell me so he told me so that I can tell you that that’s what they’re saying, they are trying to stop this. Good. This is not something that needs to be debated even on the merits or on the margins. This is something that needs to be stopped, just like cap and trade needs to be stopped. This is where we should all be proud to say, ‘Yep, we are just saying no to this. We’re saying no to statism; we’re saying no to Marxism; we’re saying no to the overthrow of our Constitution; we’re saying no to this.’
You fall into a trap when the media says, ‘Well, you never say when you’re for, what are you for?’ We make it clear what we are for every day. When you are for personal liberty, freedom, and responsibility, that about covers it, and we’re not going to debate the merits here of to what degree of tyranny are we willing to accept. We’re not going to debate that. That ought to be the stance. This is not your traditional ebb and flow of power from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party. This is something we have never had before in this country. We have never had so many radical, radical leftists who have never done one thing of note in the private sector, achieve this kind of power. People who do not like the way this country was constituted are now running it. They are not traditional Democrats where you argue in the daytime, you go to a bar and have a drink at night, go out to dinner, this is not who this is anymore. This must be stopped ideologically. This is not politics as usual. This is not both parties are the same by any stretch of the imagination.
Scott, Jacksonville, Florida, great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Sleep Number Bed mega dittos from your number one listener in Jacksonville, Florida.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: You remember several years ago Newt Gingrich was on the cover of Newsweek being the Gingrich that stole Christmas.
RUSH: I do.
CALLER: Well, this past Saturday, Rush, the Democrats in the Senate cut over $40 billion from the Medicare home health benefit, over $40 billion. And we’ve already talked about death panels. This is precisely what’s going to happen. These folks, Medicare at home who choose to be in their own homes, their funding is being cut. It has death panels written all over it.
RUSH: Well, and they’re cutting nursing homes by $15 billion as well. But Scott, with all due respect, and I remember when Newt was not even proposing Medicare cuts, they just took that whole thing out of context and said Newt wants Medicare to wither away on the vine, and now these guys in both the House and the Senate are proposing $500 billion in cuts in Medicare, $500 billion. Now, I don’t believe that the final bill will have any Medicare cuts. (interruption) Oh, Snerdley, anybody who thinks the final bill’s going to have $500 billion in Medicare cuts, if it does, if the final product of this has $500 billion in Medicare cuts, then that alone is a death panel. And that will convince me that this administration, that the Democrat Party is totally on board with the elderly passing away because they represent a problem. They’re informed. They’re educated. They have a memory of a better time in this country. They can remember what gets us out of recessions. They remember thus that what we’re doing now is not ever going to work.
I’ve always had the theory that the $500 billion cuts were just mentioned in the language so they’d get a favorable CBO score. And I’ve always been of the opinion that by the time the dust settled those cuts would not be made. But if they are, if they follow through on this, then people’s deepest suspicions will be confirmed. They’re essentially saying that elderly people, we’re just not going to treat you, we don’t have the money, it’s not worth it, you’re too old, and besides, you know too much.