RUSH: It’s a total sham. It is a 100% fraud, a giant sham and it has once again, ladies and gentlemen, exposed the media and the Democrat Party who are aligned on the side of ruin of the United States of America. I’m talking about the CBO number that everybody started running with today before it had been officially released. Steny Hoyer just told the media, ‘Hey, our health bill comes in at $940 billion with $110 billion in deficit reduction,’ bam, every media outlet ran with it, they’ve been running with it all morning. The only problem was the CBO had not officially released anything and now they have.
Greetings, I’m Rush Limbaugh. This is the EIB Network, great to have you here. Our telephone number, 800-282-2882, the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
This morning the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, said, ‘What’s everybody talking about? There has been no official release here by the CBO.’ That was about an hour ago, maybe 45 minutes ago. Well, the CBO has spoken, and all of these numbers are meaningless. Let me read to you from the first page of the letter from Doug Elmendorf, the director of the CBO, to Pelosi. ‘Although CBO completed a preliminary review of legislative language prior to its release, the agency has not thoroughly examined the reconciliation proposal to verify its consistency with the previous draft.’ Because there isn’t one yet! The reconciliation proposal is the Slaughter Solution. The CBO is saying, ‘We haven’t seen that,’ because nobody’s seen that. ‘Therefore,’ writes Elmendorf, ‘this estimate is preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal, as well as further review and refinement of the budgetary projections.’
So the numbers that have been put out today are meaningless. They are only for the purposes of depressing everybody, it’s a giant PR scam run by Steny Hoyer, Pelosi and the Democrats and Obama and it’s designed to get everybody depressed, designed to get all the wavering Democrats in the House giddy as James Clyburn said, but it’s a fraud, it’s a sham, there is absolutely nothing concrete in what the CBO has said. They clearly say these are preliminary estimates, because they haven’t seen the guts of it. Essentially what they’re doing here is simply redoing the Senate bill, which passed in December. But the reconciliation portion, the Slaughter solution, the deem-and-pass procedure, nobody has seen that. It has yet to be posted. Obama doesn’t even know what’s in his bill. This Bret Baier interview, we’re going to dissect this as the program unfolds today. What a great, great job that Bret Baier did. That was the first time since Obama has been elected that anybody anywhere in the media challenged him on anything that he has said, and Obama clearly was uncomfortable with it. Obama was on the defensive. He was stuttering; he was aimless; he was angry. This upstart young little journalist, who does he think he is? Obama looked horrible in this thing; he sounded horrible in this thing; he didn’t know what’s in his bill and he doesn’t care.
He is right out of Marx, folks, the end justifies the means. It doesn’t matter what’s in there, it doesn’t matter about the process. When he says he doesn’t care about the process it means the ends justify the means. Washington’s a mess anyway, who cares, this is going to be a vote on health care reform, we’re going to get it and he told Bret Baier yesterday, ‘This is not about my presidency. This is about the people.’ It is about his presidency and the Politico’s even reporting it today, confirming, ladies and gentlemen, exactly what I have been painting all along. It’s totally about his presidency; it’s totally about saving him, and that’s how he’s approaching wavering members, particularly most recently the Hispanic caucus. It’s about saving his presidency. It’s about making sure that he has a future as a president to get things done. It’s not about health care.
Now, we have quite understandably here a lot to do. I am a little excited, I’m speaking probably a little faster than I should because there’s so much to say about what’s going on, and I’m probably trying to say too much, too soon here. But I don’t want people to get sidetracked with the CBO show because ultimately, as has been demonstrated this morning, the CBO number is a distraction anyway. It’s designed to take our focus off what is really wrong with this bill and that is everything. The guts of this bill are why it needs to be opposed, not the CBO number, not the deficit number, not this or that, it’s all part of the same combination. The one thing we don’t know — well, there’s several things that we don’t know even now from this preliminary report from the CBO. We don’t know what tax increases are in this bill. We can guess. We know what’s in the Senate bill but we don’t know what’s yet going to be in the reconciliation package, we don’t know what spending cuts. We know that they’re double counting Medicare and the president was asked about this by Bret Baier last night, he didn’t even know what he was talking about when he answered that. He got off on a tangent about closing a doughnut hole for senior citizens on the latest Medicare entitlement. But he doesn’t care.
They’re double counting, and Brett Baier pointed this out, (paraphrasing) ‘Look, you can’t say that you’re taking $500 billion from Medicare and applying it to your new bill and say you’ve cut Medicare by $500 billion.’ So if they’re not cutting Medicare by $500 billion then this whole $940 billion number CBO has is totally irrelevant because there’s no $500 billion Medicare cut, they’re spending it somewhere else. It’s like you shifting money from one pocket to the other and saying you just cut your budget. It’s irresponsible, it’s silly. We don’t know how many job losses are going to happen over this. Grover Norquist and a friend of his have a piece out today at National Review Online, David G. Tuerck, and they say that the health care legislation will cost up to 700,000 jobs by 2019 and that doesn’t include the doctors and nurses who are probably going to opt out of this, stories about nurses wanting to quit and hospitals around the country trying to urge them not to quit.
Then we throw this on top of it. I don’t know what this means yet ’cause this just happened. ‘The National Council of La Raza just issued their opposition to the health care bill, saying that the immigration restrictions (which disallow undocumented workers from buying coverage on the exchange with their own money) are too punitive to earn their support.’ So the La Raza gang says this is Kucinich all over; this is not liberal enough for us; there aren’t enough transfer payments; there aren’t enough giveaways for our people. Now, on the 21st, this Sunday the immigration crowd, the illegal immigrants are going to storm Washington and they hope to have a quarter million people there on a big March and rally demanding illegal immigration amnesty on the day they’re theoretically going to be voting on the health care bill. And I still don’t think they’re going to be voting on the health care bill because I don’t think they have the votes, and they don’t have any actual numbers that they can take to anybody with the CBO. This is clearly preliminary. Everything about this, I told you, has been about dispiriting you, depressing you, making you think it’s a lost cause, making you give up, making you think there’s no way we can fight this.
Today they just doubled down on that with the phony fraud of the CBO number. But they’re no closer than they were, and that’s what all this means. All of this trickery, all this chicanery, all of this behind the scenes stuff, the effort to create momentum where it doesn’t exist. They’re asking the president to delay his departure Sunday to later in the week. And the reason they’re doing that is because they know they don’t have the votes by Sunday, and it’s really going to complicate things now because what’s happened is that everybody now knows that the CBO number that came out today is fraudulent. Everybody knows that what went on this morning now is meaningless, and more and more people are going to know it as the day goes on. In the old days, before there was an alternative media, before there was an Internet, before there were independent people who examined and analyzed the lies, the deceptions, and the frauds coming out of the Democrat Party, the White House, and the American left, this stuff woulda stood, there would not have been any alternate news, we’d have been stuck with $940 billion and they would have their vote. But they have been exposed again in a giant scam, a giant sham, exposed the media, exposed the Democrat Party who are joined on the side of ruin in the United States of America.
Let me read to you again from the cover letter from Doug Elmendorf at CBO to Pelosi. ‘Although CBO completed a preliminary review of legislative language prior to its release, the agency has not thoroughly examined the reconciliation proposal to verify its consistency with the previous draft. This estimate is therefore preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal, as well as further review and refinement of the budgetary projections.’ In other words, whatever numbers you see in the following pages don’t mean anything. This is a wild guess and it comes on the heels of Elmendorf saying, ‘We are overworked.’ And my heart bleeds. We’re overworked and these guys keep sending stuff to us. We’re working hundred-hour weeks here trying to get new scores for them. The numbers are all over the place. This is a fire drill. We have utter chaos happening, there is no organization, there is no leadership, the Democrats — trust me on this — contrary to the image that the media and the Democrats have put forth today, are in disarray. Buck up. You keep calling. There is no reason to stop the intensity.
This is going to go on and on and on, and even, folks, Fred Barnes has a piece I’m going to be sharing it with you as the program unfolds today, a pretty good piece in the Weekly Standard, even if it passes, it’s nowhere near over. This is going to go on and on and on for years and years and years because nobody in this country wants it. The effort is going to be focused on repealing it and stopping it, rolling it back or what have you. Obama has succeeded in his primary objective, and that is dividing the people of this country. I mean even David Brooks, and I hate quoting Brooks here, forgive me on this, but even David Brooks in a blog at the New York Times — got a little chat going back and forth with Gail Collins of the editorial page — he thinks it’s asinine for the Democrats to sign this. He thinks it’s asinine to use the Slaughter Solution. Chris Matthews thinks it’s not a good idea to use the Slaughter Solution. Mr. Leg Tingle himself. There are a lot of people that don’t like what’s happening here, even Lawrence O’Donnell. It’s a tax increase; they don’t have the votes; this is illegal. We got the sound bites coming up here. They are in total disarray, and don’t think the opposite, don’t think they’re a well-oiled machine heading down the tracks. If they were a well-oiled machine this would have been passed last August. Buck up, folks, hang in there and be tough.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Once again, ladies and gentlemen, we know that the CBO numbers this morning that Steny Hoyer put out were fake, were fraudulent. The CBO had not released anything when he put the numbers out, the CBO then did put their PDF file out. They released everything, the letter to Pelosi. We know that all this is just a joke because it’s preliminary. There’s nothing official because there’s no reconciliation bill to score. That’s where we are. But again I want to stress: Let’s not get caught up in the CBO aspect of this. I remember back in the 1995 budget bill between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, they got caught up in CBO numbers back then, what ten-year deficit projection numbers were going to be — and that wasn’t the issue. Clinton was happy for our side to get lost and caught up discussing CBO. The point of CBO and its relevance this morning is that we’re being scammed. The numbers are irrelevant. The fact of the matter is: The number doesn’t matter.
There’s no way you can double count $500 billion in Medicare and save any money. There’s no way you can register 30 million new people and give them insurance and save money. There’s no way you can reduce the deficit. We have a $1.6 trillion deficit this year and we’re going to spend another $1 trillion that we don’t have. There’s no way this does anything the CBO says. So the importance of CBO is it’s just another lie. It’s just another scam orchestrated by the Democrats and their buddies in the media. There’s some people talking about also, ‘You know, we can get rehearse of the Cornhusker kickback and get rid of the Louisiana Purchase some of this other stuff maybe we could, you know, have something to talk about.’ No, no, no. There are no ‘fixes’ to this bill. We need to remain the party of ‘No, hell no.’ There are no fixes to this bill, there’s no streamlining it, there’s no tweaking it. There’s just destroying it.
Then for whatever reforms are necessary get started with the way Mitch Daniels is doing it in Indiana. Heritage has a bunch of great ideas; we’ve talked about them. There’s a poll out there by a group that used to be called the Independent Women’s Forum. Now it’s IWV, and I’m having a mental block on what the ‘V’ stands for. They published the results of their poll Monday on the Wall Street Journal, and this is very interesting data in their poll. As much as people really oppose the corruption of all of this, as much as people oppose the process of how the Democrats are getting this done, the thing that really irks people (and thus should be the focus of any continuing opposition to it) is the underlying approach to the whole thing, the fundamental framework of it, the purpose of it. The purpose of it is not health care.
The purpose is the growth of government, the elimination or the — Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but the attack on liberty and freedom. Its’ the ability, with one bill, to regulate every aspect of human life under the auspices that it has an impact on the cost of health care. Obama doesn’t know care what’s in this. You’ll hear this. If you didn’t see the Bret Baier interview, even if you did, you could see by his answer, he doesn’t care what’s in this. He’s speaking purely philosophically about ‘we need to insure people and give them health care.’ He was talking about… This bill is not about reforming the insurance industry. This bill’s about destroying the insurance industry! (sigh) The point here is: People do not want the mandates. People do not want the federal government demanding, requiring by force of law, that they have to buy anything. Oh! And do you know, we have learned something?
Twelve thousand brand-new IRS agents will be hired. Twelve thousand! Why? Because the IRS is responsible for the enforcement of the mandates that you either buy insurance or pay a fine if you don’t. Twelve thousand new IRS agents in a health care reform bill. It’s that kind of stuff, when people learn about it, they want no part of. They don’t like the penalties. They don’t like the fines, the possibility of going to jail if you don’t buy the insurance mandated by the government, which they also don’t like. They don’t like the massive government configuration. They don’t like the Marxism in the bill, they don’t like the socialism in the bill, they don’t like the loss of freedom in the bill. They’re sophisticated. The American people understand what this is about and that’s why they oppose it in increasingly large numbers, and they’re not running around saying, ‘Well, look at the CBO number, the CBO number.’
They’re not talking about the cost of the deficit as it relates to CBO number. They’re talking about the cost of the whole thing as it relates to bankruptcy for their children and their grandchildren. The people of this country know we can’t afford this, no matter what the CBO says. The CBO came out and said it’s $1.5 trillion. So what? We know it’s going to be more than $940 billion. We know that there’s not one government entitlement that’s ever cost less than projected. We know that there’s not one government entitlement that’s ever worked as advertised. The American people are fully aware of what they face in this, and it’s the substance, the underlying foundation of this bill that they oppose. All of these unaffordable entitlements, the loss of choice, the cuts to Medicare Advantage, these are the things that people know in this bill they do not like and want no part of.
So go ahead and focus on the CBO number if you want, but focus on the fact that it’s nothing more than the latest element of fraud and scam that is part of the sales job of this whole thing. So the media ropes you in. We’ve all been breathless waiting for…what? Two things this week: The reconciliation text, the actual words, and what the reconciliation bill will be? What are the fixes to the Senate bill? (We still haven’t seen that.) And the CBO number. Oh, yes, we’re waiting on the latest CBO score! We can’t move forward ’til we get that.’ So the media, breathlessly in their horse race-reporting mentality, breathlessly (panting) waits for the CBO number, and before the CBO even puts it out Steny Hoyer comes out and says what he says. They run with it. ‘Oh, wow!’ They got Juan Williams on Fox. ‘Oh, this is great for Obama! This is really going to put people over the edge. This is exactly what they want.’
They go get Clyburn and Clyburn, says, ‘Oh, members are giddy over this!’ They get an hour and a half out of this, maybe two hours out of this, and then all of a sudden Paul Ryan says, ‘Wait a minute. There is no official release here.’ Steny Hoyer was just making it up. Steny Hoyer is essentially the big editor today for the State-Controlled Media. So then we get the CBO numbers and then we get the cover letter which basically says: This is a preliminary estimate. It’s like the weather forecast: It’s a wild guess. Algore and the people at East Anglia may as well put the CBO process together. It’s just as fraudulent, not because of the CBO people. The CBO people don’t have anything concrete to work with. They’re being asked to calculate estimates. So what’s happened? We may as well get Michael Mann from Penn State and Phil Jones from East Anglia and James Hansen at NASA and Algore, put ’em over at CBO, and have them write the report.
That’s essentially what’s happened here. The same hoax that gave us the nonexistent, man-made global warming is now perpetrating itself in the CBO because of Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Steny Hoyer, and the rest. It’s a hoax. This number is a hoax. It’s not real, because what they’re going to be voting on isn’t even real yet. It doesn’t exist. Nobody has seen it. It was supposed to be posted last night. Obama said, ‘You’ll know what’s in it when it’s posted. I’ll know what’s in it when it’s posted.’ He doesn’t know what’s in it! He doesn’t care what’s in it. ‘It’s going to be up there for 72 hours.’ No, it won’t be. If they put it up tonight or tomorrow and the vote is Sunday, it’s not going to be up for 72 hours. They’re going to limit Republicans to 30 minutes of debate on Parker Griffith’s idea of having a vote on not using the Slaughter Solution. Just 30 minutes. They’ll wipe that out. They’re in trouble. They don’t have the votes here, and it is patently obvious to anybody with an objective eye looking at this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, Pelosi continuing this fraud-sham here of the CBO numbers, had a little press conference to talk about the numbers out there. Here’s first of two sound bites we have.
PELOSI: (haltingly) They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, a number is worth a lot, too. I love numbers, and today the number from the Congressional Budget Office that this health insurance reform legislation will save $138 billion in the first ten years and $1.2 trillion in the second ten years speaks very eloquently to the deficit-reduction that is in our package.
RUSH: What is she on? Did you hear the way she sounded there? Very hoarse and tentative. Madam Pelosi, your days of getting away with this kind of trickery are over. We have the CBO report ourselves, and it says all of this is a preliminary estimate. You don’t love numbers ’cause you don’t have any! You don’t have the votes, you don’t have an accurate CBO number. You’ve got nothing, Ms. Pelosi. You got nothing, right now. You don’t even have a bill. She doesn’t even have a reconciliation bill. ‘I love numbers, and today the number from the Congressional Budget Office’ is a sham! Not because of them but because of Pelosi. There’s nothing to score. It’s an estimate — and, of course, what Democrat press conference would be complete without a parade of victims?
PELOSI: I’m very pleased that we’re joined by Ed Morris, Kim Muldofsky, Stella Johnson, and Carolyn Comeau. Uh, their personal stories tell the eloquent story of why health care is needed, uh, to make America healthier, to lower the cost of America’s families’ budget while we lower the cost to the federal budget.
RUSH: See, this is where they’re losing ground because people know that none of that’s going to happen. We’re not going to reduce deficits; we’re not going to reduce spending. You know something else? We hear Pelosi and the Democrats talking about these numbers: $940 billion, $1.2 trillion. You know what they can’t tell us? ‘What’s my insurance premium going to be next year after this passes in relation to what it is now?’ When Ronaldus Magnus went out there and started talking about tax cuts in the eighties, there was a workable number that everybody knew that would apply to them. If their taxes got cut by 10, 15%, they knew what that meant. It was there. Nobody, nobody on the Democrat side can tell anybody what their insurance premium’s going to be the year after this thing goes into law.
And that’s what people want to know. Now, they’re giving us hints. Dick Durbin’s out there saying, ‘Well, anybody who thinks these premiums are going to go down is not looking at this honestly. We hope to reduce the rate of increase, but health care premiums are going up.’ That’s why they’re not telling us what it is because it’s not going to be what they say. I got e-mail. These are challenging days for your host because, you know, I’m working on prep to coordinate my own thoughts, and I’m getting drowned in e-mails from everybody who wants me to tell their thoughts. ‘No, Rush!’ (interruption) Yes, it’s real e-mail. You want me to show them? I’ll put a couple of them on the website. I’ve got about 15,000 of them in the last week.
‘Rush, what you need to be saying is we’re going in the wrong direction.’
‘Well, you need to focus on X Y, and Z.’
‘I just want a new open. You open the program the wrong way.’
‘You need to do this.’
Somebody said, ‘You just went past the CBO numbers too fast. You said they don’t matter.’
I said they don’t matter in terms of reality. What matters is it’s part a piece of a puzzle and it’s the latest piece of a fraud. But, okay. If you want a specific reaction to the CBO number of $940 billion even though it means nothing, I’ll tell you. We’re supposed to be applauding this number? (clapping) Really? This is the same president who has run up tens of trillions of dollars in deficits in record time, he has destroyed the private sector economy, and we’re supposed to be excited and that a phony number comes in after a-two-day delay that’s just $60 billion magically short of the $1 trillion figure? What has this president said that’s been correct or truthful through this entire process, or during his entire presidency?
There’s more bad job news out there today, folks, and you have to remember this continues to be bad. People are upset. The nation’s being laughed at by our enemies. We’re trashing our allies. What’s to celebrate with this number? What’s to celebrate with this guy? He’s wrong about everything! He’s screwing up everything. And now we’re going to say, ‘Okay, well, you’ve shown us what a failure and liar you are. We’re now going to confer on you the power to destroy the health care system.’ Is that what we’re going to do? And Pelosi, one of the most hateful and foolish people to ever serve as Speaker, she didn’t have a single thoughtful idea or policy. I don’t care what number the CBO puts out. The Democrats are involved. It’s a fraud, it’s a sham, it’s a scam.