RUSH: Aw, darn it, does this mean there’s not gonna be a government shutdown? That’s the only thing I really wanted for Christmas. I got everything else. My Christmas is giving stuff. All I wanted was a government shutdown. Now to heck with it.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: Great to have you here, ladies and gentlemen, Open Line Friday, one of the potentially dullest days of the week, and I mean there have been some of these Open Line Fridays that have bombed big time. Well, one in recent memory. (interruption) November 12th, you know the date? It was that bad? (laughing) Oh, we ought to replay it as a best-of show, November 12th, the bomb, to show what a career risk Open Line Friday is, that even I, El Rushbo, am willing to risk what actually happened on November 12th. Our staff has it marked on the calendar. Well, I’m not gonna say that. You know, every Open Line Friday can be a bomb. You just never know. Anyway, we’re happy you’re here, we’re happy to be here. Telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882. E-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
If you’re gonna waste time watching the Sunday shows, let me tell you right now what the theme is gonna be: Obama, the comeback kid; Obama, what a brilliant guy; Obama, he took the Republicans to the cleaners. Obama came back from disastrous November elections and now totally owns the agenda, totally owns the next two years. Obama has the Republicans in situations they don’t even know how bad the situation is for him. I mean, depending on what you watched last night on television, depending on what you read today, that’s the standard template inside the Beltway. Obama snookered the Republicans so bad the Republicans still don’t even know quite what happened to ’em. I’m not kidding. I have been amused reading all of this stuff and some of the stuff I heard last night on television, too. I have, as you might imagine, ladies and gentlemen, an entirely different take.
Now, granted, the tax deal, this is an Obama zag. One of the things I love is Obama’s triangulating. He’s no more triangulating than I’m becoming a moderate. There’s no way Obama is ever gonna become a moderate. He’s pretending and I want to tell you, folks, I may be a lone wolf on this. In any talk of an Obama win, how can you leave out the fact that Obama and the Democrats lost humiliatingly big in the omnibus? Folks, that was the big thing. That’s what they wanted. That was hijacking the government for a year. That was obviating the entire election. If they were able to get that omnibus spending bill, in other words, if they were able to hijack and write in two days the entire budget for next year that had 2,000 pages, if they’d gotten that, this would have been funereal today. But that was a huge defeat, and not just for Harry Reid. As I look at this, the tax deal is what it is, and there’s plenty of bad stuff in it, and I still would have opposed doing it, but I think we coulda had everything we wanted waiting three weeks. We coulda had tax cuts. Obama wouldn’t dare veto it. I mean there’s no reason to have ethanol subsidies in there. There’s no reason for any of this. But it is what it is. But to me, this tax deal, I actually think as I look at this, it might have been a head fake all along to get people distracted while the omnibus was taking place over there.
I really do believe, and of course in many people’s eyes I am the wizard of smart. I’m not recognized as such inside the Beltway because I’m not there. I’m recognized as an entertainer. But I believe that the omnibus, this spending bill, by the way, written by Daniel Inouye, we found out this thing was written in February. That’s how long they had the strategery. They knew they were gonna get shellacked in the November elections. The indications were all last year they were gonna lose, so they start writing the omnibus spending bill, 2,000 pages in February, Senator Inouye from Hawaii was the primary architect and author of it, but everybody got their hands on it. And they even, as Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal points out today, the earmarks in this bill were old Republican earmarks, not new ones. They were Republican earmarks from earlier in the year. And one of the reasons why nobody wanted anybody to read the bill was to find out how old the Republican earmarks were, long before any promises to ban them had ever even begun. But the thing went down because McConnell, somebody, was able to get to these wayward Republican RINOs and read ’em the what-for riot act.
At the end of the day the Republicans stayed unified, and that is the blueprint for defeating Obamaism and the Democrats from here on out. I know, Mr. Krauthammer has a piece on Obama, ‘The New Comeback Kid,’ how he’s outsmarted everybody here. He’s taken what was one of the worst humiliating defeats in presidential history in the midterms and turned it into now where he’s totally setting the agenda, running the show. USA Today: ‘Political Rebound? Obama Sets Up as New Comeback Kid.’ Sorry, folks, I don’t buy it. I don’t think the American people are as… what’s the way to put this? They’re informed and they’re engaged. I just don’t think they look at this the way inside-the-Beltway people did. The American people are not sitting there judging who’s outsmarting here and who’s smarter here and who’s smarter there and so forth. They’re looking at brass tacks, nuts and bolts, and just in sheer size, the tax deal, whatever is wrong with it pales in comparison.
There is no $800 billion cost in this bill, as it continues to be reported. Tax rates staying the same is not an increased cost to anybody. There’s no $800 billion cost. This tax bill pales in comparison to the size of the omnibus spending bill. That was 1.1 to $1.3 trillion, and it had all kinds of destructive, ruinous stuff in it, and it has been defeated. And make no mistake Obama wanted it as badly as the tax deal. To say that he was detached from it, that he had nothing to do with it, that it was Harry Reid’s deal, don’t buy that. I think if you look at the chorus, Obama’s chorus, the Drive-By Media, State-Controlled Media, the very fact that they’re paying hardly any attention to the omnibus going down — how about this headline, by the way? This is laughable. The AP: ‘Bill Preventing Big Tax Increases Heads to Obama.’ Bill preventing big tax increases? That’s a new take. Notice the sudden change. They’re no longer calling it the Obama tax cut deal. I mean that was too big a lie even for them to carry off in perpetuity.
‘The measure would extend tax cuts for families at every income level, renew jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and enact a new one-year cut in Social Security taxes –‘ I watched a little bit of the Democrat reaction. They are fit to be tied. They think that this one-year, 2% cut in the payroll tax is the beginning of the end of Social Security. They think the Republicans won big on this. They think the Republicans took Obama to the cleaners, and they think that because they think Obama has caved as this hard-core socialist, Marxist that they always thought he was. They don’t understand that he will zigzag to get where he wants to go rather than go in a straight line if he has to. He is a committed ideologue. He is a committed socialist. He’s not moderating; he’s not moving to the center. He is, ladies and gentlemen, a giant pretender.
(playing of spoof song)
RUSH: Well-known white comedian Paul Shanklin with the vocal portrayal of Barack Obama. That’s The Platters, Great Pretender. That’s Barney Frank in the background vocals. (singing) ‘Woo, woo.’ Didn’t have to work hard, just keep the mouth open.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Hello, we’re back, it’s Rush Limbaugh. This is Open Line Friday.
So I guess, listening to Dick Turban, I guess Obama’s for tax cuts for the rich, too, now. The big winner, Barack Obama, the big comeback kid has now just come out for tax cuts for the rich. Oh, yeah, we had to do all this stuff to make sure we didn’t harm the economy. This is what the Democrats are saying. Sorry, folks, I can’t let this go. After two years of totally unnecessary economic destruction done purposefully, all of a sudden now when we near the presidential campaign for 2012, guess what? We gotta start making Obama look like he’s not what he is, and somehow this is called a victory.
From an e-mail: ‘Dear Rush: Sorry, bud, we lost. The tax freeze –‘ meaning the Bush tax rates ‘– is only two years. Democrats are gonna use it for a sledgehammer in the next election cycle.’ Damn right. I know that. I know what’s gonna happen. Obama’s telegraphed that to his leftist base, ‘Don’t worry about it, 2012 comes, we’re gonna get rid of these Bush tax rates. We’re gonna raise taxes on the rich in 2012.’ That’s what he told his base was gonna happen this time. We’re not gonna let these tax cuts stay in place. We’re gonna let these tax cuts expire. That’s up ’til a month ago. Now all of a sudden this is Obama’s idea? Mr. Durbin, the only way to save the Obama presidency was to admit that Bush was right in Afghanistan, on Gitmo, on taxes. This is what we’re being told is a big Obama win, that Bush was right? Now, let’s look at this business, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but Dems are gonna use it as a sledgehammer in the next election cycle.’ Let them. It will just go and show that they didn’t mean any of the stuff they’re saying now.
I know what people are thinking, that certainly by the presidential race in November 2012, certainly the economy’s gotta be coming be back, certainly jobs are gonna be added, certainly there’s gonna be an uptick and certainly Obama is gonna be able to claim credit that he did it. And then he’s gonna say we’re not gonna need these tax rates anymore. We can raise taxes now on the rich. Fine, there’s nothing big, surprising about that, very predictable, in fact. Libs are libs. We know who they are; we know what they’re gonna do. We know that he doesn’t mean a word of this. We know that Durbin doesn’t mean a word of this. So in two years we can throw it right back in their face. Wait a minute, Mr. Durbin, you said two years ago that we had to do all this stuff to make sure we didn’t harm the economy. I guarantee you in 2012 we’re not gonna be adding jobs to the rate of replacement levels. Look at the stats we had yesterday. We have lost 257,000 full-time jobs here while everybody’s taking credit for 200 some odd thousand temporary job gains. There’s nothing good, there’s nothing positive happening out here in the economy.
So you roll the dice and think, ‘Well, in two years it has to.’ Well, two years ago, ‘My gosh, Rush, it’s gotta be better than than it is now.’ It’s done nothing but get worse, right? Somebody want to show me any improvement from 2008 to the present? Just because the Democrats are gonna use this as a sledgehammer doesn’t mean, ‘Oh, God, it’s over, oh, we got snookered, oh, my God, oh, gosh, oh, gosh, Obama is going to come back and he’s gonna really cream us on the tax rate.’ I know he’s gonna do that. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like these tax rates staying. He’s doing this because he has to and he knows that the only way to save his presidency right now is to admit that Bush was right although he’s not using those words, but with somebody like me on the case analyzing it properly.
In the meantime, the definitive liberal legislation, this omnibus trick budget, this coup of the US budget process, a bunch of losers in the November elections try to hijack the budget process after ignoring it constitutionally for a year, try to hijack it, and they lose big, and Obama was totally in support of it, the thing that had liberalism written all over it, the omnibus budget, this spending bill goes down in flames after three days, maybe even less than that. When did Dingy Harry drop it, Tuesday? Last night it’s gone simply because of Republican unity? And we’re talking about Obama’s the comeback kid here? The way I look at it, liberalism’s taken it on the chin yet again. We got the president and his minions talking about how great conservative ideology is in bad economic times. They’re not using those words, of course, but this is the end results, the meaning. I don’t care if they mean it or not. I don’t care if it’s a head fake. It is a head fake. I think this whole tax deal was mostly a head fake to get everybody’s attention diverted while they drop this bomb, this omnibus bill. I don’t see how they win anything here.
The omnibus budget was gonna be the new Obama bucks. That was gonna be the new stimulus. They’re calling this thing stimulus 2. There’s no stimulus here because there’s no new spending. Yeah, the unemployment, yeah, the ethanol stuff, yeah, it’s not stuff I would do. I’d have killed the deal, but compared to what was in the Obamabus, ha, this is chump change compared to what coulda happened. Look, I will admit, folks, maybe I’m just not smart enough to see what it really is. Maybe this is a huge Obama win. Maybe we got totally snookered here and maybe I’m just blinded by my… what am I blinded by? My hopes and desires and so forth? Maybe I’m just not smart enough to deal in that league, so I’ll stay here on the radio and I’ll just keep calling it as I see it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Janice, Grand Junction, Colorado. Welcome to Open Line Friday. You are first. Hello.
CALLER: Merry Christmas and thank you, Rush, for keeping us informed.
RUSH: You bet, madam.
CALLER: I’m 56. I’m unemployed with no unemployment insurance. And all this week I’ve been listening to what’s been going on, and I’ve never been so involved as to calling Washington as I have been now. I’ve called Washington every morning, and when I found out about the omnibus bill and everything that was going to be spent for all of these ridiculous earmarks, I thought I was gonna come unglued. I really did.
RUSH: Wait now, one second here Janice. Earmarks are earmarks, but the earmarks in this thing, and they were large, they were 10%, but the earmarks were not the bad thing about the omnibus. The bad thing about the omnibus was the omnibus.
CALLER: Well, true, absolutely. And when I heard the whole thing, I was dying. I’m spinning around going absolutely crazy, and the song that opened up this set, you know, Psychotic Reaction, that was me. That was me. And that’s been me every day. I cannot get over that they don’t understand, the Democrats, the liberals do not understand that we’re out here suffering big time, and they don’t care.
RUSH: That’s the truth.
CALLER: They don’t care.
RUSH: It’s not that they don’t understand anything. They understand full well what they were doing.
CALLER: But they don’t care.
RUSH: Right, they don’t care.
CALLER: They talk the most caring talk, but they don’t care. They lie to us, and then they say that we’re the liars.
RUSH: Janice, the Democrat Party profits off of the misery and suffering of the American people. That’s what is outrageous. We have a political party in this country which benefits from their own self-imposed suffering, and yet at the same time they’re the ones that somehow are compassionate, they’re the ones that care about the little guy, they’re the ones that have all this concern for the downtrodden. They profit from creating misery and suffering economically in people. They profit from it because they think those people are gonna end voting for them to keep getting a meager subsistence in whatever check, be it unemployment, whatever. Look, when I heard that Dingy Harry dropped this thing after I left this microphone on Tuesday, Dingy Harry drops this thing, I spent that whole night ticked off and the next day I spent all day on it on this program. I know how you feel.
CALLER: Oh. It’s unbelievable. It’s truly unbelievable and there’s no relief. There is no relief. They hit us every single day, and then I’m the oxymoron because I’m conservative, I’m unemployed, and right now I’m poor, and I’m the oxymoron. (laughing) That’s what I’m told. That’s what I’m told by my so-called liberal friends.
RUSH: Well, yeah.
CALLER: They tell me that I’m the oxymoron, and I’m like, no, there’s no oxymoron here. It’s just facts. Americans are hurting, Americans are suffering, and they continue to follow the lie, and we’re the ones that suffer right along with ’em. I knew this was gonna happen two years ago.
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: Not that I was gonna be unemployed, but I knew that what was getting ready to happen was gonna happen. I had no idea the severity that they were going to act, the viciousness that they were going to act with. It’s really been — whew!
RUSH: Let me tell you something. The working poor are almost always conservative. The unworking poor are Democrats and liberals.
CALLER: You know, you’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right.
RUSH: Snerdley’s frowning as though he doesn’t get it. What’s so hard to understand, the working poor are conservative, meaning, they’re working. They’re poor but they’re working. The unworking poor, sitting around watching Oprah, are Democrats. By the way, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I had to go over to Mar-a-Lago after the program yesterday to meet some people to whom I was making a charitable donation, I was giving them the donation, and one of the guys just loves Mar-a-Lago. It’s Donald Trump’s club here, the old Marjorie Merriweather Post home and it’s the East Coast’s Hearst Castle and Trump bought it many, many, many, many moons ago. It was unoccupied and deteriorating, bought it for ten million and has now turned it into a $250 million property, just beautiful, he’s restored it and so forth. And this guy who is a member took me to the beach side guest house complex and so forth for an adult beverage, and as we’re leaving, he said, ‘You see that second floor up there?’ Yeah, yeah. ‘That’s where Oprah stays when she comes here. You know why?’ ‘No, why?’ ‘Cause it’s got a kitchen right below it.’