RUSH: So I’m sitting here, I’m at the computer here, and I’m continually doing show prep with my back to the TV monitors, of course, the way the room’s laid out here, and as I come back, get ready for this hour to begin, Brian, the broadcast engineer, in a panicked voice on the IFB, said, ‘You hear the breaking news?’ ‘No, no, what did I miss?’ ‘The Redskins are benching McNabb.’ I said, ‘I knew that earlier this week when Shanahan was talking.’ It is official. The Redskins are benching Donovan McNabb. I don’t know, man, this guy, he cannot catch a break.
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: And we’re back, broadcast excellence authored by me, El Rushbo here at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. Open Line Friday, you get to talk about whatever you want to talk about. Not the case Monday through Thursday. You know, it’s funny, it seems like only yesterday, the news media was full of stories telling us that the Tea Party was already outta gas, that the Tea Party was compromised, that they had already failed, and now the Tea Party is being cited for killing the omnibus pork bill, which is the first glimmer of sanity on Capitol Hill for who knows how long. McNabb, he can’t catch a break, he can’t throw one. It’s a terrible shame out there. Again, 800-282-2882, great to have you here.
All right so, folks, in all of this analysis of what’s going to happen in the next two years based on the tax deal and the omnibus spending bill going down the tubes, this is not 1994. I think a lot of analysts are forgetting this is a wholly different electorate now. The Tea Party, these people are aware. These people know full well what’s going on here. This not the same old duped public that watches NBC and CBS and ABC, believes everything they see there anymore. A lot of the people disagreeing with me in the e-mail, their opinion centers on the fact that the voting public’s a bunch of idiots and two years from now they’re not gonna remember any of this and it’s all gonna be politics-as-usual, Democrats outsmarting us here. I think it’s a different era. I think people are more involved, their country’s future has been spent down the drain. These people are desperate. They’re gonna demand that health care be repealed; they’re gonna demand that all this spending be scotched.
Look at the outrage over the earmarks. ‘That’s right, Mr. Limbaugh, but while your people were sandbagged looking at the spending and the earmarks, look at all the spending that took place in the tax deal that they got snookered with.’ They didn’t get snookered. They were opposed to it, and in great numbers they were opposed to it. But the spending, they’re reporting, the tax deal here: ‘The bill’s cost, $858 billion, would be added to the deficit, a sore spot among budget hawks in both parties.’ This is from the AP. Now, the AP just can’t help but keep lying about the cost of this bill. Extending Bush tax rates in place for ten years costs nothing. Steny Hoyer: ‘I know that we are going to borrow every nickel in this bill.’ Oh, come on, Steny, we’re not fools anymore. You want to worry about all the borrowing for this stupid tax bill? What about the $1.3 trillion omnibus? We don’t have the money for anything we’re doing. Everything is gonna be borrowed or printed, and of that $858 billion, by the way, $700 billion is the tax rates. It’s not gonna cost us $700 billion. These tax rates have been in place for ten years. It’s not a new cost.
Dear Rush: ‘If the economy recovers, Obama’s gonna say that we can now tax the rich. If the economy doesn’t recover, he can say, ‘See, tax cuts don’t work.” I can see how people might think that on the surface. Therefore isn’t that a win-win for him? And even I, El Rushbo in the early days of this tax deal, one of the reasons that I was opposed to it was that Obama was setting up a win-win for him. This is before I heard Democrats start talking about it the way they’re talking about it. If Durbin would shut up, and another e-mailer says, ‘Well, nobody’s gonna remember what Durbin said.’ Yes, they will, because I will. ‘Yeah, but ABC, CBS, NBC, the alphabet networks, they’re not gonna.’ I don’t care about them. They’re irrelevant, as far as I’m concerned. If I was concerned about them, I would retire. They are becoming more and more marginalized. CNN barely exists. MSNBC is laughed at.
Now, the original thinking on the tax deal was — and I put this forward — okay, so leave the tax cuts as they are and the economy comes back, and Obama says, ‘Well, let’s go raise taxes on the rich now that the economy’s back.’ But we’ve now got Obama and Durbin and everything saying we can’t raise taxes right now, it would hurt the economy. Durbin just said it. A brilliant win for Obama. You can’t raise taxes. Don’t make me go through this again. These guys coulda done this two years ago and avoided all this damage. These guys have wreaked havoc on this economy for two years, purposeful destruction, and now all of a sudden we can’t let current tax rates expire because that would hurt the economy. Well, they’re admitting Reaganomics. They’re admitting high taxes hurt the economy. So if the economy is roaring back, and it isn’t gonna be, but if it is trending upward in two years, then Obama says, ‘Okay, now we can raise taxes on the rich,’ well, we got Obama and Durbin on the record saying that raising taxes stymies an economy. All you gotta do is remind ’em of that. I’ll be leading the charge.
If the economy doesn’t recover, he can say tax cuts don’t work. There aren’t any tax cuts. There’s not a single tax cut here other than the 2%, one-year payroll tax, and that one year is gonna expire before 2012. So we’re not gonna be going into the 2012 reelection campaign with a 2% payroll tax cut in place. In fact, in the final year, we’re gonna have a tax increase, because the 2% sunset for one year is gonna be back. So we’re gonna be talking about tax increases there, but there aren’t any tax cuts here. All they’re admitting here is that raising taxes hurts the economy. If there were tax cuts in this and the economy doesn’t roar back — of course it would. This is what Obama knows, which is why there aren’t tax cuts of any significance. You know, a one-year payroll tax cut’s not any big deal. So, yeah, if you want to tell yourself that you’re just being a realist, and Obama’s president, has bully pulpit, he’s got a slavish media that loves him, and they’ll spin anything the way he wants, and if he wants to say after two years the economy doesn’t come back, ‘See, I tried it Reagan’s way, I tried it your way and it didn’t work,’ well, he hasn’t. He hasn’t cut anybody’s taxes. All he’s done is kept them the same, and Dick Durbin, Steny Hoyer, all these guys are admitting that raising taxes right now would harm the economy.
So we’ve got ’em on record. Raising taxes stifles economic growth, period. Doesn’t matter. The only significant tax anything is the hike in the death tax, and that’s up from zero. And the left is livid about this. They wanted it back up to 55%. It’s at 35%, but right now it’s zero. In two weeks it’s gonna go up to 35%. Right now the estate tax rate is zero. So you can’t even say that there’s a tax cut there. The Democrats are. There’s no tax cut. The old rate was 55%, but that’s not been the law for a year. Let me look at this another way, too. As we sit here, this lame duck Congress is still dominated by Democrats, both houses, folks. I mean huge in the House of Representatives. It’s huge. The cavalry hasn’t shown up yet. The Tea Party Congress is not sworn in until January 5th. If they can’t raise taxes with Democrat majorities in both houses, how are they gonna get it done with a Republican House in an election year? They may come back and try. Tax bills start in the House of Representatives. Somebody explain to me how he’s gonna get away with raising taxes? He’s gonna say he wants to, but he’s gonna placate his base.
See, right now, Obama, ‘He’s triangulating, this guy is so brilliant, he’s moving to the center. And, Rush, we told you he would, we told you he’d move to the center ’cause he wants to get reelected.’ He hasn’t moved to the center. He has zagged away from his straight line to Marxism. And you get to 2012 and he’s gonna zig back and he’s gonna start sounding every bit like the Marxist that the left wants him to sound like now, raise taxes on the rich, raise the estate tax back up, get out of Afghanistan, close Gitmo. He’s gonna be saying the same stuff all over again. Here’s what Obama’s doing, we got this special tape. He was in the recording studio two nights ago, ladies and gentlemen. Our microphones were there.
(playing of spoof song)
RUSH: And white comedian Paul Shanklin as Barack Obama and the Great Pretender. That’s The Platters, Barney Frank with the backup vocals. Now I’m looking for this economic piece that says we’re not gonna recover anyway. ‘The Huge Structural Employment Hole Is Going Nowhere — Initial jobless claims came in, as expected, at 420,000 this morning.’ This is yesterday’s report. ‘That’s improvement over last week and shows improvement in the long-run. But does it even matter? The reality is that, while claims are improving, the U.S. has a structural unemployment problem that isn’t being addressed. There just aren’t any jobs of workers who’ve been hit the hardest by the housing collapse, and with the way the housing market is going, there likely won’t be for some time.’
We’ve also got all the new temporary hires taking place because businesses don’t want to commit to full-time people ’cause they don’t know what circumstances are gonna be. So if there aren’t any indications the housing market’s coming back, then there’s a whole employee base that’s not coming back, and these guys at Business Insider claim that’s why we’re not seeing movement in the unemployment rate. The people honestly looking at circumstances don’t see the ingredients for a massive economic recovery. I don’t doubt it’s gonna uptick some. It has to. But a massive economic recovery? ‘Okay, let’s raise taxes on the rich.’ Yeah, we’ll see. We all want the economy to come around. We all do. I take it back. Some of us don’t. The Democrats actually don’t. They would like the illusion of it, 2012 election.
Here’s another e-mailer disagreeing with me, I don’t know what I’m talking about. ‘Dear Rush, you’re missing the point. It’s simple. In 2012 the Democrats are gonna hammer the fact that they had to extend the tax rates just to get the unemployment benefits extended ’cause Republicans held America hostage on these benefits just to help the rich, and 95% of the media will pound that message and the Democrats win.’ That discounts the existence of the Tea Party, which is a movement, by the way, that’s only going to grow. Ninety-five percent of the media will pound the message every day, and that assumes that 95% of the people will believe them. I’d like to offer this analysis. To those of you who think the media’s going to beat us every time, how did we win in November? Somebody’s gonna have to explain to me how we are hopelessly defeated at every election. The media is gonna always spin for Obama; the media’s gonna spin for the Democrats; they’re gonna avoid the truth; they’re gonna make Republicans look like a bunch of scrooges. ‘We’re never gonna win, Rush.’
How did we win in November? Oh, don’t give me slick marketing. How did we win in November? We won in November because the public rejected Obama; the public rejected the Democrat Party; the public rejected everything about them. The Republicans didn’t stand for anything, purposely. They got out of the way. So the media was not able to spin the country out of what they knew to be the case, the destructiveness of the Democrat Party. So somebody tell me, why are they gonna be able to do it in 2012? How has a Republican ever won any election if the media is so all powerful? How did Bush win two presidential races? We know the media hated his guts, lied about him all over the place, Hitler this, how did it happen? Somebody’s gonna have to help me out here. I can sense my intelligence just oozing outta my brain. Before this show’s over, they’re gonna need to put me in a home.