RUSH: Mike Lee sent out an e-mail letter. I don’t know if it’s a fundraising letter or not. Somebody sent it along to me. I didn’t get it myself. It’s one of these “Dear fellow American” e-mails. It’s got some interesting points in it.
“Dear Fellow American,
The Obama Administration’s behavior during the government shutdown has been the best argument against Obamacare anyone has ever made.
The American people do not want Obamacare, and they are demanding that Washington act to protect them from the harmful effects of this unaffordable and unfair law. The president’s response has been to ignore them, allow the government to shut down, and then use his power to inflict as much pain as possible on the people by closing national parks and monuments, stopping payments to veterans, and cutting off cancer research.”
And all of that’s true. The sequester did not create the result the Democrats and Obama wanted. There wasn’t enough pain. They want people suffering when the precious government is somehow shut down or when it’s deprived of money. And they were hell-bent this time. There’s a shutdown, okay, then people are gonna suffer. We’re gonna make sure. This is the active strategy of the president of the United States. The active strategy is to make sure that there is pain, personal pain, such as 26 military families not being funded, getting benefits. Such as the debacle involving illegal aliens and amnesty on the National Mall, which is closed. Such as National Parks being shut down. Such as cancer-stricken children not having access to the National Institutes of Health.
These were things that need not happen. These were items chosen to be defunded after the shutdown by the president of the United States and his party, because together their purpose is to try to create a mind-set in as many people as possible that life is not worth living if there is no government in it. If the government is shut down, if the government has to do with a penny less next year than it got this year, then they want people to actually feel pain, because their objective is this government getting as big as possible, taking as much capital from the private sector as possible and transferring it to government for power and control.
They want people as dependent on government as they can make them, and that includes inflicting pain on them during a supposed shutdown. And Lee, in his letter to Americans, is pointing out that that very behavior ought to be sending up red flags to everybody. If we have a president and a party willing to inflict this kind of pain because they petulantly don’t get their way in a shutdown, with this kind of power, we’re gonna give ’em total control of the health care system?
The president’s response has been to ignore people who oppose Obamacare. His response has been “to allow the government to shut down, and then use his power to inflict as much pain as possible on the people by closing national parks and monuments, stopping payments to veterans, and cutting off cancer research.”
And then Lee writes, “The President’s actions show exactly why we should not expand the government’s power over our health care choices. What power the government has, it will use – and misuse – to advance its own interests, even if that means punishing the American people along the way.”
And there can be no doubt that the regime has attempted to punish people it considers its political enemies. It has sought to inflict pain in the shutdown so as to create the impression that you and anyone else cannot possibly get by without government. Without more government, without bigger government, without more powerful government your life would be absolutely disastrous. That’s the impression they want to convey. And of course their rabid supporters are right in there furthering that notion. Their rabid supporters who are gonna be among those really harmed by all this.
I’m talking about their voters, you know, the people that go to these websites and post comments at the blogs, just your average, ordinary derelict Democrat voter. They’re all-in for this. They’re all-in for you suffering. They’re all-in for you having pain inflicted on you.
Lee continues. “The message behind the Administration’s shutdown bullying is the same message sent by the IRS’s abuses of power against the president’s political opponents. This is the abusive, unaccountable bureaucracy that, under Obamacare, will soon be running America’s health care system. President Obama is not just using the vast powers of his office as leverage against Republicans – he is abusing his powers as leverage against the American people.”
And he is. There isn’t any question. There’s a reason his approval numbers are at 37%. There is a reason his approval numbers are falling. It’s a reality that is not reported upon. It’s a reality not commented upon practically anywhere inside the Beltway.
Now we have news, guess what? The claims for unemployment insurance last week or this week, I forget which story, somewhere in the Stack, are so high, this just shocked everybody. It’s a California story. “Well, you know, it’s because of the shutdown and because of the computer glitches and the California employment reporting system, and that’s why the unreal and very unusual high number of people applying for unemployment.”
No, it can’t be that we’re losing jobs left and right. How in the world can private sector unemployment go up or not based on a government shutdown? What are the things that are related? They aren’t. Just because you’ve got a government shutdown doesn’t automatically mean unemployment’s going to skyrocket. Not in the private sector, but yet that’s the impression that is being conveyed in this story on joblessness that is out there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I tell you, Mike Lee is right, folks. This shutdown should show us that the federal government already has too much damn power, and it’s worse than that. They are not afraid to use it against the people for partisan purposes to advance the agenda of a particular party. You know, it’s one thing to go out and inflict damage on your political opponents within the realm of your business and politics, but to go out and inflict pain purposely on the American people, regardless of their party affiliation?
Everybody wanting to go to the Grand Canyon is not a Republican, for example, and everybody wanting to go is not a Democrat. That doesn’t matter to the regime. They are just trying to demonstrate to everybody (snide), “If you shut down the government, then we’re gonna make your life miserable. We’re gonna show you how much life is not worth living if you don’t have your government here,” blah, blah, blah, blah.
But in the process of doing this, they are illustrating the corruptive nature of power. What we’re dealing with here is just blatant, flat-out corruption, and it’s right out in the open. In the process, we’re also learning that these people don’t care. They have so much power, they aren’t afraid of the reaction on the part of the people when that power is used to make life either more inconvenient or more painful or more arduous.
So people who want you to believe that government’s the greatest thing on earth, people that want you to believe that government is good and decent and just, the very people who want you to believe that government is the end all to every problem, are the very people using it to make your life harder — and, in the process, demonstrating publicly that they’re totally willing to corrupt, be corrupted and corrupt this power to get their way and to keep it.
This is exactly why we have a Constitution: To provide an obstacle, many obstacles to this kind of thing happening. This is exactly what the Founding Fathers of this country did not envision and strove to prevent from happening, and yet it is. It is happening because of lawlessness, because of extra-constitutionality on behalf of people positions of great power in the government, and it’s just out there for everybody to see. It’s just a question of realizing it and admitting that’s what’s happening.
The problem is the Democrats love this. The Democrats love the inflicting of pain, just like they love tax increases on the rich because they think that’s gonna make them suffer. They love it — and that’s the nature, the human nature that Democrats and the left have cultivated among way too many people in this country.