RUSH: This is Wednesday — it’s been three days. It has been three days since it was discovered, again, that the architect of Obamacare, which happens to be the most tectonic shift in America and the way we govern ourselves, it has been three days since the architect of Obamacare was discovered to have said last year that they had to lie to the American people about this legislation, Obamacare, in order to get it passed, because the American people were too stupid to understand what was at stake.
The legislation was so important, it was so fundamentally transformative it was going to change this country forever. It was going to change this country into something it was never founded to be. And to do that, the American people had to be lied to. Three days have gone by and not a syllable in the mainstream media. This story remains segregated, it remains relegated to talk radio and to Fox News on occasion.
Obamacare is not just a fundamental change to our country. It’s a transformative, forever-altering, throw everything upside down change in the way this country was founded, the way this country was intended to operate.
The fact that the primary architect has been out admitting that they lied every time they had to, to get this thing passed, that they couldn’t dare let people know what was really in it because it wouldn’t pass, they had to lie to the American people, the fact that this story is not the lead story and has not been the lead story at ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, and all of the others, the fact that that story has yet to appear in any Drive-By Media outlet is one of the greatest examples of the challenge that we still face. It represents a great example of what still needs to be overcome. And, I might add that, aside from Senator Jeff Sessions, there hasn’t been much reaction to this from Republican Party leadership.
Now, before I make a great case on that, Mr. Snerdley, am I wrong? Have you seen Republican leaders react to the Gruber video? (interruption) Look, it’s nothing new, the media being in the tank for Obama. Don’t misunderstand. But the fact that this story is being hidden from the low-information voter or the mass of the American population, however you want to think of it, this underscores what is, in many people’s view — I mean, we got plenty of fatalists out there who believe it’s an impossible task. I mean, if the people of the country are not properly informed on things, you really can’t blame them for inaction.
Now, I know the election results sort of contradict this, but they really don’t when you realize that two-thirds of Americans didn’t vote, and I’m not gonna make any more of that than is necessary. I’m not gonna attach negatives to that, don’t misunderstand. The point here is that we’re lucky that one-third of the population was informed sufficiently and motivated to vote and show up, to give an indication that the country’s not been lost here and that there is a desire to fight and save it.
But I’ve been waiting. I have been waiting three days. Every day I have waited to see, I didn’t expect to see it, I didn’t expect Brian Williams make a big deal of this; I didn’t expect Charlie Rose to make a big deal of it; I didn’t expect Tom Brokaw to be a guest anywhere, make a big deal of it; I didn’t expect Scott Pelley to make a big deal of it; I didn’t expect to see it on the front page of the New York Times, Washington Post. And I didn’t see it in any of those places because they’re covering up.
They are helping this Regime in its massive effort to transform this country into something it was never intended to be. Here you have the architect of this disaster, the architect of the legislation that is responsible for the economic demise of this country; that is responsible for the negativism and the fatalism that has permeated this country; the legislation that is behind all of the disasters that are happening to this country. The architect is flat-out saying they had to lie. And he’s joking about it with his fellow economics buddies.
They had to flat-out lie. They’re giving themselves pats on the back. The American people are too stupid. And it doesn’t make the news. I find this not surprising, but it certainly is noteworthy. And I have to again include the fact that I haven’t seen the Republican Party leadership express any outrage over this at all. The outrage, the anger, the disbelief is contained in only one segment of our population. And that’s us. In the old days, you know what they would call this? Smoking gun. There aren’t any such things anymore. No such thing, I guess.
On top of this we’ve got Obama selling this country down the river while he’s in China wearing a Mao jacket, chewing Nicorette. Then we’ve got the president selling the country out with amnesty. Then we’ve got the president saying he wants to regulate the Internet, as though it’s the power and light company, as though it’s just another utility. And we’re not even finished with Wednesday yet.
Now, by the way, I should let you know that there has been another discovery of Gruber saying again, another video, the American people are too stupid, that they had to lie. They couldn’t reveal the truth, it was too important. The American people a bunch of dunderheads. And it’s not the media who have uncovered this. It’s citizens, people who have lost their health care, people who have lost their insurance, scouring the Internet, trying to find out what is going on.
They have been broadsided. Some of these people believe everything they were told in the media about Obamacare. It was gonna be cheaper. If they liked their doctor and their plan, there wasn’t gonna be any change. And now all of a sudden they can’t afford it, they’re being canceled, and this was not anything they expected because they were lied to.
One such man is Rich Weinstein. He lives near Philadelphia. He was on our affiliate today, WPHT, and he says that he’s got even more audio and video that will probably make… He’s not a reporter. He’s just a guy. It’s all there for journalists, but they’re not interested. There’s not a single Drive-By journalist interested in this. They are just flat-out ignoring it, because to them, when you get down to brass tacks, it isn’t news.
Because it isn’t any different than what they’ve been doing on every other Obama issue. The entire six years of this Regime has been one lie after another, with the media promulgating it, promoting it, amplifying it, or covering for it. From the stimulus to all the supposed jobs summits — you name it — everything has been an inordinate, in-our-face lie with the Drive-By Media doing everything they can to promote the lies or to cover them up or to ignore them, whatever is called for on any occasion.
Let’s go to the audio sound bites.
A new Gruber video has emerged calling the American voters stupid again. This was in St. Louis at Washington University, October 4, 2013. This is about three weeks before the video that we heard on Sunday, which was at a University of Pennsylvania conference. I think it was October 23rd or 27th of 2013. This was October 4th at the Washington University in St. Louis. It’s Jonathan Gruber speaking about health care reform, what it is, why it’s necessary, and how it works.
GRUBER: They said, “Look, what you economic nerds want to do is you want to say that, for people with expensive health insurance plans, they will no longer get a 40% tax break. What if we instead just levied a 40% tax on the insurance companies that sell these terribly expensive Cadillac plans?” We said, “Well, that’s pretty much the same thing.” They proposed it and that passed and that passed, ’cause American voters are too stupid to understand the difference.
AUDIENCE: (guffawing laughter)
GRUBER: Okay?
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
GRUBER: (chuckling) So basically we now have the Cadillac tax!
RUSH: “American voters are too stupid to understand difference. So basically we now have the Cadillac tax!” What he’s talking about here is he said, “Look, what you economic nerds want to do is you want to say that, for people with expensive health insurance plans, they will no longer get a 40% tax break. What if we instead just levied a 40% tax on the insurance companies that sell these terribly expensive Cadillac plans?”
It’s none of their business!
If somebody wants to buy a Cadillac plan, it’s their business. If an insurance company can make money selling them, it’s their business. It’s none of Gruber’s business. But here he comes, as the architect of Obamacare, demanding there be a 40% tax on it. Why? “‘Cause it isn’t fair that somebody can afford a Cadillac insurance policy. It isn’t fair. If one person can but nobody else can, then nobody should have it!
“So what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna tax these really good plans out of existence so that everybody’s sitting there in equalized misery. We have to do this because the American voters are too stupid to understand the difference of eliminating a 40% tax break or levying a 40% tax on the insurance companies. So we’re just gonna do it ’cause the American people are too stupid to understand what we’re doing here.”
Here is the original Gruber video, just so you can hear it again. This is October 17, 2013, at the University of Pennsylvania.
GRUBER: This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies, okay? So it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said healthy people are gonna pay in… If you made it explicit the healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay? Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.
RUSH: It’s a theme. It’s a running theme. It’s a running theme, and it’s a joke. The American people are too stupid. We had to lie to ’em to get it passed. Again, I think what he’s actually saying is, “The American people may figure out what we’re doing if we tell ’em the truth, so we have to lie.” I think he’s worried they’re too smart, actually.
When he says, “The American people are too stupid,” what he’s really saying is, “You know, they’re not brilliant enough to agree with us.” That’s what he means by the American people are too stupid. This is arrogant, condescending conceit like you can’t believe. It’s not that you’re too stupid to understand what they’re doing. You’re too stupid to agree with them. You don’t have the brain power to be a good liberal.
So they have to lie to you. They have to be dishonest on purpose and lie to you about what’s in this bill to get you to vote for it because you, you’re just dumb. They know they’re in the minority. They know that they’re governing against the will of the people, and they know what they have to do to overcome that. They have to lie and laugh about it at the same time.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the most dramatic and flagrant breaches of public trust that has occurred in my lifetime, in terms of our government and its relationship to the citizens. Richard Nixon, who is considered the pariah — Richard Nixon’s considered the default, go-to example for out-of-control, egotistic presidential authority. Richard Nixon cannot hold a candle to what has happened here in the six years of the Barack Hussein Obama administration.
This breach of the public trust, this acknowledgement — this cavalier, arrogant, braggadocious, laughing acknowledgement — that you are irrelevant, that you don’t matter. Only the elites matter. Only the people who lead our government matter. Only what they want matters, and they are empowered to make that happen however it’s required. If they have to break the law, if they have to violate the Constitution, if it’s because you’re stupid and do not have the ability to comprehend how wonderful and great they are, so be it.
It wasn’t that long ago that the discovery of the architect of such a transformative piece of legislation like Obamacare admitting these kinds of things would have had this country in outraged protest. It would have had this country in an uproar. It would have been leftists and conservatives and everybody in an uproar over the outsized overreach and the lying to the American public and the breach of the public trust and all that.
It would have been simply outrageous. But here we are today in 2014, and it isn’t even news. It is stunning, and it deserves to be noted and focused on to the point that it spreads to all four corners of this country, despite the efforts of the Democrat Party and the American media and the Obama administration to cover this up and to pretend that it didn’t happen. Gruber’s apologizing, but he doesn’t mean it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The majority of the American people do not want amnesty, do not want “comprehensive immigration reform.” They want the border secured. That doesn’t matter. Obama’s going to violate their will anyway. The vast majority of the American people are now convinced that there is no such thing as man-made global warming, and whether it’s a hoax or not, it isn’t happening.
That doesn’t matter. Obama is going to violate their will by making a big deal via executive order, and he is going to put further penalties via taxes and regulations on energy production and consumption, which is going to have disastrous consequences for the American economy and the disposable income of the American people.
Obama is lying to and cavalier and not being respectful at all of the American people. Net neutrality? The same thing. There’s nothing wrong with the Internet now. It’s just open. It’s free. You pay for what you get. Some people don’t like that. A lot of people want freebies. A lot of people want discounts. Obama wants to treat the Internet like the phone company, like the electric company.
He wants the government to be able to regulate Internet usage, Internet providers. No good can come from it. The American people do not want it. That doesn’t matter. Likewise, the American people have never been in favor — from the moment Hillary Clinton tried it — of socialized medicine. They have never been in favor, on a majority basis, of the government running the American health care system.
That doesn’t matter, either.
You were lied to about the “reforms” in the health care system. You were lied to dramatically. You were told that things that really mattered to you were going to happen. They were known to be lies even before they were uttered. Your premium was never gonna come down $2,500 a year. You were not gonna be able to keep your doctor and you were not gonna be able to keep your insurance plan if you liked it.
The law specifically made those things impossible, if it were followed. The federal government constitutionally cannot demand, cannot require that the American people buy anything. That didn’t matter. A series of fines were installed in Obamacare to penalize you if you didn’t buy an Obamacare insurance policy. They don’t have the constitutional authority to do that.
The Supreme Court said, “No big deal! We’ll let it happen.” The American people didn’t know where to turn, except to the Republican Party on Election Day. It’s a teachable moment for you Democrats, a teachable moment for you young people. The Democrat Party says what about themselves? The Democrat Party says they are the guardian of the disadvantaged.
They’re the guardians and the protectors of the poor and the hungry, the used, the taken advantage of, the tossed aside. The Democrat Party is the advocate for the little guy. The Democrat Party is gonna make sure that African-Americans suffer no racism. The Democrat Party is gonna make sure that no minority suffers any offense whatsoever. The election of the first black president was gonna end racism in America!
Does all of this sound familiar to you? Just what is the Democrat Party doing for the little guy? How does lying to the American people in order to be able to pass massive tax increases, massive health care costs — how in the world does any aspect of Obamacare — help the little guy, outside of those who get subsidies?
By the way, we have Gruber on record telling the truth about subsidies. If his testimony ever gets to the Supreme Court in this case, it could be problematic for them. (Hang on for that in just a moment.) How does lying to the American people, how does insulting their intelligence, how does assuming the American people are the biggest collection of idiots the Democrat Party’s ever confronted, respect the little guy?
How does any of what the Obama administration has done help the little guy?
Pick one constituency group in the Democrat Party outside of the rich in Hollywood and Wall Street and tell me how they’ve benefited. You can’t. They have not benefited. This breach of the public trust that we have now discovered, Jonathan Gruber — the arrogant and conceited so-called economist from MIT — admitting that they had to lie in order to get this bill passed because the American people are “too stupid” to understand it, is as egregious a thing as I can recall.
So Gruber’s out trying to cover his tracks. He’s appearing on such heavyweight programs as Ronan Farrow on MSNBC. There is no audience there. I don’t have the audio sound bite. There’s a ban on this program on anything coming out of MSNBC. But that’s where Gruber went. He also went to WGBH-TV in Boston. That’s PBS. The host, Emily Rooney, who is the daughter of Andy Rooney, I believe (not that it matters, except that the media’s incestuous).
Emily Rooney was interviewing Gruber, and she said, “You’ve been under a lot of fire for remarks of yours that recently went viral, and you’ve gotten a lot of nasty, upsetting e-mails. But your larger point was about how much politics you have to play in order to get something done. So do you essentially stand by what you said?”
GRUBER: I mean, I am… I apologized for the terms I used. I expressed myself very poorly. I think the point I was trying to make, Emily, is, uh, that essentially a very sensible way to do this law would have been to literally copy what we did in Massachusetts. There was one important difference: In Massachusetts, we actually gave poor people money and said, “Here’s the money you get to get health insurance.” At the federal level we couldn’t classify it as spending. That’s too politically unpopular, going back to presidents Clinton, Bush.
RUSH: Well, this is classic. This is classic misdirection. And, by the way, how’s it working out in Massachusetts? It’s working out so well Romney wouldn’t even run on it. It’s working out so well in Massachusetts that Mitt Romney ran away from it. You just gave money away? That’s what made it work in Massachusetts? You just gave money away and you can’t do that here?
That’s what you really wanted to do, was give money away, but you can’t do that because too many people would be upset about the spending? “It’s a poor choice of words. I expressed myself very poorly…” No, you said exactly what you intended to say, and you’ve said it over and over again! It’s part of your stump speech, Professor Gruber. It was not an unfortunate choice of words.
You chose them!
You laughed about it!
You were with your economic buddies, and you were all on the inside of this joke, slapping yourselves on the back, praising yourselves. How smart you all are! Oh, yeah. You guys are the smart ones. You’re the brilliant ones. “Look at what we had to do to get this thing passed, because nobody wanted this, except we did.” You mean the little guy didn’t want this?
Oh, the little guy thought he wanted it because the little guy was being lied to. The little guy thought it was gonna be free! Ask yourself a question. Search the deep, dark crevices of your memory. How many of you, on the day Obamacare passed, encountered people who thought that meant health care was free from that day forward?
I can’t tell you the number of people I encountered who say they ran into somebody who thought that, in their office or at a fast-food restaurant or at a coffee shop or wherever. The people who were all excited about it thought what it meant was that it was free. Why would they think that? On what planet is health care free? In what country is it free, really free? Nowhere.
Yet they thought it was. Somebody told them. They had heard enough to believe that it was free. Could it have been the Regime and the media that were creating this impression? No question about it. And why? That’s the only way they could get people to support it. And even with the lie, even with the assumption of “the stupidity of the American people,” they never have had majority support.
Gruber hasn’t even discussed the lies they told members of Congress to get this thing passed. Gruber hasn’t even talked about how stupid some of the Democrats in Congress are that had to be really cajoled and really manipulated and really threatened and really promised deals to get this passed. Remember the Cornhusker kickback? Remember all of the bribery that was going on in the Democrat Senate and House in order to get this bill passed?
Not even all the Democrats were for it. How stupid must they have been? What kind of lies were told to them? Well, we know one was told to Bart Stupak, that Obamacare wouldn’t be paying for abortions. Stupak has now admitted that he got taken for a ride. He should have known that he was getting in the car the first moment he was promised what he wanted to hear. This is just incredible. So he’s out there now apologizing. (imitating Gruber) “I had a poor choice of words. I really spoke very poorly. The point I was trying to make, Emily, a very sensible way to do this would have been…”
You didn’t say anything about this in that audio. You didn’t say anything about giving money away, that’s how you made it work in Boston. It’s also instructive to examine her question. Her question does not even contain, “So, Professor, why did you think you had to lie to the American people? So, Professor, why did you lie to the American people? Professor Gruber, why do you think the American people are stupid?” Note that none of that is in Emily Rooney’s question.
Her question is (imitating Rooney), “You know, you’ve been under a lot of fire for remarks of yours that recently went viral, and you’ve gotten a lot of nasty, upsetting e-mails. Wow, you’re quite a guy. You must have a strong backbone, Professor, ’cause there’s a lot of people mad at you. You’re getting a lot of e-mail, but you’re really taking it well. But, Professor, your larger point was about how much politics you have to play.”
Oh, yes, the political system made me lie. That’s it. The system is so corrupt, the political system is so corrupt that you had to lie, Professor, the politics you had to play. That means you had to lie to the American people in order to get something done.
You see how this works? Corrupt people end up in our system, and they blame the system for corrupting them, when they arrived corrupt. Corrupt people put together Obamacare. Corrupt people ran the IRS targeting the Tea Party. Corrupt people run the EPA. Corrupt people are all over the federal government, and they are enshrined there. They are empowered to do whatever it takes to get whatever done they want done, even if they have to lie to the American people, and even if those lies to the American people are predicated on the belief that the American people are too stupid.
This is the exact kind of thinking and behavior our founders feared. This is the kind of arrogance and conceit and corruption that the Founding Fathers of this country feared, and this is why the Constitution was written as it was, to prevent this kind of thwarting of the will of the people.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber was paid nearly $400,000 in taxpayer money to design Obamacare and to lie about it. I have a story on ABC News from 2010. Gruber was given a $95,000 contract, then another $297,600 contract with Health and Human Services for providing technical assistance in evaluating options for national health care reform. Options, of course, including lying to the stupid American people. Of course, the media was willing to lie about Obamacare for free, but they paid Gruber to do it.
Let me ask you a question. You know, George W. Bush has written a very heartfelt and touching book about his father, George H. W. Bush, 43 on 41. And yesterday College Station, or somewhere in Texas, Bush 43 did a little lecture and Q&A about his dad, about the book, with his parents and a crowd in the auditorium. Can you imagine what would happen if during this appearance yesterday George W. Bush started laughing and told the people in the room how he had to lie to the American people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to get us into the war there, ’cause the American people were too stupid to understand how unnecessary it was. Could you imagine what the news coverage from that moment on would be like?
Nobody would even know there’s a book. Nobody would even know that George W. Bush had written a book about his father and it was touching and heartwarming and all that. I mean, nobody would know about Obama’s half-baked executive actions today. All they would know is that Bush lied and laughed about it, if that had happened. And I’m telling you, it did happen with Jonathan Gruber. Jonathan Gruber admitting that they lied to the American people about Obamacare because the American people are too stupid is every bit as big, if not bigger. Because the left already believes that Bush lied about that. But it comes as news that the architect lied on purpose, laughingly so, because the people are stupid. And yet that’s met with crickets.
Here’s another Gruber sound bite from Emily Rooney, WGBH Boston. After he said, “Well, you know, I expressed myself very poorly. We should have just been able to give money away like we did in Massachusetts.” She said, “Well, you’ve heard more of it than I did over the last two years about what was going to happen when we finally got a Republican Congress. Will they try to dismantle this?” This is her fear now. Oh, Professor, have you blown it, have you blown it for all of us here on the left? Do you think, oh, my God, Professor, you’ve done this, oh, my God, oh, my God, do you think they’ll try to dismantle it?
GRUBER: I think that this comes to a master strategy of the Republican Party, which is to confuse people enough about the law —
RUSH: Stop the tape! Here is the guy who laughingly admitted he lied to the American people, and that everybody did, we had to lie. Jonathan Gruber admitting numerous times last year they had to lie to get this law passed because the American people were too stupid, now says in Boston on TV last night that the strategy of the Republican Party is to confuse people about the law.
The strategy of the opposition has been to inform people about the law, and that’s why it isn’t supported. So here is the man publicly laughing about lying to the American people accusing the Republicans of confusing people about it so that they don’t understand it. This is rich. And Ms. Rooney was smiling, “Hm-hm, hm-hm, hm-hm, well done.” Well, she didn’t say “well done,” but may as well have thought it.