Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You know what day today is.
Today is pork day.
The Senate is debating as we speak the porkulus stimulus bill.
They are going to pass it almost certainly tonight.
It is larded up with all sorts of garbage.
So today is pork day, but it is also live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Well, kind of.
It's not Rush's Open Line Friday because I'm not in sunny South Florida.
Although, it might actually be warmer here right now.
It was so cold yesterday in Florida.
I did my thing yesterday on making Al Gore try to sun himself on the Miami beach 45 degrees.
I am here in New York, Mark Elling, sitting in for Rush.
It is Open Line Friday.
I got to bring you up to speed on a lot of things.
First of all, the Senate is debating the porculus stimulus bill right now.
The moderates are claiming victory and that they've made it better.
There isn't quite as much free spending and there isn't quite as much pork.
And we're more focused now on shovel-ready projects, they say.
I suppose you can argue that they've made it better if you can take a terrible idea and make it better.
If you accept that the whole notion of having an economic stimulus package, which is premised entirely on spending money, is a good thing.
Before we get to that, something happened last night that I think is very telling.
And I don't want to sound overly arrogant here, although I'm going to sound arrogant.
I don't think anybody other than me has figured it out.
Obama went to this love fest in Williamsburg, Virginia last night with Democrats in Congress, a bunch of other liberals, the 200 House Democrats were there.
And he delivered a speech in which he disregarded what he had written and disregarded the teleprompter that they had there for him.
And instead extemporaneously went off on the Republicans for obstructing stimulus.
The media is playing this up as this is back to the old Obama.
This is the Obama the fighter.
Obama was back in his comfort zone.
They are reading this completely wrong.
First of all, as we all know, whatever anyone does when they get their back against the wall in life is they go with the same thing that they've done in the past.
We tend to revert back to our same old traits, whatever is comfortable to us when our back is against the wall.
And Obama, what he's comfortable with is not leading and governing.
It's campaigning and fighting and advocating and ranting and raving and carrying on.
Jim Johnson, the great defensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles, if it's third and nine, you know what he's going to do.
He's going to blitz.
He thinks that's the way to stop the other team.
Obama had to revert back to his comfort zone.
And while if you listen to the audio, and it's out there on the internet, if you listen to the audio, he sounds pretty good.
The little bit of video that you see, he looks agitated.
Now, I've got some of the quotes here.
Listen to some of these.
I welcome this debate, but we are not going to get relief by turning back to the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin.
What do you think a stimulus is?
It's spending.
That's the whole point.
Seriously.
So he's taking on the Republican critics and the conservative critics of the porculus stimulus bill by saying, look, you guys are carrying on and crying about that this is going to blow up the deficit.
Well, what have we been getting for the last eight years?
Deficit.
Suddenly you're upset about the deficit.
And then you're concerned that the stimulus bill is filled with spending.
That's the whole point.
That's what stimulus is.
This is a major change in tone.
Then, more, when you start hearing arguments on the cable chatter, just understand a couple of things.
Number one, when they say, well, why are we spending $800 billion when we've got this huge deficit?
First of all, I found this deficit when I showed up, number one.
I found this national that doubled, wrapped in a big bow tie, waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.
Obama's words bore only a vague resemblance to the prepared remarks the White House distributed to reporters as he began to speak.
House Majority Whip James Clyber in Democrat South Carolina said Obama appeared to ditch his teleprompter about a third of the way through the speech.
He went to his heart.
I think he spoke from his heart.
He went back to being the Barack Obama that Americans fell in love with when they went to the polls.
Okay, fine.
Here's the thing, though.
We are still only two and a half weeks into the Obama presidency.
This stimulus thing is the first thing that he's tried to do as president.
And if you watch him and you watch the Democrats in the Congress, they seem extremely frustrated.
Think about that, though.
They're going to win this.
It's going to pass.
They have the votes.
It already passed the House.
It's going to pass the Senate.
They'll come up with a conference committee to reconcile the two and then they're going to pass it again.
They're going to win.
Yet this he's frustrated over.
If he's already frustrated and agitated, two and a half weeks into his presidency over something in which he is winning, how is he going to handle the adversity for the remainder of his presidency?
I have this opinion, and nobody else shares it, but it's mine.
I think Obama is in over his head.
Nobody ever focuses on that.
They all comment on his incredible command.
He's so brilliant.
Harvard Law Review.
How many times have you heard?
Harvard Law Review.
He's so brilliant.
He's charismatic.
He's a natural leader.
No, he's not.
Were he a natural leader at some point in his life, he would have led something.
He's never been in the situation that most of us have been in at some point.
And if you're a foreman in a factory, you've got to make decisions and tell your workers things that occasionally they're not going to like.
You've got to solve problems.
Any job.
You've got to solve problems.
Anyone who is in charge of anything realizes that their life, their job, is nothing but a bunch of headaches.
You want to do something.
There's just always reasons it can't be done.
You've got no people all around you saying, no, you can't do this.
You can't do that.
You have your boss above you, your manager saying, no, you can't do it this way.
You constantly have to fight.
That's life.
When has he ever had to do that?
He's never had to lead or fight ever.
When he has been in a position of, quote, leadership, this is how it's worked for President Obama up to now.
He gives the speech.
The acolytes around him are all impressed.
They admire him.
And they do what he wants.
And he gets the reaction that he's looking for.
That's because prior to now, every single situation he's been involved in in his life and his political life, he has been surrounded by supporters and people who think like him.
Harvard Law Review.
He's got fellow Harvard law students there.
He's their charismatic leader.
Goes back to Chicago.
Starts working, quote, in the community.
He's working with a bunch of people who think like him.
He turns on the inspirational skills, and they pretty much do what he wants.
He gets into the Illinois State Senate, controlled by whom?
Democrats.
He's a member of the majority party, doesn't do much of anything there other than vote president or vote the way that he's told.
Never has to face any conflict.
Gets to the United States Senate.
Never sponsored a major bill that anyone can ever name.
He never had to fight in the Senate to get a bill passed.
He just gave his speeches and he'd be applauded.
And oh, isn't that inspirational?
Boy, Barack, you really are impressive.
Runs for the presidency.
Has a little, a couple of hiccups.
He lost a few primaries.
Hillary didn't just roll over and die, but he won.
And then he beat McCain relatively easily.
He's never faced situations in life where people have fought him on anything.
So now he's getting grief.
And I don't even think all that much.
How much grief really is there?
There's the talk show host.
There's Rush.
There are the rest of us.
Some of the Republicans in Congress squawked, but only after the talk show host told him it was okay to squawk.
They voted no in the House, but in the end, what did that really matter?
Public opinion has turned on it somewhat, but it's not like the overwhelming majority of Americans are saying don't pass the stimulus bill.
And they're going to win.
This piece of junk, this larded-up bill, is going to pass, and Obama is going to get what he wants.
Yet you already see two and a half weeks in, a total abandonment of everything about how he said he was going to govern.
And remember, his big selling point all along has been the style.
I like how he inspires us.
He can unite us.
He can lead us.
He talked about changing the tone.
He talked about being bipartisan.
Two and a half weeks into his presidency, he looks the same as everybody else who's ever been in that job, fighting with the Congress, fighting and trying to get the things that he wants to have done, and rather frustrated about the whole process.
The tone isn't being changed at all.
And this is after two and a half weeks, and it's after a bill in which he is going to win.
Right now, given the fact that he's got an overwhelming majority in the Senate and an overwhelming majority in the House and remains personally popular with high popularity ratings and we have a bad economy, they can get anything they want passed without regard to how bad it is.
This is the easiest bill, Barack Barack Obama will ever propose to the Congress and will be passed.
This is so simple.
Those of us who are objecting can only object and try to apply some pressure that they make it a little bit better.
That's all we can do.
This one's easy.
If he's already this agitated and this frustrated over a win that is easy, imagine what the tone is going to be like when he takes on things that are going to be more controversial.
When the mandate isn't as strong, when we're two, three, four, five months into the administration, when feelings start to get sore, when the Democrats in Congress start bucking him from time to time, like, for example, when do we get to health care?
That's coming soon.
He thinks that there are objections to the stimulus bill.
Socialize the entire American health care system.
Ask Hillary Clinton how smoothly that goes.
We're talking about changing the tone.
And he's implying that those who are objecting to the form of the legislation are somehow to blame.
Sense when is it not part of the American political process when a major bill, in this case, $1 trillion worth of spending is proposed, that some people don't stand up and say, I don't think this is a good idea.
That's been going on forever.
From the days of George Washington, it's been going on that way.
You propose something that's controversial, and there's a debate over it.
Sometimes it passes, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it's altered.
There are going to be a lot of harder fights for Barack Obama than this.
I mentioned health care.
Well, let's get to the really, really hard stuff.
Let's suppose Iran starts acting up.
Let's suppose, God forbid, that there is a terror hit.
Let's suppose something unexpected occurs in the Middle East, where now you have to deal not with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress and an adoring American public, but you've got to deal with other nations, or you've got to deal with terrorists, or you've got to deal with the nut job over in Iran.
He's never had to face anything like this.
You know, they made fun of Sarah Palin and her qualifications, but at least she has faced situations in which she had to fight to get things done, maintain her composure, maintain her cool.
When has he ever been put in this type of situation?
My answer is never.
I think he is totally ill-prepared for the position that he's in.
And I think that you are going to see an angry and an agitated and an emotional, an appeeved, and an immature president every time we face one of these things.
And he acts like it's our fault that there's a debate.
Well, of course there's a debate.
You watched President Bush had to put up with, in which everything the president tried to do is obstructed.
This isn't a dictatorship.
They may have control of everything, but for heaven's sakes, we can object.
And it's, I think, been a pretty polite objection.
There's been no inflamed rhetoric here.
The criticism, be it from Rush, the talk show hosts, Republicans in Congress, this is an inflamed, mean-spirited debate.
It's just people objecting.
And we already have the Democrats all hacked off, and it's over an issue in which they're winning.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I know it's Open Line Friday.
I think I talked too much in that first segment.
Rush does that, though.
Doesn't Rush talk all the time on Open Line Friday?
I'm just doing what Rush does.
1-800-282-2882 is our telephone number.
And I promise within 30 seconds to actually talk to callers in Open Line Friday.
But before I do that, I want to repeat one of the comments that Obama made at this Love Fest in Williamsburg last night.
When you start hearing arguments in the cable chatter, just understand a couple of things.
Number one, when they say, well, why are we spending $800 billion when we've got this huge deficit?
First of all, I found this deficit when I showed up.
I found this national debt doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.
What was he doing there?
He's doing the same thing the left has been doing for the last eight years, bashing Bush.
What's the point of that now?
Without regard to what President Bush did, he's got to deal with the here and now.
He's the president.
Yet they revert back to the comfort zone.
Let's beat up on Bush.
Bush is gone.
It's your thing now.
Stop worrying about what happened before.
You've got to deal with this.
They're not ready for this.
And he's especially not ready to lead.
We haven't had a president of the United States, potentially ever, who has come into this job with less experience dealing with actual problems, I think, ever.
Columbus, Ohio, and Shelley.
Shelley, you're first up on EIB.
Hi, how are you?
I'm great.
Thank you.
Yes, I agree with you completely.
I believe that Mr. Obama is, or President Obama is frustrated because all he knows how to do is campaign.
He has run successful campaigns.
And I believe that the stimulus package is a thinly veiled attempt at getting him re-elected in the next election in 2012 because most of the stimulus package won't hit until 2010, 2011.
And he's thinking everything will be going great.
And then he'll get re-elected.
I think that's all he's about.
And the fact that he's so frustrated is just because he likes things going his way.
Isn't it fascinating?
They are going his way.
The thing that's just fascinated as I watched is our side is going to lose this debate.
We may make this terrible, terrible bill a little bit less awful, but they're going to win.
They're going to pass the porculus.
It's going to go through, yet they're frustrated.
It's like a football team that wins a game 49-3, and the coach just stews about giving up the three points.
If you watch Obama or if you watch Pelosi or any of the Democrats right now, they seem very, very upset at how this whole stimulus thing has played itself out.
That somehow Republicans objected.
Well, what do you think happens?
And as I said, this level of objection is nothing in comparison to what's going to occur when you have the radicalization of health care in this country, socialized medicine, which is probably the next thing that he wants to do.
Yet already you've got all of this agitation so much for changing the tone, so much for attempting to be bipartisan.
If you just watch him, he seems very, very frustrated and very upset that things aren't going the way he wanted them to go.
He's only two and a half weeks in and he's winning.
So how is he going to handle actual defeat?
How is he going to handle rejection?
And never mind the Republicans.
The Democrats in the House already larded up his stimulus bill.
A big part of the problem here is that this thing has been filled with pork.
Madam Pelosi was walking down the chambers of the Democratic Isle in the House.
What do you want?
Which is what's created a lot of the opposition to this thing is that it is so filled with pork.
Well, that's what the Congress is going to do.
He thinks the Republicans, he thinks Russia Limbaugh is his problem.
Those Democrats are not going to make things easy.
They're looking at Obama and they're seeing him as an easy mark.
There are all these bills that they've wanted to pass, all these things that they've wanted to do over the years.
And they see this guy in the White House with this pen in his hand and they view him as a rubber stamp.
He's going to have a problem with them.
Well, guess what?
That's what governing is like.
Every governor in America has had to face that.
Mayors have to face that.
People who run businesses have to face that.
HR has to face that in dealing with me in here.
Except, are you in charge of me or not?
I've not figured that part out yet.
Kind of, yes.
You have to keep me like reined in so that I don't do anything that's inappropriate.
Well, and deal with that so I stop whining about not having the bathroom key.
All of those things.
Barack Obama's never had to do any of those things.
He's throwing a snit about a bill that is going to pass both houses of the Congress overwhelmingly.
I'm Mark Gelling sitting in for Rush Limblaugh.
The so-called compromise to be passed by the Senate today on the porculus stimulus bill would take about $90 billion out of what had been a $1 trillion deal.
Remember, the House passed, what, $817 billion.
Just saying these numbers sounds ridiculous.
It sounds like it's a parody.
$817 billion.
Well, then the Senate added to it.
Now they took some of it out.
David Brooks, the New York Times version of a conservative, has a column today in which he said, well, look, the moderates are now governing.
They're being the mature people here.
Susan Collins on the Republican side, a couple of the moderate Democrats, they're pairing this bill back so we can reach a consensus that everybody can be happy with.
Moderates are not in control of this.
The moderates are reacting to the fact that conservatives objected to all of the pork that's in there.
Support for the thing was starting to slip.
So the moderates had to try and patch things up.
There was no leadership here.
Once again, you had a situation in which a president proposed something.
Everybody was going to roll over.
The conservatives in this country, led by the talk show hosts, objected.
The public started learning that this thing is actually filled with pork and isn't a massive infrastructure program.
And they felt a need to work on the margins to try to make it a little bit better.
That's all that's going on here.
But in the end, Obama's getting what he wants.
He's getting the ability to blow up the national debt and spend nearly a trillion dollars on Democratic pet projects.
To Crofton, Maryland and John, John, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yeah, Mark, I have to agree with you.
I think he's in over his head.
He's the least qualified of any president we've ever had.
And when you're in over your head and things aren't going your way, if you're a spoiled brat like he is, he's had things given to him on a silver platter, regardless of what he says about his beginnings.
He went to the most expensive school in the world, Punahu High School, that his white grandmother paid for.
But anyway, this is what you do when you are a brat.
Things go wrong.
You blame everybody else, even if it means blaming the guy that was most gracious to you, that allowed for the most smooth transition from one administration to the other.
Bush was a perfect gentleman about this, especially.
I want to stop you for a second.
The interesting thing you said, when things go wrong, you start blaming everybody else.
Absolutely.
Here's my point.
This hasn't even gone wrong.
He's going to win and he's getting.
He said all along that he doesn't really care about all the specifics.
He wants to get to the right dollar amount.
That's what he was concerned about.
He's gotten all of that and he's winning.
So he's doing everything that you say before things have gone wrong.
This has been relatively pleasant.
If you go back and write the history of any piece of major legislation that's gone through in the United States of America's history, there's been less controversy on this than almost any of them.
There's been very, you know, they're going to pass overwhelmingly.
He's bothered that there aren't going to be more Republican votes, although I guess they're going to get some in the Senate.
Point that I'm making is that he seems to be agitated and pointing fingers after a victory, which is really weird and bothersome.
Well, maybe there are things that we don't know about.
Maybe he might be mad at some of his own Democratic leadership.
I think so.
You can't be happy with Nancy Pelosi, who turns out to be an idiot saying that we're going to lose 500 million jobs every month.
You realize that at that rate, after 12 months, we would wipe out every human being on the face of the earth.
What is the global population right now?
It's 6 or 7 billion, isn't it?
Somewhere in that range.
500 million.
And somebody emailed me and said that's not the first time she said that, that she's used that 500 million figure in the past.
What you just mentioned about Pelosi at the Williamsburg event, I've got a quote here from her in which she kind of takes some blame for what happened with regard to this.
She said that we must not heap mountains of debt on our children and grandchildren.
We did put the president in a difficult situation here.
So, yeah, I think he's very upset with the way that they handled this because they couldn't resist the opportunity to take what was just a free one here, an absolute free one, using the recession as an excuse to do every stupid thing they haven't been able to do for the last 40 years.
And they overplayed that hand.
And that was an extremely strong hand.
They were essentially told, you can pass anything you want.
You've got all the votes in the House.
You've got all the votes in the Senate.
We have a president who's popular.
We have an American public very, very concerned about the economy, willing to support anything that they think will help.
And they still had to overdo that.
I've often joked about if you told the Democrats that they could do anything they want, how long would it take them to get that done?
And I think that here you see the example.
They were told by Obama $800 billion, and they immediately had to ratchet that up to $1 trillion.
If Obama told them $5 trillion, I guarantee you they would have still managed to find an extra $500 billion and thrown it into that.
They're unstoppable.
And yeah, I think you're right.
I think Obama's probably frustrated that they managed to screw this up and make him look bad in the process and expose the bill for the pork fest that it is.
Having said that, though, it is going to pass, and the American public is probably pretty much okay with it, even though they know full well that there is a lot of debt associated with this and that there are a lot of things in this that aren't going to do anything to improve the economy.
Thanks for the call, John.
To Lincoln, Nebraska and Candy.
Candy, it's your turn on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Hey, you're doing a great job.
Thank you.
Hey, this whole thing with stimulus is supposed to be for us to spend money as the public and, you know, process that, make taxes for everybody.
Yeah, that's the idea, isn't it?
He thinks he knows what he's doing.
I can't believe it.
Well, that is what you just described.
What you've just described is what stimulus is supposed to be.
Now, I'm not one who believes in government spending stimulating the economy.
But many do, including some conservative economists.
I think they're wrong, but they believe that.
But without regard to that, everybody who does advocate stimulus, who believes the government can prime the pump by throwing money out there, says that the key is you've got to get money into the hands of the public so that they spend and invest it.
This thing isn't premised on doing any of those things.
When you see all of the stuff that isn't going to happen until 2010 or 2011, that isn't stimulus.
That's just more government spending.
That's just more expansion of the deficit.
It has nothing to do with improving the economy.
If you really were a believer in stimulus, and again, I'm not, but let's imagine you are.
You believe that we've got a desperate economy and the way that we can jumpstart it is to get money into this country right away.
What you would do then would do something that would immediately take the entire 800 billion, 900 billion, whatever it is, and immediately get it in the hands of the public and create an incentive for the public to immediately put it to work.
There are a lot of ways that you could do that.
An immediate tax cut would be one of them.
You could lower mortgage rates by saying the government is going to underwrite all mortgages.
A lot of things.
I'm not advocating any of them, but there are many things that you could do that would immediately result in more money in the checking accounts of Americans right now, American businesses, American individuals.
And once that money was there, it isn't going to sit around and lay around.
It would be put to work.
That's stimulus.
Now, I don't think that's a good idea, but that would be stimulative.
That would result in a lot of activity right now.
This isn't primarily stimulus.
When you're looking at another billion dollars for Amtrak over three years, there's no stimulus to that.
Amtrak's been hemorrhaging money forever.
Now we give them more money to hemorrhage.
You're talking about spending money on all sorts of social programs so that we can set up big, big projects to deal with things that are going to take two, three, and four years.
There's nothing stimulative about that.
So it isn't even really stimulus.
When Rush started calling it porkulus, it wasn't just a slogan.
It is a pretty good description of what they're doing here.
But I think Obama never gave much thought to what would be in it.
He allowed the Congress to pretty much write what it was going to be.
And then he made this disastrous mistake of allowing all the governors and all the mayors and all the school boards across the country to be able to apply for their cut of all of this.
And the next thing you know, you've just got a free-for-all in which he's taking a trillion dollars, throwing it up in the air and telling any liberal out there, grab some of it, rather than do something that might actually have an immediate impact on the economy.
Thanks, Candy.
Appreciate it.
To New York City and Adam.
Adam, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Mark, how are you?
I'm great, thanks.
Mark, you're one of the best talk show hosts.
Thank you.
Listen, I think this Obama...
Do we really need to go any farther than that, Adam?
Okay.
Go ahead.
Okay.
I have a feeling under Obama, the economy is not going to rebound.
I think for the first time, we're in big, big trouble.
And I think that I know Congress is up for election in 2010.
And my question to you is, if the economy gets worse, which I think it is going to be because of his massive program, when is the American public going to really get fed up with this guy?
Well, Dick Morris wrote a column.
And Dick Morris is kind of full of it a lot, but he's got very good insights.
He says this isn't going to work.
And there's going to be a major turnback as early as 2010 in terms of what's going to happen in the Congress.
But Obama will have a lot of the stuff done by then.
They will have nationalized health care.
The welfare state will be radically expanded.
And once you create all of this socialism that you can't turn back, I don't know that I fully agree with him.
I do think that there's going to be an impact in the economy from this.
And it's not going to be all bad in the short term.
I think the real problem is the long term.
We are creating all of these new programs and new projects that will require constant spending years out.
You know, every one of these brick and mortar projects that he creates that isn't a road or isn't a bridge are going to be things that are going to have operational costs for the long haul.
Plus, we don't have any way of paying for this.
This is all based on more borrowing.
We're going to have an incredible expansion of the national debt to the point that I think for the first time in our nation's history, that will be a real problem.
And I think that's going to lead to what it always leads to.
Anytime you spend too much and have government put too much money in the marketplace, whether it be from the Fed or through government spending, whether it's fiscal policy or monetary policy, if you overdo it, you have inflation.
And I think that's what we're looking at.
I think we are going to have inflation.
I think it's going to be bad.
You can't just take our national debt and blow it up through the roof.
Never mind what Bush did.
This is going to explode it.
And remember that we're also getting very close to the witching hour of how to pay for Social Security and Medicare.
That debt is going to be massive.
And if the response is going to be each time, well, let's just stimulate by creating money.
Remember all the things that we're doing with the TARP fund right now.
I think you're looking at a lot of inflation.
And that is worse than a recession.
I'm Mark Gulling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
May I clarify something that I said when I indicated that I'm not a big fan of stimulus per se?
I probably should be using the word spending.
Were this stimulus premised on lowering the tax burden on the American public, then I think that positive results can come of this.
Traditionally, stimulus programs have included a fair amount of government spending, and that's what I was referring to when saying that I'm not a big fan of stimulus per se.
If this were a reduction in tax rates or a rebate based on how much people have paid over the last several years, something like that, I would be willing to support it.
So now that that clarification is out there, I would like to share with you a great column today by Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post.
He's the guy that you'll see on Fox News channel, always stern-looking.
Krodhammer never seems to be particularly happy.
His writing style, he's never particularly happy either, but he's borderline sarcastic, but very, very prescient.
He writes today, catastrophe, mind you.
So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared, we have chosen hope over fear.
Until that is, you need fear to pass a bill.
And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple.
An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position, followed by a treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040.
Followed by Tom Daschell, who had to fall on the sword, according to the new Washington rule, that no cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.
The Daschell affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes.
As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington, the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal.
Not paying taxes is one thing.
But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschell 5.2 million in just two years.
He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm, but he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist.
You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process.
You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.
At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury Secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages.
Daschell, who had made another cool million a year plus chaffer and caddy for unspecified services to a Pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.
And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill, the stimulus package.
He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the Barons of the House.
The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.
It's not just pages and pages of special interest tax breaks, giveaways, and protections, one of which would have set off a ruinous smooth-haul-y trade war.
It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which reports the Milwaukee Senator Journal, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools, and quite logically, no plans for new construction.
It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules, committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs, are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus, and then throwing and then throwing it into hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching special interest,
lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish, he said.
Not just to abolish, but to create something new.
A new politics where the money pork barreling and corrupt log rolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up grassroots participatory democracy.
That is what made Obama so dazzling, so new.
Turns out the fierce urgency of now includes $150 million for livestock and honeybee and farmed raised fish insurance.
The age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington.
By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings.
California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase and one provision.
Substituting planted for ready-to-market would mean a windfall garnered for a new bonus depreciation incentive.
After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end.
The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie.
The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal.
The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell and that this president told better than anyone.
I thought the awakening would take six months.
It took two and a half weeks.
Great column, Charles Krauthammer, today's Washington Post.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Lumbau.
We've established that President Obama seems to be very, very frustrated over how the Porculus bill is being passed.
Who do people normally blame when things don't go right?
Usually the right-hand man.
My prediction is, look for stories over the next three or four weeks, that Obama is frustrated with Rahm Emmanuel.
He took a shot at him at that speech in Virginia last night that I thought was rather harsh.