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Sept. 9, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:28
September 9, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #2
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The views expressed about a host on this show, documented to be almost always right, 99.1% of the time as we meet and surpass all audience expectations every day.
Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, behind the golden EIB microphone at the Limbaugh Institute for advanced conservative studies.
President Obama today in New York at Lincoln Center spoke at the Walter Cronkite Memorial Service.
We have two sound bites.
Here's the first one.
Just as the news cycle has shrunk, so is the bottom line.
Too often we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip.
And the softer stories that Walter disdained rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he chanted.
What happened today is replaced with who won today.
The public debate chiefless.
The public trust alters.
Fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should.
For crying out loud, he's got the most compliant soft media anybody has ever had.
There is zip zero nada investigative journalism aimed at him or his administration.
Except by us.
Imagine, I mean, to go to the Walter Cronkite Memorial and whine and cry and complain about the nature of the news business.
You know what next thing he's going to say?
Hell, don't blame me.
I inherited low poll numbers from George Bush.
Inherited everything else from Bush.
He'll blame Bush for his low poll numbers.
Walter Cronkite's memorial crying and waning and whining about the news media.
Here's the next soundbite.
The simple values Walter Cronkite set out in pursuit of.
Seek the truth, to keep us honest, to explore our world the best he could.
They are as vital today as they ever were.
Mm-hmm.
Our American story continues.
Not for long.
It needs to be told.
And if we choose to live up to Walter's example, if we realize that the kind of journalism he embodied will not simply rekindle itself as part of a natural cycle, but will come alive only if we stand up and demand it and resolve to value it once again.
Then I'm convinced that the choice between profit and progress is a false one.
And that the golden days of journalism still lie ahead.
So it's all the fault of profit.
The news business pursuing profit, evil profit.
And progress.
That's a false choice.
The golden days of journalism still lie ahead.
The golden days of journalism are over.
The golden days of journalism where people in it determined and shaped public opinion without any competition whatsoever is over.
And Cronkite, yeah, I know you don't like to speak ill of the dead, but Cronkite was just a raging lib through and through.
This reason Walter Cronkite didn't like the news today is because he couldn't do what he did, even if he went back on the air.
After he had uh after he'd retired.
Explore our world the best he could.
There's vital today.
Our American story continues, needs to be told.
Our American story may not continue very long with this guy in charge.
If we choose to live up to Walter's example, the kind of journalism he embodied will not simply rekindle itself as part of a natural cycle, come alive only if we stand up and demand it.
Who stand up and demand it?
It's the market, Mr. President, and it is what it is.
So tonight, President Obama calls the people's representatives together to tell him to ignore those that elected them.
That's what's on tap tonight.
How's that for an authoritarian?
He calls for a joint session of the U.S. Congress, those who represent the people of the 57 states, and he is essentially going to make a plea to them to ignore the people who put him in office.
If uh Obama is successful, he'll give a speech that's so persuasive the elected representatives of the people will ignore the specific instructions of the electorate.
Not only that, The president will also convince lawmakers to add trillions of dollars of debt to trillions of dollars of debt, with the next step being trillions of dollars of tax increases heaped on the very people who didn't want socialized medicine to begin with.
And if everything goes to plan tonight, Congress will make it the law of the land to deny health care to their fellow men.
Death panels, the people who put them in office.
This can't be happening, except that it is.
We have the money to insure those who can't afford their own insurance and who are legally here in the country.
We could either have the feds pay for private health insurance policies with something akin to food stamps, or we could set up charities to fund privately held policies.
And if those charities couldn't raise enough money, that would trigger supplemental payments from the federal government.
Let's raise the current ceiling on charitable contributions.
Let the private sector take care of these people through purchasing insurance policies from the private sector.
What a great charity that would be.
A win-win-win, larger deductions for all charitable giving, private sector is paid for their insurance products and services through charitable contributions.
And the needy get coverage.
I just I look at all of this and it's just surreal.
Now the president's out there advancing a lie that he has advanced before.
He said he's open to ideas.
If anybody's got any better ideas on health care, he's willing to listen.
He said that before his porculus bill as well.
On the economy, on health care, Obama has repeatedly said that he was open to new ideas from Democrats or Republicans.
And it's a lie.
Oh he didn't take my idea.
I had a great idea, it was published in the Wall Street.
Take anybody's ideas.
It's all BS.
It's just words.
Obama's never taken any idea that wasn't leftist.
To the core, stimulus bill was jammed down our throats just like Obamacare.
So he's out and say, everybody got a great idea, I'll uh listen to it.
But he never does, just says it.
That's part of the illusion.
That's part of the effort to convince people that he is this new guy that can unify and get rid of the whole notion of partisanship and bring us all together as one in this glorious utopia.
One of the things they're talking about is triggers.
This is one of the ways, and by the way, keep a sharp eye on Bauchus.
Keep a sharp eye on Max Baucus and a gang of six, because they're working on, he wants to get something done today.
He wants to get an agreement today with his gang of six, three Democrats, three Republicans, and his Senate committee, to be able to say, Hey, we got a compromise here in the Senate.
We got to be for Obama's speech tonight.
This is a guy who uh yesterday announced a fine of $3,800, up to $3,800 if you don't have health insurance.
And there are people in this country who choose not to have it.
The notion that people are clamoring for health insurance and is a giant crisis is not true.
So let's talk about some triggers, shall we?
How about these triggers?
If unemployment exceeds 10%, that triggers the resignation of the president who promised unemployment would not exceed 8% if the stimulus was passed.
If any taxes are raised on people making less than $250,000, that triggers Obama's resignation from office.
All the Czars will be fully vetted, and if just one fails an FBI background check, and most of them will fail FBI background check, that triggers a requirement for all the Tsars to resign and the czar program to be discontinued.
You like these triggers?
If the average temperatures in the United States have not increased to the end of this year, as compared to average temperatures over the past three years, that triggers the end of any and all cap and trade legislation.
If any health care bill proposed by the President or Congress lessens the profitability or availability of private sector insurance in any way, increases taxes, adds to the deficit, does not include Republican reforms for private sector health insurance companies.
That will trigger an automatic withdrawal of the bill from consideration.
Further, if a bill results in any policyholder losing his policy or his doctor, that triggers Obama's resignation from office.
And finally, if Ford Motor Company ends the year more profitable than General Motors or Chrysler, Obama car companies, the government and the United Auto Workers will be forced to sell their ownership.
If Ford You want to talk triggers, I can come up with triggers all day long.
And we're back.
Simply by showing up.
We go back to the phones.
Downers Grove, Illinois.
This is Art, and it's great to have you here on the program, sir.
Hello.
Greetings, Rush.
I guess you're uh pinky finger mobster.
Uh thank you, sir.
Yeah, the mob father.
Mob father.
Uh I got something that tonight uh um President Obama, who profanic uh the uh the word Cairo uh is gonna speak tonight.
I was just wondering if uh the uh Republican response, I suppose it's gonna be headed by Banner or somebody like that, uh, that they would keep it simple and short, uh, like you were saying today, maybe stick with tort reform, portability, and the fact that there's not 40 million, but only eleven million people that are uninsured.
Well, I have I look at uh even though the White House thinks I am the leader of the Republican Party, I had no role, played no role in the selection of who is giving the Republican response.
In fact, I just I just saw the name flashed on television, I don't remember it.
It's not Vayner.
Uh Dr. Congressman from Louisiana.
Bastani.
Well, we'll I find out who it is.
Uh I have no clue what he's gonna say.
No clue whatsoever.
I frankly hope that the central theme of the Republican response tonight's freedom.
It's a marvelous concept that we're on the verge of losing if Obama wins this thing.
Freedom, liberty, private sector.
You don't want to start talking about reforms, specific reforms, you could do tort reform, you can mention that.
You can also mention uh the portability, cross-border purchase, state border purchase of uh of health insurance.
You know, one of the reasons it's so screwed up is that every state has its own mandates.
And if you live in uh Florida, you want health insurance, you gotta buy it in Florida.
What if you like a policy in Missouri?
You can buy auto insurance of any auto company insurance in the world, in the country.
You can go or you go you can buy uh you got a personal liability umbrella from Lloyds of London if they'll insure you.
But when it comes to health insurance, you've got to buy it within the state because of so damn many mandates.
Well, you know, it's a real simple matter.
If you get rid of that, the costs would plummet.
It's one of the fastest things you could do to reduce cost.
You know why?
It would it would really ramp up competition.
If insurance companies throughout the country had the entire population to pitch their policies to, imagine all that competition.
Imagine what would happen to prices.
Right now you've got these mini monopolies.
The insurance companies have to deal with the mandates that the states give them, but they can only sell policies to people in those states.
It's so screwy.
I want you to listen to this soundbite.
Grab audio soundbite number four.
Now, if this question isn't a plant, I don't know what with.
This is yesterday.
Uh, in a QA before Obama gave his speech to the young skulls full of mush at the Wakefield Hash School.
He spoke with the ninth graders there.
A student named Sean asked this question.
You tell me if this this this question isn't a plant, I don't know what is.
Question Hi, Mr. President, my name is Sean, and my question is currently 36 countries have universal health coverage, including Iraq and Afghanistan, which have it paid for by the United States.
Why can't the United States have universal health coverage?
Now, where does a high school ninth grader come up with the notion that they have universal health coverage in Afghanistan and Iraq?
That's some kind of leftist drivel that a teacher is pumping into their heads.
Can you imagine the President of the United States asked by a ninth grader?
How come our health care is not as good as it is in Afghanistan?
How come our health care is not as good as it is in Iraq?
As though universal coverage equals good health care.
Here's the president's answer to this.
What happened is that back in the 1940s and 50s, uh a lot of most of the wealthy countries around the world decided to set up health care systems that covered everybody.
The United States, for a number of different reasons, organized their health care around employer-based health insurance.
What happened was is that the majority of Americans still have health insurance through their job, and it's you know, most of them are happy with it.
But a lot of people fall through the cracks.
Good Lord.
Well then why if he just admitted that most people have insurance through their job.
And by the way, the reason that we were organized with health coverage through our employers was because we were strict capitalists back then.
The idea of the government doing this was foreign.
Well, it wasn't foreign, and FDR has done what he'd done.
But this this it there's been a slow creep to get government involved to the point that they are.
And uh so Obama says, Well, most people like their coverage.
He tells this kid most people, most people, the majority still have health insurance at their job, and most of them are happy with it.
So why are you messing with it tonight then?
He just You know, you get this guy off the teleprompter, and it's a crapshoot.
They're probably in the White House when he said this, go, oh no, gosh, I hope this doesn't end up on television.
Oh no.
I know Limbo's gonna get it and then they're gooses cooked.
Most people have health insurance and they like it.
So why is he doing what he's doing?
Back to the phones.
We go to Paducah, Kentucky, and this is Sam.
Sam, thanks for holding on.
I uh appreciate it.
That's okay.
Good afternoon, Rush.
I'm very glad to be here.
Thank you.
So am I. Uh I just wanted to bring up the fact that Obama and company cannot lose this fight.
Uh if they are ever to realize their dream of some sort of progressive socialist system, they must get control of the health care system.
Yes.
Uh the uh not only because of its the financial value in the system, but the the health care has a tremendous symbolic value uh to them.
Uh wait, i i it may have a s symbolic value, but it's far more than symbolic to them.
It is subsidy.
It is the regulation of every citizen's life to the max.
That's the point.
And if if anything were to prevent that, for instance, Congress taking a hand and passing some legislation that would actually help the health care system work better without the government control, they're sunk.
They've they've got a good start on taking over the economy, they got the uh uh stimulus bill by without even worrying with Congress.
They uh somebody el the uh another group wrote it.
They got that through.
Now health care is next.
If they don't get this, they're in really bad shape.
That's why they're doing all these silly things that they're doing, saying these silly things, and Obama's running around like a chicken trying to do whatever he can do to salvage this.
I don't think they can do it.
Well, I've you know I I am not going to say that this is dead.
No, it's not dead.
Because this we're just eight months in or seven months in.
I mean, they it's this guy's got four years here, three and a half more years to try to get this.
Oh, they'll try again.
Let me tell you, and and uh if if if they if they um appear to do something that is a cave-in to the public wishes, I'm telling you right now, it's not gonna be a cave-in, it's gonna be a lie.
This I t I everybody needs to keep a sharp eye on what Max Baucus and this gang of six are doing in the Senate to come up with this compromise bill.
Because what they're going to do, what they're working on, is coming up with language that's going to end up making people think that health insurance is going to be much cheaper.
They're going to limit how much a deductible you have to pay.
They're going to say they're going to limit your copay.
There'll be out-of-pocket maximums that you have to pay, and the illusion is going to be that, well, well, I finally got a bill.
It makes sense.
I'm going to get my insurance and it's going to cost me less.
What's going to happen, though, it's going to cause premiums to skyrocket.
And people are going to agree to it thinking, well, my costs are going to go down.
And then you get some some some Republicans that are going, oh, wow, I can join this now because costs are going to go down.
But the point is we're going to end up with more uninsured than ever.
And that will be the result.
The more uninsured will be the query and call for a couple years, and okay, we've got to have national insurance.
Now, that's uh our Senate plan didn't quite work out as we intended.
Uh and so we got more uninsured than ever before, and we have no choice but now the public up.
They're going to go about this one way or the other.
I tell you, um I'm uh it's not dead.
That's why I said yesterday, we're gonna have to be vigilant as we can be.
Now, your your point that if they lose this, they lose their rationale.
Um they may lose their rationale, but they're not going away.
See, I actually think that if they get this, ultimately they're dead.
Nobody is gonna want to live in a country run by these people with their vision.
If they get it, there is going to be a revolt at some point down the line in some people do not want this.
Once they experience unadulterated fascism, once health care is passed, there's a government option, private insurance is history and gone, people aren't gonna put up with it.
Not in this country.
And unless they do something about the second amendment, get guns out everybody's hands, uh there's there's there's gonna be hell to pay.
So I think they lose either way, but we lose if they win.
We lose for years if they win.
Their rationale goes away if they if they lose.
But but you're right, that this is this is I mean, this is the building block.
The building block for a fascist America, a building block for an ever-expanding, growing government.
That's why that speech to these kids yesterday infuriated me.
He didn't believe any of that.
He didn't believe personal responsibility.
He doesn't let him let him give that speech to the country at large.
He doesn't believe a word of it.
And I just, it's it's all it's all lies.
Oh, the AP is reporting that uh his speech tonight will be 35 minutes, and it will quote, answer all the major questions on the contentious issue that has become Obama's top domestic priority, health care.
Gonna answer all the major questions.
Well, now that's some challenge, gonna answer all the major questions.
Basically, what he's gonna have to go out there and do is say that everything you've heard that's in the House bill isn't true.
Can he pull this off anymore?
Listen, grab uh grab somebody number six first, and then we'll go back to five.
On Good Morning America Today, the co-host Robin Roberts interviewed Obama.
She said, Is there a new approach that you're taking to getting your message across?
I, out of an effort to give Congress the ability to do their thing and not uh step uh step on their toes, uh, probably left too much ambiguity out there, which allowed then opponents of reform to come in and to fill up the airwaves with a lot of nonsense.
Everything from this ridiculous idea that we were setting up death panels to false notions that uh this was designed to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants, and then this broader notion of a government takeover of health care, which none of the bills that work their way through Congress ever envisioned.
Well, this is just it's unbelievable.
I don't think he's read the House bill.
That's why and answer all the major questions.
Everything he says is not there, is there.
Now, of course they're not called death panels.
Give you uh the analogy I gave you yesterday.
The war on poverty.
Do you find anywhere in the legislation that set up the war on poverty?
And by the way, we intend to destroy the black family.
Now, of course it's not in there, but it did.
The federal government became the father with all the AFDC.
And women were popping babies out, poor women, not just blacks, poor women all over the country, just busted up families.
To this day, it's a huge problem.
Now, the word death panels is not in the House bill, but they're this is.
You're gonna cut Medicare, he says.
We are going to um told the woman with the hundred-year-old mother, uh, no, we don't think we would calculate somebody's spirit, spunk, and will to live, give them a pain pill.
For crying out, wow, we got the guy on tape on his own television show on ABC, saying essentially at some point it's not worth the treatment.
Now there's somebody's gonna have to decide that, and he said it's gonna be us.
And one of the main things that Rahm Emanuel and Obama wanted this is to transfer the authority from Congress to the White House to tell doctors what is and is not treatable and what will and will not be spent on Medicare.
They want total control of it.
That's national health care.
Look at this notion that none of these bills envision a government takeover of health care.
How in the world can he say this when the House bill at 1,018 pages is out there and it's all about a government takeover.
But even without that, it's pure common sense, my friends.
If the government is going to write a health care bill that empowers the government to make all these decisions, what it's government run health care.
Whether it is envisioned or not.
The dirty little secret is that all kinds of rotten things happen that weren't envisioned.
Every time these clowns get together and come up with a major entitlement program.
It's just this is just ridiculous.
So he's gonna go out there and answer all these major questions, and he's gonna have to lie through his teeth, or he's gonna have to say, finally, I got a plan.
And he's gonna have to present a plan that does not have the stuff in it that the House plan has.
And maybe that's what he's gonna do.
Maybe he's gonna come out this ambiguity.
He was too ambiguous.
He let the House run the whole thing.
He didn't want to step on their toes, and that allowed people to fill up the airwaves with lies.
No, it allowed people to read the House bill and tell the American people what was in it.
It's right.
It's nobody's making anything up.
And by the way, this House bill, this House bill was not written this year.
That's been sitting in Henry Waxman's drawer.
These people have had this dream and vision.
It's a thousand eighteen pages.
Bunch of staff members of over the years have written this thing.
Look at it.
I mean, you go to pages and find this paragraph supersedes this paragraph in this legislation, and in that bill over there, you've got to go back and look at 15 different bills to figure out what this one means when you read some of the paragraphs.
Because this, well, this paragraph supersedes paragraph uh 4A, XYZ in U.S. Code Title 35 Zitch, whatever it is.
It's impossible to decipher this in some cases.
But what is decipherable is an abomination.
This thing has not been written this year.
It's been written.
It's been Henry Waxman's desk, and they just had to pull it out.
Thousand eighteen pages.
So you've had some staffers over the years, special interest lobbyists have no doubt contributed to writing this thing.
That's that's why Obama didn't present his own bill.
This is his bill.
This is what the this is this is the dream of the far radical left.
So if he's gonna go out and present a new bill tonight, a new plan, he's gonna go, this is what I've got.
This is gonna be fascinating.
Because, as Michael Gerson writes today In the Washington Post, Obama's crisis is credibility.
The overwhelming majority of Americans, by the definition of denied care, do not face a health care crisis.
Perhaps this is the crisis, rising costs that will eventually overwhelm state and federal budgets and consume more and more of individual paychecks.
But this is precisely the area where current Democrat approaches are least credible.
Obama abandoned his pledge to reduce the government's health costs long ago.
Now he aims only at budget neutrality.
So he's got a crisis problem, and the prices crisis is his credibility.
Because he's been so all over the board on this thing and hasn't been able to answer specific questions.
They relied on his power to uh transcend uh the rancor of politics, the power of his biography, and his oratory.
And that's all he's ever had.
He's got a five-minute career here.
It's all he's ever had, and it's gone.
So a nine-year-old student stands up and asks Obama at the uh the Hass Scroll yesterday, hey, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Well, they got uh universal coverage.
Why don't we have it?
From Reuters, April 21st, 2008.
Afghan laborer Chuman traveled a whole day to bring his son to Kabul to have a kidney stone removed after doctors in their home province turned him away because they couldn't afford the fees.
The two-year-old boy who suffered excruciating pain for three days, finally had the stone removed in a charity hospital funded by Turkey.
The private hospitals are only for rich businessmen.
Poor people have to use government hospitals, and if they can't help the children die, said the young father from Ghazni province, as he unwrapped a piece of paper to show a brown pebble measuring half a centimeter in diameter.
Ghazni's in Southwest Kabul, or southwest of Kabul.
Foreign donors have given some billion dollars in aid to Afghanistan since the U.S. led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001.
Now, who's putting this idea in his little kid's head that Afghanistan and Iraq have universal coverage?
Well, you know it's a damn teachers.
It's the damn teachers, and where they're picking it up, probably from the stupid left-wing website that's run by the Obama White House or something, or maybe from Acorn or whatever.
I mean, I've been to Afghanistan.
The notion.
It's more ridiculous than saying Cuba's got the best health care in the world.
I've been there.
You there's not an American that would live there.
There was not one American who would accept the living conditions in Afghanistan.
Forget health care.
You want to see the food in Kabul, the Capitol.
You're driving around.
Dust.
The roads are dirt.
Dust is raised by the tires of all the cars going by.
And they're not that many, but they're old and so.
And along the roadside is the meat market with raw meat hanging in the sun with the dust circulating, and people are standing in line to buy it.
You want to talk about universal health coverage in Afghanistan.
Jeez.
There is not one of you.
There is not one American in poverty.
There's not a homeless person in this country who would accept living conditions in Afghanistan.
Forget forget the Taliban.
Pile a Taliban onto it, and what they're doing over there, and it's the you know, home base of terrorism, it's even worse.
And we got a planted question about Afghanistan and Iraq have universal coverage, and why can't we?
I got to raising these little kids to hate this country and to get the totally wrong idea about it.
All for the sake of this guy's monuments and this guy, the advancement of his political objectives.
Detest this stuff that's going on here.
And then that phony baloney speech about accepting personal responsibility.
A rare occasion I disagree with your analysis of Obama's speech to the kids, and I said it was a conservative speech, and he didn't believe it.
But that was The content was good.
I printed that speech Tuesday morning rush.
I read through some of it, and I gave it to my son, a ninth grader at our local has school.
The speech was effectively a call for nationalism a la Hitler.
It was less about individual responsibility, and more about responsibility to the state.
How the kids need to feel an obligation to their community, the state, the nation, and of course, Obama himself.
I found this speech repugnant because I saw it as insidious and manipulative, starting with the poor me attempt to connect with the kids emotionally.
This is when he had to get up at 4 30 in the morning to study.
Sounds a bit like some some uh national labor party tactics being used.
It was full of allusions to things like fighting discrimination and making our nation more fair and more free.
Poor me, my father left my single mother's struggle.
Who hasn't heard all this over and over?
Lots of eyes, eyes, eyes.
So that woman disagrees with me.
Anyway, what regardless?
Uh it's just it this is this is unacceptable.
It's ridiculous.
And it's gotta be stopped.
What happened in August cannot cannot stop.
It must continue for four years.
Couple of headlines coming up in the next hour.
A year after financial crisis, the consumer economy is dead.
From state run McClatchy, from the Washington Post, waiting for deep pockets to open.
Recovery may well wait on the wealthy to step up their spending.
You mean tax cuts for the poor for food, toothpaste, and detergent aren't working.
Ladily wealthy get their taxes raised.
And Henry Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, very concerned about whether or not they have a backup teleprompter in case the one being used tonight malfunctions.
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