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Aug. 9, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
August 9, 2010, Monday, Hour #2
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Welcome back.
Well, as we speak, the President of the United States is winging his way in Air Force One towards Austin, Texas.
It's going to be a grand and glorious sight when the plane pulls in at Berkstrom.
President plane comes to a stop.
The stairs are rolled up, the door opens, the President emerges from the plane and begins to walk down the steps, and they're waiting for him at the bottom of the steps at the beginning of a two-stop visit to Texas for a fundraising events for the Democratic National Committee.
There at the bottom of the steps will be Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry with a howdy, Mr. President.
May I have a minute to talk to you about what a lousy job you're doing on border security?
And where you might ask, where might you ask is the Democratic candidate for governor?
Do you think that he'd be waiting there at the bottom of the steps to greet the President's arrival, get in the limo and ride to the event with him, and then ride on Air Force One to Dallas and attend the event there in Dallas at which money's being raised for the Democratic National Committee?
Well, if you bet that you would have lost your ranch, Bubba.
You'd be out.
Because Bill White, the Democrat candidate for governor of Texas, he is nowhere to be found.
He is out there in West Texas, about as far away from President Obama as you can get.
He is as about a far from an airplane, a bus station, a train station, an automobile rental agency, even a corral.
He's not going to be able to get on a horse and get there in time to greet the President of the United States.
And why?
Because Bill White wants to win, and he knows being next to Barack Obama in Austin, even in Austin, Texas is going to be like, you know, getting the political Ebola plague.
So he's going to be as far away as he possibly can be.
You know, not only is he not going to be there, but a couple of months ago, he went out of his way to insult President Obama by dismissing him, saying, quote, I was in the oil and gas business when he was a community organizer.
Ain't it great to come to Texas, Mr. President?
Know that you've got such staunch friends as that.
I mean, this is the Democratic nominee for governor in the second biggest state of the Union, and what is he doing?
He is dissing you, man.
He is saying, Mr. President Obama, don't be coming here.
Come and get the geeters, but don't expect me to be there when you collect the moolah.
And Governor Perry's doing a very smart thing by greeting graciously the President of the United States as he comes to a state, thereby dramatizing the unwillingness of the Democratic nominee to be seen in the same county, the same region of the state as the President, and also doing a wonderful job of getting a moment that the President cannot avoid at which the Governor of Texas can say,
you know what, you're doing a lousy job on the border, and these 1,200 National Guardsmen that you're sending the border, which are less than a quarter of what Bush sent down, they're inadequate, particularly here in Texas.
Do more, Mr. President.
So uh anyway, we'll be talking more in politics here later in the hour, but I thought I just I, you know, just to mark the moment, the special moment when Air Force One is on final approach to my hometown of Austin, Texas, and the President is gonna have a special greeting and a special uh discreeting from the Democratic nominee for Governor, Bill White.
What a man of courage.
I'd love to be in a foxhole in a fight with Bill White.
That's that's a man you want to be able to count on.
Anyway, we were talking last hour about the bad stimulus bill they passed last year.
Did you know they're about ready to pass stimulus two?
Pelosi has called the House of Representatives back from their August recess, their August vacation, and she's got them coming to town and they're gonna vote, and they're gonna vote on that Senate bill that was passed last week.
Stimulus two, two, two, two.
After all, we did such a bang up job with that first stimulus bill.
Wanna top it off with a second one?
Let's let's take a few minutes, though, and re and look at what happened here.
It started out ten billion dollars for teachers.
Oh, unless we pass this bill, they said in the Senate, we're gonna have to furlough teachers because without this ten billion dollars of federal taxpayer dollars, we're gonna have to let some teachers go, and wouldn't that be terrible just as we're getting ready for the little school children to go back to school to have to let those ten, you know, ten billion dollars worth of teachers go.
So we got to find ten billion dollars to do that.
Now, first of all, that's a little bit strange, don't you think?
After all, the budgets of state and local governments in 2008 was 826.1 billion dollars.
$826 billion.
Don't you think they could just find over Uh, you know, one percent savings somewhere else in the government if state and local government put their put their bare brains to it?
I mean, well, don't we have all this stuff going on right now?
I mean, in Milwaukee, the teachers union wants to be able to have coverage for Viagra.
You know, in in New Jersey, we got teachers who are pounding the table, they get their health benefits for life and they don't have to contribute anything, and the Governor of New Jersey is wisely saying you ought to put up at least a percent and a half of your salary for your benefits.
I mean, can't they find ways creatively to do this if teachers are all uh are all that important?
But you know what?
The secret is it's not really teachers.
The teachers are an excuse.
We got this last week when Senator when a Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, Oh, we've got to pass this bill in order to save the teachers and the firemen.
Now, of course, there's no money in here for firemen, but she sort of let loose the secret, which is the teachers are not what it's about.
It's about government employees, and they're gonna put the most attractive ones out there, the teachers and the police and the fire, in order to tug at our heartstrings and get the American Congress and the American people to support vast new spending.
In fact, Gerald W. Mackie, the head of AFSME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, he put it straight.
He said, Look, money's fungible.
We need this money so that we can keep other government workers from being laid off.
They're using the teachers as an excuse to keep other people who are state government bureaucrats and county bureaucrats and municipal bureaucrats on the on the payroll.
Think about this.
We're taxing men and women who were working on a manufacturing line somewhere or a man in a cash register somewhere or to toll uh tilling a field, or uh, you know, doing something to earn a living in the private sector.
We are taxing them more, and we're gonna have them pay more in interest in the future in order to pass ten billion dollars to give to state and local governments, ostensibly for teachers, but really so they can keep from making tough decisions elsewhere.
Now, that if that's not bad enough, think about this.
The bill started out at ten billion dollars, but they couldn't pass it through the Senate.
They didn't have the votes to get it past the filibuster.
So they had to get a couple other votes.
So what did they do?
Well, they found a couple of Republican senators who had a couple of concerns.
Senators Olympia Snow and Susan Collins.
They were concerned about their state budget.
And they wanted some money for their state budget.
88 or excuse me, $77 billion in Medicaid spending.
And so what they said is that look, the $10 billion is inadequate.
We want some money to cover the seventy-seven million dollars to our State's general fund that's gonna that's gonna be incurred when the stimulus money for Medicaid funding goes away.
So we want you to extend the special supposedly one-time spending that you had for Medicaid assistance, we want you to extend it for another period.
And that'll cost $77 million for our State, which doesn't sound like a lot in terms of the whole Federal budget, but guess what?
If you do it for Maine, you've got to do it for everybody else.
So to get the two votes of the two Senators from Maine and the request for $77 million for the Maine State budget, they had to add on a sixteen billion dollar price tag for Medicaid assistance to the rest of the States.
Because look, that's a tiny ity bitsy state compared to a lot of other states.
And if you give $77 million to Maine, you've got to give billions to States like New York and Texas and California and New Jersey and Florida.
So literally, sixteen billion dollars more.
And oh, incidentally, one of the senators, uh Susan Collins had some concerns about the Bath uh the Bath Works, what that's a big naval shipyard up there, and she said, I'm worried about you cutting uh uh jobs at the Bath Ironworks by reducing uh, you know, some shipbuilding uh for the Navy.
Now, look, I I want the military to have all the metal they want, but let's be candid about that.
Part of this is also she could extracted promises with regard to ships.
So we're gonna get we're gonna get a $26 billion bill.
The $10 billion for teachers they originally started out, the sixteen billion dollars for Medicaid that they had to put in in order to get the Senators' votes from Maine, and it's now coming to the House of Representatives, and how are they paying for it?
They're paying for it in part, $12 billion of it by cutting food stamps.
The Senate voted to cut food stamp assistance starting in 2014.
Now, who thinks that that that's gonna actually happen?
The House is already saying we're balking at that.
We want to kick that out of the bill, but who thinks in 2014 we're gonna cut food stamps in order to pay Then for something we've spent now.
And I want you to think about this.
This is all being done to supposedly stimulate the economy.
We need this in order.
We need this $26 billion in order to stimulate the economy.
Of course, the $862 billion we authorized last year didn't stimulate the economy.
So why why do we think that $26 billion more is going to do it?
Look, you know what the value of the U.S. economy is today?
It is $14 trillion,597 billion $700 million.
So the $26 billion represents 0.18% of our GDP.
Every bit of it is going to be borrowed from the future.
Every bit of it is going to be red-inked, and somehow or another that $26 billion being added to the Federal deficit is going to jumpstart a $14 trillion $167 billion economy.
Who's kidding themselves?
Who's kidding themselves?
All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're coming up to a break.
We'll be back to talk about politics here in our next segment.
Thanks for tuning in.
This is Carl Rove sitting in for himself, the man, Rush Limbaugh.
Oh, yeah, that's good.
That is really good.
We're back.
It's Carl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh today.
You know, before we get to politics, I you know, look, it's my first time here at Behind the Golden Mike, and I want to share with you what an extraordinary experience it is to be in Russia's inner sanctum, the lair here in New York City.
It's a pretty amazing place.
I hope I don't break any of the security rules by describing what the lair looks like.
First of all, on the wall, there are some pictures of Rush.
These are some of the secret pictures of Rush that have not seen uh, you know, not seen the light of day, but uh he keeps them here inside the lair.
There's a rush, a picture over there in the corner of Rush uh pointing his gun at Saddam Hussein in the Heidi Hole, just before h you know, Sodom, he's pulling Heidi uh Sodom out of the Heidi Hole in Iraq, assisted by a couple of very tough uh Delta uh guys.
There's a picture of Gorbachev kneeling in front of Rush and kissing Russia's ring, declaring uh defeat in the war against communism.
I mean, that's a pretty extraordinary, a world famous picture.
There's a picture of Rush with Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa planning uh private compassion uh all around the world.
I mean, these are some pretty amazing photographs.
Some there are some trophies.
Over there underneath uh in the corner is a uh plexiglass case that has Osama bin Lad's blanke that Rush retrieved uh from a cave in Afghanistan when uh Osama was fleeing the country when it when Rush on horseback leading a group of uh Northern Alliance and Special Forces guys uh almost caught Osama in uh the the uh winter of two thousand and one.
Anyway, this is an amazing place with lots of extraordinary things.
Uh n some of you have said there's a bat suit in the corner, that thing that you saw in the movie, the dark night.
Uh, I can tell you that's not true.
There is, however, a Captain America outfit in the corner with a special device of where Rush just jumps in and the suit magically forms around him, and then he goes out and commits all of these wonderful acts of heroism on behalf of our country.
Anyway, it's amazing right here in the lair.
Uh they promised that after we're finished, they're gonna take me and show me the weapons locker.
Everybody here at uh the center is a highly trained fighter in the event that uh you know, just to the south of us here is the NBC.
And if there's an attack from NBC launched across from Rockefeller Center, uh let me just tell you that every person here has been trained uh in uh uh uh weapons and armament, and I mean, there is a I met one of the uh one of the web uh activists here, and uh she's she knows the computer from top to bottom, but let me just tell you the woman is walking around with a SIG revolver on her hip, and I gotta tell you, nothing's attractive as a computer nerd with a weapon.
Anyway, it's a pretty amazing place, and I'm delighted to be here.
Uh we were talking about uh Governor Rick Perry greeting uh President Obama when President Obama arrives in Texas for a democratic fundraising trip.
You might think that's sort of odd, a Republican governor greeting the Democratic president who's on a partisan foyer into a state.
But I think uh it uh President Obama's uh standing in the Lone Star State is so low it uh it uh i it it it does him well to uh draw attention to it.
You know, Obama can't go a lot of places this year.
I mean, uh uh his wife's more popular than he is, but she's not gonna be able to deliver the kind of message she is.
A key test, a democracy.
Well uh she's in Spain getting ready for you know, she's resting and relaxing and getting ready for the fall.
And after all, she's doing her part to help, you know, this economy in America is hurting, and so she's doing her part in visiting some of the wonderful sites inside the United States of America that would uh benefit from the First Lady drawing attention to the wonderful scenery or facilities or hotels or other attractions available to them.
Oh, I'm sorry, that's right.
It's in the United States.
Spain is not in the United States.
Is that right?
What so what the heck is she doing in Spain, man?
Uh for a moment there, I thought you thought, what what what is she doing?
Well, look, I if she was costing a lot, I don't begrudge them a vacation, but why don't you vacation inside the United States of America?
The Estados Unidas rather than a Spaniola.
I don't know.
It's it's anyway.
Yeah.
Hey, did you see the thing?
Hey, Snurley, did you see the thing this morning in the newspaper where they said sort of White House, you know, political consultants close to the White House said to Democrats, uh avoid bragging about our accomplishments?
Avoid bragging.
I mean, i how I mean, yeah, I want them to go out and brag.
Come on.
Look, I mean, do they think politics is like, oh, don't say that you did something nice, uh, that you did something good because people will be upset with you.
No, no, no, they're saying avoid bragging is a convenient way.
Don't tell them what you did, for God's sake, don't admit it.
And uh anyway, it's gonna be a uh it's gonna be an interesting fall.
How did the president end up here?
Uh how did he end up here?
I'm gonna in the next uh segment, I want to spend some time going over how the president ended up here and share with you a poll, the outlines of a poll, a devastating poll that is gonna come out tomorrow, and uh it is gonna be a mind blower.
Uh I I don't want to get into the specific numbers, but I want to talk to you about a secret poll that will be coming out tomorrow from American crossroads uh of key Senate battle ground grounds that measures the effectiveness of Democratic and Republican messages, and we'll we'll do that in the next half an hour.
But uh I don't want to start it right now because we'll run out of time here at the bottom, but it's uh pretty remarkable uh what's what's happening in American politics.
President of the United States going to Texas today.
Uh he's uh alone on the range, as they say in Texas, because he's not being greeted by the Democratic candidate for governor who finds the president so toxic that he's trying to find a way to be uh uh the on the other side of the state.
And uh remarkable test.
Well, yeah, we can let's take a quick call here before we break here at the bottom of the hour.
Scott in Troy, Michigan.
Hi, Mr. Rose, nice to speak with you.
Thank you, Scott.
Um just wanted to let uh the listeners out there be aware.
Uh I'm an insurance agent in Michigan here.
Uh uh health insurance.
And all the companies that I represent have now been mandated by the Obamacare bill that they have to pay out twenty percent in benefits of all the premiums they receive.
Well, the first year I make twenty percent in uh they have to have to have to they have to put out eighty-five percent, isn't it, uh, on on actual benefits.
They have to limit their administrative cost to is it fifteen percent overall?
Well, what's gonna end up happening is is I won't make twenty percent anymore.
I'll make five percent.
Right.
So I'll be out of work.
All the other agents in the state of Michigan will be out of work, and that means that all the people looking for insurance won't have an agent that can show them the proper benefits that they require, won't be able to fight for them if the insurance company denies some sort of a claim.
So basically it's just one more step down the road to national health.
Yeah, and look, it was a deliberate effort.
This this so-called, you know, uh this limit on non-medical expenditures uh is designed to help shift the burden of the cost of health care back on to insurance companies and insurance agents.
Now, insurance companies on an average last year had a profit margin of just over three cents on every dollar.
So if you start saying you've got to limit the total amount of money that you can uh that that that you can spend on anything other than somebody's medical expenses to some arbitrary number, it's gonna squeeze everything and you don't have much to squeeze.
And so what they end up squeezing is they end up squeezing people like you straight out of the market of providing service, and it causes them to diminish the services they provide to their clients as well.
So at the end of the day, we all end up in a place where we get lousier service and the federal government gets to tell us more of what we want to do, and we become increasingly less happy with what we get, and at the end of the day, uh we we become more receptive to the government taking it over because after all, uh they'll it won't cost us anything, and uh we'll get that fine service that we get when we go to the post office.
I uh you know, this is this is just the the front edge of this.
And we're gonna see more of this in the in the months ahead.
Small businesses all around the country are starting to meet with their insurance agent or their benefits counselor, and they're figuring out how bad this bill is going to be for them.
I was just, you know, we're coming up to a break here.
We've got to go shortly, but I want to come back when we come back.
I want to talk some more about uh how this happened because as I went around the country, I just finished a book tour for my book, Courage and Consequence, and everywhere I went, small business people talked to me about health care and what's happening to their employees, and the picture of what's coming is ugly for America and ugly for American workers.
So uh thanks for your call, and we'll talk more about this when we uh come back after the break.
Well, welcome back.
Welcome back, welcome back.
You know, I I you know, every man has his critics, and I have mine, and and I've already heard from one of them.
When I referred to Saddam Hussein's heidi hole, I got an email from my friend Pinky Joe Albaugh.
This is the guy who is the campaign manager for President Bush in his 2000 campaign.
He's about six foot four, he has a flat top, and I love calling him Pinky, particularly when he is about eight or nine hundred miles away from me.
But he said, look, it's uh it's not a hidey hole, it's a freighty hole.
And it's that's you know, that's what they say.
He's from Oklahoma, and that's the place where in Oklahoma, a fry a Freighty Hole is the is what you call the place that you go to get away from a tornado.
But Joseph, you're wrong.
Pinky, you're wrong.
Yeah, a hidey hole is what they found Saddam Hussein and he was in Iraq, not in Oklahoma.
If he was in Oklahoma, we'd call it a Freighty hole.
And uh in Iraq, we call it a hidey hole.
Anyway, enough of that from my friend Joseph Albah.
Um look, uh we were talking about um health care before the break, and I want to come back to that subject because the insurance agent made it clear that already the mandates in this bill are gonna have a physical cost.
And the physical cost is that he is gonna no longer find it economical to provide services.
The assumption was if we cut you from 20 percent uh to fifty to five percent, that all we're doing is we're cutting out some of your unnecessary profit.
In reality, he can't provide that service anymore.
And that's that's gonna be happening throughout this bill.
There are gonna be so many mandates on so many rules and so many regulations that the cost of health care is gonna be dramatically above what it would otherwise be.
And that's not the worst of it.
The worst of it is that we're gonna find that people are gonna lose the coverage that they now have.
You know, I was out in uh Kansas City, Missouri, I was actually in Johnson County, Kansas, and I met a guy who's that runs a construction company, and he said to me, he said, Look, I made fifty million dollars were our sales last year, and he said we didn't make any money.
Uh and and I paid out five hundred and ninety-eight thousand dollars for the health care coverage for my employees.
He said, now the year before we had a fifty million dollars in sales, but we made a bunch of money that year in 2008, but he said in 2009 everybody was sharpening their pencil, so they were just trying to meet their payroll and pay their overhead.
So he said we had to compete that way, and we didn't make any money.
But I'm I paid the $598,000 for my employees' health care.
Pretty good program benefits that he gives his people.
If you're with him for six years, you get eighty, four hundred dollars for a family of four.
But he said, look, I've been meeting with my benefits guy, and the benefits guy is telling me that under the bill, my costs are gonna go to as high as $800,000.
And he said, I'm not gonna be able to provide that.
I mean he said, I'm not making any money, and if my costs go there, I'm not gonna be able to provide it.
However, if I dump the coverage for my employees, I don't get fined on the first 40 employees, and I get fined $2,000 on each of the 30 employees above and beyond it.
He had 70 employees in his company.
And he said, you know, guess what?
That my choice is between $598,000 a day or $800,000 in a year or two versus $60,000.
And I think I'm gonna I don't want to do it.
But he said, if I want to keep my business going, I may have to dump the coverage and dump every one of these people into the government exchange.
Now, you know, that's that's happening everywhere across America, and small business people all across the country are starting to meet with their insurance agent or their benefit counselor or talking with their own human resources person, and they're beginning to find out what it's means to their employees, and guess what?
They're not gonna wait until it actually happens in order to still start telling people, warning people, preparing people for that moment, which is one of the reasons why health care is going to get less popular as time goes on rather than more popular, particularly between now and November.
Because these employers are going to be smart.
They're not going to want to treat their employees as, you know, sort of mushrooms to be, you know, kept in the dark.
They're going to want to tell them what's going on and what's coming.
And it's going to be very problematic for them.
And it's not going to just be small enterprises like this 70-person construction company.
I was having dinner with a CEO of a company that employs a hundred thousand people.
A lot of them are part-time.
A lot of them are young, so they elect not to participate in the program.
We were talking about health care.
I said, Well, what is this bill going to do to you?
He said, look, right now we're putting out $25 million a year in health care coverage costs for our employees.
He said this bill will drive it to $90 million a year.
We'll pay $65 million more a year for health care.
And I said, Well, what are you going to do?
He said, I'll tell you what we're going to do.
We're going to dump the coverage for every single employee, starting with me, the CEO.
Every single employee is going to lose their coverage.
And every employee that we now is a part-time employee, part-time under the health care law is defined as 30 hours.
He said, every employee now who works 31 or 32 or 33 or 34 hours, we're putting in place a system so that they will no be they'll no longer be able to work anything more than 30 hours.
And he said, look, I I know what my workforce is like.
He said, I know who my employees are.
He said, I got single moms who are working who need 34 hours or 35 hours in order to meet their bills.
I got students who don't who don't want to work.
Sometimes they want to work 34, 35, 36 hours during the summer because they they you know they've got time to sort of earn the money for school.
And he said, but that's not going to happen.
And what's gonna you know I cannot afford the $2,000 fine if they work 31 hours, so we're gonna have them only work 30 hours.
And what's going to happen is they'll work 30 hours at my place and then they'll go down the street and work someplace else to pick up the four or five or six hours.
He says it's gonna be not going to be good for them.
It's not gonna be as as easy as it is now, but that's the way it's gonna be because this law is gonna drive my costs to a point where I cannot afford it.
Think about that, going from $25 million a year to $90 million a year.
I mean, you that $65 million is gonna come from somewhere, and it ain't i it ain't gonna be come from from profits like that.
I mean, this is the kind of thing we're gonna see repeated time and time again all across the country because of this new health care reform.
In fact, uh Price Waters House Cooper, I believe it is, uh let me grab my piece of paper right here, uh, did a did a study of this in which they found that the cost of this bill was gonna drive health care costs up.
Let's see here.
Where is it right here?
Gotta find it, gonna find it right here.
It is gonna drive the cost of this up more than it would be otherwise by I want to say 11 percent.
Let me just check that number.
I wouldn't want to Yeah, there we go.
Price Watershouse Cooper estimated passing Obamacare would drive up the average cost of insurance premiums by 11 percent in the first decade compared to 79 percent if nothing were done.
And look, we don't need to do nothing.
There are plenty of things that we could do that would hold down insurance, rising insurance premiums.
But think about that.
If we do nothing, it's gonna go up nearly 80 percent.
If we do what we did, which is pass Obamacare, it's gonna go up over 11 percent.
And uh, you know, that's because of these additional mandates and costs that we built into the law.
But so rather than saying what can we do to get more competition by allowing there to be a nationwide market in health insurance so you can buy health insurance across state lines, we didn't do that.
Uh rather than saying, look, we want small business people to be able to join together to pool their risk to get the same discounts the big boys get, we didn't do that.
Rather than saying, look, we're gonna do something about getting rid of these junk and frivolous lawsuits that are driving up the cost of health care for every single American, uh.
We didn't do that.
Instead, what we did is we passed something that's gonna drive up costs through mandates, regulations, rules, and dictates from Washington.
They're gonna drive them up more than they would go up otherwise.
And uh and didn't President Obama promise us, hey, uh, if we pass the bill, and one of the reasons we need to pass it is because we want to lower premiums.
I guess that was just another thing where he was misleading us.
Anyway, we've gotten off on a little health care hick uh uh kick here.
Um let's take a quick call before the break from from Lee And Wheeling, Illinois, and then we'll come back and talk politics here after the break.
Lee, are you there?
Yes, I am.
It's an honor to speak with you, Mr. Rove.
I I bought your book and it is fantastic.
Well, thanks for reading it.
I'm really delighted you you enjoyed it.
I had a lot of fun writing.
Oh, fabulous.
Well, send me a send me an envelope to my P.O. box in ORSHAN, two five five six four zips two oh two seven.
I'll send you a book plate to slap in the front of the book.
Repeat that, please.
P.O. box two six uh two five five six four.
Two five five six four at the zip six four is two oh two seven.
You can also, if if you didn't write that down, go to rove.com.
It's got my mailing address.
Offers good for anybody who's listening today.
If you bought courage and consequence and want an autograph book plate, send me a self-address stamped envelope to my P.O. box and I'll send you one.
Oh, thank you.
For listening to me for uh for suffering through me on Rush Limbaugh today.
Anyway, Lee, enough about my book, Courage and Consequence, available at your local bookstore.
Let's together.
What's your question?
Okay.
Why do don't the the Republicans stress the fact that the Democrats ruled the Congress the last two years of Bush's administration?
It's a good point and well worth uh reminding the American people that the Democrats have been in control of Congress since 2007, uh, the last four years, and uh, you know, the President had a veto and he was able to force them as a result to control spending, but it is a sign that uh, you know, they got things done and did things in a way, started tilting things their direction, and once President Obama got in, uh those uh they they simply made it worse.
But it's a good point where well we're stressing.
They've shown to us how much, you know, they they they have criticized Bush's spending not because it was too much, but because they thought it was too little.
They criticized Bush on deficits, not because they thought they were too too much, but because they thought they were too little.
They th they they criticized Bush for for uh, you know, uh reigning in federal power, not because they thought that he was doing too too little of that, but because they thought he was doing too much of it.
And so it's a good thing to remind people.
Anyway, let's come back.
We'll talk politics after the break.
This is Carl Rove sitting in for a rush limbaugh, who's presiding over the conclave of our vast right-wing conspiracy at an undisclosed location.
Cheney hosted lunch.
My understanding is that after lunch, there's gonna be a presentation by Speaker Gingrich on uh the seven great steps to save American civilization, uh, which uh it's uh it's part of the uh the ongoing conspiracy here of uh of uh the the right wingers to uh take back our country from uh the community organizer, the uh lady from San Francisco, and that really weird guy from Las Vegas.
Anyway, thanks for uh listening.
Hope to hear you on the other side of the break.
Ah, we're coming on with a saucy Latin beat, sort of a Carlos Santana thing going there.
Very cool.
Incidentally, let's have this disclaimer put on right at the start.
I picked none of the music.
And the reason I picked none of the music is I'm incapable of picking the music.
Fortunately, we have a gigantic uh Rush Limbaugh musicology department here at the EAIB Central, and they do a fantastic job.
Let's uh let's go to the uh let's go to the uh phones.
We've got a fantastic caller waiting for us, Scott from the very coolly named Lone Wolf, Oklahoma.
Uh Scott, are you there?
Yeah, I'm still here.
Yeah, Carl.
I must am I still on?
You're on, man.
You are on.
The nation is listening for the words of Scott from Lone Wolf, Oklahoma.
Hey, yeah.
Um, I just wanted to ask you, um, what would ha well what are the Republicans Republicans going to do if they get control of the House and Senate, which we're hoping.
And then, of course, uh, Obama will have the veto pen and he'll veto everything they put through and he'll call them the do nothing Congress.
Well, what should be their strategy if that takes place?
Well, their strategy ought to be to do the right thing.
And to force him to veto the right thing, and then to stand up and defend the right thing.
Well, first of all, look, let's be clear about it.
This is all in the hands of the people that get elected this fall, whether they live up to what our expectations and hopes are, what they're l if they live up to what they're saying, many of them on the campaign trail, or if they wimp out.
And if they wimp out, the moment will pass and the American people will walk away from them.
So if the Republicans win this fall, after talking about the need to control spending, to reduce the deficit, to strengthen our economy, to cut taxes, to keep our military strong, to stand for our traditional values, then by God, when they get in office, they better do it.
And if they do it, the American people will reward tough decisions, even if the President vetoes it.
And the President can't veto everything.
I mean, you can control spending by, you know, basically starving things in the budget, and he can be threatened and he can do this and he can do that, but eventually you'll win a lot of what you are fighting for.
If we if on Obamacare, we stand up and begin to whittle away at it.
And even if he does veto them, let's make an issue about it.
Let's have confidence that we're on the winning side and then if we explain to the American people what we're doing and why we're doing it and how we're doing it, that they'll hold he and his people accountable in the 2012 election.
I mean, look, battles are not won overnight.
Our system of government is not designed by the founders to be won overnight.
It it it it these things will take time.
But if we stay in the fight and we have the courage of our convictions and we realize what's at stake and love our country enough to stay in the fight, then we will at the end of the day win.
And it it's that's that's what's most important thing for us.
I mean, uh this is not an election like a normal election.
I've been around a long time in politics, even though, you know, I started at a relatively young age, so I've seen a lot of contests.
These next two contests really are among the most important in the nation's history because if we fail to put the country in the right direction, then the country will look to dramatically different than it than the way it was when we grew up and when we uh came to came to adulthood in the kind of country that has been so magnificent for so many generations of Americans.
Um what's my prediction?
Yeah, look, uh well, let's get into that in the next hour.
We'll we'll we're gonna devote we're gonna stay away from policy as much as I'm a nerd and love to talk about things like I even brought a copy of the Medicare Actuaries Report, Medicare Trustees Report and the Actuaries Disavow of that report.
But we're gonna spend the next hour talking about hey man, I love that kind of stuff.
Look, and think about this.
This is just I had to read to page two hundred and eighty-one of the actuaries report, Snerdley, before I read the the th the uh the uh the the the uh the actuary said there is a strong likelihood that certain of these changes will not be viable in the long range, specifically the annual price updates for most categories of non physician health services will be adjusted downward each year by the growth in economic economy-wide productivity.
You know what that means?
It means the Medicare program is going to heck in a handbasket, and the medica and the health care bill is making it even worse.
And uh and uh the the assumptions upon which the trustees made their glowing upbeat uh uh projections are completely phony.
Means we're we're we're in a deep doo-doo as 41 would say.
Anyway, let's uh let's hear we're coming up to a to a break here.
Let's let's take a brief break here, then we'll come back and talk a little bit more policy before we come back and talk about politics.
I've been promising it for about an hour and a half, nearly two hours, but we're actually gonna do it.
Nothing but politics the next hour, and we'll be taking some of your calls.
Thanks.
We'll be back after the break.
Well, welcome back.
Welcome back.
Uh we're ending the uh nearing the end of the second hour of Carl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
And yes, got a couple of emails during the break.
Uh uh yes, send a uh self-address stamped envelope to P.O. Box 25564, Washington, D.C. 20027.
If you've bought my book, Courage and Consequence, and I'll send you an autograph book plate, inscribe book plate to slap in the front of it.
And I want to thank uh those of you who emailed me to say that you, uh like our recent caller, enjoyed it.
Uh have I had a lot of fun writing it, and uh it was uh it was quite an experience.
Uh yeah, I'd like to do another one if I could come up with something to write about, like maybe my adventures with Snerdley and Kit Carson.
I mean, uh, you know, I mean, uh and the Yeah.
No, that no, that would be a long and grossing volume of uh stories of heroic achievement and the fight to preserve American culture and civilization is what it would be.
Snerdley, you're looking good, man, incidentally.
Uh you know, you it's you you're casual.
That's one of the great things about the EIB network is that everybody looks like, you know, they're very casual, they're they're with it, they're hip, they're cool, and they like each other.
Everybody around here has been very nice.
Well, thanks for having me here in the secret lair.
Um, look, we're gonna be talking politics next hour.
Um I know that many of you have a political addiction.
I'm here to provide you some help at least through the November election.
If you will go to Rove.com and sign up, I will send you every Thursday a link to my column in the Wall Street Journal, and more importantly, I will send you a uh one-page sheet on some inter interesting things about polling that I've seen uh called polling news and notes.
And I will send you my Senate map showing the current status of all the Senate races and my predictions for the Senate.
Absolutely free.
Rove.com.
It's my little gift to you to help preserve your sanity between now and the November election.
We're coming to the end of the hour.
Be sure to come back and spend some time with us in the next hour.
Politics, Rove for Rush.
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