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Nov. 8, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
November 8, 2010, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 podcast.
You know, Obama's always talking about the the Bush tax cuts and whether or not we're going to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire.
Have you ever noticed Obama never talks about the Obama tax cuts and whether or not we should have them expire?
And Obama claims he cut taxes for 95% of the American people, but he never talks about the Obama tax cuts.
What we ought to do about them.
It's always the Bush tax cuts.
Should they expire or not?
And the reason is there weren't any Obama tax cuts.
And I'm going to have fun with this today, too.
The story on CNN.
You know how I love ladies and gentlemen, those of you who have been here for a while, you know how I love stirring the pot.
The conventional wisdom when it comes to diet and exercise.
I just love it.
I absolutely love it because the conventional wisdom on diet and exercise is all wrong.
It's been all wrong for all time.
A nutrition professor, a nutrition professor, lost 27 pounds eating nothing but Twinkies.
He lost 27 pounds and his cholesterol went down.
Triglycerides came down.
All he did was eat twinkies.
When he got tired of Twinkies and he went and got some little Debbie stuff, and then some other hostess cakes.
I mean, he ate nothing but dessert, essentially, and lost 27 pounds, and I am going to relish explaining this to you.
As the program unfolds today, great to have you.
Well, it's it's uh no, he's not a name for it.
He's not calling it Twinkie.
The headline calls it a Twinkie diet.
Uh, but it's it's he didn't do any exercise.
And he was eating health food prior to that.
He hadn't lost any weight eating berries and twigs and rocks and fruit and all the other crap that all the health Nazis say you gotta eat.
He tried all that.
Vegetables and stuff, all the high fiber stuff.
He didn't lose any weight.
I'll explain it all as the program unfolds.
Also, the uh there there are there are a couple of themes that have evolved uh out there, and I'm gonna add a third to it.
Pelosi has announced she's gonna run for leader of the Democrats in the House again, and a bunch of people are suggesting that she should.
And uh that that that that's I mean, how tone-deaf do you have to be to insist on keeping not just Pelosi, the same party leadership in the House, they want to keep it.
The Democrats are gonna keep it.
You just had a 69-seat blowout.
Well, 63 seats in the House, it could reach that high.
Six seats in the Senate.
And they want to have the same leadership back.
Here's Jim Clivern, the Hill.com underdog Kleibert and uh says Democrat losses in the House had nothing to do with Pelosi.
Outgoing Speaker Pelosi's leadership had nothing to do with Democrats' losses in last week's elections, said the number three House Democrat, this Jim Kleiber in Democrat South Carolina, he blamed the poorly performing economy for the party's electoral drubbing, which saw them lose around 60 seats in the House, along with their control of the majority.
They also are saying health care had nothing to do with the loss.
That's the big thing.
If you've watched, if you spent any time watching the Sunday shows, you even saw this develop uh late last week.
Mara Lyerson was one of the first out of the box trying to keep her job at NPR after seeing what happened to Juan Williams out there.
So she's leading the charge, Juan Williams following up that health care had nothing to do with this.
That the health care bill had nothing to do with the reason the Democrats lost.
It had nothing.
I hope they continue to think that.
They're gonna they they think it's messaging.
They went back and they talked to Jorm Zlankoff, uh rhymes with uh to get more they they think it's lousy marketing, uh lousy messaging.
Well, if they think health care had nothing to do with it, well, we got a golden opportunity here.
The Republicans need to send up to the White House a repeal of the health care law in mass, in total, every month.
Send it up every week.
And then and make him veto it.
Make the Democrats defend it.
If health care had nothing to do with the reason they lost, make the Democrats defend it.
It was all the economy.
Who's in charge of that?
Make them defend all of these things.
In other words, if they'd have just had a better message, then this wouldn't have happened because it wasn't policy.
They're out there claiming their policies.
I don't care what it was.
Spending, debt, health care had nothing to do with their showacking.
I mean, they're going to keep the Senate leadership too, Dingy Harry.
Now, if if the House losses had nothing to do with Pelosi, uh she must what she had no power.
If they had if what what health care had nothing to do with it, uh there's a there's a big story here at the in the political today, and you can take and analyze this in a whole bunch of different ways.
Folks, I don't know why.
You know, I always trust my instincts.
I read this political story today.
Obama isolated ahead of 2012.
And I'll give you some of the and there is a story, A.P. Obama surprised by political cost of health care.
Obama isolated ahead of 2012.
And the conventional wisdom analyzed I is that you know, that it's it's uh I don't know, this it's a messaging problem, and if they could have just rearrange some of the ways they were talking about all of this, then the outcome would have been different.
That the narrative is that uh health care and Obama and all had nothing to do with the with the election.
Uh and the Tea Party's had some role in it and so forth.
And I as I read this, I'm I'm wondering if there's a lot more going on in the White House that we know about than we know about.
Look at what's just happened here.
This is the biggest drubbing since the 30s.
The biggest drubbing.
This is not insignificant.
I think the House leadership, the Democrat leadership in the Senate.
I think this uh this again, this narrative to keep that leadership in both houses the same, is an attempt to cover up something that is far worse.
I think this party knows that it is in far greater trouble in the White House and on down than they want to admit.
And I think that there are men, I think there are members of the media covering the White House who know it.
I th I I think that deep in the bowels of the Democrat Party, they realize some people realize that Obama is an utter disaster.
That they're going to have to do something about it.
And I think it's political story, Obama isolated ahead of 2012.
It's made to look like a a hit piece on Obama.
And I don't think it's a hit piece on Obama per se.
I think it is the beginning of sort of a setting the table to explain what might happen, set the foundation for what might happen as the months ahead unfold.
Now, I don't know anything.
I'm this is just my instincts.
But they're running around acting like this is not that big a deal.
This drubbing that they took last year, it's not really that big a deal, but it is the biggest, actually since 1948, the biggest drubbing since 1948.
And I I I really think what's the the the the thing that has I think become clear in their minds is that at the center of this is Obama.
Michael Novak has a piece at National Review talking about how the American people made a moral statement in the election.
We don't want to be European socialist.
This was an utter, total rejection of an American president, unlike any in American history.
That's Michael Novak's take.
And I happen to agree with him.
I think this was no president has ever been utterly rejected like this on substance.
On the basis of policy, it wasn't marketing, it wasn't packaging, it wasn't a lack of proper messaging, it had nothing to do with it, it had everything to do with what Obama stands for.
It had everything to do with the direction Obama wants to take this country.
When you have independence moving in such droves against a sitting president, the same independence who elected him.
It's actually a very heartening thing to realize that a large segment of the American population is taking notes, is paying attention, is expressing at the ballot box their utter disagreement, their utter rejection of everything the Democrats stand for.
And that is Obama.
And the Democrats making it clear here that they're going to stick with the same leadership team is an effort, I believe, to cover up what is really going on behind the scenes, and that is a total shakeup some way to limit the damage of Obama going forward into 2012.
I wish, folks, I wish that I could tie this to something substantive that I know, because there isn't anything I just common sense.
This kind of drubbing is not reacted to in such a cavalier manner as they are reacting to this.
You don't send the president out of the country for ten days after such a drubbing unless you want him off stage domestically.
You just...
This is...
Thank you.
And I think this political story, I'm going to get into it in greater detail as the program unfolds today.
Let me just give you the opening paragraph of this thing.
President Barack Obama has performed his act of contrition.
Now comes the hard part, according to Democrats around the country, reckoning with the simple fact that he is isolated himself from virtually every group that matters in American politics.
Now you could look at that paragraph and say, hmm, he's tone deaf.
He's arrogant, he's conceited, he's isolated himself from virtue, or you could look at that paragraph and say, something is seriously wrong.
Congressional Democrats consider him distant and blame him for their historic defeat on Tuesday.
Democrat state party leaders scoff at what they see as an inattentive and hapless political operation.
Democrat lobbyists feel maligned by his holier than thou take on their profession.
His own cabinet, with only a few exceptions, has been marginalized.
His relations with business leaders could hardly be worse.
Obama has suggested it's a PR problem, but several Democrat officials said CEOs friendly with the president walk away feeling he's indifferent, at best, to their concerns.
Add in his icy relations with Republicans, the media, and most importantly, most voters' And it's easy to understand why his own staff leaked word to politico that they want Obama to shake up his staff and change his political approach.
Now, who's doing the leaking?
And why?
Who are the adults in this party that have finally come to Jesus and understood this is an unmitigated Disaster that we have elected.
It's an unmitigated disaster in the White House.
Who is it leaking to the politico and for what ultimate purpose?
Because whatever's in the politico is not the ultimate purpose.
The politico is being used here or is compliant, complacent in being used, complicit in being used to accomplish something here.
We know that this is not just per se a hit piece on Obama to explain what happened.
There's far more going on here.
My antenna are sky high.
It should be a no-briner for a humbled Obama to move quickly after Tuesday's thumping to try to repair these damaged relations, and indeed in India someday, he acknowledged the need for mid-course corrections.
But many Democrats privately say they are skeptical that Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed in his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job.
They are skeptical Obama is self-aware enough.
Now, that doesn't mean elitist.
That doesn't mean arrogant.
That doesn't mean conceited.
That means is he all there?
Period.
That means.
Well, you know what it means.
That means is everything normal.
My interpretation here.
I'm going to share more of the kind of take a obscene profit time out here.
But you sit tight, come back and I will explain more of this.
And again, I want to stress just instincts, just a feeling.
And I've never doubted them.
I've always trusted my instincts, particularly in matters political.
But it just it strains credulity to me to believe that Democrats think nothing's wrong here except messaging.
That all they need is to go talk to George Lackoff and come up with a different way of presenting their case.
They know full well why they got trounced.
Now they're not going to admit it.
They obviously gonna come up with, yeah, bad marketing, bad packaging, um, bad uh bad messaging, but there has never been this huge, a personal repudiation of a president in just two years, especially one who was messianic.
He has fallen from heavenly heights.
We'll be back after this.
Yeah, what I'm saying is, and look, and I know this is gonna sound strange to you if you if you if you base it on uh some of my uh previous comments, because on the one hand, everything that's happened here is because exactly what Obama has wanted to happen.
He has wanted to inflict damage on the U.S. private sector.
He knows that single payer health care is the fastest way to accomplish that.
He's trying to put the private insurance business out of business.
Here comes this election, this this shellacking.
And based on this story in the uh in the politico, and based on the insistence that health care had nothing to do with this.
My sense is that there are some Democrats who think Obama, and everybody he's brought to Washington with him.
Everybody who is of like mind with Obama is doing long term damage to the Democrat Party.
There have to be Democrats thinking that.
Now, I know we look at them and we see them as uh invincible, as unafraid, as not concerned that they lose this kind of power.
Folks, it's not just Washington.
They have lost state legislatures.
They have lost governorships.
The Democrat Party took a drubbing.
I It was a wipeout, the likes of which this country has not seen, and it is owing to one man.
One man made this happen, Barack Obama.
And I'm suggesting to you that there are Democrats somewhere, may not be very many, but there are Democrats somewhere who know it and are asking themselves if they can survive two more years of this as a party.
I know that balances weirdly with the assessment we've all made that they're about destroying on purpose the institutions and traditions of this country.
And I believe that the far left has co-opted the Democrat Party in many ways, but there are some adults in that party, I'm convinced, who did not, who don't want what they want so badly that they're willing to destroy their ability to have power for generations.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, El Rushball behind the golden EIB microphone kicking off a brand new week of broadcast excellence.
We will get to your phone calls, 800-282-2882.
Email address L Rushbow at EIB net.com.
Folks, I think I'm gonna have to double check this, but I'm pretty certain the last time that there were less than 200 Democrats in the House of Representatives was 1947.
1947.
This is the worst drubbing since 1948.
I erred when I said this in the 30s last year or last week.
It's but it's not just that, it's not it's it's not just less than 200 Democrats in the House since 1947.
It's the governorships, it's state legislatures.
You may not know this.
The Republicans are making a move on West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin to switch parties.
He sounded like Ronald Reagan in this campaign.
There's no way Joe Manchin can vote with the Democrats the next two years and have any hope of being re-elected.
A Republicans are making a move in there to get him to uh to switch parties.
Now, in addition to all the governorships, and less than 200 Democrats in the House since 1947, first time for that, there were what 680 state legislative seats that switched hands.
You know what this means.
This means if the Republicans have the guts, and we'll have to wait and see on this, if they have the guts, they could redistrict the Democrat Party into permanent minority status for who knows how long.
Well, permanent.
Nothing's permanent in politics.
One of the that there's any number of steps that Republicans could could take to weaken uh much of the power base that that uh has built the Democrat Party.
Republicans have control of the rewriting of 195 congressional districts, 195 can be rewritten now.
Garrymandered, if you will.
Gerrymandered, if you prefer that pronunciation, for perpetual Republican elections, compared to 45 for the Democrats.
So my my point here is this huge what happened last Tuesday, and it is a rejection of one man and his policies.
Now the Democrats are out there trying to say it had nothing to do with health care, it had nothing to do with policy, it was all messaging.
That is to co-opt everybody and to fool everybody.
They're also out saying that the Tea Party cost the Republicans the Senate.
The Tea Party is what gave this massive defeat to the Democrat Party.
The Tea Party is what has vaulted the Republican Party to where it is.
The Tea Party's responsible for 60 some odd seats in the House of Representatives.
The Tea Party is responsible for victories in the Senate.
Yeah, there were three that didn't go the way they wanted them to go, but the effort here to blame the Tea Party for this is just it's it's it's part of the the narrative and and the template, there is there there is something, this political story, something bubbling up way below the surface, and it's getting closer and closer to reaching the service, and if it does, I think people are going to be shocked and stunned at what might happen.
Listen to this again.
And in his I see relations with Republicans, the media, and most important, most voters, and it's easy to understand why his own staff leaked word to politico that it wants Obama to shake up his staff and change his political approach.
Easy.
I see relations.
Let me tell you something.
His own staff leaked word to politico that it wants Obama to shake up his staff.
That means they're making efforts behind the scenes to get Obama to shake up his staff, and he is rejecting it.
And so they're going the root of the media.
This could be, and we'll just have to wait and see.
This could be near mutinous, what's happening here.
His own staff, and who is the staff?
Who is running the show?
Emmanuel's leaving.
The economic team's gone.
Axlerod's leaving in the spring.
Who is running this show?
Well, Valerie Jarrett's still running a show, and Michelle My Bell Obama's still running a show.
And this man makes it clear he's being nagged by women whenever he gets out and makes public statements.
Who is running this show?
Now you've got the politico saying that the staff is calling them, asking them to um asking the political to publish the fact that they want him to change his political approach.
It should be a no-brainer for a humbled Obama.
That's not possible.
This is another thing to throw in the mix.
It's not possible to humble Obama.
Obama has done everything he intended to do here.
See, see, this is the problem they've got.
He doesn't look at this as brand destruction.
This is this, you think Jeremia Wright cares about Democrat Party?
You think Bill Ayers cares about the Democrat Party?
You think any of the people that mentored Barack Obama care about the Democratic Party as except as a vehicle?
You think there's any brand loyalty to the Democrat Party?
I don't think there is.
And there's no such thing as a humbled Obama.
Now I guess another thing that bothers them.
No such thing as a man capable of humility.
And if you're not capable of humility, then you're not capable of understanding where you're going wrong.
It's always somebody else's fault.
Then you said in a paranoia sits in.
It should be a no-brainer for a humbled Obama.
It should be a no-brainer.
It should be, meaning anybody ought to be able to figure this out to move quickly after Tuesday something to try to repair these damaged relations.
And indeed, in India on Sunday, he acknowledged the need for mid-course corrections in India.
But many Democrats privately say they are skeptical that Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed in his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job.
Many Democrats privately say, and I know look at the politico is famous for all these private people saying things without an attribution.
It's become a politico technique.
In this analysis I'm engaging in here, many Democrats privately say they are skeptical Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic...
Do you do you understand what this could mean?
Take a giant thumping huge, not just in Washington, in the states, throughout the country.
Democrats privately say they're skeptical that Obama's self-aware enough to make The sort of dramatic change.
He doesn't that it hasn't dawned on Obama how big the drubbing is.
If it hasn't dawned on Obama, why?
What could possibly explain that?
Skeptical Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed in his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job.
He's they question his self-awareness to the point, is he capable of doing the job?
Folks.
This is um not lightly thrown out there by the political.
This is the politico clearly state-controlled media, clearly sympathetic.
This is not you you throw a paragraph like that out there.
He got somebody detached, not even aware what happened, not capable of doing the job.
Uh, folks.
Put that in context with this giant huge drubbing on Tuesday, which I think they were shocked at.
I don't think the Democrats had any idea it was going to be this.
They live in denial.
But now they didn't think it was gonna be this bad, Snurley.
They knew they're gonna lose some seats.
They didn't think it was going to extend down to dog catcher, which it has back after this.
All right, now there's a there's a companion story here, and I want you to grab audio sound like number uh number nine.
Let me see, make sure that's the one I want.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh AP.
Obama surprised by political cost of health law.
Now, let's go back here.
Many Democrats privately say they are skeptical that Obama is self-aware enough.
That to me, folks.
You're telling this to the politico.
This is the kind of thing they would say about Newt Gingrich.
This is the kind of thing they would say about George Bush.
He's off his rocker, he's lost his marbles, that he's gone nutcase, that he's drinking again in the White House.
There were all those stories out there.
That Bush had lost it, he's back on medicine for anxiety and all this kind of stuff.
That's the kind of stuff that they always say about Republicans.
You don't see this about Democrats.
Many Democrats privately say they're skeptical about Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed, or in his very approach to the job, self-aware enough to do the job.
And then this next headline, Obama's surprised by political cost of health law.
What are they setting up here?
Are they setting up somebody totally out of touch, clueless, doesn't know what's going on out there?
And he's helping.
Last night, 60 minutes.
Steve Croft.
You know how they promoed this?
Obama's first post-election interview.
Big whoop.
It's about his one millionth interview.
What's the big deal about it being his first post-election interview?
Anyway, here's Croft.
Are there things that you wish you could do over?
For some that argued, well, you should just stop and let people digest all these changes.
And so you shouldn't take on something as big as health care.
It's a huge, big complicated system.
I made the decision to go ahead and do it.
And it proved as costly politically as we expected, probably actually a little more costly than we expected politically.
No.
No.
From that, we get an AP headline, Obama's surprised by political cost of health care.
I don't believe that for a second.
I know that Obama intended to do exactly what he did.
He intended to do everything that he has done.
And yet, two separate stories.
We're getting a picture of somebody clueless, out of touch, and in the politico, Not self-aware enough to even do the gig.
And now he's out there saying, I had no idea it was going to be this costly politically.
BS.
You knew damn well it was going to cost this much politically.
He doesn't care what happened to Democrat Party.
This is what I've been trying to tell everybody for as long as he's been president.
He doesn't care.
He told the blue dogs, look at what he told them.
He told the blue dogs, you've he sent Clinton out to confirm it.
You'd vote for this health care bill, or you don't have a chance of being re-elected.
And they said, Well, wait a minute.
What happened to Democrats in 94?
Obama said the difference this time is you've got me.
Well, look where that got him.
The difference is this time you've got me.
Yeah.
This time you got Obama and you lost 60 seats.
You have less than 200 members in the House since 1947.
You've lost state legislatures, you've lost the governorships, the Republicans can redistrict Democrats out of power for who knows how long.
And if they've got the guts, they can disempower some unions with right to work laws.
If they've got the guts to.
And the blue dogs are now saying, you know what, we're gonna stick with the same leadership in the House and the same leadership in the sense.
Folks, I didn't, you know, I wasn't born on a turnip truck, and I didn't fall off of one.
But even if I had been born on a turnip truck, and even if I had fallen off a turnip truck, this you're not gonna make me think this is just standard old politics as usual after a political defeat.
In his effort to change Washington, Obama has failed to engage Washington and its institutions and customs.
All right, yeah, I told you, he doesn't care what he leaves in his wake as he sets out to reform, transform America.
He doesn't care about the wreckage.
In his effort to change Washington, Obama has failed to engage Washington and its institutions and customs, leaving him estranged from the Capitol's permanent power structure.
Well, we've spoken of that on this program.
The elite ruling class, they are liberal Democrat, they run that town politically, they run it business-wise, they run it socially, and he has failed to engage them.
He is estranged from them.
Right here says so to Politico.
Right at the moment when Democrats say he must rethink his strategy for cultivating and nurturing relations with key constituencies ahead of 2012.
So, Obama's not Washington enough.
Obama's not hell, he's not American enough.
That's what they're saying here.
He's not Washington enough.
Because these guys, Washington's America, San Francisco's not America, St. Louis is not America, Kansas City's not America, Washington is America.
To the people that run that town, to people who run that show.
Here's a Democrat official, as usual, in the political unnamed.
Democrat official who deals frequently with the White House.
Quote, this guy swept to power on a wave of adulation, and he learned the wrong lessons from that.
He's more of a movement leader than a politician.
Thank you.
He's more a movement leader than a politician.
Meaning he's above all of us.
In his own mind, he's not of the soil.
He's messianic.
He's a movement leader.
He doesn't care about our party.
He's a community organizer.
He's a movement leader.
He won't come down to our level.
Oh.
This guy's final comment was, he I'm just quoting him now.
Hide the women and children, folks.
Three, two, one, hide the women and children.
Final quote, this political advisor, unnamed.
Obama needs somebody to kick his ass on things large and small and to teach him to be a politician.
Now is politico part of reverse operation chaos?
I ask you.
I ask you.
Boy, how times changed, folks.
I mean, just a few weeks ago, just a few weeks ago, it was Obama looking around for asses to kick, and now it's his ass being kicked by unnamed Democrats in the politico.
Somebody needs to tell whoever leaked this all to the politico.
Obama's 9,000 miles away in India.
If you want to make a change, now's the perfect time.
He's 9,000 miles away.
If you think the adults need to step up here, this is the perfect time to do it.
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