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Nov. 27, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
November 27, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
So did anything happen since the last time I was here?
Anything big go on in America or anything like that?
Yeah.
I think the last time I was here, which was late summer, early autumn.
Late summer, I think.
I think I assured you that Obama was going to lose.
I was wrong.
Now all of us have our own takes on this.
Rush has his take.
Mark Stein has his take.
The other people that you're here filling in for Rush have their takes.
Conservative pundits, everybody's figuring out what happened and talking about the future and where do we go from here?
And nobody's really on the same page.
And I think a lot of people are still kind of shell shocked by the fact that Obama won re-election.
But the fact of the matter is is that whomever what would have won this election, whether it was going to be Obama or Romney, was going to have to deal with a mess.
We're in a mess.
You can argue about who created it, I think most of it's Obama's own doing, but there's a mess.
And right away we've got this fiscal cliff sitting there.
And the reality is is that the winner is the one that has to deal with the mess.
If Romney had won, he would have had to deal with this mess.
He didn't win.
Obama won.
And already, you're seeing him tell the Republicans they have to fix his mess.
This whole notion, well, you Republicans have to agree to raise taxes or we're gonna go off the fiscal cliff.
Why do the Republicans have to agree to anything?
Obama wanted a second term, right?
This is his problem.
And before telling the Republicans that they've got to agree to raise taxes, and the Republicans have to roll over and agree to do this, that, and the other thing.
Will someone please tell me what the plan is of the president of the United States to avert the fiscal cliff?
He has no plan.
He's never had a plan.
He had two plans when he came into office.
He wanted to hand out a bunch of pork in the form of stimulus and he wanted to have national health care.
He got both of those things done, but when it's come to managing the finances of this country, they've never had a plan.
The Democrats who controlled the Senate for the entire four years of Barack Obama's first term never passed a budget.
The budgets that Obama proposed were laughed out of the Democrat controlled Senate.
Now here we are.
We've got this fiscal cliff that's there for a lot of reasons.
December 31st or January 2nd, however you want to interpret it, there are going to be huge tax increases and across the board budget cuts.
The markets are freaked.
We can't let this happen.
It will devastate the economy, it will put us back into a recession.
The Republicans don't want the automatic tax increases to go up, the Democrats don't want the automatic tax increases to go into effect in the middle class.
The across the board budget cuts would savage the defense budget.
Probably put a lot of Americans out of work.
So nobody wants this to happen.
So before we've had even one talk, all of a sudden the onus is on the Republicans to suddenly say that they will agree to a tax increase to avoid us going off the fiscal cliff.
And some Republicans, not surprisingly, are taking the bait.
You've got a few of them.
Who was the first?
Who was the first Republican to say I'm going to repudiate on my no tax increase pledge?
Was it was it Peter King out there on Long Island?
He was one of the first.
See you've got this problem.
We need the Republicans to agree to raise taxes, but all sorts of Republicans in the House and Senate have pledged never to vote for a tax increase.
Here's how this came about.
There's a group out there called Americans for Tax Reform.
It's Grover Norquist, who nobody ever really heard of until four days ago when the media decided to make Grover Norquist the entire problem here.
Anyway, Grover Norquist for the last two decades has been running around during Republican primaries for the United States Senate and the House and having his group try to get candidates to sign on to this no tax increase pledge.
Now usually when there's a primary election Involving Republicans.
All the Republicans want to show that they're a real conservative, that they aren't going to raise taxes.
So many of them sign on to this pledge.
And pretty much over the last couple of decades, really ever since Bush I broke his no new taxes pledge, pretty much ever since then, the Republicans haven't voted for a tax increase.
They've been able to stick to this pledge.
Now here we are, though, the fiscal cliff.
And you've got all these Republicans that have taken this pledge.
They said they'd never vote for a tax increase.
Well, to avoid the fiscal cliff, there's got to be a deal, and the Republicans are being told that you've got to agree to raise taxes, but they made this pledge.
So now you're starting to see all sorts of Republicans try to figure out how to weasel out of this pledge.
And you've got the media demanding that they do so.
New York Times Frank Brunei's column today is Grover finally over.
Pledges are for purists who have no place in a democracy.
All these demands are being made of Republicans to repudiate their pledges never to raise taxes because now we have to raise taxes to avert the fiscal cliff.
And indeed, a lot of Republicans are lining up, well, you know, I made that pledge, but I can't be held to a pledge that I made 17 years ago when I told Grover Norquist that that was 1995 was very, very different time now we get the fiscal cliff and so forth and so on.
I want to give you my take on this.
Whether or not there is a deal to avert the fiscal cliff.
It is ridiculous that you've got Republicans who are already caving in.
If there is to be a cave-in of any type, shouldn't it come after the Democrats start their own cave in?
If the idea is is that there will be some form of tax increase out there or revenue enhancer or whatever euphemism you want to use.
Everyone knows that it has to be accompanied by cuts in federal spending.
But nobody's talking about that until there are assurances that President Obama and the Democrats in the House and Senate are going to vote for significant spending reduction until they're willing to put entitlement reform on the table.
Why do the Republicans need to roll over already?
Here's what should happen.
The president should propose a plan to avert the fiscal cliff.
And we should take a look at it.
I suspect it'll be a bad plan, but his plan has to be the starting point.
Why should the starting point be a bunch of Republicans caving in and breaking their pledge when they don't even know what they're going to get in return?
It's theoretically possible, and my key word there is theoretically.
I suppose I could say metaphysically possible.
Somehow you could imagine it being possible that the Democrats could come up and say, you know what?
After all these years of spending like crazy and handing out Bennies to all of our constituents out there, and after demonizing on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, we finally realize that we've gone too far and we have to reduce federal spending.
Even we Democrats now know we're about to go off the fiscal cliff.
And we're really we're willing to cut spending in a real way.
We're willing to take a look at the entitlements, look at Medicare, look at Social Security, and try to fix these problems long term.
And here's our honest real solution.
I don't think that's going to happen, but it's possible, I suppose that it would.
If that happened, if they offered a deal on real spending reduction, too good to pass up.
I think the Republicans could perhaps then entertain the notion of giving up something.
I've got my own ideas on taxes.
But until you see the other side putting something up, why should the Republicans offer anything?
They act as though Grover Norquist is the person to whom these pledges were made.
Grover Norquist is just a guy.
He's a liberal he's a Republican conservative activist based in DC.
These pledges were made to voters.
Many of you live in districts that are represented by a Republican member of the House of Representatives, may have Republican senators.
And those senators and representatives told you, if I go to Washington, I'll never vote to raise taxes.
If they renege on that, they're not reneging to Grover Norquist.
They're reneging to you.
We all know in life, there are times that you have to make hard decisions.
And maybe you can make the case that taxes are going to go up anyway if we go over the fiscal cliff.
The Bush tax rates all expire when we have these massive increases in taxes.
So we need to accept some smaller tax increases to avoid the larger ones.
Maybe you can make that point.
But when you do it, you're violating a pledge that you took.
The Republican Party needed years to recover from Bush the First reneging on his own tax increase pledge.
When he said in 1988, read my lips, no new taxes, and then broke that deal three years later.
It made the Republicans look as bad as the Democrats on taxes.
The point I'm trying to make here is that there's no reason to cave in now.
They shouldn't have to make the first move.
Unless there are major reductions in spending, the Republicans shouldn't be expected to agree to anything.
Furthermore, the first move should come from the president and the Democrats.
They run the presidency and they've got the United States Senate, and they won the election.
Winning means you're in charge of things.
My side lost.
My side I think doesn't have any onus to fix the problems created by their side.
If we've got a fiscal cliff that we need to address, the president of the United States needs to address it.
And when we see what his plan is, maybe it's time to counter with something.
In the meantime, these Republicans, Peter King and the rest of them, they look like a shop owner putting up their hands, pringing the cash out of the cash register before the robbers even come in with the gun.
Everybody needs to chill out here before we sell out all of our principles and start agreeing to raise taxes.
When the other side so far hasn't agreed to one thing.
Anyway, that's what I think about this.
We've got the phone number here, which I actually forgot.
You'd think I'd remember that, but I've got my local show too, and I'm going to say the wrong.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number at EIB.
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about all of this.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm today's guest host for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
The fiscal cliff that everyone's been talking about, it's two things.
It's the automatic across the board spending cuts that are supposed to kick in at the end of the year, if there isn't a deal reached on spending reductions.
This happened two years ago when they agreed to extend the current tax rates another couple of years and they put off any real spending reductions.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans agreed to kick the can two years down the road.
Two years is now here.
The law is pretty clear.
The Bush tax cuts are expiring at the end of the year, and these automatic across the board spending cuts, which actually hit defense harder than anything else, the schedule to kick in.
The financial markets are saying that this would be absolutely terrible.
For those of us who don't want massive tax increases, it would be terrible for the tax rates to all revert back to 2003.
So both sides feel a need to do something.
The point I'm trying to make here is that the problem was never lack of tax revenue.
The tax rates that we've had in place have been producing more than enough revenue to run the government.
We have a spending problem in our country.
If in order to get the Democrats to address their excessive spending, You have to make some moves on taxes.
Maybe you can talk about that, but not until that move is made.
The Republicans are caving in when they are under no pressure to cave in.
The president won.
It's about time for him to lead and for him to propose a way to avert this fiscal cliff.
Instead, he sits there and he keeps waiting for somebody else to make the move.
He's the president of the United States, God forbid.
He won.
He's going to be there for four more years.
The Republicans control one thing, the House of Representatives.
Yet the media and everybody else is putting the pressure on them to somehow fix all of this by raising taxes, as if you could ever raise taxes enough to avert the fiscal cliff.
Anyway, let's go to the phones right now to Gene in Bradenton, Florida.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yes, hello, thanks for taking my call.
I uh my point is you could not be any more wrong.
This issue is going to go away real quick.
If the Republicans fight this and they let the uh tax uh rates expire, it's gonna be the Republicans oppressed day after day after day to cut they raise everybody's taxes.
Six months from now, the Democrats will come in and raise the or lower the rates to the uh middle class, they'll be the heroes, and for the next unseen future, we're the bad guys again.
Well, you are right about that.
What that but that's kind of the point that I'm making about the onus that the media is putting on this.
If there isn't a deal, who's going to get the blame?
You are right.
The Republicans will be given the blame.
I'm just challenging what I'm I'm challenging why that is, why that automatically why the why the expectation is is that the Republicans are supposed to solve a problem when the Democrats have the presidency, the Democrats have the Senate, and this whole fiscal cliff thing here is a product of the Democrats kicking the can down the road two years ago.
Why is the onus automatically on them?
Now you said that my analysis is wrong about this.
What do you want them to do?
Cave in now?
Absolutely.
It'll be all forgotten within two years.
But if they get another black mark, that will never be allowed to be forgotten.
Cave in and do what?
Raise taxes?
If they've already lost the issue.
The American people are already against the top 2%.
The uh American people are already for their middle class tax cut.
They're not going to win that issue in the next six weeks.
They might as well give up this battle.
In exchange for what?
Nothing?
If they if they lose this battle, Gene, in exchange for in exchange for what?
For nothing?
Yes.
Well, how did how does that how does that address any problem that we have?
If you were it's let's suppose you give Obama whatever he wants in terms of higher taxes on the so-called higher income.
Let's suppose we do all of that.
It doesn't do anything to avert the spending problem that's out there, and it doesn't really stop us from going off this fiscal cliff.
You've got to raise enough revenue in order to deal with the problem that's out there.
And and that small amount of tax increase that you would get would even do that.
You're arguing that well, we've lost this issue, we haven't won the fight, so you should automatically cave in.
So the next two years the Republicans should what?
Cave on everything?
No, the how they they own the house.
They can they can cut the budget piece by piece by piece, just like the Democrats do raise it piece by piece by piece.
Cut it.
But they don't have to do a big omnis uh show all and lose everything in front of everybody at right this point.
What changes what changes in four months, what changes in six months, what changes in eight months?
The one thing that you have now is that you've got some pressure on Obama to avert this fiscal cliff.
If this moment if because the financial markets are telling him we'll have a disaster, we'll have a recession.
My point is is that if you can't get him to agree to any reduction in spending now, what reason is there to think that there will ever be a reduction in spending?
You want to roll over and give away the store now, and I'm I'm saying there's no reason to do that.
And if you're worrying about the blame, uh the blame that's going to be assigned here, the ludicrousness of assigning the blame to the Republicans for not agreeing to raise taxes when the Democrats run everything.
Really, so what?
We can't lose the presidential election again.
It's over.
Obama did win, so people are going to be mad and Obama can demagogue the Republicans.
He already did that and he got himself re-elected.
I'm merely asking what the great rush is here to s abandon principles, break pledges, agree to raise taxes without getting anything in return.
But the per the damage is that if they if they let all the tax rates go up, they are going to be branded intact forever.
If they let them go, if they let go and they say, okay, we'll give you what you want, then go while they're in control of that House.
Build on that and start cutting the budget.
And then they can once they know that they can do tax reform, they can do so many things.
Yeah, and I understand.
I understand what you're saying.
Because if we do go off this fiscal cliff, it isn't just higher taxes on the higher income.
It's all the tax rates for everyone.
All of those tax reductions that occurred that President Bush put in place back in 2003, all of those would go away and the Republicans would get the blame.
Part of the problem for that is is that everyone assumes that if something doesn't get done, the Republicans have to get the blame for that.
I'm just challenging that.
Obama's the president of the United States.
If something doesn't get done, why isn't any of that considered to be his fault?
This whole fiscal cliff thing, kind of fascinating stuff.
If we have the kind of across-the-board spending cuts, I keep saying across-the-board, they're not really across-the-board, spending reductions that are talked about and the massive tax increase that would kick in, everybody says the economy goes back into recession.
I fear we're going to have a recession anyway because of the re-election of Obama, because of the tax increases that are coming, and because of Obamacare.
But there's this fear.
The last caller suggests that if there isn't a deal to avert the fiscal cliff, the Republicans get the blame.
That is a legitimate concern.
I'm not denying that.
In standing up here and saying that the Republicans shouldn't be unilaterally caving in and bending over backwards and sacrificing their principles and blacking their pledges, I'm not denying the reality out there that if there isn't a deal, the Republicans will be blamed for that.
That's absurd.
But it is reality.
Obama's the president.
Harry Reid and the Democrats run the Senate.
Yet if somehow there isn't a deal, that isn't their fault.
It's the fault of the Republicans, because they wouldn't do what we wanted to do we wanted them to do.
First of all, Obama and the Democrats still haven't even come out and said what they want the Republicans to agree to.
We've heard the President propose in the campaign in a speech that he wants a tax increase on the so-called wealthiest Americans, the millionaire tax that kicks in for anybody over two hundred thousand dollars.
But we don't have that in the form of a proposal.
We don't know what the plan is that they want to come up with to avert the fiscal cliff.
They haven't agreed or proposed any type of spending reductions.
I'm looking at page one of the New York Times today.
You've got an acknowledgement here that Obama may not be able to deliver Democrats to agree to any reduction in entitlement spending.
If you're worried about blame and you're worried about how this thing is going to be portrayed, then I ask you to think about this.
How about worrying about the reaction that you're going to get from people who are conservative minded?
Who you told when you ran for re-election, and you ran the first time around, that you weren't going to go to Washington to feed the spending monster by raising taxes after taxes after taxes.
You told us that.
Before you go and renege on that pledge, you better make sure that you get something that makes that betrayal worth it.
And I doubt that Obama right now is going to offer anything that makes it worth it.
Maybe he will.
Maybe you'll actually get the president showing his first whiff of leadership, standing up and realizing that the entitlements are a terrible problem, that we don't have the money to pay for them, that we're sixteen trillion dollars in debt, that we have trillions and trillions and trillions more in unfunded liabilities, and he realizes that he doesn't want to leave as his legacy the bankrupting of America and he'll actually come in with major spending reductions.
I don't think that's going to happen, but as I said, it's, I suppose, plausible.
If something like that would happen, if the grand bargain could be struck, maybe the Republicans would need to get pragmatic.
And I've got thoughts About taxes as well.
I think the tax rates need to be sacred.
We shouldn't be raising those, but I'm willing to look at a cap on deductions.
But I think all of this is premature.
There's no point in betraying your own principles and betraying your base if you're not going to get anything for it.
Now the last caller wants this unilateral cave in because wow, the Republicans are going to get the blame.
They get the blame for everything as it is.
Standing up for your beliefs ought to matter at least a little bit.
And putting some pressure on the president to lead by forcing him to make his own offer before you start selling out, I think isn't asking too much.
Let's go now to Chesapeake, Virginia.
Jeff, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, how are you doing, Mark?
I'm great, thank you.
Um, yeah, I uh, as I told your call screener, I absolutely totally disagree with that last caller.
Um, and I I do agree with you that you should not cave in on anything unless you are going to get something worthwhile in return.
Um I feel that the uh the Democrats are just they're in control now, they're sitting there and they're just waiting and they're they're trying to make the Republicans panic.
And like you say, some of them are already starting to.
I think if um if uh if they do cave on this and to allow taxes, I think the Democrats are gonna welcome it with open arms and they're gonna become the heroes for getting us uh all settled.
And then in two years' time, every one of these uh Republican congressmen that do cave, you're gonna see the Democrats flip it right around and it's gonna be plastered all over the airways, how they caved, and it's gonna be just like George uh George Bush Sr.
You know, one of the advantages.
Well, you're right about that.
One of the advantages of remembering the not so distant past is knowing how this stuff played out.
Everybody knows that President Bush I, reneged on his read my lips, no new taxes pledge.
What the media and anyone else refuses to remind you is why he did that.
He did that because he was under intense pressure from the Democrats in Congress to agree to a budget deal.
They wanted the tax increase.
When he agreed to it and they got their budget deal, they turned around and Bill Clinton used that against him and hammered him in 1992.
The same is likely to be true of the Republicans.
Any Republican in a swing district, Lindsey Graham or anyone else, who goes and agrees to raise taxes here, can expect a Democrat in 2014 to run against them saying that this person voted to raise your taxes.
There's a risk in a Republican and a Republican or swing district raising taxes.
There's that political risk as well.
I do agree with you.
If you're offered something that's too good to be true, too good to be believed, and for me that would be President Obama being serious about cutting spending.
But if something like that would happen, if it would come down the pike, I think you can talk about revenue increases.
My idea to raise revenue would be to take a look at limiting deductions.
I don't know why somebody who has a $500,000 mortgage should get a bigger tax break than somebody who has a $150,000 mortgage if they make the same amount of money.
I can look at stuff like that.
I think that that wouldn't have the same kind of damaging effect on the economy as raising tax rates would do.
I think that you can be creative about some of this stuff.
I'm not somebody who thinks that you can never make a deal.
But that only can happen if the other side puts up something real.
And instead of worrying about who's gonna get the blame for this and people will go crazy if we go over the fiscal cliff, instead of doing that, you've got to be true to your principles here.
We are in a major problem in America because we have spent money like crazy.
We've ignored the entitlement problem for years and years and years.
We've created all sorts of other spending programs recklessly.
We allowed President Obama to create the stimulus program that exploded the budget deficit.
We have an anemic economy that isn't producing enough tax revenue to match the amount of spending that we have.
We're really in a crisis, and that's why we're at this fiscal cliff point.
To simply say that the Republicans, well, okay, just we'll give you whatever tax increases you want and then walk away from that.
It's really inane.
And to say that this pledge that you ran on all of these years ago is something that should be disregarded.
If these Republicans are going to disregard pledges that they made, how about making the Democrats disregard a little bit of their ideology and make them for once get serious about controlling the spending we have in our country?
If you want Republicans to sell out, is it asking too much for the Democrats to give something up?
That's the point that I'm trying to make here.
If you're going to negotiate and you're going to make a deal, the President of the United States, who is in charge of the country, ought to have to give something up.
I don't think that that's asking too much, Senator McCain or Senator Iod or Senator Graham or any of the others, or Peter King or any of the others that already seem to be intent on rolling over on this thing.
Thank you for the call.
Let's go to I'm going to try to pronounce this correctly.
I'm going to say Papion, and I might be wrong.
Nebraska.
Dan, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
How do they do on the name?
Great, Mark.
Thanks.
It's Papillion.
It's papillion.
I knew I'd be wrong.
I knew I'd be wrong, but I took my shot.
Yeah, you're you're good.
Okay.
And this is well, I think one of the reasons Republicans won lost the election is because they seek dishonesty.
but you have the same dishonesty in the Democrats.
No one wants to be honest about taxes.
So I'm I hope you'll let me do the math with you.
If you're not making 296,000, you're paying 15% Social Security, right?
Yeah.
You're paying 2% Medicare, right?
Yes.
Okay, but where are we going?
Where are we going, Dan?
What's your point?
The middle class is paying 33% of every dollar they make in income taxes, right?
Okay.
Again, where are we going with this?
I think if if 33% of everything you make for the middle class is an appropriate tax rate, it should be appropriate for everyone.
Up.
Mitt Romney can say I paid eleven, twelve, thirteen percent and be proud of it.
Why did he lose the election?
If your argument is is that the way that the current tax code is structured, that some people hang on, that some people at higher incomes are not paying as much in taxes as the rate would indicate.
I do think you have a valid point there.
That's why I believe that if you're going to talk about revenue, you need to take a look at the deductions that are in place that allow some taxpayers to weasel out of the high rates that they're assessed, but not others.
We all know you can take five people in the United States who have an income of 250,000, and many and every one of the five will pay a widely different amount of money in taxes based on the deductions that are available in the in the tax code that is out there.
I don't deny that.
If we're if we're going to talk about addressing that, then let's get rid of all of the tax deductions that exist for the lefties too.
Let's get rid of the Chevy Volt deduction.
Let's get rid of the deductions for the people that are making the solar power stuff.
Let's get rid of the deductions for, you know, for the favorite, you know, for the favored for the favored interest groups of the Democrats.
I'm willing to look at all of those things.
The point that I'm making about a general increase in tax rates for higher income or anyone else is that the Republicans shouldn't be willing to cave on that unless they get something in return, and that something in return isn't a game.
It's the future of our country.
We are bankrupting ourselves and simply raising tax rates on people on higher incomes isn't going to come close to dealing with that problem.
If we're at the fiscal cliff because we're broke, an increase in taxes on a small percentage of Americans isn't going to fix this problem.
The problem exists because the government of the United States is spending way too much money.
And rather than look upon this as another reason to have to roll over and cave, I think it ought to be looked upon as an opportunity to try to leverage the Democrats to for once be responsible and start controlling spending.
implausible though that may seem.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I don't think most Republicans are ready to cave here.
A handful of them have.
In fact, Grover Norquist himself said that, well, a few of them are having impure thoughts.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell went to the floor of the United States Senate today and his staff sent me a copy of his remarks.
And I want to read a couple of them here.
Yesterday I came in to the floor to discuss what is happening, what is known as the fiscal cliff, a mix of automatic tax increases and defense cuts and so on.
He then goes on to say that the president should get off the, quote, campaign trail and be serious about negotiating here.
the Republicans in the Senate can't unilaterally do anything because they're in the minority, but you do have a lot of them that are trying to make it clear that the onus needs to be put on the president.
There's this big concern that a lot of people have about who gets the blame if there isn't a deal.
Well, you do have to start winning that argument and start reminding people who the president of the United States is.
Whether or not you're going to agree to raise any taxes or not, there's gotta be a cut there's got to be real cuts in spending here, otherwise, what's the point?
If Obama's not going to cut spending now, when will he?
If we're not going to have entitlement reform, when is that magically going to happen?
Every month that goes by, he's closer to the end of his second term.
While that's a good thing, the onus on him to be responsible, the longer his term is, and the sooner he is to having to leave office, the less likely that's it that's going to be.
Let's go to Grass Valley, California.
And Nathan, Nathan, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, how are you doing?
I'm great.
Hey, by the way, your voice, your accent uh reminds me of my family back in Michigan.
So I don't have an accent.
I'm from Wisconsin.
We don't have accents from the Midwest.
It's uh it's great to talk with you.
Here's the thing I want to tell you.
Just seeing the Lincoln movie uh over the weekend, um Lincoln was a great communicator where he told basically what were similar to parables, um, not to compare him too much to Jesus, but he related to people in a story that they could understand.
And here's what I'd like to tell you and all of us that are Republicans that are so ideologically um strong-willed is you can be right or you can be dead right.
And um the story goes where you're walking through a crosswalk and there's this traffic coming by, and yes, they're wrong by not stopping, but if they hit you, you're be you've become dead right.
And right now there's been a big change in our election recently, not just the last presidential election, but the last couple where there is a majority of people, like it or not, who want things different than what we necessarily ideologically want.
And if we keep fighting this fight and we lose, we are gonna be dead right.
Now, when you say don't cave in, don't cave in.
I don't even know what that I don't even know what that means.
So what what do you stand for?
Nothing through the cross you're walking through the cr no, you're walking through the crosswalk saying don't raise taxes.
No, I didn't say that.
I said the Republicans shouldn't be bending over backwards, offering to raise taxes before they get anything from the other side.
What's President I I'd love for you to tell me, Nathan, since you're the guy that's so afraid the Republicans are going to be unpopular here.
What is President Obama's plan to avert the fiscal cliff?
Admit it, you don't know it.
I I'm Mark, I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid to admit that I don't have all the answers, but if I Well the answer is he hasn't he hasn't offered one.
I'm only suggesting that the Republicans shouldn't be caving in, abandoning their principles, offering to raise every tax under the sun, telling their constituents who they made an who may they made a pledge to to not raise taxes to sell all of that out before they even know what they're going to get for it in return.
What if the president is willing to offer something serious, then we can talk about your crossing the street or whatever it is that you're telling that you were telling me before.
But the president hasn't made an offer at all.
He's sitting back once again playing politics, demonizing.
He can't he can't get his own people to agree to any kind of spending reduction either.
I don't see any reason to cave in and bail on this.
Simply having lost one election doesn't mean that you have to sell out on everything.
Lord knows that the Democrats didn't do any selling out on their lefty principles after the slaughtering they got in the 2010 elections.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Gulling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
So now the president is going to go out and campaign this week.
He's going To do the same thing that he did during the campaign.
It's the only mode that he knows.
And the Republicans are starting to criticize him for that.
There is, I think, among some conservatives a sense of defeatism here.
That we fought our arguments and we lost.
Well, they still control the House of Representatives.
They did win a landslide election for the Congress back two years ago.
It's not like these ideas can't win, but more importantly, while there is clearly support in the country for raising taxes on the higher incomes, there's also a lot of support for cutting federal spending.
All Americans say they want a balanced approach.
What this is an argument about is one of tactics.
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