To Hell with You People

Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out. This morning I watched the first 15 minutes of the Today Show. I don’t particularly love or even like the program, but I find it useful to see what the producers think is the big news of the day. And sometimes Chuck Todd is on, and I like him. If I sound defensive about watching the show it’s only because I am.

Anyway, the first ten minutes was about Gabby Giffords’ return to the House yesterday. I’m not sure it merited the full ten minutes or trumped the hard news that later followed, but it’s a great story and everyone is rooting for the lady, so I’m fine with it.

But think about this for a second. The Giffords shooting sent the media elite in this country into a bout of St. Vitus’s dance that would have warranted an army of exorcists in previous ages. Sarah Palin’s Facebook map was an evil totem that forced some guy to go on a shooting spree. The New York Times, the Washington Post, all three broadcast networks — particularly NBC whose senior foreign-affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, devotes, by my rough reckoning, ten times as much air time to whining about Sarah Palin as she does about anything having to do with foreign affairs — flooded the zone with “Have you no shame” finger wagging. A memo went forth demanding that everyone at MSNBC get their dresses over their heads about the evil “tone” from the right. Media Matters went into overdrive working the interns 24/7 to “prove” that Republicans deliberately foment violence with their evil targets on their evil congressional maps.

Everyone “knew” the shooter was a tea partier. Except he wasn’t. He wasn’t even a conservative. He was a sick, demented, nutball. And it still didn’t matter! More bleating and caterwauling about the “tone” followed. More chin stroking and tut-tutting from Meet the Press roundtables and “very special segments” on the Today Show. More pizzas were ordered for the Media Matters galley slaves.

Finally, president Obama, our national-healer, gives a speech. It was a good speech. Indeed it was one of the first speeches in a long while that got anything like bipartisan support. Civility. New tone. No more martial metaphors. These were the takeaways.

So flashforward to this week. Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the Founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair. Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said.

Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists.

No one cares. I hate the “if this were Bush” game so we’re in luck. Instead imagine if this was Dick Cheney calling the Progressive Caucus (or whatever they’re called) a “bunch of terrorists” on the day Giffords returned to the Congress. Would the mainstream media notice or care? Would Meet the Press debate whether this raises “troubling questions” about the White House’s sensitivity? Would Andrea Mitchell find some way to blame Sarah Palin for Dick Cheney’s viciousness? Would Keith Olbermann explode like a mouse subjected to the Ramone’s music in Rock and Roll High School? Something inside me hidden away shouts, “Hell yes they would!”

The Today Show even had Debbie Wasserman Schultz on this morning for five minutes talking about Giffords. No one thought to ask her what she thought of Biden’s comments? It’s not like she’s the Democratic party’s national spokesperson or anything. Oh, wait. She is!

Instead, after the full ten minutes on Giffords, we get an update about the debt-limit situation (which is supposedly an Armageddon-level issue) and Kelly O’Donnell basically carries water for Biden on the issue by completely muddying whether he said anything of the sort at all. (His office says, no, no the vice president didn’t call them terrorists, he just politely agreed with all the Democratic congressmen in the room that they “acted like terrorists.” Ah, this is a distinction a team of a million Jesuits working around the clock would have a hard time slicing.)

And yet you know the next time there’s the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers, and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wing’s rhetoric.

I usually listen and missed most of today. You can usually find transcripts of most of the show at: www.rushlimbaugh.com

You don't need to be a member to access almost all of the content in transcript form, here's the first one from the top of today's show. More at the link.

A Total Waste of Time and Effort
August 2, 2011
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Well, the Senate is prepared to vote on the bill. It's a fait accompli. It is going to happen, and depending on where you look, everybody's claiming to be winners, and in other places you look everybody's claiming to be losers. If everybody lost, it means it's probably a pretty good deal. If everybody's unhappy, it's that line of thinking. I look at this, ladies and gentlemen, and I see an absolute, total waste of effort, a total waste of time. It's gonna come down now to how dispirited people are and just how much they want to continue to fight for this, because what happened here is typical Washington. It's the same old, same old. There's nothing really new in this in the way it all happened when you boil it all down.
We're gonna reach a new debt limit here today sometime, and then we're gonna reach another debt limit in three or four months, and then we're gonna reach another debt limit, and we're gonna keep spending, and we're not gonna change the baseline any at all. And we're gonna be told it's the best we can do with just one-third of the government, meaning the House of Representatives.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, how many of you believe that there are budget cuts in the new debt ceiling bill? You've heard that there are cuts, have you not? We're cutting here, we're cutting there. Yeah, well, what I want to know is why would anybody believe that this deal includes any significant cuts in spending? If it really cuts spending, why would we have to raise the debt limit by $2.4 trillion? Why? And we're still gonna get downgraded, and the markets are still not happy, and all the reasons we were sold for doing this have turned out to be bogus. Vladimir Putin, he's out hunting. He says the United States is "a parasite on the world economy." A parasite, meaning our growth is all phony.
It's all based on borrowing, it isn't real, and we are gobbling up all the resources around the world just to sustain our spending. We're really not the rich country that we are is what Putin means. It's all borrowed, it's all fake, it's all phony. We're parasites. All the numbers in this deal are just government math. Government math's even crazier than Farrakhan's Million Man Math Made Easy. Rand Paul has an open letter on his website: To paraphrase Senator Jim DeMint: When you're speeding toward the edge of a cliff, you don't set the cruise control. You stop the car. The current deal to raise the debt ceiling doesn't stop us from going over the fiscal cliff.
"At best, it slows us from going over it at 80 mph to going over it at 60 mph. This plan never balances. The President called for a 'balanced approach.' But the American people are calling for a balanced budget. This deal does nothing to fix the overreaches of both parties over the past few years: Obamacare, TARP, trillion-dollar wars, runaway entitlement spending. They are all cemented into place with this deal, and their legacy will be trillions of dollars in new debt. The deal that is pending before us now," get this, "Adds at least $7 trillion to our debt over the next 10 years." Not $2.4 trillion; $7 trillion. "The deal purports to 'cut' $2.1 trillion, but the 'cut' is from a baseline that adds $10 trillion to the debt."
As you well know, because we've been we've been explaining this in easily understandable detail all wee. I love the illustration. We could prepare a budget that is a freeze next year that doesn't spend a dime more than this year, and it would be scored as a nine and a half trillion-dollar cut because of the baseline, because of how the budget is expected to grow. "This deal, even if all targets are met and the Super Committee wields its mandate - results in a BEST case scenario of still adding more than $7 trillion more in debt over the next 10 years. That is sickening." Folks, I'm gonna give you a little history. I remember when this program started -- well, even before it started here, when I was in Sacramento and the show started in 1984 -- getting phone calls throughout the years from people concerned about the national debt, and I pooh-poohed it.
I told these people, "You know I've been hearing about the national debt my whole life." My grandfather was telling me about the national debt. My dad told me about the national debt. Everybody talked about the national debt and how it's gonna consume us one day and it's outta control, and I said, "I've been hearing it for years and years and years, and we're still here. I've been hearing this national debt business for years and years and years, and we're richer as a nation, and we're more prosperous than ever." So I said, "This national debt business? Big deal. We owe it to ourselves, so it's really not any big deal." Now, at the time that I was saying that, it was still manageable in size.
Now here I am an old fuddy-duddy, and I don't have that attitude about the national debt anymore. Now this national debt is $14.3 trillion plus the $2.4 trillion that's gonna be added, so we're just under $17 trillion, and another $10 trillion's gonna be added in ten years, maybe as much as the number 13. We could be looking at a $27 trillion national debt, and now I am no longer of the attitude that it doesn't matter, because we owe it to ourselves. I don't know when the change came. Well, I do know when the change came. It came during this particular regime and administration, when I was able to detect that a number of these things are being done on purpose, to purposely inflict harm on the private sector. This amount of debt has to be serviced. I mean, the idea of paying it off is impossible, but it has to be serviced.
That's gonna require tax rates that nobody will be willing to work in order to pay.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, folks, this doesn't end anything. The next thing that's going to happen is that President Obama is going to ask for more stimulus spending as part of his reelection campaign. You watch. More stimulus spending and the Federal Reserve will probably print more money. There probably will be a QE3. These next months leading into the presidential campaign, the president is going to do what all presidents do. He's going to use every bit of presidential power at his disposal to orient the government toward buying votes, doing things for people, without regard to the budget, without regard to any fiscal sense or sanity whatsoever, it doesn't matter. Particularly we know it doesn't matter to Barack Obama because he's gotten us here in the first place.
It's why holding the line on this bill was so important and why it could have really put the brakes on Barack Obama. But now that he's got the authority to run that debt up real fast, how he chooses to do it, create a slush fund, send the money to unions, people that pay dues so the money comes back to him in the form of campaign contributions, you ain't seen nothing yet. The things that are sickening to all of us about the way the ruling class and politicians use government for their own benefit is about to go on steroids. If you're ticked off now, you don't know what ticked off is. From Rand Paul's open letter on his website after he mentions that it adds at least $7 trillion to the debt over the next ten years, probably ten trillion because of the baseline, best case scenario, it never, ever balances. I mean no pretense to balance, doesn't come close.
"The Super Committee's mandate," the six Republicans and the six Democrats, "is to add $7 trillion in new debt. Let's be clear: $2.1 trillion in reductions off a nearly $10 trillion,10-year debt is still more than $7 trillion in debt. The Super Committee limits the constitutional check of the filibuster by expediting passage of bills with a simple majority. The Super Committee is not precluded from any issue, therefore the filibuster could be rendered most. In addition, the plan harms the possible passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment. Since the goal is never to balance, having the BBA as a 'trigger' ensures that the committee will simply report its $1.2 trillion deficit reduction plan and never move to a BBA vote.
There's more from Rand Paul.
END TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.