It's Not a Good Day for the Left

RUSH: It is not a good day for the left out there, folks. The Drive-By Media and several elements of the pop culture left are not happy out there today. The movie Selma took it on the chin in the Oscar nominations, and they're livid. How dare this happen so close to Martin Luther King's birthday. Oprah got snubbed, totally snubbed. Roger Ebert got snubbed. Roger Ebert is a god to several young aspiring would-be leftists and particularly Drive-Bys.

And I'll tell you something, folks. You probably haven't seen reference to this, maybe you have, as much as there is to access today, but I have found today three different pieces, actually two from serious leftist establishment foreign policy types who have turned on Obama like you can't believe. One of them is Leslie Gelb. Does the name Leslie Gelb ring a bell to you, Mr. Snerdley? He's a lifelong New Yorker, New Jerseyan. You should recognize his name. He's a longtime reporter for the New York Times, and now he's the director of "boring" for the Council on Foreign Relations.

If it weren't for his varicose veins, this guy would be a totally colorless guy, but he is a ranking member of the leftist intellectual establishment foreign policy apparatus, and he is not happy. He wants Obama to broom everything. It's all about not going to Paris. It's all about not going. It's all about not sending anybody to Paris. They're just beside themselves over that. Roger Simon, who is not a leftist, has written a serious piece here at PJ Media that was published a couple of days ago, three days ago, my birthday, "Is the White House a 'Sleeper Cell'?" I saw the headline and said, "Wait." This is about the snub of Paris.

By the way, unemployment numbers have just skyrocketed way up. I just saw this, too. There has to be a better way. There has to be. "US Jobless Claims Rise to Four-Month High -- Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose by 19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 316,000 for the week ended Jan. 10, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims falling to 291,000 last week."

It comes on the heels of all this great economic news Obama treated us to last week, or maybe it was earlier this week, I can't recall, when he was out there, I think it was last week. He went to some university and started just singing the praises of the economy and the recovery.

The IRS is totally overwhelmed because of Obamacare and their new instructions, and the IRS is saying only half of the citizens who call the IRS for any kind of assistance, clarification, whatever, only half of them are going to be served. The IRS says they are overwhelmed with all of the new requirements that they have to follow under Obamacare. Now, this kind of chaos, do not assume that this is troubling for Obama. This is exactly what's been ordered.

The pope, folks, the pope is doubling down. Now, one thing about this, one thing I've learned about the pope, Pope Francis, he goes out there and says stuff, and the Drive-Bys report it, oftentimes, I'd say about 50% of the time he doesn't say what they report him saying. The Vatican or somebody has to jump in, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is not what Il Papa said." It happens almost regularly. The Pope will say something and people react. The Drive-Bys report it to make him look like the next incarnation of communism now occupying Vatican. Happily, they do this happily.

We're loaded here today, got all kinds of things. Obama is pushing for mandatory paid leave. Can I give you a quote that I uttered on this program from way back on my television show, April 19th, 1994. Clinton was in the White House, and they had proposed mandatory 12 weeks unpaid leave to handle emergencies, the birth of a child, take a dog or a cat to the vet, whatever it was, 12 weeks, mandatory. This is what they pushed for back in 1994. They called it the Family Leave Act. You may have heard of it.

What I said from the archive of the television show -- Family Leave Act, if you have a company of 50 employees or more, it gives everybody 12 weeks unpaid leave a year to handle emergencies or births of children. And I said, "Folks, as is always the case with the left, this is not the solving of a problem. This is not the solution. This is not the end of the problem. This is the beginning. They just created a new problem, by design and on purpose.

"What is the nature of the problem? Twelve weeks of unpaid leave. How many of you could afford to take three months of unpaid leave, particularly now, when we hear over and over again that over half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? How many of you --" and this is back in 1994 when we supposedly had a roaring economy. "How many of you could have afforded 12 weeks off with no pay? Very, very few."

And so it was easy to conclude, this is step one. They're gonna realize this down the road. They already have realized it, and they're gonna come back with, "It's gotta be paid leave. The leave is no good if people are gonna go broke." And, lo and behold, Obama, it's finally taken some time, but here we go, Obama is gonna launch a new push today to require paid leave for US workers. It's gonna be a memo. It's not an act of Congress. It's not a law. "Obama will sign a memorandum to ensure federal employees get at least six weeks of paid sick leave after giving birth."

Thereby furthering the notion that pregnancy is an illness. Paid sick-leave after giving birth. This according to Valerie Jarrett, president-in-waiting. "The president will also call on Congress to approve legislation cementing the mandate into federal law. Jarrett wrote in a blog post on LinkedIn. 'We can't say we stand for family values when so many women in this country have to jeopardize their financial security just to take a few weeks off of work after giving birth. We can't say we're for middle-class stability when a man has to sacrifice his economic security to care for his ailing mother.'"

Exactly, 1994. Now, a lot of people might have been able to come up with this prediction, but I did, and here it is. It's taken a little while, but here we are. Who can afford six weeks off without pay? Who can afford 12 weeks off? This has to be paid leave. Nevermind we don't have the money for this. This is the federal workforce for now, but if Obama succeeds in mandating it, i.e., forcing it on the private sector, I don't have to tell you small business people, you're gonna be paying two people at same time while one of them isn't doing the job. You're gonna be paying two people, one of them is not producing anything, not even there. You need the job done or you wouldn't have somebody doing it. You're not gonna be allowed to eliminate the job. They're gonna make sure you don't get around the regulation that way.

Now, the federal workforce, they don't care about the money. They just print it. To heck with deficits and the national debt and all that. But once you get into the free market economy, there are not just loads of piles of cash sitting around in small businesses not being used that could be allocated in ways Obama mandates. (interruption) Well, yeah. What's gonna happen, what always does, the market always reacts, and there's this dynamism to it.

So you implement this mandatory paid leave. What employers are gonna do quietly -- they'll never say so unless someone screws up -- they're just not gonna hire anybody they think might be getting pregnant any time soon, and that would be the newly married, that be somebody with one, maybe two kids, I guarantee you they're gonna do this. It's gonna be very quiet, and they'll never say it so they can't be accused of discrimination.

They're gonna do background checks and if some guy comes in, wants a job, and he's got a history of hanging around the house pretending to be a house husband, I guarantee you a lot of people are not gonna be hired just on the assumption that they're not gonna be working anyway. They're gonna be demanding six weeks' paid leave because they're gonna be getting pregnant, need to take the dog to the vet, whatever, it covers everything. It covers whatever you would normally need to do during the workday that you can't do because you are slave having to show up and work for this mean-spirited boss that doesn't even appreciate what you do and doesn't pay you enough and doesn't provide you health care and is probably a Republican.

That's why we have to do this anyway, because Republican businessmen don't care about people. The government has to come in and make sure that Americans are treated fairly. Obama's also rejoining the global warming battle again, even though it's over. There isn't any man-made global warming, and I don't need to go through this all again, but Obama's coming back at it, and I'll tell you how. He is now focusing on methane. Most people associate methane with the expelling of gas by livestock. In other words, cow farts.

The leftist environmentalist wackos have actually suggested eliminating beef because that would mean we'd have fewer cattle, and that would mean there would be less gas, which is methane, expelled by animals. Obama is joining this, but not because of that. The real reason he's going after methane is to attack fracking. Methane is a key ingredient in horizontal drilling or fracking. If they can mandate all kinds of uses and proscriptions against uses of methane, then they can do indelible damage against the fracking industry. And that is why Obama is focused on it.

George Will has a piece today. I'm just setting the table here. It's a good piece. I'm not setting out here to criticize. I just have a question. "The Keystone Pipeline's Many Miracles," is the title of George Will's piece. And let me just read you a few excerpts, which will set up the question that I have about this. "Not since the multiplication of the loaves and fishes near the Sea of Galilee has there been creativity as miraculous as that of the Keystone XL pipeline. It has not yet been built but already is perhaps the most constructive infrastructure project since the Interstate Highway System. It has accomplished an astonishing trifecta."

Now, this is where my question begins. George Will asserts the next three things as overwhelming and astonishing aspects of the Keystone XL pipeline. One, "It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama’s pose of thoughtfulness." Number two. The Keystone XL pipeline, the debate about it and the refusal by Obama to approve it, all that, "has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities." And a third observation that George Will makes about the Keystone pipeline and the miracles, the lessons that the whole process has taught. The Keystone XL pipeline "has dramatized environmentalism’s descent into infantilism," meaning they've turned into a bunch of kids, a bunch of infants, infantile.

"Obama entered the presidency trailing clouds of intellectual self-regard. His carefully cultivated persona was of a uniquely thoughtful, judicious, deliberative, evidence-driven man comfortable with complexity. The protracted consideration of Keystone supposedly displayed these virtues. Now, however, it is clear that his mind has always been as closed as an unshucked oyster."

Now, my question is, to who is all this obvious? Do you think anybody in Hollywood's looking at Obama this way? As a faux intellectual, an exposed, pretend intellectual? Again, this is not a criticism. I'm gonna have to take a break here pretty soon. In the old days, this would be true. Obama would be exposed as a fraud. And by the old days, I just mean 20 years ago, 20, 30 years, he would be exposed as a total fraud. He's not an intellectual. He's not a complex guy. He's a total ideologue. And George Will said the Keystone XL pipeline is just one of many things that's illustrated what Obama is not.

It's made mincemeat of his pose, his act that he's a thoughtful guy. It's demonstrated he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. Okay, but to who, outside of George Will? I mean, these are the kind of things we need everybody to conclude and realize, but I don't think they do. You do; I do. I don't know if you associate Obama's fraudulent pose with Keystone. I think most of you associate his ideology with it. It would be great if more and more people thought of Obama the way George Will says, if more and more people were actually now aware of and exposed to Obama's fraud and pose. But I don't know who is. I have to take a break. Snerdley's looking at me with a puzzled look on his face, which tells me I still haven't closed the loop on what I'm trying to say.

RUSH: I guess one of the problems I'm having is I never fell for the Barack Obama Version 1.0 that George Will cites here. The sentence reads, "Obama entered the presidency trailing clouds of intellectual self-regard." He's a narcissist! Intellectual self-regard? Come on. The Berlin speech and all this? Speaking before Greek columns? "His carefully cultivated persona was of a uniquely thoughtful, judicious, deliberative, evidence-driven man comfortable with complexity."

It wasn't any of that, and maybe Will means that. Maybe "carefully cultivated" means that, but I don't think so. I think it's all been an act. The left is a sucker for people who can speak as intellectuals speak. You can be the dumbest idiot walking the earth, and if you can sound like you know what you're talking about, they'll praise you. It is the most amazing thing. George W. Bush ran rings around Obama in grades at school.

But because of the way he speaks, they call him an idiot and think of him as an idiot. But anyway, that misses the point. George Will says that Obama's handling of the Keystone illustrates what an intellectual fraud he's been. And I want to know: To who? I wish everybody would realize it, but I don't know who is! That's the point. Now, it could be -- it could be -- that it is beginning to sink in as it relates to Obama not going to Paris.

Because as I said at the top of the program, there is some real fear for US national security among leftists who consider themselves experts in it, and they're blaming Obama. There is some real anger at Obama and his entire inner circle, and they are worried to death or mad that Obama's decision not to go to Paris illustrates how incompetent and how undeserving of this power and how out of place with it they are. And leading that charge is Leslie Gelb -- who is the ranking, boring, leftist, establishment foreign policy expert in the world!

In Sacramento, Rush’s popularity exploded and people drove from literally HUNDREDS of miles around in order to buy the mattresses he advertised —his liberal fellow broadcasters loathed him.

They made social points by being seen by their colleagues as belittling him, usually quite needlessly —his weight at the time was just the easiest target.

But his popularity continued to shoot skyward. Finally a really huge broadcasting big-shot living up in Granite Bay, east of Sacramento, up in the fancy golden hills threw a dinner party to which he invited Rush. Rush thought it was his big break-through moment. He thought he’d finally gotten a chance to really make his bones.

He drove up there, figuring he would be a margin player at the dinner, but the minute Rush sat down at the table his prominent host quieted everyone in the room:

He marved at how stupid Rush’s show was and how he would never be successful. He repeatedly asked Rush how he thought he could get away with all this (meaning his new format, combining his humor with confidently stating his opinion about everything).

You’d think he’d get tired of it, right? That he’d shut-up about it and let the dinner finally resume tastefully, right?

Nope:

He just went on, and on, and on, with the whole room listening, for over an hour about how stupid Rush was and how he’d never succeed. How he’d fail and no one would hear about him again.

And Rush lashed out, right? He was mean and started screaming..?

Nope! He kept it classy, was the bigger man and just took it, letting the big-shot work through all his hostility.

RUSH EMBODIES CLASS AND WILL BE MORE FAMOUS THAN PAUL HARVEY OR ANY OTHER BROADCASTER IN HISTORY.

Gelb’s article was not just about Paris. It is a comprehensive demolition of everything about Obama’s national security and foreign policy team, topped by a declaration that Obama is a clueless, egomanical, self-isolated, dithering menace whose presence puts the nation is in grave danger. He calls for immediate replacement of ALL of Obama’s advisers — including ValJar, mostly with experienced, respected ...Republicans. He semi-ruins it by pretending that this could ever happen. Maybe he is just breast-beating to impress a foreign audience. I prefer to hope that Leslie Gelb actually knows better, but wants readers to conclude that it is time for Obama to resign, and take his Biden with him.

Finally a really huge broadcasting big-shot living up in Granite Bay, east of Sacramento, up in the fancy golden hills threw a dinner party to which he invited Rush.

OK, am I the only one who is really curious about who the big mouth-small brain "huge broadcasting big shot" is?"

Surely it can't be a secret.

This MENSA reject should be reminded of his huge error in judgment at least once a month...

>> The pope, folks, the pope is doubling down. Now, one thing about this, one thing I've learned about the pope, Pope Francis, he goes out there and says stuff, and the Drive-Bys report it, oftentimes, I'd say about 50% of the time he doesn't say what they report him saying. The Vatican or somebody has to jump in, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is not what Il Papa said." It happens almost regularly. The Pope will say something and people react. The Drive-Bys report it to make him look like the next incarnation of communism now occupying Vatican. Happily, they do this happily. <<

I agree with Rush on this one. Half of the stuff the media reports that the Pope "said" just isn't true, and the Vatican has had to debunk it on numerous occasions. Impy seems to agree with "the Pope is a communist because the media says so and freepers hate him" school of thought.

I really miss JPII, if no other reason than the media created an instant "Benedict XVI = evil NAZI extremist" and "Francis = gay friendly tree hugger who hates conservatives and capitalism" narratives, and carefully edited all material about the Pope to reflect their propaganda. Millions of people blindly accept whatever the media reports as truth.

That being said, I'd agree Francis is to the left of Benedict XVI and he's said some things I certainly don't agree with. On the plus side, I think he's solid on social issues (Francis flat out defrocked a priest for officiating a "gay" marriage), no matter how much the media propaganda machine screams otherwise.

On the other hand, the new Archbishop of Chicago does indeed appear to be an awful liberal. Yes Francis appointed him, but Bush I gave us Souter. Same problem, IMO.

“It’s not a good day for the left.”

Makes no difference.

They have a lock on a larger and larger part of the electorate and they will turn facts into propagandistic salvos against the Republicans who left an “impossible mess” for them to clean up.

(The brilliant, intellectual, enlightened Progressive masses will vote for pure democracy every time.)

IMHO

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.