Thursday, February 26, 2009

Thanks, Rush

From Rush Limbaugh’s Feb. 25 radio show:

RUSH: Amazingly, ladies and gentlemen, some of the brightest, most informed, and effective conservatism is now found on CNBC. Larry Kudlow has a program called The Kudlow Report. It’s at 7 p.m. on CNBC. He’s talking with Democrat Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania last night. Kudlow says, “Are the Democrats, your party, in danger right now? Are they on the edge of relapsing back to a 1967-, 1907-style of Big Government spending, welfare entitlement? Is that a danger? Has your party relapsed into that old big-spending label?” Now, here’s a montage of Bob Casey’s answer to the question.

CASEY: Democrats have demonstrated, at least in our recent history, that, uh, we know how to balance a budget. [snip] I’m happy that the president made a commitment, put us on a path to, uh, cutting the inherited deficit in half by the end of his first term. [snip] We’ve just been through a period where we had tax cuts for the wealthy galore. I mean we’ve never seen tax cuts like this, and we’re in the ditch now. I think we gotta get out of the ditch.

RUSH: This exasperated a guest later in the program, Charles Gasparino, who works at CNBC. He is their on-air editor. He also writes for the New York Post. Chuck Gasparino and Larry Kudlow had this exchange about what you just heard.

GASPARINO: I’m going to say why your last guest was a little full of it. You realize that Senator Casey just blamed the check troubles we’re in right now on tax cuts?

KUDLOW: On debt.

GASPARINO: It was absurd.

KUDLOW: Yes.

GASPARINO: And let me tell you something, here’s ... I’m going to give him a little lesson. There’s a stock market bubble. It blew up under Bill Clinton. It caused a recession. George Bush inherited it. Guess what he did? He cut taxes. Guess what? Things got better. I can’t stand how these guys forget about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All of a sudden, it’s tax cuts!

RUSH: Well, we’re dealing with Bob Casey. He’s order of fries short of a Happy Meal. But nevertheless, he still was given the talking points. This is a great response. The Democrats are trying to say that tax cuts gave us these problems. It’s the same playbook. There’s nothing new. Folks, do you understand? Really, you can boil the Obama speech down last night to what we have heard from every Democrat since FDR except John F. Kennedy, and that is: Raise taxes and cut the military. That’s it. That’s the program. Except this, the Obama program is more wide-ranging and deeply penetrable into the fabric of this nation’s decency and goodness than any Democrat has ever tried, including FDR.