Limbaugh On Drugs Again Or Ego Trip?

In his latest bloviation he’s challenging President Obama to enter into negotiations with him on an "Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan," which would divide up a trillion dollars earmarked for stimulating the economy, according to the election returns

[Beneath The Spin]

Is Rush Limbaugh on Drugs Again, or Simply the World’s Biggest Ego Trip?
Ultra Conservative Political shock jock, Rush Limbaugh, seems to have
finally slipped off the reservation. It is hard to know whether he’s back on
drugs, or if the recent election returns have caused him to lose his mind
all together.

In his latest bloviation he’s challenging President Obama to enter into
negotiations with him on an “Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan,” which would
divide up a trillion dollars earmarked for stimulating the economy,
according to the election returns. Limbaugh reasons that since the President
has pledged to take a bipartisan approach to governing, in Limbaugh’s view,
that entails the president controlling only the percentage of the bailout
funds that reflects his margin of victory in the election.

In other words, since President Obama won the election by 53% of the vote,
he should only control 53% of the bailout funds. The remainder of the funds, that
percentage that reflects Sen. McCain’s percentage of the vote, should be
controlled by none other than Rush himself, to be applied to the economy as
way he sees fit.

Limbaugh said the following:

“As a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the
most effective way to deal with recessions, under the Obama-Limbaugh
Stimulus Plan of 2009, $540 billion of the one trillion will be spent on
infrastructure as defined by President Obama and the Democrats. The
remaining $460 billion, or 46% that voted for Senator McCain, will be
directed towards tax cuts, as determined by me.”

Then he goes on to say, “Congress wants to spend — think of this now —
$1 trillion that they don’t have until you and I go to work and pay taxes.
They want to spend this on a stimulus plan. They want to take it out of our
pockets and redistribute this money in their way to their constituents and
to their make-work projects like schools, roads, bridges, blah, blah, blah.”

Is the man insane? First of all, since when has it been required for the
winner of a presidential election to have to share executive power with the
losing party? And even if he did, who elected Rush Limbaugh to assume
control of the Republican Party? The man is absolutely delusional. The
Republicans have allowed him to develop a Messiah fixation over his own
importance.

But with regard to Limbaugh’s cavalier dismissal of the president’s
initiative to address America’s failing infrastructure as a stimulus to the
economy, maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t congress’s constituents, the people? And
doesn’t spending this “make-work” money on “schools, roads, bridges, blah,
blah, blah,” going to benefit you, your children, your communities, and the
lives of your family?

So what does Rush want to spend the money on? One guess. That’s right–”just
the announcement that $460 billion will go toward paying for tax cuts,
capital gains, and corporate tax rates — we could throw in some personal
income tax rate reduction in order to make sure that the voters don’t think
it’s all about helping the big guys. But we need jobs, do we not?” Isn’t
this kind of thinking exactly what caused the problem in the first place?”

But even if we choose to ignore Limbaugh’s maniacal greed, selfishness, and
unmitigated arrogance, it is abundantly clear that he is either blind or
completely oblivious to reality. He’s advocating the recycling of Reagan’s
discredited supply-side economics, which virtually guaranteed Bill Clinton
historical fame for simply having just dug us out of the hold that it left.

Limbaugh is claiming that if we give Gucci a big enough tax break, he’ll
hire people to make Gucci bags to sell in a homeless shelter–which, thanks
to Rush and his cohorts, is exactly what America is becoming. But the fact
is, the only way you’re going to get Gucci to create jobs to make more
handbags, is by providing more funds to the people in the homeless shelter
to buy his bags. Otherwise, Gucci is simply going to take his tax cut and
buy a Ferrari with it.

We’ve been through this before many times before with the Republicans.
Supply- Side Economics was a scheme hatched by U.S.C. Economist Arthur
Laffer and the Reagan crowd which was supposed to cut the deficit and
balance the budget. The theory behind this scheme, came to be known as
Reaganomics.”

The theory was, if you cut taxes for business and people in
the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as
safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would
invest their savings into creating new jobs. In that way the money would
eventually “trickle down” to the rest of us, and the resulting broadened tax
base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the
tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even
George Bush Sr, Reagan’s vice president to be, called it “voodoo economics.”

Reaganomics, for the most part, sought to undo many of the safeguards put
into place during the Roosevelt era and created a business environment
similar to that which was in place during the Coolidge Administration. What
actually took place, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than
planed. Instead of taking the money and investing it into creating new jobs,
the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One of
these schemes, the leveraged buy- out, involved buying up large companies
with borrowed funds secured by the company’s assets, then paying off the
loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost
the citizens of this country an untold number of jobs.

In addition, the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Monday, October 19,
1987 the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points. It was the greatest one-day
decline since 1914 – fifteen years before the Great Depression.

We must also not forget that during the Reagan era the good Senator John
McCain played a leading role in undermining the public trust, and our
economy, as part of the infamous Keating Five. He was a leading player in
the Lincoln Savings and loan scandal in 1987–a scandal that bears an uncanny
resemblance to the one that’s currently being played out on Wall Street
today. He was one of a group of senators dubbed “The Keating Five” involved
in a scandal by the same name.

In 1976 Charles Keating moved to Arizona to run the American Continental
Corporation. In 1984, shortly after the Reagan era push to deregulate the
savings and loan community, Keating bought Lincoln Savings and Loan and
began to engage in highly risky investments with the depositors’ savings. In
1989 the parent company, which Keating headed, went bankrupt, and it
resulted in over 21,000 investors losing their life savings. Most of the
investors were elderly, and the loss amounted to about 285 million dollars.

After having received over a million dollars from Keating in illegal
campaign contributions, gifts, free trips, and other gratuities, the Keating
Five–Senators John Glenn, Don Riegle, Dennis DeConini, Alan Cranston, and
Sen. John McCain–attempted to intervene in the investigation into Keating’s
activities by the regulators. Later, they were admonished to varying degrees
by the senate for attempting to influence regulators on Keating’s behalf.

Charles Keating ended up being convicted for fraud, racketeering and
conspiracy, for which he received 10 years by the state court, and a 12 year
sentence in federal court. After spending four and a half years in prison,
his convictions were overturned. But prior to being retried, he pled guilty
to a number of felonies in return for a sentence of time served.

Then in 1988 another prominent Republican name pops up in the Silverado
Savings and Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers another $1.3 billion. It
was headed by Neil Bush, brother of George W. The investigation alleged that
he was guilty of “breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple
conflicts of interest.” The issue was eventually settled out of court with
Bush paying a mere $50,000 settlement. So while the Republican Party
continue to tell the American people that they are best equipped to handle
our economy, the same Republican names keep popping up repeatedly in
connection with economic incompetence, scandal, and disaster–and each time,
it takes the Democrats to come to the aid of the American people.

And what about Ronald Reagan’s promise to balance the budget and lower the
deficit? By the time he left office he was not only the most prolific
spender of any president in the history of the nation, but he also added
more to the deficit than all of the other presidents from George Washington
to his own administration combined. And what did the Republican Party
propose to do about that? One of the Republican proposals in their “contract
with America” was again, a capitol gains tax cut–for the rich.

So in light of all of these easily verifiable facts, I’d like to close this
piece with a personal message to Limbaugh:

Rush, you’re nothing but a drug ingesting windbag. You’re neither
intellectually qualified, nor do you have the authority to negotiate with
the president. So leave the thinking to the people with the intellectual
resources to handle it, and go drop a few tablets and fantasize about being
an astronaut instead.

For more articles by Black Star News columnist Wattree please visit
wattree.blogspot.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *