"Fearmongering" is the main arsenal of the Democrats. Scaring any group of people, Democrats feel emboldened and the easiest target is the elderly. As a very big voting group, Democrats need to keep seniors dependent on the government with entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. Since the GOP is trying to balance a budget, Democrats are screaming Republicans are killing senior citizen. We hear this all the time. The last time Congress balanced the budget was under Clinton in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, and that was with a Republican majority. During that time, the "fearmongering" was intense by the Democrat party, but no senior died from a balance budget.
Transcipt from the Rush Limbaugh Show
RUSH: You remember all the grief that Sarah Palin got talking about death panels in Obamacare. She was called a "fearmonger" and all that. Never mind that these so-called nonexistent death panels then were removed from Obamacare. Now, here comes Debbie Wasserman Schultz accusing the Republicans of killing senior citizens, and there is no outcry from anyone, anywhere, that is in any way similar to the outcry Sarah Palin got. That's another example of the blatant double standard which exists.
Here's the Patsy Schroeder sound bite. This is 1995 on the House floor, Pat Schroeder, Democrat congressperson from Colorado.
SCHROEDER: And they had the Big Kahuna of GOPAC come speak, none other than Rush Limbaugh himself, who stood there and said to all these people who paid all this money to keep GOPAC rich, he was hailing the GOP budget! He said, according to the paper and according to the C-SPAN tape, he thought it was wonderful because it would starve the poor and it would drive Medicare recipients, including his mother, to eat dog food, but not to worry, Mom, he says, I'm sending you a new can opener. Wow. That tells you what today's about.
RUSH: It's amazing how history repeats itself: 1995, 16 years ago, the Republicans had a budget, the Democrats react to it the same way. "It's going to kill old people." Now, there's a part of me asking, why does history keep repeating itself? How is it, you have to ask yourself, that the Democrats continue to get away with this? They got away with it in -- well, it's arguable -- they got away with it in '95 in the PR sense. They did not get away with it in '95 at the ballot box; Republicans won reelection in 1996. But they clearly won the PR battle. By winning the PR battle, they scared the hell out of the Republicans and made them timid, started to back off, their forcefulness declined a little bit. May not be that history repeats itself, but the hysteria surely does. It's the same thing. You might also say, "Well, Rush, the history's repeating itself. Back then, the Republicans were talking about the need to get the budget in balance." Well, that is always true. That's something that always has to be done.
You know, we had a bite earlier this week -- maybe latter part of last week -- talking about quick fixes. If we would've tried the quick fix 30 years ago, where would we be today? We wouldn't be in the mess that we're in today if we had stuck to what we started in 1995 when it came to balancing the budget. We wouldn't be where we are today. The problem is that between 1995 and now, we've had a bunch of Democrats in Congress, and we've had some spendthrift Republicans as well. The bottom line is that we're always gonna have people in Washington who are going to want to spend money because that's the ticket. That's the route to success. And it's all personal, in terms of their own career and their advancement. Spending money is one of the quickest ways to ingratiate yourself with people.
And you go talk to some elderly members of Congress about this health care bill and what it's gonna do to this country 10, 15 years down the road, and some of these members of the House and Senate who are in their seventies: "I don't care. I'm gonna be dead." That's really their attitude about it. Under Reagan and Bush, the Republicans had control of the White House and both houses of Congress -- how many old people died then? We can go back and count the numbers. How many old people died during the Reagan, Bush 1, and Bush 2 administrations? How many old people died because of the Republican budget every year? Answer: zero. And yet the same complaint, the same charge is made. And above all, most of all, you wonder about the idiots that hear it out there, average Americans who believe it, who buy into it.
