This hour of the Limbaugh Wire brought to you by the Milwaukee Machiavelli
By Simon Maloy

Good afternoon. As you know, we've been doing this Limbaugh Wire thing for four months now, but we've realized that life is too short to compromise time and resources, and so we've decided to resign. Sure, we could continue working hard every day to provide thoughtful and incisive commentary on Rush's radio program, but “working hard” for the “duration of the job” is the worthless, easy path. It's the quitters who have shown the wherewithal to get the job done, so we're quitting. After all, isn't a quitter just someone who knows he's already won and doesn't need to play the game anymore? But let's go back to a comfortable analogy for us: sports. We're like a power forward, driving into the red zone in the ninth inning of overtime, and a good power forward knows when to pass the shuttlecock so the team can two-putt to save par. And don't think we came to this decision lightly. It was way too important for us to make on our own, so we polled the interns. We told them that we were mulling resignation and asked if we should step down. The count was unanimous: four “absolutelys,” and one “about [expletive deleted] time.” The “about [expletive deleted] time” sealed it. So that's it -- the Limbaugh Wire will go on, but without us. We're reminded of the words of General George S. Patton: “No good decision was ever made in a swivel chair.” That's why we wrote this while sitting on a barstool.

Speaking of abandoning one's post, Rush is gone for the week, leaving us with a guest-host schedule that will reveal itself as the week progresses. First up to bat -- Milwaukee's own Mark Belling. We did a little snooping into Mr. Belling, and the results were not encouraging. But he's going to have to work hard to beat the Mark Steyn standard for guest-hosting excellence...

Belling got things rolling today by claiming that he hosts his own show on MSNBC. This, of course, is not true, and Belling acknowledged that it wasn't true, but he said he could get away with that joke for two days because no one watches MSNBC. Then Belling moved on to the passing of Robert McNamara, Defense secretary under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McNamara, said Belling, screwed everything up while he was in office, and it is “appropriate,” he said, that McNamara's death was announced on the same day President Obama is talking arms control in Russia.

It's the same thing that was happening in the '60s, said Belling. The problem with the McNamara/Kennedy/Johnson approach, he said, was that they thought they could negotiate with the Soviets. This was the plan we were given by those brilliant Ivy League elitists. And Obama, said Belling, just concluded his conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in one of those halls that exists only in Russia. It was 15 stories tall and had statues everywhere with all the majesty. Obama, said Belling, never looked more at home. We're used to the Obama that can't speak without a teleprompter and stumbles over his words, said Belling, but here he is standing with the president of Russia, “a fellow tyrant,” and he looked completely comfortable. Belling also asked why we're worried about Russia's nukes with Iran and North Korea out there. It's elitist naivete, said Belling. The reason Obama was so uncomfortable with the protests in the streets of Iran, said Belling, is that he wants to deal with the elites. Look at the coup in Honduras -- Obama sympathized with the president because he understood his pursuit for power.

Then Belling noted that Obama said today that he trusts Medvedev. “Isn't that beautiful?” Belling asked. Former Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Belling, must have been “busting a gut” watching this, and looks at Obama as a guy he can walk all over. Obama didn't accomplish anything today, said Belling, and if he thinks that he can deal with these people by being reasonable, that's the prescription for failure. The Russian government, said Belling, still wants to overrun Georgia, and they're looking at the U.S. as the useful idiot. The way to deal with the world that we live in is to have its respect and fear, counseled the Milwaukee Machiavelli. The approach that Belling saw today reminded him so much of the Eastern elitists of the '60s, who made the foreign policy disasters of the '70s, which weren't fixed until Reagan in the '80s.

After the break, Belling read from a Wall Street Journal article reporting that, over the weekend, Vice President Biden said that the administration “misread how bad the economy was.” What this means, said Belling, is here comes the next stimulus. We do not need more stimulus, he said, and we can't have one because the money is all gone. They wasted the stimulus, he said, and the problem was that it wasn't really stimulus, it was just more Democratic social spending, and they used the economic downturn as the pretext to do it. The reason the stimulus didn't work, Belling said, is because the money wasn't spent on anything that would work. All of it was aimed at fostering enrollment in the “liberal government gravy train.” It should have been spent on infrastructure, said Belling, who went on to explain that he isn't an advocate of that, but if you're going to do it, you need to find projects that are going to put people to work.

We should point out here that despite Belling's use of the past tense when discussing stimulus spending, there's still a whole lot of it left to be spent.

Anyway, Belling said all we've done is take the debt and the deficit to levels this country has never seen. We can't do another stimulus, he said, especially when they're talking about national health care and cap and trade. There is no mulligan here, said Belling. They blew it by putting all the money into the same liberal Democratic garbage.

Belling's first caller said that the AP and Washington Post reported that the Obama administration misread the situation in Honduras. Belling said we're going to get a lot more of this, they're going to say they misread everything. Look at the situation we're in now -- the economic downturn began last year, but we have higher unemployment now than we did when the stimulus passed. Belling asked if there was a greater indication of failure than that.

Another break and Belling was back saying that stimulus is easy to understand -- just imagine Belling as a rich guy who wants to do something to help the economy. What would be a more effective use of his money: going around giving 50 people $5,000, or starting a business and hiring 50 people? Of course it's better to start a business, said Belling, and what we need is more money to be generated from the private sector. The private sector has to start investing again, and that means no stimulus, no cap and trade, and no national health care.

Belling's next caller said that these bailouts aren't creating wealth; we're just taking water from one end of the tub and putting it to the other, and the tub is leaking. It's worse than that, said Belling; a lot of this money won't even get into the economy for years (yes, that does contradict what he was saying earlier in the hour). At least if you spent it on brick-and-mortar projects, it would have an immediate impact. But they didn't even waste money correctly, said Belling. This was all about the Democrats in Congress figuring out which of their special interests they could keep happy. According to Belling, we did nothing to reward or invest in the private sector, and now they want to do the same thing all over again. The fact that they're talking about a second stimulus, said Belling, is an acknowledgement that the first one didn't work.

Belling's next caller said he works for a utility in the Midwest, and that the company was going to build a coal-fired power plant that would have created a lot of jobs, but it elected not to build it because of cap and trade. This, said Belling, is the point he was making -- if you want to put people to work, you have to encourage them to invest and spend. But we've had nothing but an attack on every private sector company ever since Obama was elected. They tried to say that corporate profits are a terrible and evil thing, said Belling, but we need corporate profits for the economy to recover.

Belling then took another caller, who asked all the people who lost their jobs to ask themselves if they were in that position when Bush was president. Obama hasn't done anything, said Belling, it's only gotten worse. The rest of the world is starting to recover, but, in the United States, we're not seeing that. Belling then said he wasn't going to be an “apologist” and say Obama didn't inherit financial problems from Bush, but nothing Obama has done has changed anything. It's funny for us to hear that, because the man Belling is guest-hosting for insists that there was no financial crisis for Obama to inherit, just amber waves of grain and purple mountains' majesty. Anyway, Belling said the Democrats are “lost” here -- they are the ones who said stimulus would work, and it's not working. So they're doing what liberals do. Whenever a project fails, they want to do more of it. If they could prove they're making jobs, then they'd have an argument, said Belling. But they don't, so they're just spinning away.

A quick break and Belling was back, saying that one of the best things about being a conservative is watching liberals as they realize that their ideas aren't working. Belling saw some of this Schadenfreude in a New York Times article on job retraining. The problem with job retraining, said Belling, is that it's spending more money on a program that was already there. The government officials running these programs have no idea what's going on out there in the job market, said Belling, but this fits with the liberal philosophy -- retraining doesn't work, so let's do more of it.

One more quick break and Belling came back with a caller who said that Obama has done more damage to this country than 9-11 and Pearl Harbor combined. Belling laughed at this, and said if we'd done none of these bailouts or stimulus packages and instead just lowered the capital gains tax, the economy would be rebounding. But that's anathema to this administration, he said. They like people working for social services, nonprofits, and the government.

Hannah Dreier and Zachary Pleat contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire.