This is a rush transcript from “Hannity,” March 31, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: And this is a FOX News Alert. It has happened again. Yes, I’m serious. Another Obama nominee has admitted tonight to having problems paying their taxes. Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius, who is the nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, said today that she and her husband have paid over $7,000 in back taxes and more than $800 in interest.
Now, if you remember, the president’s first nominee for Health and Human Services, former senator Tom Daschle, had to withdraw his name after also admitting that he had failed to pay his taxes. And then, of course, there’s my friend, Turbo Tax cheat Tim Geithner, who was confirmed as treasury secretary and is in charge of overseeing the IRS who also admitted to what? Not paying taxes.
Now on April 15th, the very same day that we travel to the tea party in Atlanta, maybe we should also call all the president’s Cabinet members to make sure they have contributed enough to their own redistribution scheme.
And we’re going to have more on this in a few moments with Karl Rove, but our headline on this Tuesday night, day number 71 of change you can believe in, “Welcome to Europe, Mr. President.”
• Video: Watch Sean’s interview
As the commander in chief turned car executive heads to Europe for this week’s G20 summit, well, he is not getting the same outpouring of love that he received last summer when they showered him with wine and roses.
(VIDEO CLIP OF RIOTING)
HANNITY: Now that is just a sampling of what’s expected this week and it’s nothing compared to the welcome that he’s getting from Europe’s ruling class, like the French president, Nicolas Sarzoky, who has reportedly threatened to walk out of the summit if France’s demands of tougher financial regulation are not met.
And this comes as German chancellor Angela Merkel has refused to spend even more money on economic stimulus plans, claiming that it will not lead to sustainable growth. Looks like President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown could be going it alone all week.
Now wasn’t Obama going to bring the world together? Wasn’t he supposed to rebuild America’s image abroad?
And joining us now is National Review’s Jonah Goldberg.
Jonah, good to see you, my friend. So, let’s see.
JONAH GOLDBERG, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Hey, Sean. Great to be here.
HANNITY: One more — you know, Democrats don’t mind raising taxes, Jonah. You know why? Because they don’t pay them. So what do they care about redistribution? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Why should any American be diligent in paying their taxes when none of these guys pay?
GOLDBERG: Well, it would be fine if they didn’t get the jobs. But the Tim Geithner thing ruined everything. I mean, after Tom Daschle, I started using the phrase, “Dine or Daschle” with my friends, because, you know.
HANNITY: Yes.
GOLDBERG: These guys, you know, went to the public trough, they cashed in and then didn’t pay taxes on it. But with Geithner in there, now you have a real problem because, you know, this is a guy who’s dictating the tax code for the entire country and talking about the sacrifices we need to make. And he wasn’t willing to make them when he was an honest citizen himself.
HANNITY: Yes. You know, by the way, and the government is offering emotional help and support with a new Web site getting through these tough economic times. They only forgot that they caused, I mean, if we get to the bottom line here, why we’re in this situation, they caused a lot of the economic problems, their redistribution policies have.
There’s been no introspection as to how we’ve gotten here and now they come to the rescue and they’re offering emotional support. That’s just exactly what I wanted from my government. You know, the nanny state government. Emotional support for the tough economic times they create.
GOLDBERG: Well, no — my understanding is they’re going to now start subsidizing hugs as well. Look, I agree. It’d be nice to have a Web site that — you know, if we had a Web site that said, you know, how to get you through the tension in tough times of the Obama administration, and stop talking about the financial crisis. But these are the times we’re in. You know?
HANNITY: Well, all right, so we have the former Czech prime minister suggesting that, you know, Obama is leading the U.S. to hell. And you know, look at how the world is reacting now to the anointed one. What a difference from when he’d spoken in Germany before a massive crowd.
You know, the Obama halo is gone. He’s getting lectures from Germany, from Sarzoky in France, from the communist Chinese, and just about everybody else, that he’s on the wrong path. But yet, there doesn’t seem any — to be any thought process, as he travels around and gets his adulation, as to, you know, maybe these folks are pretty smart and right.
Where do you — is he going to take any advice from anybody, or is he just hell-bent on the radical agenda that he bought into?
GOLDBERG: Well, I think it is sort of fascinating. I mean he’s still popular in a sort of celebrity way in Europe, but he is getting the cold shoulder from everyone. And you’re right. If you go back and you remember that Brandenburg Gate speech, where he basically — you know, he seemed as if he was saying, you know, people of earth, stop your squabbling.
HANNITY: Yes.
GOLDBERG: I’m here to solve all of your problems. And…
HANNITY: Citizens of the world.
GOLDBERG: … everyone told us.
HANNITY: Yes. Citizens of the world.
GOLDBERG: Yes. Everyone told us that, you know, because he could pronounce Pakistan in an interesting way, he sounded like a Klingon and do all these things, and that he was the guy who knew the real citizens of the world and all the rest, that he could bring everyone together.
And if he just go by the standards that Obama raised in his own campaign, he’s an abysmal failure. He can’t get the Europeans who were supposed to love him to agree to anything. He has already, you know, blown off all of the major ambitious agenda items that he wanted out of this summit before he even got there.
HANNITY: Yes.
GOLDBERG: … before he even got there.
HANNITY: Are you as concerned as I am that Tim Geithner, the tax cheat’s openness towards a global currency, as he suggested?
GOLDBERG: All of this stuff, I mean, this administration — there’s Harold Koh, who’s, you know, his confirmation hearings are this week. The — this administration is full of what we at National Review typically called trance nationalists, people who look to the U.N. as the morally legitimate force in the world, who see, in many ways, America as the problem in the world rather than the solution in the world.
And I think that Geithner’s comments, which may have just been an off-the-cuff mistake on his part…
HANNITY: Yes.
GOLDBERG: Or he may regret it now, certainly reflects that general zeitgeist in this administration where ideas like that are given, you know, free rein. And I’m very concerned that we have a sort of cosmopolitan administration that, you know, certainly considers the British not to be our serious allies anymore and sees itself as sort of a, you know, transnational, you know, post-partisan, post-national, post-sovereign kind of regime and that’s a scary thing to see.
HANNITY: And well, it’s interesting, Daniel Hannan’s comments which got so much publicity, and he will be back on this program, by the way, tomorrow night, because he’s warning America. He looked in this camera and he said, “Do not go down the road to nationalized health care.”
Now here’s where we are. Now we have the government of the United States dictating to corporations who their CEOs are going to be. They’re guaranteeing auto warranties. They’re telling American car companies that they’ve got to sell their car companies. They’re going to dictate the employee salaries, and they’re saying, in trying to gain the power, Barack Obama and Tim Geithner — we’ll get into this in the next segment and we’ll get into it later with Karl Rove — they want the right to take over any company that they decide or deem impacts the economy.
Now if that is not socialism or national takeover of our economic system, I don’t know what it is, Jonah. Tell me where I’m seeing this wrong.
GOLDBERG: Well, I mean, I think we can get caught up in the labels. I wrote this book called “Liberal Fascism,” which pointed out how under the corporatism, the fascism you have big government and big business in bed together, where all the big industry is too big to fail because it’s being used to further the agenda of the states.
And you have at this point, you know, the federal government basically saying, oh, what you consumers want in cars, that doesn’t matter anymore. You have to.
HANNITY: Yes.
GOLDBERG: We have to have an auto industry that makes the kind of cars that Barack Obama likes.
HANNITY: Well.
GOLDBERG: Now, you can call it corporatism, you can call it socialism, you can call it fascism. What it is not is liberal Democratic capitalism.
HANNITY: Well, that’s a good point. That’s why there are all these tea parties and this movement now that is gaining widespread grassroots reports and we’ll have more details.
Jonah, good to see you. We’re going to be in Atlanta on April 15th for this very reason.
Watch “Hannity” weeknights at 9 p.m. ET!
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