LARRY O’DONNELL: Well, Rush loves this, David, as you know. I mean, how is Rush going to get attention in what became Obama inauguration week?  And Obama handed it to him actually by mentioning him in that meeting.  What Rush is saying when you go through the full version of his comments is he doesn’t want socialism to succeed, he believes the Obama agenda is socialism. And so he’s hoping for socialism to fail. What he doesn’t go on and say is, is he hoping for Obama to succeed in Afghanistan. Presumably he is, but he seems to leave that out of the discussion.

The other thing that Rush and other conservatives like Sarah Palin do, when they talk about socialism, and John McCain was doing this too when they talked about socialism, is that they lie very directly about what socialism is.  One thing Rush likes to say is: show me where socialism has worked.  The answer is: in the United States of America. Medicare: it’s pure socialism. It works very well. The truth of it is, there is no economy in the world that is entirely socialistic, there is no economy in the world that is entirely capitalist.  They are what economists call mixed economies. We have had some very successful exercises in socialism here; we’ve had some that have failed.

It was then that O’Donnell threw down the gauntlet to Rush over the abolition of Medicare.

O’DONNELL:  But I’d love to hear Rush, I would challenge Rush, and we know that he monitors everything that we say about him. I would love to hear Rush tell his listeners that he wants to abolish Medicare. Most of Rush’s listeners are on Medicare.  I want to hear him say, Medicare is a socialist program, tell the truth about it, and abolish it. He will never do that.