On Tuesday night, November 18, 2008, in Washington, DC, at the Wall Street Journal's CEO council, President-elect's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel spoke, and here is a portion of his remarks.

EMANUEL:  "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.  This is an opportunity. What used to be long-term problems -- be they in the health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area -- things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with.  And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before."

RUSH LIMBAUGH comments:  Do you need me to translate this for you, folks, or is this clear enough?  We love this crisis!  This crisis finally is going to give us a chance to socialize as much of this economy as we can!  The effort to get health care nationalized and all these other things that he mentioned were just too long term, too many obstacles in the way.  But now this crisis, with people demanding fixes to everything; why, this is going to make it easy for us to radicalize the US economy and the United States government.  "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." (laughing) What an opportunity! The crisis is an opportunity, is what he's saying.  We have got the Obama team telling you that this crisis is an opportunity -- for them. It is an opportunity for them.  So they think your panic and your crisis mentality will make you stand aside while they radicalize, nationalize as much of the economy as they possibly can.

I can't improve on that. I'll be watching to see if Rush's prediction comes true.