This is a rush transcript from "The Five," August 3, 2011. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
GREG GUTFELD, CO-HOST: OK. The debt drama is over, at least until the next one. So, we want to start off with the most important thing happening in the world today, or perhaps ever. Yep. One day after the United States averted a near multitrillion dollar disaster, it's President Obama's birthday party tonight. To celebrate, he travels to Chicago to attend a fundraising concert. And the shindig includes performances by Jennifer Hudson, Herbie Hancock and OK Go.
And later, Joe Biden tries to dance with a coat rack. He confuses easily.
Check out our cake. This is amazing.
KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE, CO-HOST: This is a real cake.
ERIC BOLLING, CO-HOST: Fourteen trillion five hundred -- how much?
GUILFOYLE: Fourteen trillion five hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars, baby!
BOB BECKEL, CO-HOST: Who sent that to him?
GUILFOYLE: And you know what he said? Let them eat cake. That's what he said.
GUTFELD: Bob, and, by the way, that's frosting. I know it's white, but it's frosting.
(LAUGHTER)
BECKEL: Happy birthday, Mr. President.
BOLLING: Bob, make a wish!
BECKEL: My wish is that you would go away.
BOLLING: You'll have it.
BECKEL: No, I don't. I love you. I win.
MONICA CROWLEY, CO-HOST: Did he spit on that? With special icing now.
BECKEL: I didn't spit on it. Happy birthday, Mr. President -- to one of the great presidents in the history of this country.
CROWLEY: Oh, sure. More hot air.
GUTFELD: Monica, should the president be impeached for aging?
CROWLEY: What? You know what? That is an ageist comment, Greg.
GUTFELD: It is.
CROWLEY: Yes. No, not for that.
GUTFELD: Well, is it a big deal? I mean, everybody is talking about this birthday, why is he celebrating? It costs like, I don't know, 38 grand per person. Is this the wrong time to be doing it?
CROWLEY: Well, you know, apparently, my invitation got lost in the mail, which is a total bummer because I bought a new dress and everything.
GUILFOYLE: Apparently, all of ours did. Yeah.
CROWLEY: I will say that, you know, Obama is great at one thing. He's great at fundraising, which is what tonight is. It's a massive presidential re-elect fundraiser. That's pretty much the only thing economically that he's really good at.
GUTFELD: What kind of a birthday should a president have, Eric? I mean, how could he cut loose?
BOLLING: Today, Greg, he shouldn't be celebrating. By the way, he is flying to Chicago on fundraiser one.
Look, the economy is in shambles. The stock market is rolling over.
It's crashing.
Today, we find out manufacturing data is off the charts. Low. It's almost dead -- standstill dead. Unemployment, which is going to come out Friday, we're probably going to only create a handful of jobs. It could go up to
9.5 percent.
What is he celebrating? By the way, 40 grand to go sit next to the president and have dinner? C'mon.
(CROSSTALK)
BOLLING: Millionaires and billionaires --
GUTFELD: I mean, c'mon. Attacking him over having a birthday. I'm sorry.
GUILFOYLE: Look, he can celebrate his birthday, but I'll tell you, they were worried about that because they have a couple of these fundraisers on hold because he was having withdrawals. The last was June 30. It's the biggest one. And look how much money he's raised, OK?
Eighty-six million dollars in the quarter ending on June 30th. I mean, way out surpassing the millionaires and billionaires he's running against.
BECKEL: And that $86 million, he's going to be running against your candidate. So, it's going to be great.
GUILFOYLE: You mean generic?
BECKEL: If you don't mind me saying so, those of you who do not know much about politics --
BOLLING: Why do you look at me when you say that, Beckel?
BECKEL: -- the fact is I don't know of a single politician that doesn't use their birthday party as an excuse to raise money. There are more of those invitations going around Washington. Come help celebrate blah's birthday at some lobbyist place. So, what's the big deal? So what --
(CROSSTALK)
GUTFELD: What else is he going to use, Eric? What, he's going to fly Southwest?
BECKEL: Air Force One is what the president flies on. I know, JetBlue.
GUTFELD: Take the Greyhound.
BECKEL: Of course they pay it back.
BOLLING: Sure.
GUTFELD: I actually sympathize with the president over this because once you're president, you can't have a normal birthday. He cannot go to Friday's and get body shots, which is tragic.
CROWLEY: Nobody begrudges the guy a birthday party, however --
BECKEL: Oh, no? You can't tell that around this table.
CROWLEY: But you can tell that his epic narcissism comes to play where he doesn't care about the optics of this - of a doctor on TV.
GUTFELD: Do you think he's actually enjoying this birthday? I don't think so. I think he'd like to go smoke a cigarette and have a beer out in the woods.
GUILFOYLE: Let me tell you something, with his little cash register, cha-ching! But I want to be honest with you, I find this to be a little distasteful. I get it, everybody does it. Raise money on your birthday bash. Why not? Fifty is a really good one, OK? And he's got like -- people who - it's for the people for low-income, too. Fifty dollars and bring 50 people back into the campaign.
But Americans are suffering. People are out of jobs. I don't think it's a very good look.
And I want to tell you something, Bob, if this was, you know, Bush, one or two, pick him, and he did something like that, you can bet that you would be upset about it and not think that this was a good idea, that it was insensitive.
BECKEL: No, Bush was on his ranch. Cutting wood. I don't begrudge him that, nor do I begrudge him that the total number of days he had was a year. But leaving that aside, look, why don't leave this poor -- The guy, he's got a birthday. He's not able to spend with it his family. He's got to use it to raise money. Why? He's going to raise $750 million to a billion dollars. And that's good.
GUTFELD: Bob, do you remember your 50th?
BECKEL: To expose these munchkins for what they are.
GUTFELD: Do you remember your 50th?
BECKELK: No. I don't remember it. And not because I'm -- I'm not that much older. I actually do remember it. I don't remember -- my problem is I don't remember my 40th.
GUTFELD: Who bailed you out?
BECKEL: On my 40th?
CROWLEY: Yes.
BECKEL: My friend Bill.
GUILFOYLE: Bill Clinton?
CROWLEY: You know what? There's one other point about tonight, the Obama White House, big union guys, right? Big union lovers, they actually brought in nonunion crews to run this birthday.
GUILFOYLE: How hypocritical is this?
CROWLEY: Amazing. It's in Chicago. And they brought in a nonunion crew.
BOLLING: The uniqueness of this 50th birthday in Illinois, in Chicago -- Illinois happens to rank 50th as far as bad deficit numbers. It's the most in deficit state in the whole Union. By the way, I think we should do this. We'll leave a zero up there for Mr. Obama and keep the five for ourselves.
(CROSSTALK)
BECKEL: You know what's going to happen?
BOLLING: Hold the five.
BECKEL: That cake is going to end up in your face. So you keep going. Can we move on to something else?
GUTFELD: All right. Let's move on, then, Bob. Good point.
Let's talk about this FAA shutdown. Government is going to lose $1 billion in airline ticket taxes because lawmakers left town for a month without resolving this bill. Apparently, it was supposed to end a partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration. 4,000 employees were furloughed.
Why is this -- I don't -- I think this is great. Anytime the government is shut down anywhere makes me kind of happy. Am I wrong, Eric?
BOLLING: No, I think you're 100 percent right. Let's make this clear. Air traffic control is still working.
GUILFOYLE: Or sleeping.
BOLLING: Or sleeping. All the mechanics are still working. This is really construction jobs at the airports and subsidies given to small airports that happen to be very near larger airports. At some point, up to $4,000 per passenger subsidy just to keep these little airports open. The Republicans are saying , "No mas, we're broke."
CROWLEY: This is another genius move by Harry Reid, OK? Harry Reid is holding this whole thing up for two reasons. One is the airport subsidy. They call it the Rockefeller after Jay Rockefeller -- Rockefeller air subsidy, subsidizing passengers to the tune of $4,000 per ticket, which is absolutely outrageous.
GUTFELD: Only in Ely, Nevada, though. That's only in Ely, Nevada.
CROWLEY: Well, he's got a couple. He's got a couple.
BOLLING: What state is that?
GUTFELD: Nevada. Big surprise
But the other thing is unions, because the House Republicans, in a separate, longer range FAA bill tried to put in a provision there so that people would not be forced to unionize. And the Democrats approved that.
GUILFOYLE: But here's the problem, the average folks like to, you know, fly and get a good deal on a ticket. This was going to be a happy story because you're going to be able to not have to pay the extra taxes on it, service fees. But instead, the airlines have used this, an opportunity to say, oh, no, we are losing those taxes. Guess who's going to pay? You, you, you. You are paying double. And they're going to add on another $400 and all the extra fees.
BECKEL: If I could just make a point, the airlines are keeping these fees, you know -
GUTFELD: Yes.
BECKEL: And the people deserve to get those back -- number one. Another big example of corporate welfare at its best.
GUTFELD: But I'd rather have the airlines get it than the government.
BECKEL: By the way, to a lot of people who have these small airports out there, a lot of these very Republican red states that have them out there, and some of those people, they depend on those airports. And you are so quick to say, no, you live here, you got LaGuardia, you got JFK, you got -- whatever that thing is over there.
GUTFELD: Newark?
BECKEL: What's that? Newark. So, you got all of them, they don't work, but at least you can fly out of here all the time.
BOLLING: It was as only going to affect airports that are more than 90 miles away from larger metropolitan airports.
Before we go a little bit further, listen to what Mr. Obama had to say about it, this topic, earlier today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This is a lose-lose-lose situation that can be easily solved if Congress gets back into town and does its job. And they don't even have to come back into town. The House and the Senate could, through a procedural agreement, basically do this through unanimous consent and they can have the fights that they want to have when they get back.
Don't put the livelihood of thousands of people at risk. Don't put projects at risk. And don't let $1 billion, at a time when we're scrambling for every dollar we can, get left on the table because Congress did not act.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BECKEL: This is another one you can thank Eric and the Tea Party for, for slowing down -- because at the time they were going to use to debate this bill sucked up by the Tea Party and the ridiculous effort to hold up hostage the American people.
GUTFELD: Bob, what a bunch of garbage!
GUILFOYLE: You're crazy.
GUTFELD: This is great. A, they have three choices -- either it goes to the government, it goes to the airlines or goes to the people. At least it went to the airlines.
Number two, there's no lives at risk. I hate that when they say there's lives at risk. Whose lives at risk?
GUILFOYLE: Exactly. But what about Jon Kyl? This is kind of my favorite quote of the day.
Democrats have to decide if they are going to be the hand maidens of the labor unions in every policy. And he said that every now and then, you got to put the American people first instead -
BECKEL: Jon Kyl has got to decide if he's going to be a permanent right winger or he's actually going to get some sense.
CROWLEY: They're losing, what, $100 million already in these taxes. So, what Obama is saying is, you guys should not have gone on vaca. You should have done this because the government needs the revenues. Why is it always all about the Benjamins?
BECKEL: Why don't we ask Eric's corporate friends to give the money back to the people?
BOLLING: Why don't we do this, why don't we ask Congress why they need five -- Congress gets four weeks and the Senate gets five weeks recess? Are you kidding me?
GUTFELD: Or why don't we do this? Take a break. We've got a lot more for you in "The Five," so stay with us.
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