RUSH: Jim in Roseburg, Oregon, hello, sir, nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Rush, it’s great to talk to you. You know, I’m frankly getting really disgusted with the Republican Party for their inability, either their inability or I’m not sure what it is, to take advantage of the easiest issue out there right now, and that is, excuse me, gas prices and use that to talk about domestic drilling. This is just ridiculous. And, frankly, I’m a little disgusted with President Bush for not talking about it more.
RUSH: He did.
CALLER: Well, I know he did today, and I’m happy to hear —
RUSH: He did last week, too, at a press conference. He talked big. He really ripped into Congress and last week Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison did the same thing on this program. And she’s written an op-ed in the Investor’s Business Daily about the same thing. I think what you’re really saying is that right now when you talk in this climate, when you talk about the Republican Party, you’re talking about the presidential campaign, right?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And what you really would like to hear is McCain talking about this. That’s the vessel for Republican votes coming up in November.
CALLER: Absolutely. But we know he is not going to do it because he’s constantly sucking up to the left vis-a-vis, you know, the ecology, you know, environment and what not. So somebody’s gotta do it. I’d love to hear you do it more, but they’ll just, you know, marginalize you.
RUSH: I’m blue in the face from doing it. Sometimes you can overdo things to the point that people run out of emotion.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: They don’t want to hear anymore.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And you turn it off. So it just takes an instinctive understanding of timing. But, believe me, I hear your frustration. I’m watching with great glee the debates here between Obama and Hillary on the gasoline tax holiday, the federal gasoline tax holiday and, you know, Hillary saying, (paraphrasing) ‘I don’t care if there aren’t any economists. I don’t care if there aren’t any economists, this is a good thing,’ and Obama is out there talking about what a boondoggle it would be, and these are the people, Obama and everybody thinks prices are too high.
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RUSH: Casper, Wyoming. This is Gary. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you for the call, Rush. This has been very, very exciting. I don’t know if I can go on after the last lady, I was laughing so much.
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: But I had a question about Obama and his remarks.
RUSH: Well, you know what that lady was trying to do?
CALLER: I kind of had an idea.
RUSH: No, what do you think she was trying to do?
CALLER: She was just trying to make it look like the ratings were going up because of Operation Chaos.
RUSH: She was trying to say — She was trying to get me to say the only purpose of this is ratings.
CALLER: That’s exactly right.
RUSH: As though that somehow disqualifies the objective. You know, this is a business of ratings. I don’t care what anybody says: Everybody — even the people at NPR — is in this to be the best they can. The way you measure that is with ratings.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And revenue, and to say that there’s some people doing this for altruistic reasons, is a crock. But the left, of course, thinks that that is somehow disqualifying if you’re doing it for ratings. The overall reason for doing the program is ratings! I didn’t move to New York to become number three or number five. So they think it somehow disqualifies. It’s just the exact opposite. It is an outgrowth of having a large enough audience to pull something like this off. I mean, do you realize nobody else could pull off a nationwide Operation Chaos?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Nobody else could.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Anyway, what were you going to say?
CALLER: Basically, I just had a couple of comments. One was about Obama and his remarks about the gas holiday would only save 30 cents a day?
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CALLER: How does he come up with 30 cents a day?
RUSH: Well, he’s figuring it’s 18.4 cents a gallon and that people use less than two gallons a day driving.
CALLER: Hmm.
RUSH: So 18.4 would be 36.8 cents. He figures if you’re using not quite two full gallons, you spend 30 cents; and then that somehow becomes 30 bucks a year. As though, ‘Okay, we got high prices, but cutting them a little bit isn’t going to help anybody. Thirty bucks a year isn’t going to help anybody. It’s worthless.’ And then the lies start. ‘All these federal workers will be put out of business! All 300,000 federal jobs will be lost and the roads will become full of potholes!’ I have news for the federal government: The roads are full of potholes already!
CALLER: Amen.
RUSH: The state and city governments, all their budgets are not being interrupted at all. All the roads and bridges are in disrepair. The idea that we’re in the process of repairing them and so forth, is a crock — and that it would be impaired with a gas tax. And then Obama comes along and says, with a piece de resistance, all the gas companies and oil companies just raise the price of gas at the pump to make up the loss of the gas tax.
CALLER: Hmm. Well, I don’t know. I guess he’s not thinking about the fact that the whole reason for the gas holiday is for the people that drive somewhere in the summertime to take a vacation. So that’s going to be a lot more than two gallons a day.
RUSH: No, it’s not that at all. Obama is a socialist, a liberal socialist, and the idea of the government giving up anything is anathema, it will not happen.
CALLER: I think that’s very true.
RUSH: Look, listen to him talk about his tax cuts for whoever he’s going to have tax cuts for. It’s always backed up by how he’s going to ‘pay for it.’ The government is a net winner in all this. The government will never allow itself to do with less. There are no budgets cuts, ever. The budgets never get smaller. They always get bigger, particularly the federal budget. It’s all a smokescreen.
CALLER: And especially when you have the amount of people that are government workers, they’re not going to want to give up their jobs.
RUSH: Of course not.
CALLER: So…
RUSH: They’re hiring.
CALLER: Oh, absolutely.
RUSH: The government is the biggest hirer all of a sudden, these days.
CALLER: Excuse me. I might make one other point. I don’t know if anybody’s ever said anything about it before. I haven’t heard it. But quite a while back in his campaign stumps he would say, ‘That’s not going to happen in my White House.’ What happened to ‘our’ White House? How come all of a sudden it would be ‘his’ White House? That just seems so elitist to me.
RUSH: It’s just a variation of when Hillary says, ‘When I’m back in the Oval Office, back in my White House.’ Who knows? I think this guy Obama does have an elitistism about him, a sense of entitlement, and this is really all about him personally despite his flowery rhetoric and so forth. Good catch.