RUSH: This is Jerry in Atlanta, nice to have you on the program, sir. Welcome.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, first time I ever talked to you, but I’ve been listening to you for a long time.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: Well, hey, one of my concerns is and what I want to share is that not all Democrats are like what you’re saying. And my concern is, I’m very concerned about energy policy, and I think it should be a strategic element in our security of our country. And the example I used is, if I use the example of what JFK did when he said in his speech in the early sixties to send a man to the moon and back, we did that in nine years, and that wasn’t even a viable concept. I mean what we did to overcome this was remarkable. And what I’m saying today is we need to work not only as Democrats and Republicans, but as citizens, American citizens, we need to get the energy policy back where it belongs in our neighborhoods and our country and have control of it, not to be shipped. So the answer is, it’s not just drilling. Sir, we have to do everything possible to attack this issue, and the concern I have is not just blaming a Democrat, a Republican. I’m blaming all our government right now because we’re not working as a team. If this is a football team, we’d never score a touchdown, would we, Rush?
RUSH: No, but we’d have a lot of safeties.
CALLER: Yeah, I guess we would.
RUSH: Well, we don’t work as a team. Where do you compromise? Where do the Republicans compromise with a guy like Obama who said in his speech on energy today, ‘We need to end the age of oil in our time?’ Where do you compromise with that?
CALLER: Well, my point is we have to have oil. I mean, I’m in the airline industry out here, we have to have oil, the transportation industry, the trucking — there’s no way we’re going to get out of oil. But what I’m concerned about is the dependency of our oil. We can’t depend on foreign dictators and so forth for our oil needs. We have to do that here in our country. We need to become a self-sufficient country. We have to attack it all ways.
RUSH: Well, look, I hate to remind you here, but this has been the Republican Party’s identity since the early nineties. Drilling in ANWR, offshore, all this, it’s the Democrats, Bill Clinton first vetoing ANWR, the Democrats are standing in the way of this. Look it, how do you feel as a Democrat? You’re in the airline business. The airline business is in dire straits. The airlines, combined, just parked 450 jets. It’s the only way they can save on fuel.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Your guy is not proposing one plan to increase the supply of fuel to your aircraft.
CALLER: Well, I agree, and what I’m saying is that I’ve been very much involved in a few savings programs with the airline I’m working for. It’s up to over $2 million a month just in fuel savings. And if you’re familiar with the APU, the auxiliary power unit, it’s something I was very much involved with with the airline in a major reduction program. I’ve been doing this for over two years now, with the company. And it worked. And it works by working with Republicans and Democrats and Independents and so forth, it was a team effort, and I —
RUSH: Now, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is a huge point. The government — Republicans, Democrats — had diddly-squat to do with your APU project. You and your company came up with a private sector solution. If you’d have brought Washington in, yeah, you’d have had partisan divisions over this. The Democrats would have stood in your way.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, so what’s the big push here? We need to do everything possible to find alternatives. That’s what Obama said in his stupid speech today. Oh, really? Really? We need to do everything possible to find alternatives? Well, who’s responsible for doing that? The oil companies are in the business of finding, refining, and transporting oil. They are not in the business of solar or wind energy. That’s not their business. If Boone Pickens wants to go into wind, let him go into wind. That’s the way this works. When moving from one generation of inventions to another, if the demand in prices makes alternatives more likely, then it spawns and motivates people to work and think in ways they might not think otherwise. The government demanding alternatives or picking winners and losers won’t do it and can’t do it. This is the genius of the market. It works itself out.
If alternative fuels, ladies and gentlemen, are out there for the taking, then why isn’t the rest of the world already on it? And how about all these so-called alternatives, the biofuels that we already have? Like ethanol. We already have the unintended consequences of that and even some of the proponents of this way down the road, way back when, are starting to think it was a mistake. This whole business of energy creation and usage, growth, freedom, opportunity, is far more complicated and complex a matter than the Obamas and his ilk comprehend or even care to comprehend, and the reason is that he’s into political power, not energy production. He’s into political manipulation. He’s into getting votes, not energy production. That’s why the government ought to have nothing to do with this. And yet, look, the only people among us who produce a drop of energy, spend the money to go get it, refine it, market it, distribute it, sell it, they’re the ones under attack, and yet the government couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it, would botch it if it tried, somehow is looked at as the white knight here.
Here’s Ann in Angelica, New York, nice to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hello.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: First-time caller, longtime listener.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: I’ve come to a conclusion that in order to save energy, seeing as I’m low income, I can put some aluminum pie plates on top of my car, get a giant pinwheel and stick it on the back of my car, slow down to 55 miles an hour so everybody flies by me, keeps my pinwheel going, and hook it up to a battery somehow and then line up at McDonald’s to get their used oil. How does that work?
RUSH: It won’t.
CALLER: Why?
RUSH: It won’t. In the first place, you’re going to put a little pinwheel propeller on the back of your car and you expect what’s going to propel you to 55 miles an hour to get you to McDonald’s?
CALLER: All the people flying by me. (laughing)
RUSH: Well, the people flying by you would provide a head wind that would lead you and your little propeller, your little pinwheel on the back of your car — (laughing)
CALLER: Well, I’ll put one on my beanie, too.
RUSH: (laughing) Well, don’t forget to inflate your tires.
CALLER: I forgot that, overinflate them.
RUSH: Yeah, you need to inflate your tires properly and avoid jackrabbit starts and all these other things.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Ann, thanks much for the call.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Al in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the home of Jennifer of Colorado Springs, welcome, Al, nice to have you here.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. I’d like to say hello to my staff sergeant Ryan Bland, a cav scout out of Fort Riley. He’s going to do his third tour pretty soon. I’m calling about Dubai. I saw a special on either Dateline or 60 Minutes. They interviewed the gentleman that runs Dubai.
RUSH: That would be Sheikh al-Maktoum.
CALLER: Yeah, great guy.
RUSH: Spent the weekend at Camp David with President Bush.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: He did.
CALLER: He should have been. Bush might have got a few hot tips from this guy. As you know, they are tax-free. The interviewer was kind of incredulous. Next thing, they talked about how they were dredging the ocean floor to build these false islands.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And the interviewer said, ‘I understand that you were told by the environmentalists that you couldn’t do this and that you threw them out,’ and he looked at the guy, and he said, ‘Yeah, we did, and we’re now building more islands.’ And the man was once again taken back. And the gentleman that runs the place said, ‘Let’s go take a drive,’ so he goes down, he drives his own car, has the interview in the seat next to him, and of course the guy can’t believe this, either, and you see nothing but success. They’re building these towers, and even before they’re built, they’re 90% occupied. Major corporations from around the world are there. And you get the feeling that there’s this big sucking sound of all the successful corporations that are tending to move towards Dubai and possibly Ireland.
RUSH: Well, let me tell you, a couple things here. I have been to Dubai. I have seen what you are describing, and they are building these islands out in the water that defy explanation. It’s true. They do not have any environmentalists. If an environmentalist pops up he will not be seen shortly thereafter. But it’s only in a dictatorship that you can do that. Now, we could deal with our environmentalists a lot more successfully than we do in this country by just ignoring them. They would protest and do all this, but we’re so bound by political correctness. But we don’t want to turn ourselves into a dictatorship, but one interesting thing, you said this giant sucking sound. There’s no question. Trump is building a hotel in Dubai. Maybe it’s the Emirates. I talked to him about it. And it’s same thing as you, so he doesn’t have to put up with anybody standing in his way and increasing the price of the thing two or threefold.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And of course money is going to find, just like water, it’s going to find the easiest path, the path of least resistance is where it’s going to go. The more raising capital is made difficult, the higher the taxes on corporate profits, the more those profits are going to be made elsewhere. Now, there’s a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal. It said, you know in the old days, instead of InBev buying Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, it would have been the other way around. Anheuser-Busch would be buying InBev. Anheuser-Busch did buy a whole bunch of smaller breweries as they were growing. It said things are out of whack now. It pointed out that one of the reasons the Anheuser-Busch board of directors, the CEO, might have changed their mind about this is the corporate tax rate being promised by Obama. If you’re on the board at Anheuser-Busch, if you’re the CEO, if you’re the Busch family and you want the company to stay viable, it may well be that — and essentially when you merge — this is a little bit lax, but you’ll get the point — when you allow yourself to be bought out by InBev, you are in effect moving your headquarters. You’re moving to Germany, or, in this case, Brussels, where the corporate tax is much smaller and your business can remain much more viable. And there are a lot of people already starting to make plans of this nature based on the promises that Obama has made regarding capital gains taxes, corporate profit taxes, and general income taxes, if he becomes president.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To Houston, this is Ernest and we’re glad to have you on the program, Ernest. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. This is a great honor, Maha Rushie. And I just wanted to say earlier there was this guy on there talking about a team effort. That’s just another way to water down conservatism. He’s a liberal —
RUSH: He was calling from Atlanta, is in the airline business.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And, you know, he’s sick and tired of the bickering between Republicans and Democrats while solutions to problems go by the wayside and don’t occur, and yet he cited an example where he and other pilots working with his airline on something to do with their auxiliary power unit, enabled them to save X-number of gallons or dollars’ worth of fuel in a year. And I pointed out to him that the government had nothing to do with that effort.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: It didn’t require teamwork. It requires economics and the free market.
CALLER: Oh, absolutely. And that’s the main concept. And drilling is what’s going to work, drilling is what’s going to make our economy continue to be great. The other thing I just wanted to say very quickly is that for Barack Obama to say that 700 billion, you know, because I know that 700 billion has been thrown around by a lot of different people lately, that’s my money, okay, the consumer, us, the American taxpayer, the consumers are the ones that made that possible, okay? Along with the free-market economy. And Americans need to wrap themselves around that concept.
RUSH: You know something, market economics is not tough sufficiently in the lower levels of education, and barely in college. It’s why I try to spend as much time on it as possible. Two things about his call. I wanted to have an addendum to his call after he hung up and I forgot to get to it, but this whole argument we gotta stop bickering, just all come together and stop playing politics, come up with solutions, it just sounds wonderful but here’s my sincere question. If you’re an average American, you’re a citizen and you pay the average amount of time to the news over the course of living your life, since about 2002 — let’s throw out 2000 and Florida aftermath — after 9/11, and after the brief moment of time where we all were Kumbaya, working together and getting along for the week that that lasted, if you’re paying scant attention to the news from 2002 to present, how in the world can you not conclude that the vast majority of the people bickering are liberal Democrats, that the vast majority of the people who are totally enraged and angry in this country are liberal Democrats? How can you actually look at George W. Bush and see somebody who has not tried to get along with the other side, letting Ted Kennedy write the education bill, working with other Democrats on immigration and other aspects to show that they can put all the bickering of the nineties behind us.
The problem with working together is you must have a common objective. And this is the problem. I know this is going to sound extremely bold, ladies and gentlemen, but the objectives of free market conservatives and capitalists do not jibe, they do not mix with the objectives of today’s leftist Democrat Party. So how in the world can you work together? Look, we want to increase the supply of oil. We know that there are gazillions of barrels of oil in shale and offshore waiting to be drilled, waiting to be mined and waiting to be refined and we want to do this for a whole host of reasons, so we’re not as dependent on other sources of oil, so there will be more supply and the price will come down, and that it will have a little insurance here against dependence on other people, for something that’s crucial. A country cannot get along without oil. On the other side, we had just today heard the Democrat Party’s presidential nominee has declared war on oil. We’ve got a new platitude, ‘We must end the age of oil in our lifetime.’ Now, you tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where in hell we compromise and come up with an answer that we can all be happy about.
When one political party wants — at least based on what they say — wants to do everything they can to demonize oil and demonize energy — by the way, energy itself now is a demon, energy is polluting the planet, destroying the planet, global warming, climate change, all this stuff, when one political party wants to advance its ideals to enhance and enrich themselves and increase their own power at the expense of the liberty of individual citizens, and one political party or one movement wants to do everything it can to deregulate and get obstacles out of people’s way so that they can use their ambition and become the best they can be, where is the compromise? Where do the two sides go to sit down and talk, once they get there, what do they talk about and how do they get along? The differences in the views of the future for this country and the world held by conservatives and leftists is stark. It’s 180 degrees out of phase, they’re diametrically opposed. The leftists in this country see an imperfect America in a constant state of decline that is deserved. Conservatives see an opportunity for continued growth and prosperity for children and grandchildren to maintain this as the greatest nation for the good of all humanity in the history of the world.
When one side sees their own country as the problem, and the other side sees their country as the solution, somebody tell me where we go to start getting along with that. It’s like trying to compromise between victory and defeat. How do you do it? Do you postpone defeat for two years? Does the left say, ‘Okay, we’ll let you win in ten’? Or, ‘We’ll let you win halfway?’ Where do you compromise? There’s no room for compromise here. What has to happen is defeat. You have to understand the concept of good guys and bad guys, and the right is the good guys. As to this 700 billion that the caller referenced, this is how much we supposedly spend. The phrase is, ‘United States spends 700 billion a year buying oil from terrorist dictators who want to wipe us out.’ Fine. Who’s spending the 700 billion? I asked this question in the first hour of today’s extremely relevant, poignant, penetrating program, who is spending the 700 million to buy oil from foreign sources? I want you people to think about it and come up with an answer. Who’s spending that money?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: John in Wilmington, North Carolina, welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: Congratulations in advance on the next 20.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I just want to paint a little visual for you here. If oil is such a demon, can you imagine what we’d all be like right now if we were still riding horses? That’s pretty much the same principle of what they’re talking about with solar and wind right now with the technology they have at hand.
RUSH: This is true, but they’re doing a little bit more subtly than that, because while they’re on this big push to demonize energy and oil, carbon footprint energy, as Obama said today, we must end the age of oil in our lifetimes, so we gotta get rid of oil, but they don’t want you thinking of what you would do without it because they have people believing that somebody has the secret to alternative fuels. We’re just not telling anybody what it is. The oil companies and the automobile companies are conspiring to keep this really remarkable new magical energy off the market so they can reap profits on the backs of the poor American consumer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the fact is, you’re right, there is not anything even close, there’s nothing on the drawing board. There’s nothing in anybody’s brilliant mind yet that even comes close to replacing oil and what oil does and how it is used. There is nothing. Here we’ve got Gore saying get rid of it in ten years. Here we’ve got Obama saying, end the age of oil in our lifetimes. I don’t care what you come up with, there’s no way you’re going to power your automobile with a solar panel. You’re not going to power it with a windmill or a propeller on the back of it that has no other source of energy. It ain’t happening. And most of the cities in America will not let you drive a horse through their streets with the horse dropping manure every five blocks spreading disease all around. It isn’t going to happen, folks.
There’s nothing out there and yet the Democrat Party en masse is doing everything they can to prevent the exploration, discovery of more oil, when there is nothing on the horizon even in the most brilliant mind out there that could replace it. I don’t know. The common sense of all this is so plainly visible and easy to grasp, and yet it seems to escape a lot of people. On the other hand, I look at the polling data, and I see that Obama is now even with McCain. If you throw in the leaners, McCain’s up 47-46. If you throw in likely voters, McCain’s doing even better than that. Whatever these platitudes of Obama’s are, they’re not connecting. He had a 15-point lead not long ago. He got no bump, got just exact opposite of a bump coming out of Germany and that whole foreign tour. In fact, it hurt him. These pronouncements he’s making while we have the Drive-Bys proclaiming he’s something special, something unique, something that’s never before happened in American politics, he’s not. He’s just a traditional, standard, radical leftist who’s come out of the Chicago machine. There’s nothing new about him whatsoever, and if he doesn’t have a 10- to 15-point lead going into late October, he’s toast, because I’ll make you this prediction. If they’re tied at 46, 47, whatever it is right now, that’s going to equal the McCain plus 50 percentage point win, because this election is a referendum on Obama.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: John in Libertyville, Illinois. Hello, sir. We have one minute, but I wanted to get to you.
CALLER: Hi. You’ve always been a big proponent of the inefficient vehicle, the gas guzzler, the SUV, what have you, and you’ve steadfastly maintained that the only thing at work in the high gas prices is supply and demand. But if fuel-inefficient vehicles demand more fuel and therefore reduce the supply, isn’t the supply-demand argument roughly analogous to saying we’re all paying more at the pump because of the preponderance of inefficient vehicles?
RUSH: So, because I have a gas hog, and I use a lot more gas than you do, I am affecting supply and demand; therefore, supply would be much greater if I would join you in getting an efficient car and the price would come down? Is that your theory?
CALLER: Sure. I think we’re all paying more at the pump because of the preponderance —
RUSH: But then you don’t have a free market because somebody’s gotta apply pressure on me to get me to drive something I don’t want to drive. Besides, when that happens, sir, your gasoline taxes, state gasoline taxes, are going to go up, because they’re not going to be receiving as much revenue. There’s no win here, sir.