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RUSH: I want to go back to offer some expert analysis and commentary. I want to go back to the parade of victims at the Democrat debate last night, because what I want you to think about as you listen to this is: this is what the Democrat Party has created. This is what the American liberals want the whole country to end up being like. They want people dependent. They want people in constant crisis. They want people in angst, anger, at Republicans. They want people to constantly be turning to Democrats for their needs in life. You know, ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ are two different things, and the argument that we have in this country, really, you can boil it down to one thing. That is: ‘How do we best provide for the needs and the wants of people?’ Of course, conservatism says, ‘You are better off going out and handling that yourself, because the odds are you are going to do far better providing for yourself instead of waiting and depending on other people.’ The liberals want you waiting and the depending on other people because they know it won’t be enough for self-efficiency, and therefore they will be needed and thus, they derived their power. We conservatives cringe when we hear people in circumstances like that. We really do. It is so unnecessary in this country. People do not have to have lives like this. But this is what American liberalism has fostered. This is what the Democratic Party has been all about since the New Deal, since FDR. This really breaks my heart. I cringe when I hear Americans in this circumstance, because it is so unnecessary! Here is this montage again.

WOMAN #1: My husband George Junior Hamner was one of the 12 men who were killed in the Sago Mine. The Bush administration has failed workers like my husband. What will you do to improve the health and safety in our coal mines, and all of our workplaces across America?

MAN #1: After serving in Iraq for a year, I came home to find that my factory job at Maytag had closed and moved to Mexico. What will you do to keep manufacturing jobs like mine from leaving the country?

WOMAN #2: As a nurse, I live with the failures (Audience: woo!) of the American healthcare system daily. We don’t have enough nurses to staff our hospitals. How would you address these issues?

MAN #2: After 34 years, with LTV Steel, I was forced to retire because of a disability. Two years later, LTV filed bankruptcy. I lost a third of my pension and my family lost their healthcare. Every day of my life I sit at the kitchen table, across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family, and I can’t afford to pay for her health care! What is wrong with America and what will you do to change it?

RUSH: Now, this is sad. By the way, Mike, I want you to keep that standing by, because I’m going to go through this again and I am going to pretend that they are asking me the question, and I’m going to answer each one of these questions. So, Mike, at the end of each one of these questions, stop the tape. Now, it’s a sad thing to hear people like this, because it is so unnecessary. This sort of reminds me of the never-ending complaints of the black community in this country. These people and people like them, that you just heard, have been voting for Democrats and then all of a sudden their lives turn into a guano sandwich and it’s time to come to the rest of us for them to fix their problems — via, of course, the Democrat Party and the government. Now, if voting for Democrats for all of their lives is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening, then when do these people wake up and say, ‘You know what? The people I have been voting for have not been saving my jobs. The people I have been voting for have not been providing me healthcare. The people I have been voting for have not been ‘making the workplace safe,’ quote, unquote.’ At what point do they wake up? Well, they won’t, ladies and gentlemen, because it is easy to be dependent. It is easy. Nobody, really, in the midst of a terrible crisis, focuses on themselves first — as we all should do.

If you are in the middle of a problem, and you are going to genuinely solve the problem, you have you to first say, ‘Okay, how did I get into this? What did I do that might have contributed to it?’ and change that. But change is hard, because change is new, especially after a lifetime of living a certain way, with certain assumptions, certain expectations. So it becomes difficult. So it all goes to hell one day if your life does, and it has for all of us, but these people that have been (sigh) I think damaged in terms of fulfilling their expectations and potential, by relying on Democrats to fix these problems that they themselves really have responsibility for in one way or the other, it just makes me sad. It really does to hear these people complaining. It is so unnecessary. What if everybody in the country reacted to problems this way? What kind of country would we be? What kind of country would we have? I guarantee you we wouldn’t be the leading economic output country. We wouldn’t be a super power. We would be a nation of bleeding heart wimps; helpless waifs looking to some other powerful nation around the world to help us out. We would be…France. We’d be the European Union…or worse. All right. Let’s go through this, and let me pretend that they are asking me these questions. Let me pretend that I am the presidential candidate and somehow they got into my debate, and they asked me the question. Remember, Mike, stop it after every question.

WOMAN #1: My husband George Junior Hamner was one of the 12 men who were killed in the Sago Mine. The Bish administration has failed workers like my husband. What will you do to improve the health and safety in our coal mines, and all of our workplaces across America?

RUSH: Her name is Deb, by the way. Her first name is Deb. Mrs. Hamner, I’m terribly sorry about what happened with your husband, but the Bush administration had nothing to do with it. Nobody in the Bush administration wanted the mine to collapse. The Bush administration has not stood in the way of any improvements being made. Your grief is understandable but looking to the federal government for blame in a situation like this, is just as bad as looking to the federal government to find solutions to everything in your life. We already have OSHA. We have any number of federal agencies that are out there working to make sure that workplaces are safe — and in some cases, some of these regulations have become counter productive, because they have closed businesses; they have made it impossible for businesses to stay in business and so forth. The big problem that we face here it is not too little government. Our problem is too much in some of the areas. Next question.

MAN #1: After serving in Iraq for a year, I came home to find that my factory job at Maytag had closed and moved to Mexico. What will you do to keep manufacturing jobs like mine from leaving the country?

RUSH: The question for you, sir, is — since it happened; things are what they are; it is what it is — What are you going to do to find a new job to explore new opportunities for yourself? The global economy is what it is. By the way, which union official gave you this question? This question goes back to the early ’90s: manufacturing jobs, ‘giant sucking sound.’ It should not have come as a surprise to anybody that American corporations are relocating elsewhere. It is going to continue to happen. I have discussed this with many people. They have had similar things happen. This is no different than being fired in late life when your corporation still exists. I mean, it is what it is! You face reality. You have to go out and try to find something else to do. You are far more capable of doing other things than you probably believe, and what my job as president is going to be is to help inspire you and as many people in this country to assume the mantle of greatness the population in this country requires if we are to maintain it. We can all sit around and whine and moan what happened to us, but after a while, we have to get busy getting serious about the next phase of our lives. Next question.

WOMAN #2: As a nurse, I live with the failures (Audience: woo!) of the American healthcare system daily. We don’t have enough nurses to staff our hospitals. How would you address these issues?

RUSH: Well, you are asking a basic healthcare question here, and we could say this about everything. We don’t have enough Band-Aids in the hospitals. The Band-Aids we have are too expensive. We don’t have enough sutures or they are too expensive, or the nurses are fat but they need to be fat because they have to roll around all the fat patients in bed. What do we do about the American healthcare system? We stop looking to the government to fix it! It is broken because the government is involved in it. What more evidence do we need that more government is not going to fix it? I mean, you work in a hospital, and if the people running your hospital had botched it for 30 years and it was barely staying open and patients were dying, would you not try to change the way it’s run? Would you maybe change systems? Would you get rid of the administrator, the doctors that are working there? We have a demonstrable in our healthcare system and the root of it is the government, and why are you looking to the government to fix it? What we need to do to fix healthcare, is give people who are patients more power and choice over where they go for their healthcare because that will bring the cost down. It will bring the price down. It will make accessibility a little easier. We next we need a serious conversation with the American people and define ‘sickness.’ We spend too much time in this country talking about ‘sickness.’ We don’t talk about ‘health’. We don’t talk about ‘wellness.’ We don’t talk about ‘goodness.’ Everybody wants to be sick. Everybody’s making everybody else sick, and so the first moment you think you are sick, it is off to the doctor’s office. People are going to the doctor in this country way too much. Then we have to get the trial lawyers out of this so that their medical malpractice premiums aren’t sky high so they don’t have to close up shop and so forth. There are a lot of problems here, but the nurse shortage is not something that I, as president, can effect. I don’t have time to deal with incremental details like a nurse shortage at Pine Valley Hospital. Next question.

MAN #2: After 34 years, with LTV Steel, I was forced to retire because of a disability. Two years later, LTV filed bankruptcy. I lost a third of my pension and my family lost their healthcare. Every day of my life I sit at the kitchen table, across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family, and I can’t afford to pay for her health care! What is wrong with America and what will you do to change it?

RUSH: Nothing’s wrong with America, sir. America is the greatest place in the world. There’s more opportunity and more solutions for people in your unfortunate situation, but to say that there is something ‘wrong with America,’ and then to look to me as your president to fix a problem like this, is to misunderstand the role of the presidency. I’ll be glad to discuss the healthcare issue all over again with anybody who wants to discuss it. It does need fixing. There is no question about it. But this is a classic example to me of your whole life you have worked for a corporation. You’ve not been happy with the corporation. You don’t like corporations, period. All of a sudden, the corporation goes out of business for whatever reason and you hate the corporation for that, too. So it was good for you. There is a problem in this country of dependence: too many people depending on too many others for whom they have no control, for their ‘needs.’ Wants are another thing, but when you get yourself into a circumstance of depending on others for your needs, you are never going to be genuinely free.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I got a couple of e-mail notes from people want to respond to the victims and the Democrat debate montage last night. One guy said, ‘That Maytag plant closed in 2002. This is 2007. So who wrote the guy’s question?’ I agree. That question is just a standard cliché question that’s going to show up in any union forum. Then I got this from a guy named Patrick Casey. He’s a subscriber Rush 24/7. ‘So the steel company closed. The poor guy lost a third of his pension. His pension and other union demands is one of the reasons the company closed in the first place, and he’s still collecting Social Security, isn’t he? As to his health insurance, he didn’t lose it. He still has Medicare. He has the ability to purchase supplemental insurance from the AARP. His wife has that option as well. Welcome to the real world, union member!’ There’s not a lot of sympathy out there, ladies and gentlemen. I do. See, I have sympathy. I don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but it just burns me up that people end up looking at life and itself this way. This is what liberalism it does to people. This is what Democrats do to people. They create this constant fear that life is going into turn a guano sandwich, and then when it does, go to the Democrats — and they elect the Democrats for 50 years and these problems still happen, and they still go back to them when it’s all is said and done and need help, even though it’s not solving their problems.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I cannot get this montage of sorry questions asked at the debate last night, the Democrat forum with the AFL-CIO, can’t get it out of my mind. The reason I can’t get it out of my mind is because, I’m beating a dead horse here, but it saddens me that there are people like this in the country. I know they are there, but it is so unnecessary. I realize, to some of you, when I went through those questions and answered them myself as though they were asking me those questions — and the poor guy from the steel company, been thinking about this during the whole break. The guy, I’m not going to replay it, but let me read you what he said. ‘After 34 years with LTV Steel, I was forced to retire because of disability. Two years later, LTV filed bankruptcy. I lost a third of my pension, my family lost their healthcare. What’s wrong with America and what will you do to change it?’ Okay. Let’s take the timeline here. The guy’s with LTV Steel for 34 years. Obviously a union member here. He had to retire because of a disability. Two years later the steel company files bankruptcy.

Now, I know union contracts are what they are. I know that these companies agree to them, but the fault here is on both sides, the companies for making the deals and unions for demanding this. I don’t know about you, folks, but throughout my entire life it has never ever crossed my mind once that somebody I once worked for would continue to pay me after I quit. I don’t know if it’s the way I was raised or I naturally looked at world this way. I have lived and planned my life accordingly, and I have strived for certain things accordingly. To expect somebody to pay, ‘But Rush, he was in the union.’ I know, but make additional plans, too, for crying out loud. We keep hearing all of these stories. Look at what’s happened to the unions. These were once the tough guys of America. These were the people that told the Democrats what to do. Now they have been reduced to sniffling and whining and begging on hands and knees to Democrats to do something for them.

In the early years of this program I remember a big controversy I got caught up in. I was talking about the bricklayers union. They had a new contract. The new contract called for laying fewer bricks per workday with a big raise. More breaks and so forth, and the bricklayers in Chicago, ( grumbling ) ‘That’s not true. That’s crazy.’ And it was true. I got calls from union people upset with me because that’s all they had. I’ll never forget, we had a sound bite from a 29-year-old auto worker in Detroit who said, ‘If the car company laid him off, his life was over.’ I hear these kind of things in utter disbelief. I know people are raised to have certain expectations and people’s horizons are obviously different. Some people have vast horizons, others very narrow. But even those with narrow horizons can be inspired and taught and motivated to broaden their horizons. A 29-year-old guy, because he loses his assembly line job, his life is over? What must his household have been like?

The union guys would call me and say, ‘Why are you so down on the union?’ I’m not. I just understand what you are doing. Back when we first started talking about this, union people were always the class envy people upset when they looked around their communities and cities and saw people with better lives than they had. They went to the Democrats to fix that. The whole class envy business. I said, ‘Be honest. Why are you complaining? You knew what was happening when you joined the union. You knew when you joined the union you were foregoing any opportunity to stand out and earn additional money based on your performance, based on your merit, because you are letting somebody else negotiate your deal for a whole group.’ ‘Well, I didn’t have any choice.’ But you did have a choice. You chose to join the union. Do you understand? It’s like people who become teachers. This is tough too. They want to be teachers, thank God they do. They join the teachers union or whatever, but everybody becoming a teacher knows what it pays. So five to ten years down the road to start complaining and whining about it is not going to change anything.

Some people in this country, I have to tell you, are tapped out. Everybody in this country has lost a job. Everybody in this country has gone through a period where they have been worried about catastrophic illness and an accident and whether they have the healthcare to pay for it. Everybody has gone through it. Everybody has gone through some sort of… maybe Paris Hilton hasn’t. She has her own version. There are exceptions, the Kennedy family, wealthy Democrats. But for the most part, average people, the real people we are talking about, everybody goes through this. Every four years or every two years during a presidential or congressional campaign we get this endless parade of victims who are demanding the rest of the country take care of them. Of course, right there to assist them is the Democrat Party. Guess what? They don’t get taken care of. They don’t have any of the security. They don’t have any of the happiness that the Democrats are promising them. All they end up getting is continued assaults from Democrats about how the Republicans want to ruin their lives, how conservatives don’t care about them.

Conservatism is really the essence of compassion. It seeks the best for everybody; it has trust; it has confidence; it has faith in average people overcoming obstacles. Liberalism doesn’t. It doesn’t want people to learn how to do that. Democrats don’t want people to learn to do that. If you travel around and look at the differences in lifestyles in your community, all but a few rare examples, it’s not an accident that some people do very well and others do not. There are reasons for it and they can be tapped into by each and every one of us. Just depends on how much ambition people have. But when you have a major political party that for 50 years has been encouraging people to depend on it, the party, for all of these things, and when you somehow condition people to think that they are going to continue to get paid when they are no longer productive for a company, for crying out loud. I understand, as I said earlier, all these corporations make these union deals. But at some point the golden goose will be tapped out. At some point the money isn’t going to be there for it. Who in the world gets paid for doing nothing? Where is the thought process that says that it is even possible economically in perpetuity, forever? It is called a new deal, called social security. It is called this whole mind set. So what happens is that the companies make these deals and the pension plans and all the healthcare for all of these retirees who are no longer being productive, at some point, I don’t care, these companies that make these deals are in competition with other companies that don’t have these obligations, guess what’s going to happen? So then we get a question, ‘What is wrong with America?’ The answer to what is wrong with America is liberalism.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: George in Florida, glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Maha Rushie!

RUSH: Yes, George. Welcome.

RUSH: I was born a conservative and die a conservative.

RUSH: But?

CALLER: I’ve been attending the advance learning since 1988.

RUSH: Good.

CALLER: I’m a first time caller, and I’ve done so take issue with your premise regarding pensions. I’m retired and living on a pension. I consider that to be deferred income of my 32 years working in the auto industry.

RUSH: You look at the pension as deferred income?

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: Do you realize the pension partly is your money that you had money donated from your own pocket taken out ever of your paycheck partly?

CALLER: That is why I call it ‘deferred income’ and not a handout.

RUSH: I’m not saying a handout. I’m not saying it’s a handout. But the healthcare aspect, which is what this guy was complaining about, is what I was talking about. He expects his healthcare to be paid by a company that goes bankrupt even after not working there and asks the question of the Democrat candidates, ‘What is wrong with America?’

CALLER: Oh, yeah, I understand that. The healthcare part of retirement is being reduced by all of the companies, and it’s something that we have to live with as retirees.

RUSH: All I was saying was… Now, don’t take this personally. I’m just sharing a mind set and attitude here. Now, I’ve never… I had to join a union. I am a member of a union. We have to be members of a union in this business. We just have to. I pay my dues and so forth, but I’m not expecting a thing from them. I don’t even know what the pension plan is. I don’t care what it is because I’m not going to depend on it. My whole life, I grew up never once expecting that I would get money from people for whom I no longer worked. Healthcare? My attitudes of whatever I want and whatever I need is: I have provided for myself. That’s the only way I know that I am going to get the best I can. It’s just a mind-set. Now, again, I don’t mean this personally. The thing I was talking about is this guy expecting healthcare. That was the nature of his question, and this boggles my mind. It’s so unnecessary for these attitudes to exist but they have a political party funding it, and promoting it, but here is the thing on the pensions. This is not about you. Here is the thing in the pensions that amazes me. You and every teacher, there are pension funds for practically every public employee out there. Where are they invested? They are invested in Wall Street and who’s the biggest enemy at a Democrat Party? Wall Street! Your deferred income depends on Wall Street doing well, American corporations doing well, your investments turning out right. Yet they are a target of the Democrat party as well! They want to raise all those guy’s taxes now, too!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One more thing, if you talk about the Democrat debate and the questions that I answered, as every candidate should, by the way, feel free. I just want to say one more thing about it, if you are on hold and want to talk about it on the phone, if we get to it, feel free. There are companies out there, folks, that made promises that they couldn’t keep. It happens all of the time. These companies go under. I’m not even going to get into why. There are economic reasons why, but it happens. They make promises they couldn’t keep and go under. It was a private bargain between the company and the union. LTV Steel, doesn’t matter what it is, private bargain between the company and the union. I wasn’t at the table when these negotiations took place and neither were most taxpayers and yet, when the company goes under, the idea that the rest of us have to meet all of the deals they made, by having the federal government assume the pension plan, that’s nuts. We weren’t at the negotiating table. We didn’t have a position on this. We weren’t allowed to say, ‘If you go under we are not going to assume your liabilities.’

Where does this stuff end? Where does it end? Mrs. Clinton wants us to protect people who get mortgages they can’t later pay off. We are supposed to pay for that, too. We are talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars here. We are all going to go broke before it is said and done if Democrats have their way. That is exactly what they want.

END TRANSCRIPT

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