RUSH: It was two nights in a row, I was dropping the F-bomb; I was pounding my fist on the table. These were supposedly social dinners, and I lost it. And these are with Republicans. I was pounding my left hand on the table so hard Saturday night that I knocked my watch off my wrist, and I tried to put it back on, I thought I had knocked a link out of it, because it didn’t fit, reshaped it is what I had done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell you all about it. We got a lot to do today, folks. I hope you had a great weekend. It’s the Rush Limbaugh program and here we are at the EIB Network, broadcast excellence all yours for three hours, straight ahead, telephone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet-dot.com
Well, I’ll what it was about. I just got sick and tired of hearing discussions about how China and India are going to wipe us out economically and that we’re changing and we’re changing forever and so forth. Then I got sick and tired of hearing what the Republican version of CAFE standards are. That was the thing that blew me up. I just started out, I pounded the table; I started dropping the F-bomb. I apologized to the hostess. I said, ‘Would somebody explain to me why we are sitting here and accepting the premise of the liberal Democrat agenda and trying to come up with our own better way of doing what they want to do?’ CAFE standards are a great example. For those of you in Rio Linda, this is the gas mileage standards that the government is imposing on automobile manufacturers. Now, it’s fine for me, if we want to have people to go out and drive little cars that get a lot of gas mileage, that’s fine, produce them. But at the same time if we have people that want to drive hogs, produce them. But we’ve got this massive little hoax going on about pollution and manmade global warming, so forth. As a result, automobile manufacturers cannot make the cars they want to make.
You probably saw over the weekend Bob Lutz, who’s a friend of mine at General Motors, came out and said global warming is a crock. I met with Bob Lutz back in Michigan in Detroit last May, told me the same thing. I quoted a highly placed GM official without mentioning his name to you, but he’s out there saying it now. He’s got a mock-up. They wanted to make a giant 16-cylinder Cadillac, just a gorgeous car, and they wanted it to compete with the Bentleys and Rolls-Royce sector, it’s not a whole lot of cars, but it’s a high-prestige thing. Can’t do it. Can’t make it because the thing is not going to get enough gas mileage down the road according to the CAFE standards, and of course we just sit around, we accept the premise of this and argue with them, rather than inserting conservative principles and say, ‘Let these manufacturers build what they want and let the public buy what they want and not buy what they don’t want and let that shape the kind of cars that are made in this country rather than people like Algore and a bunch of liberals dictating what kind of automobiles we have to have.’ It’s a free market.
If you want to drive a little lawn mower with two seats on it, somebody will make it for you, and that’s fine and dandy if you do. If you want to drive a hybrid, somebody will make it for you, you buy it. But if you want to drive a hog, if you want to drive a 12-cylinder little machine that gets 12 miles to the gallon and is very safe, you ought to be able to do that, too. ‘We can’t allow that, Mr. Limbaugh.’ Screw you! I’m sick and tired of you liberals telling me what we can and cannot be allowed to do from the platitudes of big government. I’m looking for conservative principles and leaders that are going to stand up for what we believe in, which is free market economics, free market entrepreneurism, particularly in energy. I got sick of it. I was sitting there, I was trying to entertain these discussions in the same intellectual light that they were being held, and I popped out my question on Saturday, I said, ‘Okay, can I ask you two guys a question?’ There’s two guys going back and forth here on the intellectual dynamism of China and India.
And I finally said, ‘Do you guys realize that neither of these economies would be diddly-squat without us? What in the world are you sitting here wanting to diminish us for? Were it not for us, those economies wouldn’t be emerging. Why do we want to kill our own with a bunch of unnecessary regulations and guilt-ridden policies while those two countries, as you say, are going to start running rings around us and being able to hold us hostage to various things. We are the engine of the free world. You ever stopped–‘ I love popping this question on people because I’m amazed at how few people ever stop to think of it. ‘Can you tell me how it’s possible that a country of less than 300 million people in less than 230 years rules the world like no group in humanity ever has before? Can you tell me this? I don’t even remember some of the answers, but the answers were the intellectual free flow of things. I’m not putting down intellectuals, don’t misunderstand, but the whole concept of the question seemed to escape these guys, and this is why I started pounding the fist and pounding the table. I said, ‘It’s freedom and the inclusion in our founding documents that our freedom comes from God, not government, not man. That’s why we’ve outlasted every other civilization.’ Somebody said, ‘Well, the Brits did a pretty good job.’ Yeah, they gave it up! The Brits gave up everything they had. They threw in the towel. They cashed in the chips. Yeah, they did have a great empire at one time but they gave it up, and we’re in the process of acting like we need to do the same thing.
We don’t even have an empire, it’s just the nature of our existence that fuels the world and I get so sick and tired of hearing this country beat up. It’s one thing when liberals start beating the country up because you expect them to hate America, but when people on our side start doing it, it is just frustrating. Finally I said, ‘You know something, all these wizards at the hedge funds, and all these wizards on Wall Street, and all these wizards out in Silicon Valley, that’s all fine and dandy. It’s not what makes the country work and the people in Washington are not what make the country work. People that you never heard of laboring in anonymity, working every day, are the people that make it country work: the entrepreneurs, the creative genius that’s out there that nobody ever knows or hears about until their product that they invent or their service happens to triumph. The strength of this country is not in government policy, it’s not in anything that influences government policy. All that does is end up putting restrictions or brakes on progress, and these people that make the country work are out there in opposition to all that each and every day, fighting whatever they have to do to overcome the obstacles put in their way and thank God they do, in most cases, overcome it all.
But it’s one thing for liberals and Democrats to want to be able to put those obstacles there to create as many victims as possible in this country and have the government be their sole source of dependence for their needs in life, but it ain’t what we do. It is not what conservatism is; it’s not what conservatism stands for; it’s not what free market entrepreneurism is. When we accept the premises, policy premises of the left, I don’t care, health care, what to do about energy. I mean our energy program is absolutely absurd. Our energy program is not based on growth at all. Our energy is based on guilt, that we’re destroying the world, polluting the world, we gotta come up with these mythical replacement for fossil fuels. There’s nothing out there, but we’re in the process of doing it, trying to. In the meantime, the same people who whine and moan about our dependence on foreign oil, don’t even seem to know that most of our oil comes from Canada, next comes from Mexico, third comes from the Middle East. But if you’re worried about the oil that’s coming from the Middle East let’s go get our own. ‘Oh, no, we can’t do that, Mr. Limbaugh.’ ‘Why?’ We can’t do that and we can’t build the cars we want to build and we can’t build nuclear power plants. We can’t do anything that makes sense, and so because we can’t, Republicans get into debates with these liberals on their premises. Health care came up, and I said, ‘I’m going to boil over here again. Why do we have to debate the concept of the government providing everybody insurance? A Democrat idea.’
There was a female doctor at this dinner on Saturday night, surgeon from Miami. I said, ‘I want to ask you one question. When you think of American health care, not your practice, just the whole health care system, what’s the number one problem you think exists?’ And she thought about it and came up with a couple things that I didn’t think were accurate, and I said, ‘How about costs? What are we doing to rein in costs?’ Nothing! We’re not doing diddly-squat. We conservatives have an idea to reduce costs. I said to her, ‘You ever wonder why a hospital room costs four times what a hotel room is? Why is it that the health care business all of a sudden is one business where the patient’s ability to pay is not a factor in what it costs? A hotel couldn’t run that way, hotel chains, no other business in this country catering to a full market or a niche market could possibly exist if it weren’t concerned that its customers would be able to pay the price that’s being charged. What’s happened here in health care that has blown that out the window?’ ‘Well…’ I said, ‘It’s the government. The government and the notion that insurance is going to pay for everything, that somebody else is paying the cost for it, and then we’ve got this idea given to us by the liberals that everybody is entitled to this, whatever it is, your average checkup to something catastrophic, somebody else should pay for it, it’s a constitutional right.’
We’ve allowed the liberals to dictate this line of thinking on us. And so now we want to talk about the health care problem, we come up with a better version of their idea, or we think it’s a better version of their idea when their idea sucks and is wrong to begin with. Universal health care coverage, take a look, anyplace they’ve got it, Canada, Great Britain, and tell me you want to emulate it. Nobody in their right mind would. ‘But, Rush, but, Rush, we’re the United States, we can do it better.’ Socialism is socialism, wherever you try it. And one thing about socialism, it always fails. It never works. Cuba. Venezuela. But the liberals admire these places and they admire these places because they are envious of the power that the thug dictators that run these little places have. They want it for themselves. I mean, it’s more complicated than that. Education. We’ve had people on our side come up with brilliant ideas for school vouchers — who is it that stands in the way? The people in charge of making sure education does not improve in this country. Protecting their jobs, making sure that the education system is a little indoctrination center for young little kids to be turned into nice little liberals.
These are serious issues that deal with the future of the country, and I just have grown weary. I’ll tell you what, one thing that this weekend proved to me, and I’ve sensed this and I don’t want anybody to misunderstand this. I’m going to have to be very specific about this. One thing this weekend showed me is I am not a Republican. I ran into so many people last night, this dinner was at a private room in a restaurant, it was a buffet, had to go out in the buffet, so many people, ‘You gotta support McCain, gotta support McCain.’ I know you have to, you’re Republican. I’m looking at things a little bit differently than you. ‘What, are you for them?’ No, I’m not for them, what do you think? I want to win! I want the Democrat Party in as much trouble; I want them fighting before the convention; I want them fighting after the convention; I want them fighting after the election. I want them fighting constantly. Look at the military context. Your enemy is weakened when they’re fighting each other. I don’t understand why everybody on our side is urging Hillary to get out. Why? For what reason? We want Hillary to stay in! We want Hillary to employ every tactic she can to try to win the nomination, tear that party apart.
It’s about time Obama — can you believe Obama is now crying, poor Obama, Hillary is daring to challenge him? This is kids’ play. Look at what the New York Times did to McCain. That’s serious stuff. They wouldn’t do that to a Clinton. They wouldn’t do that to an Obama. Obama is running around acting like he’s been hurt here because Mrs. Clinton is being critical. He’s just used to being idolized. He’s not Billy Graham running around out there. I tell you, this guy better get a bigger, thicker skin than what he’s got right now, because we have our official Obama criticizer here. He was sworn in for duty last Friday, Mr. Bo Snerdley — by the way, people love your picture up on the website. Here, this is what Obama’s all upset about. This is Mrs. Clinton in Providence, Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, and here’s a portion of her remarks. She’s unloading here on the messiah Obama.
HILLARY: Let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified. The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect. Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.
RUSH: Oh, such a vicious attack on poor little Obama! You want celestial choirs, Mrs. Clinton? (playing of Thank the Lord Rush Limbaugh Is On)
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RUSH: Did you see the news over the weekend? Richard Branson, the eccentric billionaire who owns Virgin Atlantic Airways, loaded up a 747 — one engine, the fourth engine of a 747 with coconut oil — and some nuts, some kind of wacko nuts from the rain forest. Twenty percent of the jet fuel mixture was coconut oil and something else, and the other three engines were full-fledged kerosene, Jet A. He flew an empty airplane from London, Amsterdam or whatever. It was proclaimed a big, big success. Folks, do you realize how ridiculous this is? Do you know what happens to coconut oil? At room temperature, it will solidify. I know, because I’ve got gazillion packets of it with popcorn that I use in my theater. Coconut oil will solidify! You cannot put it in a jet fuel tank, especially at high altitude. It will freeze. But that’s not the point. The point was, they interviewed some environmentalist wackos after this miraculous test flight, which is going to revolutionize air travel, and these Greenpeace idiots and all these other environmentalist wackos were upset at this! Do you know why they were upset? We need to reduce airline travel. We need to reduce the number of flights in the air. That’s the solution.
It is not enough their business to tell any of us where we can and can’t go, and how. But too many of us have been suckered into this notion that we are creating great harm by virtue of our existence; by virtue of our daily lives on this planet, we are harming it. I reject it. It’s silly. It is absurd. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s just plain stupid. But yet these people are allowed to set the agenda, and so we come up with an energy policy in response to it that includes some of what we want to do, but with not as many Draconian limits. Our answer ought to be, ‘Have you noticed how many people are buying jets? Have you noticed these giant jumbos that are being purchased all over the world by people in the oil-producing countries? Do you think maybe they know something we don’t, that there’s going to be plenty of oil; and kerosene, refined jet fuel to fly around in?’ The idea that the left in this country or the world gets to set the agenda is a result of our lack of confidence, our lack of desire to fight for what we believe in; because we want to get along and to believe all these silly notions that we human beings are destroying this planet. You may ask, ‘Well, Rush, why are you so fired up?’ I’m getting tired of hearing Republicans talk this way. I started to say in the last break, I have finally figured out that I am not, quote, unquote, a ‘Republican.’ I’m registered that way and that’s the party, but that’s not how I think.
I actually had somebody say to me last night, ‘You know, you need to adjust your business a little bit so the Republican Party gets where it’s going, because you gotta keep your audience.’ I said, ‘What? Do you have the slightest idea how I have gotten where I am?’
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