RUSH: Let me address liberalism in another fashion here. I had a story from the Washington Times yesterday about the administration supposedly changing its direction and tune on global warming, going ahead and endorsing the whole concept and meaning now to officially establish carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Do you realize that there is no evidence? A couple scientists — they got theirs, I’ve got mine — a couple scientists, no evidence that carbon dioxide affects climate; that it’s a pollutant at all. How can it be? We exhale it. At any rate, this story in the Washington Times, it made me mad. It made the administration look like a total sellout on this. Second term, lame duck, last year of the administration, realizing you gotta get things done for the legacy, that’s how I read it. I did some research on this, and I addressed some of this. Basically what I think has happened is — and the latest cover of the Limbaugh Letter attacks this very subject. Why do we accept liberal premises and then try to add our own little twist? And that’s apparently what’s happened here.
We’ve accepted the liberal premise that CO2 is a pollutant and it’s a greenhouse gas. Then what we’re going to try to do here is to, at the same time we’ve done that, tell people who already believe that — I guess the thinking is that 50% or more of the people, particularly young people, if you’re under 35 today, you probably believe because of the Saturday morning cartoons and other media assaults, if you’re between 18 and 35 you probably believe that greenhouse gases are a pollutant and are causing the climate to warm up and that we may have lost the battle to inform them otherwise. Okay, so the apparent objective here is to go ahead and accept the premise and then delay as long as possible the implementation of the Algore-type fixes and, in the process of delaying this, try to change people’s minds about how to go about this rather than changing their minds that it exists in the first place. There’s a bill called Lieberman-Warner. Harry Reid’s got 60 votes, he says. Bush is promising to veto this. But the Fish & Wildlife Service will be able to determine who can open up a Wal-Mart in Tennessee, whether somebody can build a shopping mall in Chicago. We have judges been making those decisions and we’ve got bureaucrats deciding these kinds of things.
What I think the administration wants to do, there’s some sort of a meeting in Paris tomorrow, and the nations getting together and try to battle this, and the administration is willing to accept the premise but they don’t want another Kyoto to come out of this so they’re going to insist that any new restrictions include China and India, who are exempt and China is the biggest polluter on the planet. If China and India will not accept, will not go along, then the hope is that we can scuttle the whole thing. But this is where we have come now with liberals. We accept the premise, rather than shoot it down, because we’ve lost the opportunity to do that, and now after accepting the premise, we have to tell the American people, ‘Well, there’s a better way of dealing with this rather than the Algore method.’ Now, that’s sad.
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RUSH: Let me finish this global warming riff as it has to do with the theme I established in the previous half hour, and that is liberalism is the greatest threat this country faces. Not Islamofascism, because if the liberals dominate and win and are in power for four or eight years or more, they don’t take Islamofascism as a threat and we know this because the Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats. Islamofascists from Ahmadinejad to al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden, whoever, are constantly issuing Democrat talking points. So liberalism is the big threat.
One of my big pet peeves, and it’s more than a pet peeve, is that in addition to nobody, anywhere, Republican or Democrat, speaking about American exceptionalism, trying to inspire the American people, motivate them, be proud of their country, to tell them the truth of this country and how they live in the greatest place ever on earth and that their opportunities, even economic downturns, are greater than any other person’s on this planet, rather than do that, liberals advance a premise, 
and somehow in our defensive nature or our inferiority complex nature, or, in the politicians’ case, a desire to get something done, to be seen as being a person of action, we accept the premise and then try to tweak it while opposing aspects of it and try to make a conservative notion out of the premise.
Global warming is one of these circumstances where we have accepted the premise. Why do we accept the premise? Well, in the case of global warming, I think the reason we accept the premise is that for 20 years nobody of power, nobody with guts, nobody with a political bully pulpit has fought the premise. And in those 20 years, there are a significant number of Americans who have bought into it, particularly young people. People 18-34, if you’re younger than 35, you’ve been educated in the public school system, you grew up watching Captain Planet and these other cartoons on TV, and you’ve seen Algore’s movie and the teachers and everybody in the schools are showing you the movie and telling your kids how rotten the country is for what we’ve done to the planet and so forth, you believe it. False pictures of polar bears on little plots of ice trying to make kids think that glaciers are melting, and getting a lot of people to believe it. So a politician in a democracy will say, ‘Well, the people believe it, and I need to get elected so I have to act like I believe it.’ So you accept the premise. Then in accepting the premise, the people on our side who still oppose this after accepting the premise then try to delay the implementation of the left’s fixes on this.
Now, I guess at this stage of the game that is one strategy, but I would prefer somebody standing up on a regular basis who has a bully pulpit and pointing out that this is a hoax, that when there’s consensus in science, that there isn’t science, that science is not up to a vote. I would point out that nothing’s been proved, that both people, both sides of this, and particularly the pro-global warming people, they’re relying on faith. When you challenge them, some will admit that they can’t prove it, but they’ll say what if we’re right and we don’t do anything? We have 20 years to fix this, what if we’re right? That’s such a straw dog argument, to say what if we’re right, that’s just continuing the whole basis of fear on which this takes place. So where we are now is that because of 20 years of inaction from a bully pulpit point of view and from somebody with a position of power, the premise has settled in, and way too many Americans believe this notion, and they think that they’re big and good people because they’re going to allow their lives to change in such a way that they think will help save the planet. As ridiculous as that sounds, there are more Americans than you think who believe all of this.
So we accept the premise, and then we start saying we think that the fixes that have been proposed are ineffective and they will cost too much and they will not work. And that’s where we are. Now we’re going to have people try to make the case that the premise is right, but these fixes are incorrect. You ought to read Roy Spencer’s book, I’ve mentioned this book two or three times. Climate Confusion is the title of the book: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians, and Misguided Policies That Hurt the Poor. One of the things that Roy Spencer — he’s our official climatologist here at the EIB Network — talks about is the literal economic stupidity of trying to fix the global warming problem. All it is is a bunch of pandering to a bunch of sentiments that could be described as feel good about doing something among misinformed people. It’s disgusting. No matter whether it works or not, we gotta do something, we feel good doing something, but the cost involved, the restriction on liberty and freedom, is profound. So we’ve gotten to this point now where the premise, apparently, has been accepted by everybody of substance in terms of political power, and this has got to stop.
We have got to stop accepting these premises. We’ve got to stop being afraid of what the American people think. Somebody with an electoral position of power — look, folks, conservatism is great, and we’re going to end up triumphing over all this in time, but conservatism that is loosely organized does not have nearly the ability and power to succeed as if it is in a political party. And conservatism is under assault even in the Republican Party now by a bunch of people who would rather be seen by people as moderates and open-minded types. The elites basically have gotten hold of it, and it’s going to be a battle to get it back, but these things happen, you gotta keep fighting the battle. We’re willing to do it here in manners and ways in which I’m describing here. So we’re gonna take the premise, we’re gonna accept the premise, we’re gonna say these carbon offset programs are not going to work, it’s too expensive and we’re going to come up with other solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist. If it does exist, there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the next reality. There’s nothing we can do about it but adapt, which human beings have done over the course of human civilization. We adapt. We adapt every day to what’s put in front of us. We adapt to natural disasters, we adapt to fires, we adapt to any number of things. So we have to adapt. That’s what we’re capable of doing.
Every living organism has to adapt to its surroundings. We have to build houses to stay warm in the winter. We can’t just survive as we are under normal climactic cycles. Anyway, Roy’s book explains this stuff so well, it needs to be read. It’s called Climate Confusion. You can get it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or at your favorite bookstore. You know, I, ladies and gentlemen — well, here, let me give you another example. Liberalism on parade. And this is how slowly, incrementally this stuff happens. This is a serious news story. It’s from the French News Agency. ‘Plants deserve respect,’ according to a group of Swiss experts, ‘arguing that killing them arbitrarily was morally wrong — except when it comes to saving humans or maybe picking petals off a daisy. In a report on ‘the dignity of the creature in the plant world,’ the federal Ethics Committee on non-human Gene Technology condemned the decapitation of flowers without reason, among other sins. Still, commission member Bernard Baertsche suggested at a press conference the body weighed such cruel acts on a case-by-case basis, noting ‘the simple pleasure of picking the petals off a daisy might suffice as a reason.’ Similarly ‘all action that involves plants in the aim to conserve the human species is morally justified.’ … Only a minority of the group’s members objected to patenting plants, with the majority ruling the action did not infringe on ‘their moral value.”
So, the dignity of the creature in the plant world. They condemned the decapitation of flowers without reason. Okay, so we’ve gone through the animal rights phase, we’ve gone through the spotted owl BS, we’ve gone through the condor, all these things, the coral reefs, you see how evil we are, we human beings, now we’re decapitating roses, and that is immoral, and that is unethical. So here comes the guilt play. What happens next, are we next going to be banned from walking on our lawns? Are we going to be banned from weeding the lawns? I mean, grass is a plant. You think you want to get stepped on? How would you like it if people in your house just walked and stepped on you all the time? You think the grass likes it? You see where this stuff is going. I warned you about this, when the Sierra Club got on the SUV craze and you thought I was crazy and overexaggerating. You wait. We already cut down some trees. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness; what liberty? Now plants have greater value than we do because in certain circumstances you can decapitate a person, and in certain places you can get away with it, but decapitating a rose, big, big problem.
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RUSH: We’ll start in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mark, thank you for calling, sir. I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush. Hey, these Democratic liberal so-called leaders, they’re not statesmen, they’re not lawmakers, they can’t come up with any coherent policy. But what they are is professional apology demanders. They scour the land looking for something to be outraged about, and then they demand their apologies. They can’t go back and tell the American people they created jobs or got any economic progress or that they’ve saved us from global warming. But they can go back to their constituents and brag about all the apologies they get for them. And these antics are just tailor made for the Drive-By Media because it’s lazy journalism.
RUSH: Not only that, you’re right about everything you said, but when they do go back home and brag, it’s about how much bacon they bring home, or how many old folks centers or water treatment plants they built, or how much global warming improvement there’s going to be in some sort of little project that they’re going to build in the state. They apologize for this and that, demanding other people apologize. We’re just absent leadership, folks, primarily. We’re absent leadership. We have a bunch people who are afraid and defensive of what people believe, what they think they believe. This is probably the result of people paying way too much attention to polls. Do you know how orgasmic it would be if some elected official — Jim Inhofe does. There are exceptions to this, Jim Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma, but he doesn’t actually do it on television, he does it from the Senate committee that he chairs, and they do a lot of great work getting information out, but can you imagine somebody, an elected official on television routinely, just nuking the premise of some of this stuff? That is precisely what Ronaldus Magnus did, in a charming, engaging, charismatic way. The blueprint is there. It worked. My fear is that way too many elected officials become so immersed in the concept of government, being so enmeshed in the tentacles of government, being so intertwined in as many things as possible because of the power that they derive from it that the ideological notion of a smaller government, less intrusive one, becomes foreign, even to those who arrive there with those beliefs.
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RUSH: Scott in Sarasota, Florida, welcome, sir, nice to have you here.
CALLER: Great to talk to you, Rush. I’ll be real quick. Global warming, I believe everything that you’ve said about it. The only thing that I’m concerned about is I want to know, the depletion of the ozone layer, how do you explain that in reference to all of that, where do we put that in? I mean, how do we acknowledge that?
RUSH: How do we balance or acknowledge the depletion of the ozone layer?
CALLER: Or any other scientific facts that support global warming.
RUSH: What scientific facts support the notion that human beings are destroying the ozone?
CALLER: Well, no, no. I don’t necessarily believe that. I’m just looking at the fact that the depletion of the ozone is one of the contributing factors of the global warming, is the way I’ve always understood it unless I’m wrong. I’m asking, how would you explain that in reference to everything else that does make sense of what you’re saying about every liberal putting out there —
RUSH: All right, let’s examine the ozone layer and the ozone hole, and let’s go back in time and history and listen and remember what it was we were told was responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer, do you recall what it was?
CALLER: Yeah, it was the sprays, what was it, the —
RUSH: Aerosol cans.
CALLER: Aerosol cans, right.
RUSH: Like hair spray, chlorofluorocarbons, which came from Freon.
CALLER: Right, right.
RUSH: All of that has been debunked, by the way, the Freon aspect has been debunked but we had to go to a more expensive substance when everybody feared this. Do you know what makes ozone, do you know what creates the ozone later?
CALLER: Tell me.
RUSH: The sun. The sun makes atmospheric ozone. If we wanted to destroy the ozone layer, we would have to put out the sun. If Ronald Reagan back in his day said to Cap Weinberger, the secretary of defense, ‘Cap, I want every Democrat in the world to get skin cancer. I want you to destroy the ozone layer.’ They thought Reagan was capable of doing these kinds of things. Weinberger would have taken it back to the defense department and researched it, came back and said, ‘Mr. President, we gotta send some fire trucks up and put out the sun because it’s the sun that manufactures atmospheric ozone.’ We don’t know whether that hole has been around from the beginning of time. We know it shrinks; we know it fills in; we know that it expands. It’s not permanent. The relationship that the hole in the ozone layer has to global warming is another wild guess. If that were something that were scientifically proven — and nothing about global warming is scientifically proven — among the most important thing that’s not proven, is that carbon dioxide has not been established scientifically to have any effect on climate. Yet it’s called a greenhouse gas. There are models that indicate that intense buildups can create greenhouse situations which the whole global warming theory relies on, the heating of the planet, because heat gets trapped and can’t escape, much like in a greenhouse. But nobody’s firmly established this. This is a theory. And it all sounds good, and especially when you announce the theory when it’s 104 degrees in July in Kansas, ‘Boy, something’s gotta explain this, it’s really hot here.’
I rely on this. The whole premise that we human beings can take this magnificent creation and by virtue of the enhancement of our lifestyles and our standard of living can destroy the planet, that’s a non sequitur to me. Now, this is not a scientific answer, I understand that. This is more an answer rooted in awe, respect for the creation and the Creator. The absolute complexity that is this planet and its ecosystems, so complex we can’t understand it. But beyond all that, Scott, maybe just in simple common sense language, there is no climatic event that we can cause. There is no climatic event that we can alter. We cannot change the direction of a line of thunderstorms. We cannot look at a squall line of thunderstorms and say, ‘Going to be a tornado coming out of this and it’s going to hit over here in five minutes,’ and give appropriate warning. We can see circumstances where tornadoes have formed in such squall lines, but we can’t predict ’em. If a tornado does happen to form, guess what? We can’t stop it. A hurricane or a series of hurricanes can form in the Atlantic or anywhere else in the world. We can only guess pretty much as to what their intensity is going to be and we can only guess a couple, three days out with certainty the direction the hurricane is going to take. We can’t stop it.
If we need a lot of rainfall like in south Florida because there’s a drought, there’s nothing we can do. If we’re in the midst of a Noah-like flood, there’s nothing we can do to stop it, other than move, other than leave, put sandbags out. If we’re tired of the hot sun, we can’t just summon clouds. There’s not one climatic event we can change, alter, create, manufacture, so on what basis do we arrogant little people accept the notion that we can destroy the climate of the planet or change it to the point that we’re going to be destroyed? I know this is not scientific, and I know the Darwinists would throw me out of the classroom if I dared ask them about this, and I know the evangelical Marxists that showed up at the Compassion Forum for Hillary and Obama in Philadelphia would probably have a fit with me, ‘Don’t you care about being a good steward of the planet?’ Of course I do. I’m not for pollution! I’m not for destroying anything like this, except if I need it to survive, just like it would destroy me if it needed to survive and if it had a gun, meaning animals and so forth. But the point is, there’s nothing we can do here. All we can do is adapt, Scott.
We cannot predict how big the ozone hole is going to be, and if it’s not big enough, and we want it bigger, we can’t make it bigger, and if it’s too big, we can’t fill it in, we just have to wait and keep our fingers crossed. And usually it fills in. It’s usually over Antarctica, too, right? So you gotta wonder what all the people in Antarctica and all the plants and all the aerosol cans and all the air-conditioning in Antarctica are doing to cause the ozone hole over Antarctica. All those people down there, you know. My point, there isn’t anybody down there but a bunch of scientists and the penguins. Nobody’s down there and yet that’s where the hole happens. ‘Rush, that’s not scientific.’ I know, it’s not a scientific answer, it’s a common sense answer. We had the story yesterday, most of these scientists admit to taking Ritalin, these guys are taking mind-altering drugs to stay focused, to stay up, to be sharp. Wow, how comforting is that. Ritalin and two or three other drugs they admit taking, prescription drugs, in order to enhance their work. So I just rely on common sense.
I also know this. Our planet has been around here, you can argue about it in a religious sense, but it’s been around thousands and thousands and maybe millions and billions of years. Guess what? It’s still here! And it’s still here in an inhabitable way. Amazing, isn’t it? We know that there have been periods of time where it’s been far warmer than it is now and it’s been much colder than it is now. We know that in Greenland, it’s called Greenland because it used to be, and there were civilizations that lived up there, and they grew crops and everything. How can that be? Had to be a hell of a lot hotter there then than it is now. But they didn’t have any of the so-called emissions that we’re utilizing today, that they say are warming up the planet. Scott, this is liberalism on parade. The hoax of global warming is just the latest attempt by liberals to effect the power of government, give government power over businesses and people, to limit freedom, to raise taxes. I’ll tell you what, boil it down to two simple things here, Scott, my man. Global warming, just two things, it’s all it is.
It is about allowing government to take over as much of the operation of as much of American capitalism as possible, and number two, it is an attempt to turn carbon dioxide into gold, meaning all of these charlatans out there selling you carbon credits to handle your carbon footprint, you’re giving them all kinds of money to assuage your guilt, and they’re supposedly planting trees. The Fresno Bee had a story recently — I don’t have it in front of me — certain kinds of trees pollute more than automobiles do. Ronald Reagan said this back in the eighties, too, and his own son called him a buffoon. Reagan turned out to be right. Pollute in terms of carbon, if you accept that carbon and carbon dioxide is a pollutant, then there are trees that put out more of it than certain automobiles, and some of them are in California. This is such a hoax. It’s such a blue ribbon hoax, and I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have every damn politician of consequence in this country accept it and want to move on the basis of the premise of the hoax.
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RUSH: Somebody sent me a story on the ozone hole some weeks ago and I don’t still have it, but the latest theory about the ozone hole is that cold air going through the ozone layer is creating a vortex that thins — there is no hole, by the way, there’s never a hole. There is just a thinning. Some have speculated the ozone hole thinning was simply the target area for alien spaceships to arrive when they built Stonehenge and the pyramids. But seriously, folks, it’s not a hole. It just thins. The latest theory is that cold air in the ozone layer, in the Antarctic region, is what’s causing it, and nothing to do with heat, nothing, zilch, zero, nada.
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RUSH: Todd, we have one minute. You’ve been waiting a long time from St. Louis. I got one minute, Todd. Can you do it in one minute?
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Rush, you’re the funniest and most entertaining guy on the radio. We love you out there.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, just back on the global warming scam. I’m from the old school that you gotta pay attention to history to help yourself today. Back in the 1400s, the Dutch and the Portuguese — these tiny little specks on the earth — were the world superpowers, and they were superpowers because they dominated the oceans. The reason — the only reason that they dominated the ocean and nobody else did — was they threw off the 1400s scientific consensus that the world was flat and if you sent your ship out too far, it would fall off the edge. I just think that the Kyoto is the leftists’ and the communists’ way of trying to neuter the superpower status of the United States.
RUSH: Absolutely right! You have nailed it in 50 seconds. Brevity is the soul of wit.
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