RUSH: It has been confirmed — I missed this when talking to Natalie — Dawn gave me the transcript. Natalie from Charlottesville, Virginia, said, (paraphrasing) ‘I have to say that you have fallen into the liberals’ hands on this. You were sounding like a limousine conservative. I mean, you’re just giving them more fodder to run with saying, ‘Oh, those Republicans are so heartless and uncaring.” She may as well have called me harsh. I spoke with her after this and it’s all settled now, but that’s really an insult, limousine conservative. Just so you people know, there is not a limousine out there that meets my standards. I wouldn’t be caught dead in one, and to be called a limousine conservative, I’m glad I did not hear that. It might have changed the entire tenor of the whole call.
By the way, a slight correction here on the thing we’ve been discussing about Tammy May from Pennsylvania, the letter that she wrote. It doesn’t change anything, but just a slight detail. She did not write the letter to Senator Casey. She wrote the letter to her local newspaper, a small-town newspaper, and Senator Casey’s office saw it, brought it to his attention, and he took that to the Senate hearing today in front of the chairman of the Federal Reserve. So it doesn’t change anything other than she didn’t write Casey. She wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper, and in the letter to the editor of the newspaper, she said we have to reprioritize: House comes first, day care, gasoline, and food.
Those are the new priorities. Now, I get the call from Natalie in Charlottesville, Virginia, who accused me of being a little harsh. Didn’t use that word, but not really compassionate and understanding the situation. Look, it’s time for a little tough love. Some of you might think what I’m going to say next is lacking in compassion, but I assure you that it’s not.
We have a foundation for what I’m going to say here. We’ve got a big problem in this country, and it’s a problem that’s been big for a while, and it’s growing. And the problem is that way too many of our fellow citizens expect — and some of them even demand — that our government, which is nothing more than all the rest of us, take care of them in one way, shape, manner, or form, be it health care or be it a home mortgage when they can’t afford it or what have you. And the government is only too eager to comply because they love having people dependent on them, particularly liberal Democrat members of the government.
Now, we as conservatives believe in the concept of individual responsibility, and when we say that, we get tarred and feathered as being heartless and cold and cruel. ‘What do you mean individual responsibility? Easy for you to say.’ But leftists are collectivists, and they think we all ought to be banded together and all have equal things, outcomes, houses, this sort of thing. And until that situation exists, in their minds America is an unfair place.
Now, adults have to make decisions about the families that they’re going to start, how many kids they’re going to have, the way in which they’re going to live, whether they can afford to have a home, whether they have to rent instead at first, how many cars to buy, or use public transit, how many televisions they’re going to have in the house, how many computers, cable, all these things, what kind of education they hope to achieve, what kind of job they want to pursue, whether they want to start their own business, on and on. These are decisions that all of us should make for ourselves. And most of us do, but at some point when the decision goes wrong, way too many of us look for relief from Washington and say that the system screwed me and I need to have it made right. Well, maybe the system did screw you, but welcome to the club. Everybody gets screwed now and then. Contrary to what some people think, it’s not a charmed life for everybody. In fact, for very few.
Now, let’s take a hypothetical situation. Let’s take a single mother of two living in Pennsylvania who goes out and, because some community organizer has lobbied Congress to make home mortgages available to people that can’t afford them, our fictional character in Pennsylvania, single mother of two, goes out and gets a house that she really can’t afford. But because it’s the American dream and the members of Congress have mandated that this happen, the woman is secured for a loan, and all of a sudden the rate goes up, and then it’s a problem because she can’t pay for it. She can’t afford the monthly without maybe doing without food or driving less and maybe she’s gotta pay for day care because she has to go to work, she’s got day care, she’s got a job. So she looks to the government because the government roped her into buying the house, told her it was cool and hunky-dory, she thinks. But the rest of us were not involved in her decision.
This to me is the key. I don’t know this woman in Pennsylvania, and I don’t know what she did. I don’t know the circumstances, and yet the woman — and this is going to sound harsh, but, folks, it’s a problem, we’re going to have to get a handle on this. It’s all around us, what this is leading to, the credit crunch, the mortgage crunch, entities that supposedly have assets backing their worth that don’t have those assets, we got Chuck-U Schumer out there starting runs on banks, stock markets going up and down, the gasoline price, the oil price, a lot of people are very much on the edge here. And many of them are just like the rest of us are, they’re prisoners to these cycles.
But in the case of our fictional character in Pennsylvania, I had nothing to do, nor did you, with the decisions that she made. And unless you and I are involved in the decisions that everybody else makes, which is not possible, then we can’t know whether the decisions they’ve made are wise or unwise. Now, multiply that by millions of families. In this country, we spend $3.1 trillion a year. This is not a safety net. This is a hammock, $3.1 trillion. Most of us cannot put our arms around that. Most of us have no concept of how much that is, but it’s enough that we’re not talking about government creating a safety net. We’re talking about a massive government that is involved in all things and wants to be involved in even more, $3.1 trillion is not chump change. It has become a hammock. The consequence is regulations and taxes are in fact harming more and more families, making them poorer and making it more difficult for them to succeed. This much we know for sure, this is what happens when government gets in your way.
The list of examples is endless, from the family that goes out and buys a plot of ground and finds out later on that there’s some sacred grouse on it and they can’t do anything with it. Who says? The government, some regulation, the kangaroo rat in Bakersfield, California, farmer had to get rid of his farm. Wetlands, the whole assault on private property rights, is just one example. California is readying a statewide ban on trans fat, statewide. It’s in the San Francisco Chronicle today, a statewide ban on trans fat. Now, my friends, I don’t know about you, but I think that is a waste of time. It is a waste of bureaucratic involvement and money, it is none of their business, this notion that we are too stupid to protect ourselves and ensure our own good health and therefore somebody has to. And they might make a claim to saying they have to protect our health because after all, they’re paying for our health care, and they want it to be as little as possible they have to pay, so we’re going to have to live under their guidelines since they’re paying our health care.
The minute you surrender responsibility for yourself to somebody else, then they own you. And in this case, if it’s the government telling you that they’re going to pay for your health care then they’re next going to tell you what you can and can’t eat, what you can and can’t smoke, where you can and can’t eat it. They’re going to make your life a living hell of regulation. This is already happening. It’s happening incrementally.
We sit around, ‘Oh, they’re so benevolent. They’re so good-hearted. They’re just trying to save our lives. They’re trying to keep us healthy.’ They’re not doing that at all. They’re simply exercising control. So the decisions that people make oftentimes are the result of obstacles placed in their way by a government that they think loves them and cares for them, and so their taxes have to go up and the regulations increase, and they are poorer and they have more difficulty, people have more difficulty getting ahead financially because of all these obstacles. At the same time, the government sits around and laments how stupid people are, thinks, ‘They don’t know what to eat right; they don’t know how to drive right; they don’t know how to do this or that, we need to take care of them.’ They have no faith in you. You have faith in them, you think they’re benevolent, you think they’re out to help you. They look down on you. And when I say government, I’m talking leftist, activist government.
The problem is that the Republican Party signed onto this the last couple years, too, and kind of lost their identity in this whole notion of limited government. The bottom line is that the federal government imposes on every family in this country hundreds of thousands of dollars in obligations from its entitlement programs, insurance programs, and nobody ever talks about this because some people, not all, but some people think this is all done to help us. But every time this way of managing a society, managing a society’s affairs has been tried, it has failed miserably, and people end up revolting against it, in many cases trying to leave the country which has held them prisoner, in which case many of them got shot trying to go over a wall or under a fence. Now, we’re not there yet, and don’t anybody misunderstand me here.
But for all these people that are out there in a genuine state of fear over what they see in the news every day, writing letters to little newspapers saying we need to reprioritize, we, not the letter writer, we need to reprioritize, that ‘we,’ that’s a giant red flag. That means this letter writer wants a central authority to implement what she thinks is good. Now, imagine if she hates smokers or imagine if she hates jet airplanes or imagine if she hates going to the beach. She writes, ‘Too many people are going to the beach, destroying the beach, the beach should be for animals and birds and so forth, and the crabs or whatever. We need to get on this, protect the beach.’ Some politicians are going to pick it up. The thing I’m trying to say here is, individual responsibility is something that we all at some point in our lives exercise, and that somewhere down the line too many of us abandon it and sacrifice it when our decisions maybe didn’t turn out the way we wanted them to and there’s a little pain or suffering, so we turn to someplace for help and assistance, and that can become habit-forming or addictive. We’ve gotten to the point now where there are many people who have simply surrendered their own individual liberty and sovereignty ’cause it’s easier.
Meanwhile, the rest of us pay for it, and when we try to help fix the problem, ‘Take care of yourself. Be responsible. You’ll be happier. You’ll accomplish more. You’re better than you think you can be. You’re far more qualified and capable than even you know, but you’re never going to experience that if you give up and let people pigeonhole you into some area where you’re only good for this or that.’ We say things like that and they say, ‘Well, it’s easy for you to say, but it’s really harsh. It’s really harsh.’
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RUSH: Let’s see. This is Graham in Lemoore, California. Hi, Graham, nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Yes, sir. Good afternoon. US Navy carrier, aviator-fuel-dumping mega dittos from a lifelong Rush Baby, sir.
RUSH: Thanks very much. By the way, confirm something for me, if you will.
CALLER: Yes, sir?
RUSH: You’ve gotta dump the fuel before landing on the carrier. You do it at an altitude; it evaporates before it actually hits the ocean, right?
CALLER: Yes, sir, that’s right.
RUSH: So Flipper actually doesn’t get hurt?
CALLER: No, sir. It’s not like the (garbled) for a landing.
RUSH: Yeah. Damn it. Okay. That’s what I thought.
CALLER: Sorry to disappoint you.
RUSH: Thanks for clearing that up for me.
CALLER: Yes, sir. It’s an honor to talk to you, sir, and I just wanted to make a connection between Tammy May-water (sic) and your points about personal responsibility with the people who have been calling about the election, calling your program about the election in the recent weeks. It seems to me like a lot of Republicans are eager for you to tell us how to vote or how to elect McCain or asking you to flip some kind of magic switch to get Mitt Romney in the White House. And it seems to me that Phil Gramm was essentially right about whiners, and that includes a lot of Republicans. They’re looking to you for an answer when in reality the answer lies in taking responsibility for our vote and in getting informed and in figuring out what issues are important to us to elect people into office that are going to do something about that.
RUSH: This is for the most part true. But the people that you’re referring to who are calling me, I think you’re slightly misunderstanding. They are essentially telling me I am lazy and that I could be doing much, much more; and if I were doing much, much more, it would create even more leadership and more people would be rallied to the cause and so forth.
CALLER: I never thought I’d say this, but I disagree. Your job is not to command us. Your job is to inform us on the issues and to tell us about what’s going on in the world so that we can impact our community on a local level. Our job is to go out and make the change happen.
RUSH: That is —
CALLER: You are one man with one vote.
RUSH: You are exactly right. You’re right on the money. There’s only been one exception to that, Graham.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Operation Chaos, when I did assume the role of commander, and I did issue orders. But even then, those orders were still elective on the part of the troops. So I guess, yeah. You’re right through and through. You get it.
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RUSH: Here’s Curtis in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Hi, Curtis.
CALLER: Hello, sir. Recently, I heard a Democratic spokesperson talking about the wonders of wind and solar and stuff, and somebody said, ‘Well, what about people who can’t afford the price of gas?’ She said, ‘Well, they should get a house closer to work, and if that’s too expensive, they can always get a new hybrid.’ I thought this was so absurd. Somebody should turn it into an ad, sort of like a royal coach in the palace at Versailles and Marie Antoinette, telling someone, ‘Well, if the peasants have no bread, they should eat cake,’ then show a senator with a private jet and a multimillion-dollar estate and this Democratic spokesperson say, ‘Well, if you can’t afford gas, you should buy a new hybrid car.’
RUSH: You know, about that Marie Antoinette quote, I’ve always liked cake better than bread. I have never understood that quote, ‘Let ’em eat cake.’ I’d rather eat cake than bread, any day.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: But anyway this Democrat spokesman has no clue how expensive a hybrid is.
CALLER: Well, exactly. If you can’t afford gas, how are you going to afford to buy a house closer to work or to buy a new car? That’s absurd.
RUSH: They should have just cut to the chase and say, ‘Look, move in and get mass transit.’ But the point is, yes, these are people that are trying to control people’s lives — and notice every circumstance, individual circumstance that somebody confronts, a liberal’s idea is always: ‘Get smaller. Downsize. Become less prosperous.’ It’s never, ‘Shoot for the moon!’ Liberals never tell you, ‘Gut it up! If you want to buy a new car, go out and work hard for it, find a job you want. If the gasoline is getting too expensive, find a way to afford it,’ because doing that, see, that’s harsh.
CALLER: Well, I just think that it’s interesting that, you know, the talking point is they question if drilling will yield fast enough results or if it will yield a big enough effect on price, and I think what people should say is, ‘You should question why they don’t want to do everything they can to lower the price.’
RUSH: Exactly. They don’t want to lower the price. They want misery. If I’m understanding you correctly, the people we’re talking about here want misery in people’s lives going into the election, they want people mad and unhappy. It’s like Dianne Feinstein just asked this question on Fox: ‘What’s the number-one thing that you would do to bring down the price of oil?’ Find a substitute for it. That’s just absurd. (Cosell impression) ‘It’s just irresponsibly absurd; makes no sense whatsoever,’ and yet these people are considered the wizards of smart. So many things, if you get too caught up in them, you’ll go insane. You gotta be able to laugh at this stuff — at least sometimes.
Mike in Brooklyn, nice to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I wanted to ask you, ‘How can you slough off the fact that the Big Oil people are not using the 68 million acres already allotted to them?’ Are they deliberately, you know, trying to twist our arm to make us say ‘uncle’ so they can drill other places?
RUSH: I think you’re buying into a little bit of leftist propaganda. If they don’t find any oil or explore on those leases they own, they lose the money that they paid for the lease. If they’re not doing things there, it must mean that they haven’t found any.
CALLER: Well, you know —
RUSH: You know, this is amazing to me. This really is amazing to me. Here we have a circumstance: We’ve got rising oil prices, which are leading to rising gasoline prices, and instead of an honest, intellectual curiosity from people about how to fix it, somehow we’ve gotta blame Big Oil! All of a sudden now… I’ve seen this floating around on liberal blogs; it’s outer all over the place, ‘Well, Big Oil’s got 68 million acres they’re not even using that now. Why do they need any more and drill off shore?’ as though there’s some giant conspiracy that Big Oil doesn’t really want to drill; it just wants to have all this area tied up. If they buy a lease, they have X-amount of time to start working on that property, that territory and area, and if they don’t, they lose it, and they lose the money. The president explained this today. You need to, sir, Mike, get on the bandwagon.
The villain now is the speculators. Your side has left Big Oil off the highway now. Big Oil is no longer guilty. The speculators are guilty. Gee. Why do I shrug off? Why do I shrug off? Sometimes it is a genuine challenge here. Common sense is perceived to be so damn rare as to be intelligence.
Common sense is not intelligence. If you have a modicum of common sense, the odds are people are going to think you’re a genius, because there’s so little common sense running around. Supply and demand! We are producing as much as we are using; we need to produce more. Who cares who profits? Somebody’s going to. I would much rather have Big Oil profit than big government profit. Just give me the damn oil; that’s all I care about! The market will take care of the price. You’re worried about conspiracies? ‘They’re not using the leases that they have now, 68 million acres!’ Get a life, for crying out loud. You see a red light, is Big Oil putting a red light up, or are all green lights to make you burn more gasoline so you gotta buy more for what?
How do you people think? What must it be like to get up and see the devil behind every automobile, behind every person? What must it be like to live the life you liberals lead: always suspecting everybody, always suspecting everybody of doing something to screw you, when you are the ones doing the screwing to everybody else? Good grief! I gotta take a break here. I’m close to profanity again here, and I can’t go there.
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RUSH: Joel in St. Louis. Hi, Joel, nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: The statement that Marie Antoinette made regarding cake, the cake that she was referring to is the black stuff that was left over when bread would burn, fall to the bottom of the oven. They’d scrape the oven and it was the black soot, so she was presenting —
RUSH: Well, see, I’ve wondered about this because I’d much rather have cake than bread, and I never understood that. There is, by the way, some serious historical disagreement that she even ever said it.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: She probably didn’t say it. Somebody did, but it wasn’t her. They think somebody wrote about it 20 years before she was born, some Spanish queen visiting or something. But she may have never even said it, but thank you for the explanation. Who knew? Who knew that cake meant burnt waste back in the days of Marie Antoinette? Who knew? But now it makes sense to me. It didn’t before.
Gary in Newberry, Florida, you’re on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you so much, Rush. Give ’em heck. That guy before last was just so funny.
RUSH: Well, you know, I kind of blew up at the guy, but it was as much attitude as anything else. No, I’m sorry, it wasn’t attitude. I’m getting to the point, this is just one of these days, where I have little patience for ignorance —
CALLER: You shoulda told him the truth, that we’re not going to pump oil ’til it gets to $200 a barrel.
RUSH: What do you mean, stop drilling for it?
CALLER: We’re not going to drill for it ’til it gets to $200 a barrel.
RUSH: Who, Big Oil is not?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Oh, really, that would have made his day. (laughing) I wish I’d have thought of that.
CALLER: Listen, what I was going to talk to you about was the letter that Bob Casey read. I can’t see anywhere in the Constitution that he has a right to ask the federal government to help this lady whatsoever.
RUSH: No, it’s not that, but you can come up with legislation, they’ve done it, that —
CALLER: They have, but you know. Why didn’t he just simply go around his office with a cup and shake his office people down —
RUSH: It’s not even about this. It’s not even about Tammy May. It’s about trying to create a national crisis on C-SPAN in the minds of as many Americans as possible. Casey wants people to think that everybody is as forlorn as Tammy May is, which will then prompt more and more government action to deal with all the Tammy Mays out there.
CALLER: It’s just terrible. It’s gotten terrible.
RUSH: It’s a hideous, insidious plot.
CALLER: And, you know, I didn’t help her have her children, and, you know, why doesn’t she ask her husband to help out?
RUSH: She’s a single mother.
CALLER: Oh, I’m sorry.
RUSH: Single mother. Which, by the way, that is a made-to-order circumstance, the feminists love it, liberals love it because when you don’t have a husband and you have kids, and you’re a woman, you need something, because you gotta work, you need a second income, and guess who’s right there? Bob Casey. Not personally, but the government. It’s no different than what all these great and well-intentioned and big-hearted government programs did to the black family. Ripped ’em apart because the husband, the father wasn’t necessary. So now single mothers, for whatever reason — I mean, they’re being hotly pursued now by the Democrat Party for votes. And they, of course, are victims, too. They’re victims of an unfair gender, maledom. They’re victims of an unfair society. Men just wanted ’em for the sex, gave ’em a couple kids and then split the scene when the responsibilities got too much. It’s just a horrible existence for women in America. We all know this. So there the government is right to pick up the slack.