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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I have everybody asking me, ‘How do you respond to that call?’ Ehhhh. Look, I think, folks, something is pretty obvious — and I say this with all due respect, and I’m glad Senator Chambliss called. You and I, who have adopted the principles of the nation’s founding as the things that guide us (the preservation and expansion of individual liberty and all that fall from that) consider ourselves to be in a war with the forces of the left who want to usurp as much of that liberty and reshape this nation as far from the founding as they can. So obviously we’re in a war, and we don’t see compromise. We see freedom versus less freedom, where do you compromise there? Why are we who seek freedom to give some of it away, just in order to show the American people we can get along?

And to come up with some efficient bill that nobody will admit is a great bill, but got this notion we gotta get something done. So you and I look at this and we’re at war here. Kids and grandkids, the future, you want the country to be preserved and even improved, and it just appears sometimes that people in our own party are surrendering. They don’t look at it that way. They don’t think they’re surrendering. They think that they are making progress ’cause they look at all this through a different lens. They look at it as being criticized if they don’t get anything done in a legislative body. We look at legislative bodies not doing anything as victory, ’cause what do legislative bodies do? They write laws limiting freedom.

They empower bureaucracies made up of people who are not even elected. So we have a simple issue here that has been highlighted by the workings of the market. We have emerging democracies and capitalist markets all over the world putting an increasing demand on the supply of oil. When there is not enough oil to keep up that supply, the price rises. We have learned that the tipping point in this country for gasoline, given all other market conditions is four bucks a gallon. It’s once it hits four bucks a gallon and once jet fuel hits its equivalent. Do you really know the airlines are gonna close something like 60 to 90 million seats on flights from now to the end of the year? That’s because there’s less demand to fly. JetBlue the other day said they’re going to start, what, selling bottled water and pillows, or renting the pillows when you’re flying.

They gotta come up with something. They can’t raise the fares, to be competitive with other airlines. So then we learn that we’re importing an increasing amount of our oil every year and we have it thrown in there that some of these people from whom we’re buying the oil hate and us they’re dictators and terrorists and so forth and so on. That’s neither here nor there, because the market will take care of that kind of stuff but just the fact that we have to import it when we don’t have to. We have our own, and it’s a very simple thing to do. Most people say, ‘Okay, we already drill. They drill for oil all over the world, and the world has not died and the world has not been destroyed. We drill for oil everywhere.’ Okay, so why don’t we go drill our own to lessen the dependence on these other places, increase the world supply, bring the price down, create some jobs in the process?

We have a Democrat Party that says, ‘No! Inflate your tires and get tune-ups, but we’re not going to drill. We’re going to get you driving these little Smart Cars with windmill propellers on the back.’ While the ChiComs are stepping up the SUVs and bigger cars, Americans are living retrograde lives because of the price of gasoline. So we’ve got a perfect issue. Democrats: anti-progress. Democrats: for high prices. Democrats want you angry. Democrats want you suffering. Democrats like gasoline at four bucks. The American left likes you angry at what food costs because they think they can convince you it’s Bush’s fault, therefore the Republicans’ fault. All of a sudden the Democrat presidential candidate fumbles the issue big time. Surveys in individual states and nationwide show a majority of the American people want to drill. ‘Drill here, drill now.’ Millions have signed a petition.

We got Republicans in the House of Representatives who are trying to embarrass the Democrats and Nancy Pelosi into coming back and having a debate — and then out of nowhere, five Republican senators sign a compromise bill with Democrats that limits new drilling to four states and no closer than 50 miles to the coast, with new added regulations and think it’s a victory because they’ve come to a compromise. I guess if you’re a legislator — member of Congress or House or the Senate — I guess you figure the definition of progress is ‘getting something done, when most of us view progress as, ‘Just leave us alone, you know? We get this moratorium on drilling. Let it go. Let the ban just expire.’ That’s all that has to happen, and then we got free rein. So while we look at this as a very important battle in a war, some people on our side don’t see it that way. They see it simply as a thorny little legislative issue that if we can just come to some compromise deal, then we can say we’ve made progress. So they just look at it differently than we do.

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