CALLER: Rush, hello, thanks for all that you do. I want to go back to the oil drilling legislation, and I have two points with regard to that. I agree, we’re all glad the price has come down of oil on to where it is today, but it’s still too high, and I think we’ve gotta keep the pressure on the Congress for when they come back to pass good domestic oil drilling legislation. Second point is, if somehow the Democrats are successful in blocking it or they water it down that it’s not worth passing an energy bill, then I think we need to support the Republicans with regard to the kind of the poker game of continuing resolution and the risk that that is to cut off government funding as of October 1st, but it will also eliminate the moratorium immediately. So those are the two points, and I just wanted to get your reaction.
RUSH: Well, in the first place, Pelosi has now withdrawn her… I don’t even know if you could say it was a commitment, but she had said that she was willing to let there be a vote and a debate in the House on offshore drilling. But she has now pulled back from that.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: She has denied that, and the Democrats, they’re in the process of losing this debate. However, they have a phrase that they have used successfully over the years in discussing this. That phrase is ‘Big Oil.’ This is not about Big Oil. It’s about drilling for more energy. It’s about finding more energy to be independent and all of this sort of stuff, to add to the supply. You know the drill.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: The Democrats are saying, ‘No, no. This is not about the Republicans trying to enrich Big Oil and put more money in the back pockets of Big Oil,’ and Pelosi is saying, ‘When you’ve got two oilmen in the White House for eight years, that’s how you get $4-a-gallon gasoline.’ She actually said that: two oilmen in the White House for eight years equals $4-a-gallon gasoline. So they’re playing the class envy game. They’re going to keep focusing Big Oil this, Big Oil that, and saying that this is nothing but a trick to enrich the oil companies. I’m running out of time this segment to deal with this, but it’s just specious. So she’s not going to allow any legislation. This is why it remains a huge winning issue for us — and what do we do? We make Gang of Ten-type deals.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We actually have the audio of the things I described for you yesterday, Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil talking to Charlie Gibson. This first bite is Tillerson on how much the oil companies pay in taxes.
GIBSON: When profits are so high, why is spending on exploration so low?
TILLERSON: Well, we’re spending at record levels. Through the first half of this year, we have spent $12.5 billion. That’s a record level of capital and exploration expenditures for us.
RUSH: Did you hear that question that Charlie Gibson asked? ‘When profits are so high, why is spending on exploration so low?’ Uh, Charlie? Would you tell me where in the name of Sam Hill they are allowed to explore in this country? They are exploring everywhere but here! You know, folks, there is so much absurdity out there. It’s like, have you seen this story on what they have found in the Sahara Desert? Listen to this. The Sahara Desert, it’s a desert. For those of you in Rio Linda, it means it’s miles and miles and miles of dry, parched sand. You will die there in two days, unless you run into an oasis. ‘A tiny woman and two children were laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5,000 years ago in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.
‘The slender arms of the youngsters were still extended to the woman in perpetual embrace when researchers discovered their skeletons in a remarkable cemetery that is providing clues to two civilizations who lived there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green. Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and colleagues were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in the African country of Niger when they came across the startling find, detailed at a news conference Thursday at the National Geographic Society. ‘Part of discovery is finding things that you least expect,’ he said. ‘When you come across something like that in the middle of the desert it sends a tingle down your spine.’ Some 200 graves of humans were found during fieldwork… ‘Everywhere you turned, there were bones belonging to animals that don’t live in the desert,’ said Sereno.
”I realized we were in the green Sahara.” Five thousand years ago. Now, it almost sounds foolish to me to have to ask the question, but if the Sahara Desert was once fertile, green, and lush — people and animals lived and thrived there, which means plenty of food was also available there — and 5,000 years later it’s now a barren desert, and there were no automobiles, there were no lightbulbs, there were no fossil fuels, there were no automobiles, there was nothing! There was no industrialization. There were no coal-fired power plants. There was zilch, zero, in terms of ‘carbon footprint.’ So somebody explain to me how the hell a lush, dense, green area 5,000 years ago becomes a barren desert? Now, it’s patently obvious that the climate of this planet goes at its own pace, and its own time.
It does what it wants to do when it wants to do it and we have diddly-squat to do about it, and these poor saps that lived in that region had no more ability to stop the warming back then that was going to turn the place into a desert than we have the ability to stop it now because we’re not causing it. We cannot! Stories like this just make the whole global warming story patently absurd! Just absurd. It makes me wonder why you have to spend any time on it all discussing it. The same thing here with this Russian and other situations, the oil situation. I have said the most expensive commodity in this country is ignorance, and it’s on display, and it’s costing us. It’s going to cost us some of our freedom if it doesn’t stop. It’s going to cost us lots of money. So here’s poor old Rex Tillerson — and it was Obama, by the way, that said ‘$1,400 a second in profits.’
But $15,000 a second in costs, $4,000 a second in taxes, While Pelosi and other irresponsible, shameful members of her party demonize people like Rex Tillerson and the oil companies, what is the federal government doing? They are the biggest thief on this planet. They’re the ones without doing diddly-squat get $4,000 a second in taxes off of the hard work of Rex Tillerson and his boys and ExxonMobil and all the other oil companies combined. The government gets the biggest damn take of everybody’s output and labor in this country! They do. And those people that get elected and run the place then have to turn around and tar and feather the producers and the movers and the shakers and the people that make this country work, demonize them as thieves and criminals when the thieves are in Washington, DC. And they can never get enough.
They’re going to get close to $3 trillion produced by you and me and Rex Tillerson and his boys, and it’s not enough. They’re going to come back for even more. The whole point of this stupid, worthless, totally fraudulent hoax, global warming is about getting more money and denying you freedom. And making you feel guilty so that you’ll pay it, gladly. It’s so obvious. And yet all they’ve gotta do is say, ‘Big Oil! Big Oil!’ Obama actually said — this is how stupid he is; there’s not another word for this — ‘Every time you fill your tank, Big Oil fills its coffers.’ Well, hell, yes! You’re buying their product, for crying out loud! Where’s it going to go?
You fill your tank with gasoline, who’s going to get the money? I would think. ‘Every time you fill your tank, Big Oil fills its coffers.’ Every time you fill your stomach, Big Food fills its coffers! Every time you buy a surfboard for your vacation in Hawaii, Big Surfboard fills its coffers! How stupid is this? I really worry about the state of my IQ if I have to keep trying to teach and train people about this stuff, because I’m going to lose patience with it. There’s more Rex Tillerson. Charlie Gibson said, ‘Former senators had the temerity to say the other day Americans are whining. Are they whining? Or do you really — can you, from where you are, feel their pain?’
RUSH: So then Charlie Gibson says, ‘[C]ome back to Sen. Obama. He’s calling for a windfall profits tax, $65 billion, five years. Oil companies, in his plan, pay it. And when the public sees the kind of profits that the oil companies are making, and ExxonMobil in particular, and when they see the size of the stock buybacks, isn’t it fair that they wonder why not?’
TILLERSON: Well, I guess the question is what’s that going to solve? … Nowhere in a windfall profits tax do I see anything that addresses the problem. I understand that may be popular with some people because of how they view our current-day profitability. … But, again, Charlie, I think the question is are we going to have a serious debate about solving the long-term energy problem, or are we just going to look for short-term solutions again to make everybody feel better?
RUSH: That’s what we’re going to have as long as the Democrats and the Drive-By Media control the debate. That’s exactly what it’s going to be: Solutions that solve nothing. In fact, no solutions, just a bunch of stupid rhetoric appealing to the lowest common denominator of common sense and intelligence in this country. ‘Yeah, make Big Oil suffer! Make ’em suffer!’ Why doesn’t anybody ever say, ‘Make government suffer’? Why? How come it is that the one element that always botches what it attempts…? It tries to fix poverty? It makes it worse. It tries to fix racism, discrimination; it busts up the black family and destroys it. It tries to run the Post Office, and it’s a billion dollars in debt. Everything it does! People say, ‘Let’s let the government fix health care,’ you name it. Yet whatever it is that they do, they screw up, and people still are willing to turn to them to fix what they broke in the first place.
I intellectually understand it. Fifty years of this kind of class envy rhetoric from FDR on — maybe 60 years by now, close to it — all this the government is benevolent, the government’s here to help you and so forth. By the way, I don’t have any animosity. I don’t hate the institution of government. It’s just way too big. It’s way out of hand. It’s being run by too many charlatans and phony plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n’ roller leftists who have a view of government that’s far different than most of us who want it limited, out of the way. There certain responsibilities that it compels at and does very well and get out of our way. Leave us alone. The other side wants this government involved in every step of your life they can ’cause they don’t trust you to live your life right without them.
Some people have just bought hook, line, and sinker into the class envy argument, and they’ll tell you they know that a tax increase on the rich isn’t going to help ’em, but it’s going to make ’em feel better. ‘Yeah, find out what those people feel like when they suffer!’ Well, the point is, you raise taxes on the people that hire people and fewer people are going to get hired. So the intended beneficiary (which is nuts to say anyway) of tax increases on the rich are the very people that get hurt by losing their jobs. And I’ll tell you what, a windfall profits tax, we’ve done it. Jimmy Carter did it. All that happened was the supply dropped because Big Oil stopped doing business in America and their profits were down, so there were fewer profits to pay windfall tax on in the first place! A windfall profits tax does not punish Big Oil; it punishes end users.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I guess this is one of these days I just feel like I need to get things off my chest. I sometimes get just so frustrated with the stupidity of the things I talk about. Not the stupidity of the things I say, because I don’t say stupid things. The stupidity of having to talk about some of these things like oil companies as a villain, like global warming as something that’s actually happening. It’s frightening. Last night I was out to dinner, and just to show you the power of the Drive-By Media, the subject of the automobile companies came up, and one of my dinner partners started ripping into General Motors.
He said, ‘Yeah, well, look at what’s happening to General Motors. Toyota is running rings around them. General Motors, they deserve what’s happening. They haven’t built cars anybody wants.’
I said, ‘What are you talking about? What do you mean they don’t build cars that people want? Who’s telling you this, the Drive-By Media?’
‘Yeah! They’re not making enough fuel-efficient cars, and they’re just selling these big SUVs and Hummers.’
That’s not true. It simply isn’t true. But all this anti-corporate mentality in this country aimed at American corporations… You know, I’m just proud to be an American. I love the fact that God made me an American, and I don’t understand anybody who doesn’t appreciate it. I have a tough time — I don’t mean blanket approval, blind patriotism, but I don’t understand the people who want to criticize this country and the people who have made it great enemies. We seem to be on this big anti-capitalist push right now, and it’s being led by absolute idiots, people with no brains who have sponged up a bunch of drivel and bilge from America’s leftists, because their lives are meaningless. They don’t amount to anything in their own minds, sitting there trying to give themselves some reason to say their lives count, and so they buy into global warming. They buy into the fact that Big Oil is rotten. They buy into the fact have General Motors is rotten. General Motors, folks, has more models that get 30-miles-to-the-gallon or better on the highway than any other manufacturer. They do. They make all kinds of cars. Their fleet mileage standards are fine. I just get as frustrated as I can be, because all this criticism is mindless. It’s like the criticism we got earlier today from the guy from LA who didn’t want to sound like a commie lib, but it took him three sentences to pull it off, blaming us for Russia going into Georgia, blaming us for triggering the whole thing, blaming us because Blackwater might have been there training Georgian soldiers, as though everything that we do is evil.