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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I’ve been thinking about this Joe the Plumber business, and everybody is pointing out that it’s not what Joe the Plumber asked Obama, it’s what Obama answered. He wants to ‘spread the wealth around.’ But it’s actually even worse than that. It’s now about how quickly team Obama was able to shut down Joe the Plumber, to mock him, to make fun of him, to investigate him, to demonize him, to virtual Tony Soprano him. They did everything but throw him in the East River with concrete blocks tied to his feet, and yet all of these associations that Obama has, they have no interest in exposing, at least right now.

But the issue itself is even bigger than Joe. It’s bigger than Obama’s lame answer, and it’s even bigger than Obama’s attack machine. Because the left tells us and Obama tells us, they’re only going to go after the super rich. That’s who’s going to pay the tax increases. That’s who’s going to be gotten even with, right? Well, who’s Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber is just an average, ordinary American with dreams, and who’d they go after? They went after Joe the Plumber. That tells us what they’re going to do. They’re going to go after achievers. It doesn’t matter what your income. If you achieve, you’re going to pay for it. If you dream of achieving, they’re going to find you, and they’re going to come up with policies to make sure that you give up that quest real fast.

So you might say, ‘Okay, first they came after the super rich, then they came after the rich, and now they’re going after the achievers,’ and that’s what this episode with Joe the Plumber shows. You might think it’s just about trying to silence and discredit a guy who embarrassed Obama, but it’s more than that — and it wasn’t just the media. It was Obama’s team, too, that set out to destroy this guy. So you’re sitting out there thinking, ‘Obama is only gonna go after the super rich, or the rich.’ But you can see right in front of your very eyes, they’re going to go after the achievers. And if you say nothing when they eventually get to you, there’s not going to be anybody else to defend you. Everybody else going to have been taken care of.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Alan in Memphis, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Well, thank you, Rush. It really is an honor.

RUSH: I appreciate that, sir. Thank you — and I know, but I still appreciate it.

CALLER: (chuckles) Well, I want to say while concentrating on my EIB doctoral thesis here recently I realize that Obama is even lying when he talks to Joe the Plumber. He talks about wanting to ‘spread the wealth around’ but what in actuality it’s going to be is he’s going to be spreading the poverty around. And the redistribution of wealth, I’m afraid this redistribution of poverty that we’re going to have will look a lot more like east Europe instead of west Europe.

RUSH: Well, you can call it spreading poverty around, but the bottom line is that when you tax the golden goose (or the golden geese) you destroy the production. You destroy the productivity. You destroy that which is creating the wealth. Obama has made it plain that that’s his objective! He wants the government to be distributing wealth. He wants the government to be thought of as the source of wealth. I don’t think there’s any mistake about it. Look, a socialist is a socialist. There aren’t any grades or degrees of socialist. You’re a socialist or you’re not, and he is. This Joe the Plumber business, folks — just, again, to illustrate this — everybody, I think, including me at first, missed the point here. I mean, we were correct in pointing out that it wasn’t what Joe the Plumber asked that was the question.

It was what Obama’s answer was. But it was even worse than that. It was… It’s now about how quickly the Obama team and willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media were able to shut down Joe the Plumber, at least try to, to mock him, make fun of him, investigate him, demonize him. They did everything a mob hit would do except throw him in the river with a cement swimsuit. Yet the issue is bigger than Joe the Plumber. It’s bigger than Obama’s lame answer. It’s bigger than Obama’s attack machine, because what the left told us with this little incident with Joe the Plumber is, they say they’re going to go after the super rich, but what they’re really going to go after is achievers, period.

No matter who you are, no matter where you are. If you achieve at anything, particularly financially, you are looked at as somebody who has more than you need; and if you have more than you need, they’re going to be the arbiters of how much you need. They’re going to try to take everything else above what they think you need and redistribute it. Now, one of the things that supposedly guides this is this notion of fairness. It’s a trick. Fairness is what they say because who’s for unfairness? Nobody’s for unfairness! It’s the same thing with the environmentalist wackos saying that all they’re about is clean air and clean water. Well, who’s for dirty water and dirty air? Nobody. Except animals, who don’t know the difference, but in this case, fairness.

So, ‘It’s just not fair that so many people have more and so many people have less, and we want to try to equalize things so everybody is happier, and it’s only fair to do this. There are people who have more than they need.’ But that’s not what this is. You have to understand. The fairness is just the trick. Fairness is just the route into people’s minds to get them to go along with this. What this is really all about is an expanding, ever-expanding government with more and more control over more and more aspects of individual lives. The more of you they can make dependent on them, where you gonna go, what are you going to do? If it becomes punitive for you to succeed — if there are so many regulations imposed and so many penalties imposed on your success — at some point, why work?

If most of its going to be taken from me, regardless what’s done with it, if it’s given to somebody else, if it stays in the government to grow this. Why? What’s the point? What’s the point of going through hassle, taking the risk of hiring people if at the end of the day my business is no better off and I’m no better off than before I started it? This is the aim. The overall aim is elites versus common. They’re all the elites. They’ll take care of themselves. They’ll be living fat, dumb, and happy lives like Michelle Obama sitting up there in suite 23-M of the Waldorf towers with her hors d’oeuvres and her lobster and her champagne, and you’re going to be out there begging for crumbs and hoping that what you end up with is sufficient. They’ve got a lot of people that think they’ll get their health care paid for in this way and so forth. This is what they’re all about.

So they’ve got you thinking they’re going to go for the super rich. They’re going to go for everybody. They’re going to go for the achievers. And, by the way, they’re even going to go for people who dream of achieving, and that was Joe’s great sin. Joe the Plumber’s great sin was having a dream to improve his life. They have to go destroy this guy. They will not research any of Obama’s relationships or any of his alliances. They will cover them up. But they will go out and they will destroy an average citizen. What happened here? It took a plumber to flush out Obama’s true economic philosophy. It took a plumber to illustrate to America that Obama’s ideas do not hold water. More than that, it took a plumber to open the damn of resentment that has been under the surface for decades toward the media.

These people, these hardworking Americans that are trying to play by the rules, jump through all the hoops that governments have placed in front of them; do not like to see a powerful political figure insult, belittle, and mock an average citizen — and they don’t like the media ganging up on this poor guy. If the Joe the Plumbers of the world all laid down their wrenches and their hammers and their nails and their scissors and their trimmers and their saws and their tractors — if they all stopped getting calloused hands, sore backs, and eyes full of sweat from their hard work — the country wouldn’t last a month without the Joe the Plumbers of the world. I’ll tell you what, the media… Somewhere, I have the story in the Stack here. The media just got unloaded on by people at some sort of a fundraiser somewhere.

The media just unloaded on. David Corn, wherever he works now and the media for going after Joe the Plumber and not going after Bill Ayers. So Joe the Plumber finally unloaded on that. He unleashed this dam (D-A-M) of resentment that people have had against the media. And I’ll tell you something, all this jive talk about people at Palin rallies and McCain rallies shouting ‘kill him’ and all this. We know that the Drive-By reporter from Scranton made it up. But if there are any people out there shouting at anybody, I will bet you it’s people shouting at the media, not about Obama. This has been a godsend. The media has discovered how disrespected they are, how angry people are at them, at these McCain rallies, and even when they’re not at rallies. Just when the media shows up to cover some event someplace, it was in the right part of the country, the people are unloading on them now. There is anger; and all of this, all of this has been ginned up by Joe the Plumber, an average American who simply has a dream of achieving, that the Obama campaign (including its media supporters) have to destroy.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Joe the Plumber was on Fox News Channel’s Huckabee show on Saturday night. And Huckabee said, ‘You find yourself under an enormous level of scrutiny. How does that make you feel, Joe the Plumber?’

WURZELBACHER: It actually upsets me. You know, I am a plumber, and just a plumber. And here, you know, Barack Obama or John McCain, I mean these guys are going to deal with some serious issues coming up shortly. The media is worried about whether I’ve paid my taxes. They’re worried about any number of silly things that have nothing to do with America, I mean they really don’t. You know, I asked a question, you know. When you can’t ask a question of your leaders anymore, that gets scary, that bothers me.

RUSH: That’s exactly right, Joe. They’re out to destroy you for the question you asked and for the answer you forced from The Messiah’s lips. But the thing to learn about Joe the Plumber, it’s not just what Obama said in response to his question. It’s what happened. And the left made it clear they are going after achievers. They are not just going after the rich. Joe the Plumber is not rich and he’s not on board. Joe the Plumber has not signed on. And so Joe the Plumber is like anybody else, he’s going to be investigated, he’s going to have his life turned upside down ’til he gets his mind right. What we have here with Joe the Plumber and Barack Obama is a failure to communicate. And so they’re going to have to throw Joe the Plumber back down in the ditch or put him in the box ’til he gets his mind right.

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