RUSH: Let’s go back, because Obama will not let this go. This is perhaps the telling moment of Obama’s presidency and his campaign. This little 50-second blurb from Roanoke, Virginia, on Friday, July 13th.
OBAMA: Look, i-i-if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.
FOLLOWERS: That’s right!
OBAMA: You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, “Well, it must be because I was just so smart!”
FOLLOWERS: (laughing)
OBAMA: There are a lot of smart people out there. “It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.” Let me tell you something. There are a whole bunch of hardworkin’ people out there!
FOLLOWERS: (cheers and applause)
OBAMA: If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help!
FOLLOWERS: Yeaaaaaah!
OBAMA: There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.
FOLLOWERS: Yeaaaaaah!
OBAMA: Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges! If you’ve got a business, you — you didn’t build that!
FOLLOWERS: Yeaaaaaah!
OBAMA: Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
RUSH: Okay, I’m gonna put this Internet thing in perspective and to bed once and for all on today’s program because the government did not develop the Internet. They sat on it! It was the private sector that developed the Internet. The private sector turned it into a commercial enterprise. The government didn’t have the slightest idea what they had. They sat on it. I’ll get to that in just a second. The real thing to grasp here from this bite is what Obama is really saying.
As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times, he’s literally saying to this audience and to the people he hopes are a majority of the country: “The people who’ve succeeded and the people who’ve achieved and the people who have wealth don’t deserve it. They did it stealing from you. They used work or labor from you that they didn’t pay you for, not fairly. Or they ran businesses that cheated people or overcharged. Or they made too big a profit. They’re no smarter than you are, and I’m here to get it back for you!
“I’m here to equalize this. I’m here to balance this out.”
This roads-and-bridges stuff is just liberal claptrap. What he’s doing, what he’s setting the stage for is trying to socialize profit so that he can claim it. What he wants people to conclude is that profit was not possible, is not possible, without government first making it possible. And, therefore, government owns it. It’s government’s profit. He wants to socialize the profit, and that’s then the vehicle for going after everybody’s money via higher taxes, a wealth tax, or whatever technique that he tries. Now, he’s out saying that Romney… He’s whining now. He not saying that Bush took him out of context. He’s out there saying that Romney took him out of context.
He said this last night in Oakland during a campaign speech…
OBAMA: Earlier in the day, Governor Romney was at it again: Knowingly twisting my words around to suggest that I don’t value small businesses. I understand these are the games that get played in political campaigns. Although, you know, when folks just, like, omit entire sentences of what you said —
FOLLOWERS: (smattering of laughter)
OBAMA: — they start kind of splicing and dicing.
RUSH: Yeah, that’s NBC. That’s what happens at NBC. “Well, when folks leave out whole sentences.” That doesn’t matter. There’s no taking Obama out of context. In context, Obama’s mad. In context, he’s mad! “You didn’t do anything on your own. Who do you think you are? You’re no smart than anybody else!” There’s a resentment for achievement. There is a resentment for success. It is a resentment for success and achievement that all intellectuals feel towards capitalism, as I ‘splained yesterday, ladies and gentlemen.
People have always asked, “Why are intellectuals so anti-capitalist?” It’s a derivative of the question I often ask: “Why do people hate this country?” Intellectually I don’t understand it. Well, I had it explained to me a couple of days ago. Some intellectual wrote 2,000 words that I was able to synthesize down to a couple of sentences, and it’s basically this. Intellectuals define it as people who traffic in words, specifically the written word.
This is why people who speak are not considered intellectuals. You have to write the words, and you have to have your words published somewhere. You have to be a wordsmith. You have to be a man or woman “of letters.” Now, those of you in Rio Linda, I know what you’re thinking. You hear the term, “This is a man of letters,” and you wonder how you can become a man of letters. You think, “Well, you gotta sit around and you gotta write a lot of letters to people.”
So you sit there, you write a letter to your mom, and you write a letter to your friend. And you start repeating the process and you think you’re a man of letters. That’s not what it means. No. You don’t apply for it at the post office. A man of letters is simply somebody that writes all the time and thinks that he’s hot stuff for doing it. Letters means letters of the alphabet, and they know ’em all and they know how to put ’em together in ways you don’t. And they know how to create words and thoughts and philosophy that you can’t possibly understand.
They’re smarter than you. That’s the bottom line. It’s exactly like the stuff I read yesterday from the Washington Post. That’s classic. They’re smarter than you, and they think that because they’re smarter than everybody else, they ought to be richer than everybody else. It’s no more complicated than that. They really think that capitalism is unfair and capitalism is unjust because it doesn’t reward the smartest people: Them! The intellectuals in our society have to inherit it or steal it or what have you. They might have tenure and they might get six-figure salaries.
But there’s not a Warren Buffett among ’em.
There’s not a Steve Jobs among ’em.
There’s not a Bill Gates among them.
They don’t do anything, but they think they should be rewarded simply for their intelligence, and they’re not. Therefore capitalism is flawed. It really isn’t no more complicated than that. Obama thinks that he’s one of those guys. And they think, the intellectuals think, that Obama is one of those guys. So when he started saying (impression), “There are a lot of smart people out there,” he’s thinking of himself and his other intellectual buddies.
“In fact, there are a lot of smarter people than you out there! They ought to be doing better than you are,” and he’s gonna fix it. So, in context, there is a resentment for success. There is a resentment for achievement and a desire to punish it, particularly if — in the worldview of the intellectuals — the people achieving success are not that smart. Or if they’re not judged to be that smart. So a small business owner who has a bait-and-tackle shop, for example, or a gun shop? Oh! This guy could be one of the most successful people in his community, and that would merit him nothing more than derision.
He’s a hick, as the intellectuals look at it.
So Obama can talk about how he was taken out of context on this or that, or claim Romney left a sentence out. But the bottom line is: In context, it was clear that Obama holds a deep resentment for success and achievement. He’s got chip on his shoulder about it, and he aims to do something about it. So he says Romney’s twisting his words. Then he goes on. After saying Romney twisted his words, after he says, “Romney left out the sentence where I was talking about roads and bridges! I wasn’t talking about ‘you didn’t build your business.’ I was saying these businesspeople didn’t build their roads and bridges,” which is a crock, because they did.
They paid the lion’s share of taxes that built those roads and stupid bridges.
Here’s the next thing that Obama said…
OBAMA: I believe that the free market is the greatest source of prosperity in our history. But I also believe that if you talk to any business owner, they’ll tell you that what also helps them succeed — alongside all their hard work, all their great ideas — is the ability to hire workers with the right skills and education.
FOLLOWERS: (applause and hoots)
OBAMA: What helps them succeed is the ability to ship and sell their products on new roads and bridges and ports and wireless networks.
RUSH: Yeah.
They understand that they couldn’ta done it out there. Their ability ship and sell their products on new roads and bridges and ports and wireless networks. (Again, don’t let me forget, Snerdley, to close up this misunderstanding on the Internet before the program ends.) So here he is back to roads and bridges. This lunacy that roads and bridges and the Internet are the reason businesses need government to survive and to prosper.
So here’s Romney last night on the Kudlow Report. Larry Kudlow says to Romney, “Well, why do you think Obama…? What did he mean, ‘If you got a business, you didn’t build it. Someone else made that happen’? He claims to have been taken out of context. What do you think it means? Do you think that Obama is anti-business, anti-entrepreneur? Do you think maybe he’s been treated unfairly here?”
ROMNEY: The context is worse than the quote. The context is he says: You know, you think you’ve been successful because you’re smart? But, he says, “A lot of people are smart.” You think you’ve been successful because you work hard? “A lot of people work hard.” This is an ideology which says, “Hey, we’re all the same here. We gotta take from all and give to one another;” and that achievement, individual initiative, and risk-taking and success are not to be rewarded as they have been in the past. It’s a very strange and, in some respects, foreign to the American experience type of philosophy. And, by the way, we pay for government! Government doesn’t come free. The people who begin enterprises, the people who work in enterprises, they’re the ones paying for government. So his whole philosophy is an upside-down philosophy that does not comport with the American experience.
RUSH: Exactly right.
“It does not comport with the American experience.”
That is exactly right. What Obama thinks and what he’s doing and what he envisions “does not comport with the American experience.”
Well said.
RUSH: Can’t you just see an aspiring immigrant — an aspiring immigrant on the shores of his old country — getting ready to board the ship for the United States, and he says, “Mama? Papa? I’m going to leave all of this behind and go to America!”
“Why, son? Why are you going to America?”
“Because they have roads and bridges and a big government that did the Internet! And that will make me successful.”
Go down to Mexico — go down to Texas or Arizona — and find some people crossing the border and ask, “Why are you coming here?” I guarantee you not a one of them will say because of the roads and bridges, or the Internet. They love to talk about the poem on the Statue of Liberty that Emma Lazarus wrote: “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to [walk across roads and bridges].” Did it say that? It did not say that.
By the way, Obama was in the recording studio. He’s pulling out all the stops to try to make sure he is properly understood on all of this.
(playing of Obama spoof)
RUSH: The EIB Network, Rush Limbaugh and “white comedian” Paul Shanklin doing the vocal portrayal there of Barack Obama and a cover of The Righteous Brothers’ You’re My Soul and Perspiration.