RUSH: Here is Emile in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It’s great to have you on Open Line Friday.  Hello.

CALLER:  Hey, Rush. Thanks so much for taking my call.

RUSH:  Yes, sir, you bet.

CALLER:  I just want to ask you: Do you think our government is becoming the evil empire that the Soviet Union government used to be?  If you think about it, all they do is lie.  I don’t want to list off all the lies they make — they say — but every department is a lie.

RUSH:  Well, no.  To use the term specific “evil empire,” no, and I will explain why.  The Soviet Union was called the evil empire not because its leaders lied, but because they killed people.  The Soviet Union never let anybody out of the country.  If you tried to get out of the country, they killed you.  Most countries like ours, people want to get into. In the Soviet Union — all communist countries — they have to build a wall or build a moat to keep you in.

Like in Cuba, the Soviet Union have political prisoners. They’d put you in jail just for what you think if it violated the regime’s beliefs and tenets. Like the video guy, like the guy that produced the video that did not have anything to do with Benghazi. They put him in jail, purely — and it was a show.  The guy hadn’t done anything warranting being put in jail.  Anyway, what is happening, what you are actually referring to, I can trace back to Dr. Angelo Codevilla in his piece in the American Spectator.

“Ruling Classes vs. Country Class.”  I think even Peggy Noonan now has written a column about this in the Wall Street Journal, and what is happening here — and in this country it’s relatively new.  In much of the world, it’s the way things are every day.  In this country, it’s relatively new, and you can find it in cronyism.  In the old days — and it wasn’t that long ago — corporate leaders and business leaders, you never questioned their patriotic tendencies. 

You knew they were American, and they voted — and they did business with the government when they had a choice, and they ran their companies. Even if they were multinational, if they were headquartered here and they ran their companies here, no doubt they were American.  What’s happening now is that our leaders — and I don’t mean just the president; I’m talking about a lot of the elected leaders, but people in the cabinet, people that are not elected, people in the various agencies.

EPA, housing and urban development, you name it, they have nothing in common nor any interest with the vast majority of the people who live in the country.  They have a condescending view of most people.  It’s very class-conscious now.  They are an elite, and they know it, and they only have interest in what other elites think, say, and do.  There is a greater divide between the people that lead the countries and the people who elect ’em, or who live in the country, than there has ever been. 

That’s always been the case in socialist democracies. 

Angela Merkel is a great example.  To hell what the people of Germany want, she’s gonna import 800,000 refugees from war-torn areas of the Middle East.  She doesn’t care if they’re ISIS; she doesn’t care if they are sleeper cells waiting to erupt. She doesn’t care.  She doesn’t care what the body politic in Germany thinks; she knows better.  She’s got her concerns.  She’s got her cronies and their concerns, businesspeople, people that she relates to.  The same thing happening in the United States now.  Cronyism.

It’s more pronounced in people in Big Business.  For example, I honestly, folks… I could be dead wrong about this.  It may be my hope speaking.  But I really believe with some acknowledged exceptions that most of the CEOs in this country are like most of the small business people, and in the normal run of events, wouldn’t want anything to do with Obama.  That they realize Obama’s poison.

Because he believes Big Business, any kind of business, is suspect.  He doesn’t like capitalism.  He doesn’t like businesses and individuals that are independent of government and don’t want any relationship with government.  And I think small business people understand that liberalism is not in any way helpful to them because liberalism looks at them as though they’re the enemy.  And yet, today those people will put all that aside, if there’s a chance to sidle up and get favorable treatment from Obama because of a close relationship or fundraising for him or what have you. 

I think that’s what’s different.  I don’t know how… It’s not brand-new.  It’s evolved.  But it’s never been more pronounced than it is during this particular presidency.  And it’s only gonna get worse if Hillary Clinton becomes president, the distance between leaders and the governed.  But more than that, the attitude of leaders toward the governed to look down on us, to think that we’re nincompoops, that we’re incompetent, that we’re incapable.  And, furthermore, that we’re so dumb, we can’t stop ’em anyway no matter how organized we get. 

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Okay, folks, I want to expand on the point I was making right before the previous hour concluded, ’cause I checked the email, and a lot of people have told me that was a brilliant riff, you should do it again.  I’m not gonna do it again, but I want to add some things to it, ’cause it really does — we had a call, “Are we becoming like the evil empire?” 

And I said, no, and I described the evil empire puts people in jail that don’t agree with them.  We’re not quite there yet other than the guy that did the video about Benghazi.  But that’s not what’s happening to us.  What’s happening to us is exactly what Angelo Codevilla said was gonna happen to us, he said was already is happening to us, folks.  And I’m gonna explain this in greater detail.

JOHNNY DONOVAN:  And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH:  Righto.  Open Line Friday, big final broadcast hour of the business broadcast week, and I am your highly trained broadcast specialist, although I didn’t need a lot of training because I have innate talent on loan from God.  Telephone number is 800-282-2882.  Send an email, it’s ElRushbo@eibnet.com. 

The simplest way to explain this — and I don’t want to use any names in the off chance that I’m wrong about it, but it is my contention that all of these CEOs sidling up to Obama, I don’t think very many of them actually agree with his policies.  I don’t think we have a bunch of socialist, anti-capitalist CEOs.  We have a few, don’t misunderstand.  But I think a lot of people — and this is what’s different.  It used to be that no matter where you were in American life, wherever your walk of life took you, if you were a CEO, if you were an employee, if you’re middle manager, you were loyal to that, but you were also loyal to the country. 

If you were a businessman, your business practices were, in part, based on your belief in your country.  And I think what’s happened now since Obama — I think actually Bill Clinton started this.  And it may have been common, but I think Bill Clinton, by selling the Lincoln bedroom and virtually selling anything associated with his presidency to businesspeople, began this, and Obama has just expanded it now.  This is what cronyism is.  People who otherwise wouldn’t vote for Obama and think Obama is rotten for the country, man, are eager to do business with him if it will further their own business prospects and damage their competitors’. 

But in addition to that, what has happened is that there is the widest gulf between the elected and the people that govern us and the people who are governed.  There’s always been, I think, a strain of people at the top of any chain thinking they’re better than everybody else.  But there was always humility with that.  An acknowledgment, okay, I may be better, but they’re still citizens and they’re still my customers, or they’re still my neighbors or what have you, in the sense that we’re all in it together. 

But I think now there is an arrogant condescension among our nation’s elites where they want no part of people not in their club.  How else do you explain this eagerness for unlimited illegal immigration?  How do you explain amnesty?  ‘Cause it makes no sense.  It makes no sense that you would literally erase your own country’s borders in exchange for cheap labor, in exchange for future Democrat registered voters.  The pain that that’s gonna cause average American citizens you don’t care about anymore because it isn’t gonna affect you. 

You live or operate or travel in circles where this influx of illegals, to use this example, you’re never gonna see ’em unless you hire ’em.  You’re not gonna have to put up with the rampant crime.  You’re not gonna have to put up with people that can’t speak English and having to deal with them.  You’re not gonna encounter that.  And you don’t want to encounter it, you don’t want to.  You look as down on those people as you do anybody else that’s beneath you.  You want ’em here ’cause it’s cheaper labor for you or it’s a way to win elections over Republicans.  But you don’t want to be around ’em.  But you have the ability to avoid ’em. 

But we, everybody else don’t.  You’re opening the floodgates and these people are flooding cities, towns, neighborhoods.  They are being profoundly, negatively impacted by it.  You’re not, if you’re a member of the elite.  That’s the only way it can be justified.  If these people were as affected by it as everybody else is, they wouldn’t be for it.  But because they can get favors or invitations or whatever from the elite in power, fine.  And that’s what’s changing.  And it’s not just here.  That’s always been the case in the western social democracies, Western Europe. 

And it’s getting even worse there now.  It’s almost, folks, like you heard of the old caste system that exists in India where you’re born into whatever caste and you’re there for the rest of your life.  You’ll never get out of it.  Well, the American population’s always been able to have upward mobility, based on all these great things about the American dream and American exceptionalism, you know, the old cliche about hard work, ambition.  They existed here.  It was real here. 

But now people are getting to positions of power and getting close to positions of power not because of any achievement, not because of any accomplishment, not because they’ve innovated, just because they gave somebody enough money to get noticed or because they have agreed to support some leader and his nefarious policies.  But along with that has arisen this gap where the elites no longer even have any interest in what life is like for anybody else.  They just close their eyes to it and assume everybody was gonna be okay in the end.  But they are not inflicting any of the discomfort or pain, suffering, however you want to characterize it on themselves. 

Now, Angelo Codevilla mentioned exactly this in his great piece on the ruling class versus the country class, and one of the many things he nailed was that the country class, meaning the vast majority of the people in the country, the non-elites don’t even have a party.  They will no longer have a party to represent them.  And that is a result of this great divide. 

The elites are now comprised of people in both parties, and membership in the elite club, the establishment, trumps everything else.  Well, where are we here?  The Republican Party went through its process and found a nominee, and now that party, in large measure, wants nothing to do with that nominee, proving Codevilla’s point. 

Trump’s nomination and his candidacy is proving Codevilla’s assertion in spades.  They don’t like the nominee for whatever reason so they’re not attending the convention, they’re not gonna endorse, they’re not gonna support, and, worse, they’re gonna try to undermine their own party’s nomination. 

And who are they blaming?  They’re blaming people in the media, like me.  Yeah, it’s my fault, or the fault of who knows whoever else in the media, Fox News, you pick ’em.  It’s our fault that a real conservative didn’t get the nomination. 

You know what these people don’t understand?  They never have understood it, apparently.  I gaze out over my audience here, I don’t actually see you, but I know you’re there, I know who you are.  I have a deep, deep connection with you.  You all were gonna get excited and support Trump no matter what I said.  It’s not a chicken-or-egg question here. 

If I had that kind of power, the Democrats would have never won an election in the last 28 years.  If I had that kind of power, a bunch of Republicans, they wouldn’t have gotten away with getting as close as they got to amnesty.  I mean, it’s absurd.  The way these establishment people look at you, I mean, this divide, you don’t even have a mind of your own.  You’re a wandering nomad, an empty vessel, a sponge, a mind-numbed robot waiting for somebody to tell you how to think and what to do.  And I have never looked at you that way.  The exact opposite, in fact. 

So Codevilla, I mean, he was so right about many of the things that he asserted.  And in the midst of this, what’s frustrating about it is that it is true to say that Hillary Clinton is among the most vulnerable, the weakest candidacies that the Democrat Party has nominated in I don’t know how long.  The Republicans want to talk about what a big boondoggle that happened in their party with Trump, but let me tell you something.  Hillary Clinton is a sitting duck. 

And I’m a little frustrated at times that Trump doesn’t go after her primarily on her areas of vulnerability like I think he should.  He could be pounding her on any number of things day in and day out.  But he is who he is and you deal with it as it happens.  I don’t know what is out there that could have changed, but the underlying characteristics that have created all of these circumstances predate Trump.  The Republican Party is in the trouble that it’s in because of the Republican Party before Trump even decided he wanted to be president.  

So, no, we’re not the evil empire in the sense that the Soviet Union was or in the sense that communist countries are.  But we are divided, and we are more divided than we’ve ever been, along many different lines. We’re divided on economic lines, the elite versus the non-elite.  The elite with wealth versus the non-wealthy.  We’re divided racially more than we’ve been since the Civil War.  This is my whole point! The vast majority of these the last years have been under the leadership of the Democrat Party. 

And they’ve had all of this time to implement their utopia.  And you listen to Hillary Clinton campaign and she’s complaining about the same things that she was complaining about 30 years ago:  Health care, taxes, the rich, all this class envy stuff?  It’s 30 years since she came on the scene! Hasn’t she made one improvement?  She’s had all the time. She been secretary of state. She’s been first lady in charge of Hillarycare in the first go round.

She’s had every bit of chance, every ample opportunity to implement these great policies that she says are gonna give us a great country.  Obama, ditto.  Where is it?  Why do 70% of the people think we’re headed in the wrong direction?  Because we are! Democrat policies don’t work.