RUSH: This is Joe in Paramus, New Jersey. Great to have you here, Joe. How are you, buddy?

CALLER: I’m fine. Thank you. Thank you for taking the call. It was great to hear you speaking on behalf of the working poor right before the commercial. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you do that. I hope you continue. But my main topic is the government shutdown. The president is going to win this. You have a lot of power and influence. So does Ted Cruz. So does Roger Ailes. But you guys are shouting into an echo chamber, and it’s a very small echo chamber. So please keep up what you’re doing, keep the government down, keep attacking the president. It’s gonna backfire on you in ways you can’t imagine.

RUSH: Joe, can I ask you a question?

CALLER: Um, I guess.

RUSH: Well, I won’t if you’re not —

CALLER: No, no, you go right ahead.

RUSH: Do you ever get embarrassed?

CALLER: Only when people hear me listening to you.

RUSH: Really?

CALLER: Yeah, really.

RUSH: ‘Cause I would think that you’d be embarrassed thinking what you think. In the first place, the working poor are championed on this program every day and have been for 25-plus years. Secondly, Obama’s not acting like a winner here, Joe. He’s acting like a petulant, offended, spoiled rotten little kid. I remember during the sequester right up to the sequester and when it kicked in, we were told that the people were gonna turn against the Republican Party on this, gonna be a disaster, you Republicans, you just keep going. Until it turned out that it didn’t happen. And from the polling data I see, Joe, even the lowest of the low-information voters out there realize that the problem isn’t the debt limit. It’s the debt. And that debt, fully one-third of the national debt is owned by one man, Barack Obama.

I started out as the working poor, Joe. I mean, I epitomized it. I supported myself constantly, and the working poor are the people on this program we champion each and every day. But this guy, folks, did you hear the list of people that he lumped me in with? He gets his news from left-wing websites and it’s an example of the partisan divide. What we have here is a guy who does not independently think. Classic low-information voter, classic: smug and overconfident and condescending, all the while being as wrong about everything as he can be, but thinks he has all the answers. I wish you the best, Joe. Keep hanging in out there. And Ted Cruz and I, Roger Ailes, and the rest of the conspirators will keep shouting in this echo chamber, ’cause it matters, Joe, and it works.