RUSH: This is from, of all places, LiveScience.com: ‘Study Reveals Widespread Office Bully Problem:
‘The office bully has an array of weapons at his disposal, ranging from the subtle silent treatment to not-so-subtle verbal ridicule, the effects of which can ripple through the workplace. A new study…’ (panting) as we breathlessly await the results. ‘A new study finds that while nearly 30 percent of U.S. workers have endured a punishing boss or co-worker, many individuals would not label themselves as bully targets. For those who do, it’s not just the bully victim who feels the heat. Witnesses in nearby cubicles are affected and show an increase in stress and overall dissatisfaction with their jobs. The prevalence of bullying in the American workplace tops the rates found in Scandinavian countries and is on par with those in Great Britain, the scientists found.’ Here’s the survey. ‘[T]he 400 U.S. workers who participated, including 266 women and 134 men, ranked how often they had experienced a list of 22 negative acts in the past six months, on a scale ranging from never to daily. Participants then read a definition of workplace bullying,’
Well, who wrote that? We don’t know, ‘and were asked whether they considered themselves targets of bullies. Those who answered ‘no’ were asked if they had witnessed bullying based on the given definition over the past six months.’ So there’s a ‘widespread bullying problem in the office.’ We have the discrimination problem fixed, the glass ceiling problem fixed, now we still got a have chaos and tumult in the office. It’s still gotta be just tough as hell to get up and go to work — and how novel is this? ‘People don’t like their boss.’ How novel is this that people think their boss is autocratic, overbearing, mean, or what have you? That’s just human nature. How many of you employees think your boss is a blithering idiot and you could do three times the job your boss is doing? That’s human nature as well. ‘Are you saying there aren’t bullies in the office, Mr. Limbaugh?’ No. I’m just saying it’s nothing new. Of course, the story goes on to say it’s an outgrowth of bullying on the playground. That’s where it starts. Bullying on the playground has consequences, leads to bullying in the office. (interruption)
What? What? No. I’m not saying that. Snerdley’s question is, ‘When you’re saying it’s human nature, are you saying that there’s some validity to it?’ My experience, combined with intelligence, intelligence guided by experience, tells me that some bosses are overbearing. We’ve all had them. I’ve been fired seven times because I confronted bosses like that. I had one boss who was a pathological liar. He just made things up. I couldn’t handle it anymore, could not handle it. I said, ‘You know, Jay, I’m not buying any of this. I’m not buying who you know. I’m not buying where you’ve worked. I’m not buying what you’ve done. It’s all a bunch of smoke because I talked to one of your supposed best friends who says he never met you.’ Two hours later, I got a phone call from the owner of the radio station. ‘We think that you’re having some psychological problems and we need to let you go.’ So I got canned for it. These things are out there. I’m just saying that the word ‘bully’ is a new attachment to this, and it has a political context because of all this anti-bullying legislation in schools and in playground. It’s like everything else with the left.
There’s an endgame to this, and it’s always oriented toward people of achievement, people of success, people who have reached the highest rung of the ladder at whatever they’re choosing to do. There’s something wrong with them, and it’s just not fair. It’s not fair that anybody should have a boss. Everybody should be equal. That’s where all this is leading to, but the idea that there are bosses — how many people don’t like their boss? How many people think they could do it better? There’s nothing new here. My only point with all this is that all these new-found social problems that seemed to never exist before, have existed since the first human being walked around in the Garden of Eden. There is nothing new in any of this. Yet all these idiots in this country, these people, sponges that soak it all up think that something’s happening that’s never happened in human history before — and it’s a problem, and it’s bad, and it’s going to get worse, and they end up being in angst all the time and chaos and tumult, and furthermore, what does it do? Ultimately, it makes everybody feel like they’re a victim. It makes everybody feel like they’re victimized by somebody or something, and it creates all of these excuses for not doing well. ‘I can’t get anywhere. My boss is a bully. Well, I can’t do that. I can’t achieve. My boss is jealous.’ There’s nothing new in any of this and all of these are obstacles that countless gazillions of people have overcome throughout life in the history of human civilization. Study Reveals Widespread Office Bullying! I know exactly what this is. I know exactly. It’s a bunch of liberals behind this, a bunch of pantywaist, limp-wristed, linguini-spined liberals who are out there trying to work their magic and reorder the basic tenets of human nature, which is largely what a lot of liberalism attempts to do.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, this is fascinating. This is Ralph Reiland, a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune, and get this. ‘Only 6 percent of Korean eighth-graders expressed confidence in their math skills, compared with 39 percent of eighth-graders in the United States, according to the latest annual study on education by the Brown Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington,’ but there’s a problem with this. ‘The problem is that the surveyed Korean students are better at math than the American students,’ yet only 6% of Korean eighth graders expressed confidence in their skills yet 39% of American kids said, ‘Oh, yeah. Hell, yes, better than anybody else in math. I’m cool. I’m great!’ The Korean kids are uncertain. ‘Their kids are unsure and good, in short, while ours are cocky and dumb — not exactly a good position for the U.S. to occupy in an increasingly competitive global economy.’
Now, Mr. Reiland says, ‘[W]e’re in that position of unskilled self-satisfaction by design. For those in American education with an aversion to competition…’ Remember the 26-year-old teacher I was telling you about last week who said, ‘We’re pushing these kids too hard, Mr. Limbaugh. We’re pushing them too hard, too fast. We need to slow down.’ Remember all that? ‘For those in American education with an aversion to competition, an aversion to the little of winners and losers…’ We can’t have that! We can’t have winners and losers. Why, that’s too humiliating to the losers. So what do we do instead? We promoted the idea of self-esteem. ‘We want our students to feel good about themselves, Mr. Limbaugh! That’s right. We want them to love themselves. We want them to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m good. I’m the best,” whether they are or not. We want them to have self-esteem, especially, so we put self-esteem ahead of academic performance — and of course when you do that, you just obliterate the concept of winners and losers.
Now, personally, folks, I think this leads to the creation of bullies, a bunch of people overconfident about incompetence, people that don’t know diddly-squat who think they’re the greatest thing walking the planet. It’s one of the root causes of ‘bully-ism,’ which I predict will soon be a word in the dictionary. ‘Rather than seeing self-esteem as something that flows from good performance, [American educators] made self-esteem the first priority, assuming that good performance would flow from an inflated level of self-satisfaction. It’s like those no-score ball games. The goal is good feelings. Everyone plays, no one loses, every kid gets a trophy. It’s like the teachers’ contracts — no scorecard, no linking of pay hikes to performance, everyone’s a winner. It’s a mind-set that sees score-keeping as too judgmental, too oppressive, too capitalist,’ and if you doubt this, don’t forget this story. Snerdley came to me. He must have been busy screening calls the day we did this story, but this story is three or four weeks old.
Some Seattle grade school has told kids they can’t play with LEGOs anymore because LEGOs teaches capitalism and ownership and that’s not fair and right. Kids are building little buildings and cities with their LEGOs, and the teachers came and concept them aside, kicked the LEGOs out of the class. ‘You can’t use that! Why, this is teaching capitalism and it’s teaching ownership, and that’s oppression, and we can’t have that.’ So that’s the root of this. Why, ‘score-keeping [is] too judgmental, too oppressive, too capitalist, too likely to deliver inequality and injured self-images, whether it’s with pay or on the ball field.’ I’ll tell you something else about this. You see, in liberal worldview, what is the opposite of equality? The opposite of equality is discrimination! So if you have a competitive situation, the losers, in liberal-speak, and in their worldview, are automatically discriminated against, and liberals will not discriminate. They just will not. That’s the one thing that a liberal will spend the rest of his or her life making sure that nobody ever thinks he or she discriminates against anybody for any reason, and that’s where this tolerance comes from. They are the most intolerant people on the face of the earth while telling themselves… It’s like sort of like these kids that can’t do one math problem, telling themselves that they’re really good at it. Liberals by the same token tell themselves they are the most tolerant among us, and they are as intolerant as they can be of anything that makes them uncomfortable. Any word or sentence or thought that they don’t want to hear, they try to squelch it, all in the name of equality.