RUSH: This is Joanna. Is it Jo-anna or Jo-ahna.
CALLER: It’s Joanna.
RUSH: Joanna. She’s in Steubenville, Ohio. It’s your turn on Open Line Friday. Hi.
CALLER: Rush it’s great to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: It’s the second time I ever talked to you in my lifetime and I’ve listened a long time, and I appreciate all of your thoughts, and I want your thoughts on this thing that has my husband and I troubled. The other night — well, not ‘troubled,’ but confused.
RUSH: Disturbed. A little disturbed and concerned.
CALLER: Sort of confused, yeah. The other night we were watching Charlie Rose. Warren Buffett. He was interviewing Warren Buffett.
RUSH: Yes?
CALLER: And I’m sure you know who Warren Buffett is.
RUSH: Oh, yes. I’ve played in Warren’s golf tournament a couple of times. In fact, I was on my way to play in his golf tournament on 9/11. We had to turn and come back right after the towers were hit.
CALLER: Yeah. He’s pretty rich, isn’t he?
RUSH: Well, yeah. He’s the second richest guy in the country.
CALLER: He talks —
RUSH: That’s pretty rich.
CALLER: He talks about a billion dollars like I talk about five. But Charlie Rose came right out and asked him if he were to vote now, does he have any preferences as to who he thinks would make a great president, and he said, ‘Oh, yes, I do. Hillary Clinton or Obama, Barack Obama.’
RUSH: And you were surprised he’s a Democrat?
CALLER: No, it wasn’t so much that I was surprised he was a Democrat, but I was surprised at the praise that he laid on them afterwards and the praise he laid on Hillary. I could not believe what he was saying. The only thing I could figure is, he was talking about all this money he’s going to give away or has given away and will be giving away, and he wants it all gone by the time he’s gone, and I guess he wants Hillary to help him.
RUSH: Well —
CALLER: Give me your thoughts on this.
RUSH: I’d be happy to. Warren Buffett is a nice man.
CALLER: Oh, he seems like it.
RUSH: At these golf tournaments, these charity golf tournaments, there would be a lunch, and after lunch he’d get up and speak. At the last one that I was able to attend, he started railing against the estate tax cut, and he told all of us that the last thing he was going to do is bestow his wealth on his kids, that it would ruin their lives. He was only going to give them a couple billion.
CALLER: (Laughing.)
RUSH: He didn’t say that, but that’s come out later. But he’s all for the estate tax. He’s a liberal Democrat. Now, it’s surprising to people because the left has created this image that all rich people and all tycoons are big-time, evil, mean-spirited, extremist Republicans. But he’s not that. He’s very liberal. He’s very Democrat, but —
CALLER: He sounds very smart.
RUSH: Well, he is. There are all kinds of ways to define ‘smart,’ though.
CALLER: That’s true.
RUSH: Mr. Buckley wrote a column about that in Playboy magazine back in 1985 or 1986 about do we define smart, today, back then in 1986. The task that he assigned himself when he started writing. Smart is an elusive thing. You know, there’s intelligent. There’s informed. There’s educated. I think Warren Buffett, obviously, is brilliant in the world of finance, obviously brilliant. His politics make me wonder, you know, what’s he missing? There’s a minor little contradiction. I had this story last week or maybe it was the week before, shortly before or after the Hillary Clinton, baby-sitting story on the pre-K-4. The major airlines have to pay the majority of taxes — well, the customers do, but they have to make the payment — to the federal government to run the air traffic control system. Somebody came out and said, ‘Corporate jets aren’t paying nearly their fair share, and there are a lot of people out there now,’ and the major airlines were all for this.
‘Oh, yeah! We need to share the burden. We need to get rid of some of our taxes and pass it on to corporate owners,’ and Warren Buffett owns a company called NetJets, which is a partial ownership plan that you can buy a fourth of an airplane, different kinds of airplanes. You can by a tenth. You can buy half of one. You can buy X-number of hours on one a year, and it’s a big business. It’s very successful, and he argued against increasing the tax burden on corporate owners because of the impact it might have on his business. So when something like that happens, ‘A-ha! Tax increases, they’re great when they happen to other people, but all of a sudden when they impact you, weeell, it’s a different story.’ You have to have a lot of respect for Warren Buffett, what he’s accomplished, what he’s done, and he is very philanthropic (for those of you in Rio Linda, that means he gives a lot of money to charity), but I think Warren Buffett is sort of like an argument that, you know, people out there saying that some of all of our ideology is genetic. Not environmental, it’s genetic, some people disagree with this, but I can understand your frustration.
How could somebody like Warren Buffett look at Hillary Clinton and not see the danger she poses to the very economic climate that allowed him to become the second wealthiest man in the nation? She’s out there talking collectivism. She’s out there talking taking corporate profits from Big Oil and all this. She’s talking about shared responsibilities, but I’ll tell you what you do. Next time any of you in Washington or New York hear that Hillary’s flying someplace to make a speech, here’s what you do. If she’s flying outta National. You’re going to have trouble because they’ve really tightened that down because of 9/11 and so forth. If you fly into National on your own plane, corporate plane you gotta have air marshals, or at least one. It’s a big pain in the rear. But if she flies out of Dulles, where the restrictions are not nearly like they are at National because National is right downtown. The next time you hear that she’s flying somewhere on a personal appearance, head out to Signature Flight Support at Dulles and say you want to hitch a ride with her because you’re going the same place. Because, well, she’s talking about sharing and the ‘common good’ and all of this, and next time that she’s getting somebody to give her a ride on their corporate jet, just be out there saying, ‘I’d like to go. I’m going where you’re going. I won’t bother you when I get on the plane. I won’t drink or eat anything. I’ll sit in the back. I just need to get where I’m going. I’ve heard you so brilliantly and eloquently say, Mrs. Clinton, that we all need to share, and we all need to work for the common good and so forth.’ This is made to order for her. See what she says. But as for Mr. Buffett, I think it’s a mystery to me how big-time capitalists can sit there and openly support somebody who, if you believe what she says, wants to really start whacking away at the capitalist system we have here.