RUSH: We go to Nashville, Tennessee. This is Peter. Hello, Peter. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you, too — good?
RUSH: Good, sir.
CALLER: Hey, listen, back to this health care issue with HillaryCare, I told your guy there, I’ve been taking care of my wife for over 20 years through a health care nightmare, 70 surgeries, both legs amputated and $6 million. Never once have we received a dime from the federal government. What we’ve done is we’ve made choices in our lives that we would take only jobs that would cover her, we would make career choices that would cover her, everything was geared toward what we would do to make sure that her health care and our access to insurance was preeminent in our lives. Why am I being asked to subsidize those who won’t make those kinds of responsible decisions?
You go back and look at Ronald Reagan, he said, ‘Government exists to protect us from each other. It oversteps when it tries to protect us from ourselves.’ You probably have seen my wife. Mrs. Bush had her open up the second night of the Republican National Convention, her name is Gracie, and we work overseas and provide artificial legs to amputees in developing countries. We’ve gone on to achieve what this country sets out to help individuals achieve, which is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not life, liberty, and, hey, give us everything we want, get the shopping cart out and let’s go get it. It just rankles me that we are fostering a generation of people who will not take responsibility for their own lives.
RUSH: The short explanation and answer to your question is found in your cite: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. As far as Mrs. Clinton is concerned, those things lead to inequality, the pursuit of happiness and liberty. So now liberal Democrats are not about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are about mandating equality, mandating sameness, so that nobody has anything more than anybody else, because it’s not fair. So they look at you as not a role model and not as somebody who could show others how to do it; they look at you as somebody who is unfairly taking a bigger bite out of the system than you are entitled to, and they will tell people who do not have the resources that you’ve had that they don’t have them because you took them. And that is exactly how they’re going about it. And the Rasmussen people had a poll today, and I don’t know if you heard me say this.
CALLER: I did.
RUSH: Forty-four percent of the American people want free — we’re getting close to mob rule here, and you sense it. You sense it. That’s exactly what your point is, is it not? What gives these other people a right to get into your back pocket, or what is it that gives government the right to tell you that you have to subsidize them?
CALLER: Well, go ask those same 44% if they want a free burger at lunch every day.
RUSH: Ask them if they want a free beer, you get 94% on that. We have some teetotalers in the country. Right.
CALLER: I think that we, as citizens of this country, have got to step up and say no with a resounding ‘NO’ and say, look, we’re going to foster personal responsibility. That’s what this is about. It’s not about trying to get the government to — I mean, we’re not wealthy people. We faced a catastrophic illness, and we’ve survived it without having the government step in. Now, if I can do it, why can’t somebody else do it?
RUSH: Because they’re not taught to; they’re not inspired to; they are told that they shouldn’t have to because they’re Americans. For 50 years since FDR and the Raw Deal, the reason for the existence of the Democrat Party has been to create exactly the kind of citizenry that gives us a poll result that says 44% of the American people think health care should be free and paid for by the government, with no clue of what that really means.
CALLER: Well, people assume that my wife is a liberal, because they assume that if you’re disabled and have all these things going on that obviously you’re a liberal, you’re disgruntled with the health care system. And when she stood up at the Republican National Convention (I think she’s the first disabled woman, by the way, or disabled person, to sing at any convention like this, disabled woman, Republican or Democrat), I think it shocked people because she’s not about taking handouts, she’s about, ‘Hey, look, I’m going to deal with the cards that I’ve been dealt with and live a productive life and live a life of meaning.’ It’s very frustrating to me to be in a position where we have to subsidize people who are not willing to make the kind of choices that she’s made.
RUSH: Well, take solace in the fact that there are more people out there like you than you think. They’re just missing leadership right now. You mentioned Reagan. The American people will respond to leadership. You’re an individual, and you’re making my point. You feel frustrated. What can you do as one person to reverse this trend that you see happening out there? But you’re not just one person. There are more of you than you realize. I’m confident that at some point we’re going to beat this down, or it’s going to become so prohibitively expensive that nobody is going to be able to afford to subsidize the number of people. This stuff doesn’t work. It’s been tried around the country, around the world, it doesn’t work.
CALLER: Now they’re looking at raising the poverty level up because we have so many people that are poor. Rush, we go to Africa. We put legs on people — we deal with people who — I saw a lady carry her husband in on her back into our clinic who was an amputee. We don’t understand poverty in this country.
RUSH: Exactly right. But things are relative, and people who have never seen real poverty, the only poverty they know is what they’re told about here. So that’s the reality that you have to deal with, that’s an education problem, too, not enough of the kind of things that you learned are being taught, I fear. But, anyway, I’m not blowing smoke here, but there’s been a slowing down of this onslaught. We haven’t turned the corner in reducing it. That’s going to take a committed length of time, but we’ve slowed this down, and we will continue to slow it down with examples like yours. I had a story the other day about fundraising and how I think Obama has more total donors than all Republican presidential candidates combined. I don’t know what the money differences are, but more individual donors than all the Republicans combined. The answer to Republican fundraising woes is simple: conservatism. I don’t know whether you’re giving any money to people out there, Peter, but if not, if somebody came along and started articulating the things that you just said, you’d do what you could to help them. Conservatism. It works every time it’s tried.