RUSH: Dave in Billings, Montana. I’m glad you called, sir, and welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Yes. Hello, Rush. It’s an honor to speak with you. First-time caller, longtime listener.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. It’s nice to have you here.
CALLER: I appreciate it. Rush, I guess what I’d like to know is your opinion. Increasingly, I’m concerned about Congress is apparently too busy to be taking care of their own business. They’re so busy trying to be president, commander-in-chief, how to take over Bush’s job, that they’re not getting their own job done, and as recently as not getting any of their budgets resolved, and now going to a shortened work week. It seems to me they’re not doing the job we hired them to do.
RUSH: Yeah. I addressed this a little bit earlier, and I will expand on it. I think what you have here, essentially, is a bunch of Sixties protesters, anti-war types who have assumed leadership positions in the House of Representatives, and they’ve become the Sit-In Congress. They have become the Protest Congress. Now, at work here is the usual politics. In their estimation, you’ve got a lame duck president. You’ve got a presidential campaign that is underway and starts in earnest in a mere few months. The last thing that they want to give this president and his party is any legislative achievement. They are willing to stand in the way of his achievement, his accomplishment, on anything — from Iraq, to anything domestic — in order to prevent the Republican Party from being able to trumpet success as it launches its own presidential campaign in the coming few months. In addition to that, they won the elections in November of 2006, but they don’t have nearly large enough majorities to get anything done, and they are beholden to a kook-fringe base that is demanding fealty on certain radical issues.
Otherwise, this radical base will promote primary candidates to oppose the Democrat incumbents, and that’s why Harry Reid’s frightened, although he’s not up ’til 2010. But people in the House of Representatives are up every two years. I don’t think they’re trying to be Bush. I think they’re trying to get a lot of things done and don’t have the support and don’t have the votes. They don’t have the support of the American people to do what they want, while they think they do have the support of the American people to get what they want done — and, in the process, while they think they’re making the Republicans look bad, and they think they’re making Bush look bad, it is they who look absurd. Here’s a story today from the Sacramento Bee: ‘Voters’ Views of Pelosi, Congress Have Dimmed.’ Get how this story begins: ‘House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s own party is turning on her, apparently because of a perception among California Democrats that she has not done enough to shake up the status quo in Washington, D.C., according to a Field Poll released Friday. Congress overall is doing even worse with California voters, with an approval rating sagging to 30 percent or below for only the seventh time in the past 15 years, the poll of 1,201 registered voters found.
‘Both Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who became speaker this year, and Congress as a whole have fallen short of voter expectations since taking over both houses, poll director Mark DiCamillo said. ‘I think the reason for her decline and the low ratings Congress is getting is that voters here are not seeing any change.” It’s not just that. This is where these people don’t get it. The voters are, indeed, not seeing change, but they are also seeing a bunch of spoiled brat little kids masquerading as Democrats. They are seeing and hearing nothing but lies, rage, and hatred directed toward a man that is not unlikable. President Bush may not be popular policy-wise, but nobody in the mainstream of this country hates his guts. They do, and their supporters do. I tell you, folks, they have no idea how it is they’re coming across to people. They have lived for the longest time with this superiority attitude born of the fact that they were in the majority for 40 years, and during that time they had a monopoly on power. They had a monopoly on media power. They had a monopoly on a number of things. That monopoly is gone. They were so excited when they won the House back, and they were so excited when they got control of the Senate back! Now they find they can’t do anything with it. They have two of the most ineffective leaders the Democrat Party has ever had run the House and Senate in my lifetime, and it’s starting to show up here, and all these visions of greatness and achievement and embarrassing Bush, impeaching Bush, investigating Bush, and causing all kinds of tumult and chaos have not born out. They are miserable failures, and it’s apparent. Their failures are quite visible. They are profound, and they are simply ineffective. It’s noticeable to one and all, and they are aware of it, too. It’s not that they’re trying to act like the executive branch. Let’s look at this S-CHIP business for example. Let’s go to the audio sound bites. Nancy Pelosi is still singing the same tune on Iraq and the S-CHIP line. This is from late yesterday on Capitol Hill.
PELOSI: The annual cost of assuring ten million children in America is 40 days spent in Iraq. Forty days in Iraq, ten million children insured in America in one year. So we certainly can afford to do this.
RUSH: It’s not about affording it, Ms. Pelosi, and you know this — and, of course, ten days or 40 days in Iraq? How about all the redundant social programs that have way too much money being spent on them with way too much waste and fraud? Why don’t you go get the money from there? We’re talking about US national security you want to endanger! We’re on the threshold of victory, and she wants to snatch it. She wants to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — and this old line? She used this line two or three weeks ago. This is not inspiring her side. It’s not inspiring the American people, this kind of shock, ultra-left-wing liberalism. The S-CHIP program, by the way, if you look at all the polls on it, the message got out. The Drive-By Media monopoly is over. Once the American people found out that the S-CHIP program she’s talking about is not just poor children. It’s ‘children’ up to the age of 25. It’s families with three or four times the poverty level of income! That’s not what the American people want a health program ‘for poor kids’ to be about. This is nothing more than — what’s the old phrase? — the camel getting its nose under the tent? If somebody said today that if they got the S-CHIP program and they got Medicare and Medicaid on the other end, then they’ve got the middle class surrounded, and all that’s left to get national socialized medicine is to find your way into the middle class.
Well, this was a stealth way of doing it. Now, the real question is this: Do the Democrats really want this program to pass? Do they really want the override to pass? See, I don’t think — and the dirty little secret is, folks, the Democrats don’t care about ‘the children.’ ‘The children’ are merely the vehicle in which they drive in order to get this thing down the road to accomplish what they want to accomplish. What they want to accomplish is to embarrass the president and to be able to cast Republicans as against the children, particularly against the poor children because that’s their cliché, and it’s the cliché that’s been in their playbook for 40 years. Republicans hate the poor. Republicans hate minorities. Republicans hate this. Republicans only love the rich. Those things don’t fly anymore. The class-envy business is something that hadn’t really been that successful for them for quite a while. Yet it’s the only thing they know how to play, the only card they know how to play. Once the American people found out about it, the thing was up. But what they really want, they don’t want this to pass. They’re not trying to get this done for the kids. They’re trying to get this done for themselves. They want this as an election issue for all of next year. Here’s Ted Kennedy, wailing and moaning on the Senate floor just this morning.
KENNEDY: The White House has called upon the supporters of SCHIP to compromise, and compromise, and compromise, and we have. But this much is clear. We will not compromise the future of a generation of American children, just because they come from the working poor. In May of this year, amid statements from the president that SCHIP should put kids first, his administration said yes to 39,000 adults in Wisconsin! But now they want to say no! The White House is now shocked — shocked! — to discover that adults are covered under SCHIP.
RUSH: White House is shocked — shocked — to discover that… But it’s a poor children’s program! So they’re still wailing and moaning about it, and they know that the president’s not going to go along with the compromise because the compromise is not really a compromise. What I laughed about with this, when the Democrats came up with the idea, ‘Well, we’ll come up with a compromise and give Republicans in the House a chance to save face, because it’s Republicans who embarrass themselves by not supporting this thing because they hate the kids.’ The president and the Republicans are not falling for it and so the Democrats are all doing this. Ted Kennedy’s speech here is just a preview of what you’re going to hear, in modified form, in campaign ads all of next year. This is exactly what the Democrats want out of it. They don’t care about kids. I want to say something about class envy here, too. You know, the Democrats have had this class-envy card that they’ve played all the time — the rich — and they still do. Tax cuts for the rich. Go after Big Oil. Go after Big Pharmaceutical. Go after Big Retail, Big Fast Food, whoever.
They’re always trying to tell the little guy out there that they, the Democrats, are going to get even with these evil rich people who are stealing everything and they’re going to make ’em pay. They’re going to really inflict a lot of pain on them. But I want to share with you some thoughts here, my friends, on why class envy is not only a waste of time, but it’s actually counterproductive. Let me ask you a question. What is the incentive that drives entrepreneurs and inventors to find new, and innovative, and cheaper ways of providing goods and services and making a product? What is the driving force? Profit! Exactly right. The hope of making a profit. That does not mean somebody’s heartless. It doesn’t mean somebody’s cold and cruel. It means somebody wants to go into business for something, a reason that they love, provide a service, a product or whatever, and they want it to be worth their while financially. The idea that people want to improve their financial circumstances is somehow sin, is absurd. Yet that’s what the Democrats want you to believe. If everybody in a society — and this has been tried, and it’s failed miserably — if everyone received the same amount of money, income, no matter how productive or inventive they were, there would be no incentive to do the things necessary to grow the economy or to stand out above anybody else.
If you are going to make whatever everybody else makes, why should you work harder, if there’s not going to be some reward? It’s depressing. It does not advance prosperity in any way, shape, manner, or form. Therefore, I would submit to you that it is good for society when there are large differences in income between the upper and middle classes. It is healthy that these differences, these gaps exist, because it means that there is still incentive out there for others to continue to try to find the ways of providing more and even better goods or services, at even lower cost than exist today. Remember, the rich person only became rich through the willing participation of millions of people who, on a daily basis, give up their money in return for something of greater value to them than their money — exempt the Kennedys who inherited it all. But when you part ways with your money for a product, goods, or services, you’re finding something that is at least as valuable to you as your money or perhaps even more so — and, for this reason, the great wealth of a few people is just a tiny reflection of the much greater benefits that the whole economy has experienced.
So the middle class, as well as the poor, need to be thankful that there is this gap because it’s something to shoot for. It’s an incentive. It’s something to shoot for, to be part of. This, by the way, this does not just apply to millionaires and billionaires. It applies to somebody that makes only $30,000 a year, because, if you make 30, I guarantee you you’re ‘rich’ in the eyes of somebody else. If you make 75, you’re rich in the eyes of somebody else. If you make 125, you’re rich in the eyes of somebody else, because there’s always somebody that’s going to have more than you’ve got. There’s always somebody going to have less than you’ve got. The people who have more than you have inspire you to get where they are, and the people below you are trying to get where you are, even though you think there are people who have more than you do. It goes throughout the chain this way, and it provides the incentive for entrepreneurs and inventors to come up with better services, products, at lower cost, and all of this is rooted in competition, and if that isn’t taught or if competition is taught as something evil and bad, then the people who are taught that are being done a great disservice.