RUSH: As many of you people know, I am singularly and solely responsible for placing into the public domain the name of Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, as a high-ranking vice presidential nominee and choice for Senator McCain to look at. H.R., Esquire magazine wants to talk to me about this? I just remembered this, Esquire magazine for their October issue? Seventy-five most influential, and I’m not one of the 75; it’s Jindal that’s one of the 75, and they want my thoughts on Jindal? I know I put him out there in the national sphere in this way, but October, I mean the vice presidential nominee will have been chosen by then. And there’s an interesting piece today by The Prowler at the AmericanSpectator.org: ‘Word out of the Sedona auditions for GOP vice-presidential nominee is that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal at the very least wowed other guests over the weekend with his grasp of policy and the need for change inside the Republican Party. ‘He was the only one who seemed to understand that we have to get back to innovative public policies that don’t stray far from our conservative values,’ says a source with knowledge of the weekend. ‘He was the star of the weekend without really trying.”
Now, something about this is just overwhelmingly confusing to me. I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense, because McCain is not projecting himself in this manner. McCain is not projecting himself as somebody who can change inside the Republican Party and take it back to a more conservative entity. McCain’s doing just the exact opposite. And yet Jindal goes out there, according to this report, and causes everybody to do back flips. I would think it would scare ’em. I would think, ‘Oh, no, this is not what we’re looking for,’ because the McCain campaign is doing everything it can to get away from conservatism, at least the kind that Bobby Jindal represents. ‘In the run-up to the Memorial Weekend getaway, McCain campaign aides insisted that while Jindal is under heavy consideration, the party might be better served to have him as a highly visible governor for the next several years. But Jindal apparently saw the opportunity and made the most of it.’
Now, he’s publicly saying he doesn’t want it; he’s got too much work to do in Louisiana; he’s pretty young, 36-years-old. But I read this and it stunned me. We’ve got some insider, knowledge of the weekend, somebody at McCain’s place, ‘he was the only one,’ presumably includes McCain, ‘who seemed to understand that we have to get back to innovative public policies that don’t stray far from conservative values?’ Would that not be a great thing for the nominee to try? And of course I’m sure, ladies and gentlemen, that you’ve heard all about the contretemps going on between McCain and Obama over the visit to Iraq. The Republican National Committee and it’s website making a big deal out of this, McCain making a big deal out of this. Last night in Beverly Hills before heading to a fundraiser, McCain spoke to reporters about the news that Obama’s considering a trip to Iraq now. Here’s what McCain said.
MCCAIN: I certainly was just a short time ago glad to hear that Senator Obama is now, quote, considering a trip to Iraq. It’s long overdue. It’s been 871 days since he was there.
RUSH: Last night on an airplane, reporters then confronted Obama.
OBAMA: I was asked about the Republicans trying to make an issue of frequency of visiting Iraq. And what I said was that the Republicans don’t have a strong position to argue from when it comes to substance. Their foreign policy has been a failure over the last eight years.
RUSH: What the hell is he talking about? This man is vacant. This man is vapid, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, one of the stories coming out of Iraq is the overwhelming success that has taken place there, particularly in the last year. So they think at the Republican Party they’ve scored some big points here by causing Obama to flip-flop and say go over there. It was Lindsey Grahamnesty’s idea you remember for Obama to go with McCain. There was no way Obama was going to do that. But he has flip-flopped, said he might now go. Now, in the Washington Post today, this story: ”For McCain, A Switch On Telecom Immunity? Recent Statements Signal Deeper Privacy Concerns’ — A top lawyer for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign said telecommunications companies should be forced to explain their role in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program as a condition for legal immunity for past wiretapping, a statement that stands in marked contrast to positions taken by President Bush, McCain and other Republicans in Congress. ‘There would need to be hearings, real hearings, to find out what actually happened, what harms actually occurred, rather than some sort of sweeping of things under the rug,’ Chuck Fish, a former vice president and chief patent counsel at Time Warner, said last week.’
Let’s cut to the chase on this. The administration reached out to these telecommunications companies in time of war for the FISA program looking for phone calls overseas into the United States that might be related to future terrorist attacks. The telecoms, in an act of patriotism, said, ‘Okay, here you go, here’s what you want.’ Everybody started raising hell about this because it was always miscast as Bush spying on the American people with the telecoms assisting. There is so much revolutionist history and so much lying going on about this. Now all of a sudden McCain, one of his top lawyers, said that these telecom companies ought to be forced to explain their role. Let me tell you who ought to be forced to explain their role. Once again, members of Congress get to sit here as bystanders and spectators as though they had nothing to do with this, and then they get to get into the bottom of it and find out what really went on. This is classic. I’ll tell you, Senator McCain, instead of asking Obama to accompany you to Iraq to see the progress we’re making, I’ve got another idea. Why don’t you, Senator McCain, take a tour of all the great businesses in this country, the businesses that make this country work and learn how they do it. Take a visit to ExxonMobil; go visit General Motors; go visit Merck. See how people are trying to destroy them, on and on.
What is this constant or frequent need to attack private industry? It’s almost as severe on occasion as Obama. What did McCain say recently? He’s against obscene profits, excess profits, he’s going to go out and do whatever he can to stop ’em. I don’t know if he’s ever made a profit. I don’t know if he’s ever run a business. But this indicates to me a lack of appreciation for what the vast majority of Americans do. Who is it that works at these corporations, for crying out loud? We all get sick and tired of a lot of things. I am getting sick and tired of these never-ending attacks on our private sector, today the telecoms over this stupid warrantless wiretap business. Just show a little respect for the civilians in this country, the citizens of this country. They work very hard every day. The people who make this country work are not in Washington; they’re out in flyover country. They are everywhere, and they’re working hard every day to create wealth and opportunity, societal stability. If you go see what they do, you would understand how this country works. But instead you end up having to trash the private sector. You trade in socialist catch phrases about profiteering and conspiracies and so forth, massive Big-Government ideas like cap-and-trade, a deal with global warming is proposed, which represent a total ignorance of economics and how it works.
This cap-and-trade business to stop a hoax — by the way, have you heard this? La Scala, the great opera house in Italy, is going to produce Gore’s movie as an opera, An Inconvenient Truth. Who’s going to sing the aria? What is the aria going to be? Can’t you wait to see the stage sets for this? Hope the ice they get melts and floods the whole opera house. But this cap-and-trade business that Obama’s supporting and McCain’s supporting is a terrible assault on every business and worker in this country, and people who are behind this kind of thing cannot possibly understand or have any concept of free markets. So I guess it’s easier for Obama and McCain to both go out and attack corporate executives, but the problem is this is right out of the left’s playbook. You don’t attack free enterprise because you disagree with what an executive or 100 executives are earning. Who cares? It’s none of your business anyway. It’s none of government’s business what anybody earns in this country. And just because some people earn more than you think they should, to go out and attack the whole concept of the free market and say we’re going to stop excess profits, I don’t like ’em any more than anybody else does, it’s none of government’s business. They go out and propose policies that would destroy industries in the name of punishing these executives or attacking excess profits, or ending pollution and climate change or whatever? It reveals a terrible lack of comprehension about how this country works.
I mean, at least Obama, as dumb as he is, is smart enough to know that he’s advancing an ideological agenda. What Obama’s doing makes total sense. He’s a liberal and he’s advancing a liberal’s agenda. But Senator McCain doesn’t seem capable of defending our agenda — I’m sorry to say this — even understanding it. Says he’s a Reagan Republican. This is so hard. His substance on policy. You know, substance on policy is not judged by who endorses you or who you claim to be, but what you say about our society, our economy, individual liberty. Senator McCain says he’s against earmarks, which, I mean fine and dandy, they’re a symbol. Truth be told, earmarks represent a small fraction of government spending. But he’s for government takeover of private industry through global warming. That’s exactly what it is, government takeover, government management of private industry. That’s what a cap-in-trade program is. Do you realize 535 people who get reelected 90% of the time are the ones that are screwing this country up? Five hundred thirty-five people, 100 of them in the Senate, 435 of them in the House.
We might also take some of the blame ourselves because we keep reelecting these dingleberries. Every time they screw something up, like this cap-and-trade thing is going to screw things up, and I could go through a list of things. Charlie Reese has a great column about this today. I can go through a list of things that they’ve done, and we’ve done it here repeatedly: the war on poverty, the Great Society, all of these things have just ruined people’s lives. They have ruined aspects of life that they were trying to help, and they could sit around as spectators when all goes to hell, say, ‘Well, what happened? We gotta have an investigation to throw more money at it.’
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RUSH: You know, I’ve got an idea. We keep talking about language and persuasive language to use, ladies and gentlemen, and it has been brought to my attention that when I use terms like, ‘Why do these politicians, including Senator McCain, want to continue to attack the private sector?’ it might not be the most effective term, even though it’s quite accurate (the public sector being the government, the private sector being everybody else), but to substitute the phrase ‘the economy’ for ‘the private sector.’ So as to say, ‘Why does Obama want to attack the US economy? Why does Senator McCain want to attack the US economy, with the cap-and-trade stuff?’ Look at it this way. It’s a hypothetical, just a little hypothetical. Let’s say we accept the premise of manmade global warming. Let’s say we accept the premise. And then we say, ‘Okay, now we gotta fix this, but nobody wants to have the economy contract in the process. So just what in hell are we going to do to cause the economy to grow while we’re doing this?’ Because the principles and the ideas proposed by both presidential candidates would wreck the economy, would harm it greatly, would attack it. Just where do you think the innovation is going to come from, if we accept — and I don’t; this is hypothetical — the premise of manmade global warming, and we gotta come up with all kinds of substitutes in terms of energy. Just where the hell are all these things going to come from? Five hundred thirty-five dingbats in the US House and Senate are not going to do it, and they can bring all these oil company execs up there all they want, and they can ream ’em up one wall and down the other and it’s not going to do anything. It’s not going to accomplish anything. Like I say, it’s time for Big Oil execs to have their own hearings with 535 members of Congress and say, ‘What the hell are you doing standing in the way of us doing our business?’
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RUSH: A couple of interesting polls. First off, Gallup poll. It’s an energy poll. It’s out today on gasoline prices. It has some interesting findings. Americans want increased domestic production, even if it means opening areas that are now off limits. The Gallup poll found the majority of 57% to 41% of Americans support drilling in US coastal and wilderness areas, which are now off limits. By comparison, by the way, in a more specific Gallup poll taken in March three years ago; a majority of Americans, 53%, was opposed to opening ANWR for oil production. So there has been a big shift. Despite the onslaught from the Drive-By Media and both presidential candidates, an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose rationing. A slight majority, 53%, support price controls on gasoline, but an overwhelming majority, 79%, oppose the rationing of gasoline that would result from price controls, and unlike some in Congress, most Americans don’t blame Big Oil. Despite recent high-profile hearings with oil company executives, the percentage of Americans blaming the oil companies for skyrocketing gas prices fell from 34% to 20%.
That’s the Gallup poll. Now, here’s another one. This poll is the National Center for Public Policy Research. Their poll found that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose Warner-Lieberman, the cap-and-trade bill that attacks the US economy when they learned about the impact on gasoline and electricity prices. Sixty-five percent of Americans reject spending even a penny more for gasoline in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Does this jibe with what you think? This kind of surprises me. Sixty-five percent of Americans — this is the National Center for Public Policy Research poll — reject spending even a penny more for gasoline in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Seventy-one percent of Americans reject spending more for electricity, with 16% opposing spending any more than 12% extra for electricity. When gasoline and electricity price increases are taken together, 90% of the American people reject Lieberman-Warner’s plan and its costs, even at the low range of the projecting costs. Now, I think this poll is a bit different than most other standard Drive-By Media polls, because what the National Center for Public Policy Research did is they went out and said, ‘Okay, here’s what Warner-Lieberman will do, and here’s what it’s going to cost you.’
Then they asked the question, ‘Do you support paying higher gasoline prices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?’ Sixty-five percent of the American people said no. The Gallup poll, I don’t know how this one was conducted. I’ve got the full poll. I just haven’t clicked on the link to get the questions. But both polls surprise me because the public perception is like Vaclav Klaus said a couple days ago when he was at the National Press Club doing a speech, the Czech Republic president. He said (paraphrased), ‘We’ve lost. The facts don’t matter. The facts do not matter now in the global warming debate.’ Well, maybe they do. Maybe they do. I’m under the impression that over half the American people have bought into this. But I don’t think that’s true. I think all of the media has bought into it. We played those sound bites of poor old Juan Williams who had no clue, no clue that environmentalism is an ideological advancement, that it’s liberal. He had no clue that it was about an expansion of government and a huge attack on individual liberty. He said Vaclav Klaus raised his consciousness on this. Well, that’s good, you know, any time that happens.
‘Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive officer of News Corp…’ By the way, Senator McCain, he makes tons of money. By the way, Senator McCain, so does your wife. Your wife runs that beer distributorship out there. She makes a lot of money. The Clintons? Excess profits on their books and who knows what the hell else. Go attack them. I’m sorry. I’m just fuming. I just do not deal… I can understand Obama attacking the private sector; he’s a liberal socialist. I can understand Nancy Pelosi doing it. (pounding desk) I can understand those idiots like Ed Markey and all these others doing it. I cannot abide my own party doing it. I just… I’m about to lose my temper. Especially with liberal lingo: Obscene profits, excess profits, windfall profits tax. (doing McCain impression) ‘Yes, I’m for it! I’m going to punish those people!’ The whole notion of government punishing a bunch of people who do things that none of these 535 doofuses could do if their lives depended on it; plus these endless, nameless bureaucrats putting up all the roadblocks here without anybody having votes on their ideas happening in Congress.
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RUSH: Lisa in Sycamore, Illinois, thank you for waiting. You’re up next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Mega dittos from a piano teacher here in Sycamore, Illinois, and mother of five. It is such an honor to finally speak to you.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: And I am a loyal listener every day, and I want you to know that listening to you is like experiencing my favorite moment of every week during football season, Sunday afternoon kickoff. You give me that every day.
RUSH: You like football?
CALLER: Love it! Are you kidding? It’s great.
RUSH: So you’re a Bears fan, probably.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, everybody has to have a team, I suppose.
CALLER: (laughing) Well, my question today for you — and, by the way, I agree with everything you’ve said today about socialism. I’m always trying to educate my kids about the evils of socialism and media bias, which we can point out every day in the Chicago Tribune.
RUSH: Excellent.
CALLER: And how important our freedoms are. But my question to you is, do you think Obama and McCain plan on going after the obscene and excess profits of, say, the Hollywood crowd?
RUSH: I’m not sure that there are any. You know, they have occasionally the block blockbuster movie, but their box office is in trouble out there, Lisa, ’cause they keep making trash that nobody wants to go see, but every time they do a G-rated movie for kids the box office goes nuts.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I think they’re doing pretty well around the world with the latest Indiana Jones movie, but I don’t know that their profits are all that obscene anymore. I still get your point. We need to go after baseball players. We need to go after athletes.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: You’re a piano teacher. I’m sure you don’t earn anywhere near what an athlete earns because nobody is paying to watch you do your job.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: But some might say that their jobs are worthless. You get into a value analysis of jobs — there are people that do this — ‘Well, those athletes, they’re not nearly as worthwhile to our society as teachers are, don’t you know that, Mr. Limbaugh?’ and they say these people should be making a lot more than athletes are, the athletes shouldn’t be making as much. Now, Bill Clinton went after CEOs, they went after corporations in 1993 when he retroactively raised taxes. Clinton went after the millionaire tax. Any CEO that was paid more than a million dollars, the amount above a million was no longer deductible. You know what this gave rise to?
CALLER: Hmm?
RUSH: Stock options. Stock options and bonuses! Were never taxed in the first — and we know where the stock options took us.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: To more obscene profits and unfair deals for the big guys, but there were two people, two groups of people exempted from Clinton’s millionaire tax, actors and athletes.
CALLER: Oh! Very interesting.
RUSH: Yes!
CALLER: I did not know that.
RUSH: The bottom line is, we can totally understand, Lisa, Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat, attacking the United States. We can understand him attacking the United States economy. What’s tough to swallow is when our own party is doing it in terminology used that’s almost identical to what Barack Obama would say or Ted Kennedy would say. That’s when there are days it feels like I’m chewing cud.