RUSH: Since we’re on this basic subject — and what is the basic subject? What would you say, Mr. Snerdley? I often ask the staff these questions and see if they’re actually paying attention, folks, because I know that you are. What would you say is the basic theme of the program? (interruption) Well, okay, yeah, true, market economics, indisputable, market economics. But why are we having to explain market economics? (interruption) Right, which is leading to what? Gas prices, which is leading to what? People are whining. Don’t take this personally. Certain people are whining, and when people start whining, especially Baby Boomers, the truth gets lost. When you start whining who do you whine to? You might whine to me, you might whine to government, or whatever.
Peter Schweitzer has a book out that’s a very long title. I’m gonna collapse the title here: Makers and Takers: conservatives work harder, feel happier, have closer families, give more generously, blah, blah, blah, blah, than do liberals. And his column, a little excerpt from it here today: ”Modern Liberals, Whine Connoisseurs’ — Barack Obama is many things — a senator, a gifted orator, and a charismatic figure. But he’s also a whiner. … Michelle Obama whines about the burdens of paying for piano lessons and summer camp for the kids, and the paying off the student loans for her two Ivy League degrees. … But the Obamas’ penchant for whining didn’t begin with the presidential campaign. Michelle Obama, in her Princeton undergraduate thesis titled ‘Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community’, complains of ‘further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society.” It’s a full whine.
Now, here’s the point. I do think that it would be politically potent and advantageous — it would never happen — for the Republican Party to actually target these people on the left for what they are. They are whiners. This is why the whiners are on the left, and Schweitzer makes this point. The worst thing about whiners is that they almost always expect other people to do what is necessary to make ’em feel better. They don’t undertake these things themselves. For example — and this is what I meant with my Baby Boomer reference mere moments ago — here we have a gasoline problem. A lot of people, by the way, are worried about rationing — according to polling data — more than they’re worried about prices. They’re worried about another shortage. People lived through it back in the seventies, contrived shortage. There is not a shortage. So it would have been to be a contrived shortage. But we have all these Baby Boomers who have grown up spoiled rotten. I’ve always contended this. I am a Baby Boomer. I know this to be true.
Baby Boomers have so much time on their hands that they can make their whole lives, every moment of every day, about them. They never had to learn early on in life or even now that there are things in life larger than they are, ’cause that’s not possible. They are the center of the universe. Their parents raised them that way. Their parents really went through hell in order to give us the life that we have, so we’ve had to invent our traumas. Attention deficit disorder, all these other things, we’ve had to invent them to make ourselves think that we’ve had challenges, life’s been tough. And, of course, these things are relative, but if you get an attitude that says this is impossible, this is tough, I can’t stand the pressure, you’re really feeling it, so it turns out to be real, but in a comparative analysis of what people lived through in the Depression and the Korean War, World War II and the Cold War, and defeated all those things, that was real pressure. They didn’t want to have their kids to have to experience those things, so they grew up real fast, and they wanted a better life for their kids, and they provided it on balance.
So here we are, things for us, Baby Boomers, have been plentiful, and in many cases, whatever we wanted, within reason, we got. Now all of a sudden it’s getting harder to get some things. A bunch of liberal Baby Boomers say, ‘Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! I want my gasoline, fix it!’ while at the same time joining forces with those who are standing in the way of finding more, refining more. So they whine and they moan, but they do nothing to alleviate the problem themselves. They will then turn around and vote for the people who have made them miserable, because the people that have made ’em miserable are blaming the other guys for making them miserable, and the other guys, ‘Oh, I guess we’re Republicans, and we don’t have a way to answer that.’ I’ve known golfers — because I play a lot of golf, as you people know — I’ve known golfers who whine about everything from the condition of the course to their equipment. But I’ve never heard one of them demand that the government tax everybody else to provide ’em with golf lessons, a new set of clubs, to go out and improve the course or give them a new putter. But that’s what Michelle (My Belle) and all these liberal Baby Boomers do.