RUSH: Saturday Fox News Channel, Bulls & Bears, the host, Brenda Buttner, is talking with Van Jones, the founder of something called Green for All, which is ‘an organization promoting a green economy.’ Van Jones said this about me and the energy crisis.
JONES: Here’s the problem. The left wing had a crazy solution saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to go with corn-based ethanol. That’s going to solve our problems.’ Rush Limbaugh, I hate to admit it, had the right idea. He said, that’s not going to work. It’s going to drive up food price. Now here comes the right with another set of false solutions saying, hey, let’s drill, drill, drill. We cannot drill and burn our way out of the problem. The problem is that demand is going up, up, up. We gotta cut demand —
BUTTNER: Well, actually guarantee —
JONES: — change our supply.
RUSH: You know, can I give you a… (sigh) By the way, the theme of that message is I was right on ethanol so I have to be wrong now. You’re only allowed to be right every so often with liberals. So I used up my right quota on ethanol but now I’m wrong about drill, drill, drill. What do these people say when they say we’ve got to reduce demand? They say we gotta stop growing. We have to have a stagnant economy. You know, all of this, everything… There’s a story here from the AP on Sunday. I saw it late Saturday night. It’s just typical. This is the Associated Press, which serves 4,000 newspapers. They are the Drive-By Media. They still have a monopoly. This is a piece by two people, Alan Fram and Eileen Putman: ‘Everything is Spinning Out of Control.’ This is a treatise on virtually every news story and item that the Drive-By Media has used to try to depress you for the last six or seven years and longer.
‘Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift.’ They are not. ‘Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal.’ Not for first-time buyers. ‘Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism. Horatio Alger, twist in your grave,’ and it goes on. This is a two-page story when you print it out. It sets a record for concentrated, undiluted gloom and doom in one report — and it was all over the country. I did a search for it; 3,400 different instances turned up in all the different newspapers that posted this thing on their websites, anyway; Saturday night and during the day on Sunday. It’s just amazing to read this. These people are just beside themselves. There’s nothing worth living for, except — except — when you go to the second page.
‘American University historian Allan J. Lichtman notes that the US has endured comparable periods and worse, including the economic stagflation … and Iran hostage crisis of 1980.’ Uh, the seventies, it was, Mr. Fram and Ms. Putman. Don’t leave out Carter. The 1980s are associated with Reagan, you see. ‘[T]he dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War and the hysterical hunts for domestic Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Depression of the 1930s. ‘All those periods were followed by much more optimistic periods in which the American people had their confidence restored,’ he said. ‘Of course, that doesn’t mean it will happen again.” That’s the historian, Allan Lichtman. Then the authors, the writers of the story say, ‘Each period also was followed by a change in the party controlling the White House.’
(gasp!) Can I translate this one-and-a-half pages of drivel and bilge? If you read this and you don’t know how to read this, if you never had a therapist you’re going to call one. I’m going to translate what is probably here 750 to a thousand words: ‘Vote Obama.’ That’s what the whole thing adds up to: ‘Vote Obama.’ ‘Each period also was followed by a change in the party controlling the White House,’ (sigh) and then it has a couple closing paragraphs. But it’s just typical of the Associated Press to try to depress people even more than they already are — and then to, of course, blame it on George W. Bush. All of this is his fault and the Republicans’ fault. Now, what do you think would be going on here if gasoline were under $2 a gallon or at about $2? Even if gasoline were two or three dollars a gallon? The economy would be humming, would it not be?
People would have more disposable income. Food would cost less. Retail sales would be zooming. Travel would be cheaper. Employment would be up more. Unemployment would be down less. And America would be happy, upbeat, and on the right course, right? Well, theoretically you would think so, but would Democrats in the Drive-By Media, probably not, but at least individual attitudes would be a little bit more optimistic. We’d have a vibrant economy, great progress going on in Iraq, and the left wouldn’t stand a chance in ’08, right? You almost have to admire them. For years they have blocked efforts to meet our energy needs. Now they’re running against the economic damage that they created!
Does it sound familiar? They first dumbed down education, then they count on the uneducated to believe their own BS. I think, ladies and gentlemen, I have discovered a new political truth, and that is the greater the liberal failure, the more talking points they pile on. I mean, they’re turning out BS — Barbra Streisand — faster than they can be refuted. How many of you have heard the following: We can’t drill our way out of this. It’s going to take years for oil to come online; it won’t affect the price. It’s the fault of the speculators. Big Oil has 68 million acres of leases that they’re not even using, and there’s solar and wind and hydrogen and biofuel that we could be using. You’ve heard all those, right? So have I. Let’s nuke ’em one by one when we come back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, it’s the gasoline. You’ve heard this from the left. It’s been going on now for quite a few number of weeks. We can’t drill our way outta this. It’s going to take years to come online. It won’t affect the price. (This is drilling.) It’s the fault of the speculators. Big Oil has 68 million acres in leases they’re not using. There’s solar and wind and hydrogen and biofuel, blah, blah, blah. Now, before we start with the point-by-point analysis here, let me remind you that these are the people saying all these things who turned $2 corn into $8 corn through a series of equally wrong-minded Big Government schemes. These are people who have botched practically everything they have gotten their hands on, which is what I meant was by: the greater of liberal failure, the more talking points they pile on. The greater the failure, the more they try to pass things off as a success.
But for the sake of it, let’s go ahead and dignify these talking points as if they were meant to be taken seriously. ‘We can’t drill our way out of this’ is a popular refrain from all of the liberals and Democrats throughout the country. Okay, we can’t drill our way out of it. We certainly can drill our way into more supply, and more supply leads to lower prices. This is exactly what I mean. Liberals know this, which is why they’re pleading and begging and threatening to sue OPEC for more drilling to help them drill our way out of it. It will take years to come online. You know, the next time an energy expert like Barack Obama or Chuck Schumer says this line, somebody should ask: How long is it going to take for alternative energy to come online, Senator Obama? How long is it going to be before we get that plug-in battery that Senator McCain wants to pay somebody $300 million to invent? How long is it going to take for these windmills you people are building to produce anything significant?
How long is that going to take? The next time Senator Obama starts talking about ‘the failed policies of the past’ in the context of drilling for oil, ask him: ‘Senator, what the hell do you mean? Do you think the discovery and use of petroleum is a failed policy of the past?’ How many years until alternate energy produces and distributes the equivalent of 21 million barrels of oil a day? They say it won’t affect the price. Okay, how much will alternative energy reduce prices? Come on, liberal experts! You can call new oil to the day in a dollar. How about alternative energy? Well, look at ethanol. We know what it’s done to the price of corn. Can we expect the same thing from anything else that you ‘solve’? Yes. Anything liberals solve, the price is going to quadruple beyond what their initial projections are. ‘It’s the fault of the speculators,’ they say. Well, sure there are speculators. There are speculators in everything.
Speculators say that prices will go up, matched by speculators that prices will go down. The real question is: Are the speculators betting on supply and demand, or are they speculating that liberal energy policies will continue to drive prices higher? Just what are these speculators speculating? When Ahmadinejad once again claims to blow Israel off the map, what are the speculators speculating on? In that case they might be speculating, ‘Oh, my gosh. If that happens, there may be interruption over there.’ Okay, they might be bidding in price. When Chuck Schumer opens his mouth, when Barack Obama opens his mouth, when these people start talking about punishing Big Oil, raising taxes, taking their profits, what do you think they’re speculating on? The doomed future of American politics if the liberals win?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: That’s right, if he’s going to put the Big Oil CEOs on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, of actively spreading doubt about global warming, I mean, who is the most qualified in this country to be put on trial for that? Me. Say that again? Well, Snerdley is right. Excuse me just — Brian, there really is a problem here on the IFB. The volume is so low and that’s why I had to ask him to repeat what I’m saying. Maybe we’re going to have to look into it before the program ends in terms of fixing it. Yeah. That’s right, Snerdley, I almost was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for telling the truth about the stuff, but I lost out to a truth denier, Algore. Call us deniers. At any rate, to the phones.
We’ll start with Judy in Massillon, Ohio. Hi, Judy. I’m glad you called.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s very great to talk to you. You’re so on with everything. We had yesterday a terrible day reading the first page of the Canton Repository. We get that only on Sunday, thank heaven, and we just canceled it this morning. They had that article that you were talking about, the doom and gloom, absolutely preposterous article. And we were just furious about it. And I was so happy to hear you carry on about it today, because I can’t believe that anybody in our country today isn’t just thrilled to be here. It just blows your mind, absolutely unbelievable.
RUSH: You know, it’s a tough gauge. One of the things that happened over the weekend, I was getting ready to come back to work here after three days of blissful vegging, and I was going through some of these things, and I ran across the story that Obama is going to sit out there, he’s already accusing the Republicans of using race to criticize him, to attack him and so forth.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I got to thinking, here they go, and we always end up on the defensive. So now we have a bunch of people that have to run around saying, ‘No, no, no, we’re not racist.’ No matter what it is, the liberals are always on offense and setting the agenda and causing us to respond to it. It’s the same thing with this story. This story is nothing but doom and gloom. And when you read this story, let me ask you a question about this, Judy. When you read this story, did you at any time consider, ‘My gosh, there are people in this country who are going to believe this?’
CALLER: Well, I know people that would believe this that are doom-and-gloom people, and that’s the maddening part is that there absolutely are people like this and you’re going to have those people everywhere, and we live in what they like to call the Rust Belt, which is not really the Rust Belt. But I mean just, case in point, over Easter vacation, we took a family vacation. My daughter-in-law wanted to buy the new Wii game, which cost almost $300. We had to hunt, I mean literally hunt in three different states because we were in Florida, they were up here, we looked all over, you couldn’t buy it. My son finally rushed over to a store that said they would hold it for him, but this is how bad off our country is that a $300 game is —
RUSH: Unavailable, I mean, I know.
CALLER: I mean not just available, but people are grabbing them up the minute they come on the market. I mean, you know, don’t tell me that people can’t feed their families and they can’t do this. People do what they’re going to do, and we are so well off in our country, it’s just unfathomable.
RUSH: You know, by any comparison, and despite all this that’s going on, the opportunity of an improved future is still there, as much as it ever was. So many people in this country, the left, liberals, have for so many years found problems with the affluence and the greatness of this country, and they’ve been doing everything they can to tear down the image of this country in the minds of as many people as possible, and they have, as the AP story illustrates, willing accomplices in the media who are ready to do it. Folks, the Democrat Party right now, in this election cycle, wants you hurting. They want you suffering. They want gasoline prices to continue to rise. They want the price of food to continue to rise. They want you mad as hell at the Republicans for it. They want you to accept government-sponsored changes to so-called fix all this, as articulated by Obama. It’s a cliche, but it’s true. What’s bad for America happens to be good for the Democrats, and vice versa.