RUSH: Chad in Spring Creek, Nevada. Hi, Chad, welcome to the program.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Hey, I’m 26 years old, I pay attention to news, you know, pretty attentively, and I hate to be the doom-and-gloom type, but it just seems like the way we’re going is trouble, and I wanted to tell you what I think is going to happen in the next six months or maybe the next couple years, and then I wanted to know what you think. You know, the politicians have sold us out. I believe that Obama’s going to be president. I think Israel will attack Iran. Gas prices will double. I think that will just severely collapse our economy or put it in dire straits. And I think the three possible outcomes that could happen is that while we finally wake up and have a political revolution or completely gut the government and try to get it back to its basic needs instead of expanding it, I think, you know, there’s the possibility of America falling as a country, like Rome. Or, you know, I guess I think the third possibility in my eyes is the rise of divine intervention, you know, seeing a rise of, you know, the biggest liberal that —
RUSH: And then the world ends in 2012.
CALLER: Well, I don’t know about 2012, but it just seems like we’re in trouble.
RUSH: Let me answer your question. I have a lot of compassion for people like you who think in these terms, and I hate to hear that you’re thinking this way, I really do, but I can understand it. I mean, you’re pummeled, you are pummeled every day with news reports that make you think this way, then you have real life experiences like the seemingly unstoppable increase in gasoline, taxes, a number of other things that make you think there’s no end in sight and that it can only go to the worse particular point and everything crashes in on itself and we start all over. Now, I’m not clairvoyant, and I don’t pretend to see the future. But I instinctively do not have that pessimistic a view of the future of this country. I look at our circumstances today, and I can find for you times in our recent past when they have been worse. I can find for you times in our recent past where gasoline prices have gone up identically in terms of percentage increase, and it caused just as much havoc, and in fact worse. I can remember lines at gasoline stations. I can remember talk of rationing. I can remember working for the Kansas City Royals where people actually did not come to ball games because of the price of gas.
That’s not happening now. I mean, these ballparks, people are still going, they’re still buying their Wiis, they’re still spending their money. They’re making alterations for it. I’m not saying there are not drastic alterations to lifestyle taking place. What I’m trying to tell you is that because of my advanced age of 57, I’ve been through these things. I’ve been through worse than this. The country is better today than at any time in my life previously, economically and with opportunity. So my attitude here is, rather than succumb to the fait accompli that you describe, I would rather do what I can and urge everybody who listens to the program to do what they can to stop. We are not innocent bystanders here. We are, Chad, the US economy. We are the US electorate. We do determine who our leaders are, and if we’ve got too many morons that don’t see things accurately, it’s our job to become larger in number than they are and defeat them. And that is the express purpose here. I can understand if you lived in Chad, I can understand if you lived in Zimbabwe, I can understand if you lived in some poor-as-dirt Third World country you might feel the way you do, but you live in the greatest country on earth.
Yes, we’re in debt. Yes, we have enemies circling us, not just the Al-Qaeda guys, we got China. We got the ChiComs, we got Russia, the Russians are trying to get their power back, the ex-KGB guy, Putin, trying to run a dictatorship under the guise of a democracy. We have our challenges. The point is that we need people leading us who are up to them and have the same note of exceptionalism that is America that we do. And, sadly, the Democrat Party doesn’t offer any of that, or very little of it. Can you think of a Democrat off the top of your head that’s talking about American exceptionalism? I can’t. I don’t mean to indict a whole party here, but I guess I am indicting a whole party because I can’t think of one Democrat who runs around saying anything good about this country. Not nationally. There may be some local Democrats in your town council. I’m not talking about those people because I don’t know ’em. I’m talking about national Democrats. I don’t know any of them are talking about the greatness, the positive outlook for the future, anything, I don’t know any of them, and as such I don’t want them anywhere around leadership positions.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Say, one thing. I want to draw a sharp difference, one sharp difference for you in comparing today with oil and gasoline; and the times in the past that I have been through that I was just talking in Chad about. When you go back to the seventies and even the early eighties when we had gas lines and the talk of rationing and percentage — dramatic percentage increases in the cost of a gallon of gasoline — even though that was happening, we had one thing then that we don’t have today, and that’s supply. All those shortages back then were contrived. There were no genuine shortages. It was just people playing games in the oil market, primarily. You remember the name Ahmed Zaki Yamani? He was the first Saudi oil minister of note. I will never forget. The world… I mean, this guy was on Nightline every night. He’s still around, too. Ahmed Zaki Yamani. He was on Nightline every night. The world was just begging this guy to explain.
We had all kinds of stories: oil tankers out in the Atlantic Ocean not being allowed to come into port; there were conspiracy theory rumors running around all over the place. The point is, we had supply then, and so the price run-up had something to do with things other than supply and demand. But today, it is the supply that is static, and that’s the big difference. It’s a huge difference, because there’s one reason and one reason only that supply is static, and that is the American and international left, which has done and say doing everything it can to keep exploration for new supplies of oil from happening. Now, all this talk about alternative fuels and all this talk about new sources of energy, I think people need to do some investigating to find out just how much of our daily existence is related to oil. For example, yesterday, I told you a funny story about trying to find gardenia candles. And it led to a number of people assuming I’ve become a metrosexual or what have you, but the fact of the matter is do you know that candles exist?
Most candles. I mean, there are substitutes now, but candles are a petroleum by-product: paraffin. Saran Wrap! Trash bags! A lot of things derive from petroleum and the offshoots, components of it that are not used. I mean, to think that we can get rid of oil and stop using oil, and that there’s something out there to replace it with? You don’t know how much of your life uses oil by-products every day if you believe that. You have no clue. And the Democrat Party and the American left — the worldwide international left, the global warming hoax left, all those people — are the ones standing in the way of the increase in supply of oil, and there’s plenty of it. Just, as back in the seventies, there was plenty of refined gasoline and there was plenty of oil, it was just being diverted places for whatever reasons. And, of course, the price spike was huge then, too. As I say, on a percentage basis it was just as large then as it is today, and it happened just as fast. But we always knew there was supply. Today, we don’t have supply. We don’t have an excess of supply. We’re using everything that we have. Well, we’re using everything that we bring out of the ground. There’s so much to get, decades and decades and decades and decades of it! Yet people are falling for this ruse and this notion that we have no future if it’s built on oil. You try living your day without oil, and find out all the ways you’ll be impoverished.