RUSH: Phil Gramm did not start a bank run. Charles Chuck-U Schumer did. What Gramm did was rattle the liberal world, and that’s who he was talking about, ‘a nation of whiners,’ and they are a nation of whiners. The American left lives on whining! They get up on it, they go to sleep on it, they dine on it. They vomit it. They are nothing but whiners. He was exactly right. I just wish McCain once — just once! — if he’s going to denounce, do it privately. You don’t have to go throw every one of your supporters under the bus, Senator. It’s not going to get you anywhere. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that people you need to vote for you, Senator, want to hear from people like Phil Gramm. Now, some people think it was impolitic, shouldn’t have said it. Well, it’s too late for that. He did say it, so deal with it. Expand on it, explain it, instead of denouncing the guy who said it.
His comment about ‘a nation of whiners,’ it brought on shock and outrage and of course repudiation from Senator McCain, a litany of liberal editorial writers and Democrat spinners reeling off every anecdote of every suffering American they could reel off in order to try to explain why people are whining. The point is there always are whiners. But we never hear the stories in this country about the people who don’t whine. We never get the stories with heroes. We never get the story about overcoming obstacles — until they die, and then they offer them tributes. You know, but people who make the country work are not out there whining because they haven’t got time for it, and we never hear about that because people like Charles Chuck-U Schumer and the rest of the Democrat Party want to dispirit you, demoralize you as quickly and as rapidly as they can.
As true as Senator Gramm’s statements are, and as impolitic as they were here in the United States of Oprah… Where do you think whining began? Well, I must admit, whining preceded Oprah, but whining has now become an official state of mind, thanks to Oprah. What Gramm said didn’t cause a bank run; what Charles Schumer did say caused a bank run. Schumer shot off his mouth as he always does. He released a statement to the press, as he always does. He caused California’s IndyMac banks to fail, bank was in some degree of trouble, but after Chuck Schumer mouthed off the bank suffered an 11-day run, $1.3 billion (billions with a ‘B’), and when the bank failed, Charles Chuck-U Schumer did what Schumer always does. He tried to pass the buck. He blamed the bank and its actions and the regulatory failures for the bank’s seizure.
Did he cry fire in a crowded theater? Did he report the emperor has no clothes, which he claims he did? He did shout fire in a crowded theater. What’s Chuck Schumer’s answer to the rising cost of gasoline? Sue OPEC. What’s Charles Schumer’s answer to massive trade deficits? That’s more tariffs like the ones that triggered the Great Depression in many people’s minds, and maybe even sowed the seeds for World War II. We’re not talking about some wacko with a blog here, folks. We’re talking about a senator from the great state of New York. He’s the chairman of the Democrat Senate campaign committee. He will do or say anything to load up the Senate with a bunch of liberals. Now, Schumer aside, ladies and gentlemen — oh, and here, New York Times today. ‘Government as the Big Lender.’ This is where we’re headed, and this is what so many…
I can’t tell you how frustrating this is because this is what so many of my brethren, our brethren in the so-called conservative intelligentsia claim to want. They want their government to become exactly what it’s becoming here; active, engaged, helping people with their finances so as to get their votes and so forth, exactly what the Democrats do. Saying that the era of conservatism is passed and it’s over with. And here, folks, they ought to be very happy with all they’re getting, because this is a classic illustration of exactly what happens when you have an active and engaged government in as many aspects of people’s lives as possible. The only people that ought to be happy with what’s going on here with this government are socialists. If you are a socialist, what’s happening here with the financial markets, the credit markets, subprime and all that, should make you very, very happy.
What are we doing here? We just need to keep nationalizing and subsidizing and insuring as a government? If we do this — if we subsidize every failure, if we nationalize as much we can of the credit markets and so forth — we’re going to destroy ourselves. If the government starts doing this. If people start taking risks where they know there are no risks because somebody’s going to bail ’em out or back ’em up, we are in trouble because then everybody is going to become a bottom feeder, everybody is going to just assume that their neighbors, fellow citizens, are going to bail ’em out. And that’s where the government’s headed here right now. There’s so much whining out there, and it’s an election year. We just can’t stand for any pain to happen. Now, I’m not talking about people who have been genuinely short-changed, screwed, or what have you. But that doesn’t describe everybody in this circumstance.
So the government’s on autopilot now: Anybody in trouble, we’ll bail ’em out. I don’t care if it’s Bear Stearns. I don’t care if it’s Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. We’ll bail ’em out. Both parties, ladies and gentlemen, are supporting this. Do you remember the TV show with Richard Boone, his name was Paladin, and the show was entitled Have Gun, Will Travel? Well, you’re too young in there, Dawn, too young and innocent. This was a show on in the fifties, was a western. Well, the federal government may as well pass out cards now says, ‘Don’t Have Money, Will Spend Anyway.’ They don’t have money. They’re running up massive debt and obligations for generations yet to come. These numbers are stunning, and the reason is that so that this generation does not experience the conditions of its own making. This generation being the Baby Boomers. Everything in life was always about them, is always about them. Their parents were raised with the notion — my parents, your parents if you’re a Baby Boomer were raised with the notion — of getting along with less.
They had to. They were coming out of the Great Depression. They had to fight World War II, the Korean War. They had to deal with the Cold War. They had to grow up very soon. They had to come to grips with the fact of getting along with less. They didn’t want their kids to go through that, and they succeeded. There’s not a Baby Boomer out there other than some liberal hippie living somewhere off of berries and tree trunks out in some forest someplace, who doesn’t want more of everything now, and wants it even faster. There was no such thing when we were growing up of doing more with less, getting by with less. Hell, now the younger generation is expected to have their $2.5 million house by the time they’re 25 years old. (sigh) Nothing wrong with high expectations, but when they’re not founded in reality and when they lead to you whine when they don’t get it, then we’ve got a bit of a problem.
So we’re going to bail all this stuff out. We’re going to handle all this. We’re going to grow the government, and we are going to get government. You’re going to be owing the government. They’re going to have been your salvation. You’re going to vote for whoever comes along saying, ‘I’m from the government,’ which is sadly one of the things going on here, all so that the people around today don’t have to suffer and experience the conditions of their own making. The Republicans whining here about conservatism, they ought to be so happy. I hate to be redundant here. I hate to be repeating myself. But, you know, all these enlightened country club blue-blood Rockefeller Republicans, ah, they ought to look out there and they ought to be so happy! Why, the government’s doing everything for everybody. It’s showing how activist it can be and how compassionate it can be. This is… (sigh) You know, subsidizing all of these things.
Bear Stearns, two stimulus packages here for The Recession That Isn’t. We have Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. You know, I remember when Barry Goldwater — you’re probably too young for this, too, Dawn, but I remember when Barry Goldwater — said no to bailing out Lockheed, and I remember when government said no to bailing out Chrysler. Lee Iacocca was on his own. And of course we all remember Gerald Ford telling New York to drop dead. New Yorkers have never forgotten it. I think we did bail out Lockheed. I’m not sure. But here’s the bottom line. We know this. We know this. It’s intelligence guided by experience. Big Government simply cannot work; Big Government has the potential to destroy our system. We have got to start weaning ourselves from this, which is why Obama is exactly the opposite of what we need and sadly Senator McCain is too undisciplined here on policy or ideology to get this.
It’s easy for these guys who work in government to run around promising all this money, when all they have to do is sign their name and vote for a new spending bill. It’s gotta be an incredible sense of power to know that you sit on top of trillions of dollars and as a US senator, you get to spend one one-hundredth of it, essentially; and you can spend whatever you want of it. It’s not yours and so it’s even easier and it’s a lot easier to spend it and bail people out than it is to give a lot tough love and say, ‘Hey, you took the chance,’ particularly when it’s in an election year. So what do we see here? Folks, we look around and we see Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Bear Stearns, the massive stimulus things, and now this bank system out in California. We are seeing the edifice of Big Government crumbling all around us, just like this gasoline price business, as I said last week, is a golden opportunity for the Republicans to paint the Democrats as the responsible party here.
Who traditionally has been the party of Big Government? Ha ha ha! The Democrats, the left wing. Look at what’s happening to it. I know you might be saying, ‘But, Rush, but, Rush, who’s in charge right now?’ Well, that doesn’t matter. I mean it may, in a political sense, if the left, you want to start getting into blame games. I’m not blaming anybody. I’m just saying what it is. We have a government out of control expanding rapidly. It doesn’t matter to me who’s running it. The theory that Big Government works is being shown to be untrue. This is an opportunity for our side to start making one of its fundamental arguments, i.e., limited government. ‘Cause if we don’t about get a handle on this, it’s just going to destroy things. It’s going to destroy our system. It’s going to get to the point where nobody is going to be restrained whatsoever in buying things they can’t afford because they’re going to think the government will come in and bail ’em out. The dollar, oil, insurance, debt, all of this is government related. All these problems are government related.
And if we cannot accurately diagnose the problem and articulate it to people, then we’re not going to be able to address these things and win elections, and we need to do both. I mean, look at this. The market today, when they announced the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the market knew. I mean there was trepidation here and the Dow went negative for a while, and here’s why. If you start pouring billions of dollars into Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, it means they are failed secrets. And what are Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? They are the weirdest organizations in the world. They are private, supposedly private corporations run by the government, and they are there to help the people get into the housing market who otherwise may not be able to get a conventional loan at your standard rip-off five and dime savings and loan down the road, the banker, you know how people feel about these things.
So the government comes in, the old FHA. So we’ve got Freddie Mac and we’ve got Fannie Mae set up by the federal government. They’re supposed to be self-sufficient. They don’t pay federal or state income taxes. They are not regulated by the SEC. They have every advantage and still they’ve gone under. Still! Because there are no restraints on them. It’s the government, and people that work there think that there’s a limitless supply of money. Anyway, we created a monster here, folks. We can’t allow it to fail, now. That’s the problem. It could have devastating impact if we allow all these circumstances to fail, so it isn’t going to happen. But we need to learn from this, and we won’t. Individuals need to understand that these federal creations have put this country on the line for over $5 trillion, not to mention all the entitlements — and the extent of the problem here is mind-boggling.
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RUSH: Here’s the sad truth, though, about Big Government. The sad truth. This is what the liberals know. The more we see that government doesn’t work, the more people beg for Big Government. The more people beg for government to be fixed, rather than say, ‘This doesn’t work.’ It’s the one institution where insanity reigns, and that is insanity defined as doing the same thing over and over again that doesn’t work, expecting a different result. But this is a golden opportunity, I think, where conservatives need to speak out, challenge all these Big Government programs and things. We’re not talking about radical change here. We support weaning the public off of government ’cause if we don’t, my friends, we’re going to destroy our economic system. The dollar will continue to become worthless, it will create a huge crisis for some future generation. Destroying the dollar and the credit markets and the housing market are not ways to improve the lives of people. Can we agree on that at least? And I would ask who is in charge here. It’s an entity, it’s government. Both political parties are in on this, folks.