RUSH: Senator McCain and a number of others suggested a gas tax holiday this summer, a federal gas tax holiday. However, it ain’t going to happen and instead something else is in the works. ‘Lawmakers are quietly talking about raising fuel taxes by ten cents,’ by a dime, ‘from the current 18.4 cents a gallon on gasoline and 24.3 cents on diesel.’ The new tax would be 28.4 cents on a gallon of gas, and 34.3 cents on a gallon of diesel. Now, this is profound to me. Once again, Senator McCain has a campaign issue drop right in his lap. While Obama is across the ocean on what is nothing more than a summer camp trip, or the equivalent of going off and visiting some colleges with the parents hovering around, helicopter parents, and the Drive-By Media are the parents, ‘Oh, look at Barry! Look at who Barry met today! He’s going to set him straight. Barry is going to set Maliki straight; Barry is going to set Karzai straight. In fact, when Barry gets through they’re going to ask him to teach at their country!’
It’s just sickening. All the while, what remains the big issue? The big issue in people’s minds is $4-and-rising a gallon gasoline. And now when people figure out that members of Congress are planning on tacking on an additional dime federal tax to a gallon of gasoline, Senator McCain should fly out to an oil rig ASAP; point out how environmentally safe they are. Go fly to ANWR. Go to a nuclear power plant; brag on the technology. Go to the newest clean-burning coal plant in the country, brag about that. I think that Senator McCain, with the backing of Republicans, ought to start talking down the price of oil. Draft legislation, give some speeches, make sure they have photo-ops every day that Obama is on this European vacation that demonstrates where our priorities should be.
They should be here, and they should be about energy: taking care of business here at home, because the commander-in-chief and General Petraeus and hundreds of thousands of American heroes in the military are already taking care of business overseas! We don’t need Obama over there. Obama is not making anybody any safer. If anything, Obama is going to make our position more precarious if he wins. It’s a golden opportunity here. Golden, golden, golden! Senator McCain needs to lead a surge in energy jobs for the express purpose of getting energy costs back to where they can be. Talk about security? This is economic security. Our way of life is under attack by Muslim extremists and environmental extremists, and we need a surge here on both fronts. One’s already begun and it’s working in Iraq. Bush started another, and it proved that oil prices are not immune from market forces. The surge in Iraq was based on simple logic. A surge in oil supplies here at home is simply logic. There’s a way to do it. There’s a golden opportunity here, Senator McCain. It’s something that really you need to look at.
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RUSH: By the way, folks, one thing about taxes, neither Obama nor the Democrats are going to cut anybody’s taxes. If you’re in the lower 50%, everybody’s taxes are going up, and I don’t care what kind you’re talking about, payroll, Social Security, income, everything is going up. He’s not going to cut anybody’s taxes. He may give you people in the lower realms a couple more government programs. He’s not going to cut your taxes. He’s going to do everything he can to blow up the size of this government.
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RUSH: This is John in Indianapolis. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s good to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I think John McCain has to make a passionate case, if he can, that the original Iraqi invasion was the right thing to do, and that is the only way he can win this debate about Iraq because it seems no matter what position Obama takes, the press is going to deem him the winner of that debate even though he was against the surge which allows him to go there safely. Unfortunately, I think the Republicans have allowed the debate on the rightness or wrongness of the original invasion to be decided on the basis of the absence of WMD, and that’s a terrible, terrible mistake.
RUSH: Yeah, you trace that back to the administration.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You know the administration, the president’s the leader of the Republican Party, and everybody else is going to follow his lead on that. He’s chosen not to remind people of all the reasons we went to war. He made great setup speeches before we went in explaining all the reasons in addition to WMD, why we went in.
CALLER: He’s forgotten that communication is a big part of the presidency and that’s what was so great about Ronald Reagan — and regardless what you think about Bill Clinton, he was able to mesmerize people from a communication standpoint.
RUSH: It was all communication. It was all buzz. It was all spin. You know, the substance of the Clinton administration could not be measured.
CALLER: But I think what McCain has to do is go back to all the reasons, all the reasons we went into Iraq and then say we didn’t find huge caches of WMD, but Saddam did not destroy the WMD. He hid them.
RUSH: Let me tell you something. I have looked at polling data. I don’t find Iraq in the top five of anybody’s interests right now. What McCain needs to do… I’ll tell you what he can do. While he’s visiting the oil rig with a camera crew and explaining how important the oil rig is how he wants more oil rigs and while he’s at the nuclear power plant, he can at the same time explain why the original invasion of Iraq was a good thing. But to let Obama and the Drive-Bys define the news cycle here is a mistake. There’s one thing that matters above all else. Remember that little letter from Tammy May to a newspaper in Pennsylvania, her number-one priority was houses, number four was food, but gasoline was in there. Gasoline prices, I’m telling you, matter far more to people right now than Iraq. Iraq is old news. We’re winning. It’s not a big deal. The Drive-Bys haven’t been reporting all the car bombings and the suicide bombings since there haven’t been any. There hasn’t been any news about Iraq, actually, on TV, not much because it’s been good news. So, you know, Obama got sucked into this trip, by the way, with McCain challenging him to go. So McCain needs to head to the nearest oil rig and say, ‘I sucked him in. I got him out of the country. I’m glad he’s over there! He’ll see the truth, but he won’t tell you about it like I will. In the meantime, we need more of these rigs, see?’ I’ve got this written. I can handle this in five minutes.