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How Did America Become Great?

by Rush Limbaugh - Oct 28,2008

RUSH: Now, I’m going to tell you something, folks. James Carville has warned of riots and trauma out there if Obama’s up by a significant number going into the election and then loses. And if indeed the pollsters get this wrong and if they’ve got it wrong all along, and McCain pulls out an Electoral College victory, I hope somebody tells these rioters, if they riot, that the proper targets of their wrath are the media, because that’s who’s misled them all along.

Folks, I want to try something here. We criticize Senator McCain, for example, in the debate he brought up William Ayers, and those of us who watch, ‘Good, good, good.’ He didn’t explain what Ayers is. He assumed that most people know who Ayers is. Now, for the bulk of this program and yesterday, as we have been focusing on Obama’s 2001 audio, just recently found, by the way, his interview with the public radio station in Chicago, where he makes it plain that he wants the Supreme Court or wants the government, somehow the legal system, to enact his notion of redistribution, socialism. And, of course, we’ve discussed today that some people may not know what socialism is, and some people might think it’s a good thing, what’s wrong with it? And to those of you who maybe now understand socialism, maybe you’re not quite sure about it. And I know you’re out there, some of you are college students and I know liberals are listening. We do not preach to the choir here, contrary to what the critics say. But I want to try to explain to you why this is bad as it relates to the United States of America, by telling you what this country is and how it was founded in somewhat of a detailed fashion.

I’d like to ask this question again since I have your attention. There have been populations of people organized as countries since the founding of the planet, since it was created, and since humanity first appeared. People have organized themselves in various ways: groups, families, nations. Now, the earth and humanity, depending on who you talk to, is millions of years old, billions of years old, and throughout the history of human beings, no group of human beings has ever produced the wealth, the freedom, the opportunity, the prosperity, the security, as Americans. The United States of America, throughout human history, is the greatest nation however you wish to define it, in history. Now, how did this happen? We, the United States of America, are just human beings. There are countries that exist at the same time we have, there are countries that existed long before we came into being, of course in Europe and Asia, Africa, Australia, the subcontinents.

How is it that in less than 250 years, this group of human beings called Americans has revolutionized everything about life? We’ve produced the greatest standard of living and shared how to do it with others. We have produced a standard of living unheard of and undreamed of even by people who were alive 100 years ago. We have produced a country where the occupants, the residents have the highest expectations of opportunity, security, wealth, all of these things, education, than any group of human beings has ever had. I really would like for you to take a moment and, when you have a moment, ask yourselves how this can be. And do it honestly. How can it be? And not to besmirch some of these other countries, but just to give you an example. China, Japan, Russia, the satellite countries, Rome, Italy, take your pick, France, all these countries have been around much, much longer than we have. And admittedly, people that founded this country came from Europe. Why were they not able to do where they lived what they did here? You realize our Founding Fathers were Brits. Why were they not able to turn Great Britain or England into the United States when they lived there?

Why did they have to leave these places to come here, the new world, in order to create this? Why couldn’t they do it where they lived? As human beings we’re no better than any other human beings on the face of the earth. We’re not any different whatsoever, in terms of the way we’re born. Human beings are human beings. How is it, then, that the United States has become the most powerful, and for good, the richest, the most technologically advanced, the most industrious, the most productive country in history, in human history? A nation that has liberated hundreds of millions of people from oppression, a nation that has — talking about sharing the wealth — a nation that has rebuilt Europe after World War II, a nation that turned imperial Japan into a thriving, burgeoning economic power of a democracy. We’re a nation that rebuilt Germany after World War II. All the while, continuing our own growth. We are a nation that invented so many of the things that have improved the quality of life for human beings around the world. We are the one nation that can and offers substantive relief efforts to other nations devastated by natural disasters.

How does this happen? When we’re no better than anybody else, when we’re no different than anybody else, how does this happen? The answer is very simple. Without being too esoteric about it, freedom is the answer. Most of the people around the world have not lived with the great degree of freedom that our country was founded with. And you can read it in the Founding Fathers’ ruminations at the days of the founding, talking about the industriousness of individuals and how to promote it for the common good. You can look at the original true story of Thanksgiving and find out how they tried socialism. The whole community produced whatever it produced and everybody got to go take what they want from the production, and some people figured out after awhile they didn’t have to produce anything in order to get something. It didn’t work, they changed it. Everybody was assigned a plot of land, grow what you want, grow as much as you want, and you keep it, sell your excess. Plymouth colony expanded like crazy.

The answer is freedom. The answer is also that our Founding Fathers recognized that freedom is part of our creation, and so our founding documents recognize that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and these are human rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. We all have these. Every human is born this way, with that yearning spirit. However, depending on where the human being is born, they never get to exercise it. We and our ancestors had the chance to exercise it, and they did, and they built, and they created, and they invented. And as a result, the greatest country in the history of humanity became the United States of America. And it is that freedom allowing each of us to use our own ambitions, our own desires, our own ingenuity, our own creativity, unshackled, to pursue our passions, to do what we love with as few obstacles in our way as possible, certainly fewer obstacles than any other nation’s people have faced in their lives. And we see the result. We see the greatest country in the history of civilization.

Why does this matter? Now we have in this presidential campaign not just Mr. Obama, but an entire political party which resents deeply all that I just described to you. They resent the way this country was founded and built because the way they view things is they see that those who worked hard and invented and were industrious and indulged their ambitions did whatever it was necessary to do. They worked hard, they got up before sunup, they went to bed at sundown, they went to school, whatever it was they had to do to become what they wanted, they did it. And, of course, some didn’t. Some didn’t have as many ambitions as others. Some didn’t have that drive. We’re all different. And so, the resulting capitalism here that I’ve just described produced some people that — in this country, almost everybody does better than anywhere else around the world. However, when just this country is taken as a subset of humanity, yeah, we have some people that don’t do well. And we also have some people who in our past were discriminated against for one reason or another. They were denied, at first, the same opportunities that other citizens had. But this country’s dealt with that, and those opportunities, however you want to argue, good or bad, the way we’ve gone about it, those opportunities are now far more available to far more people than even at the founding, than even 60 years ago.

Great, great progress has been made. However, Barack Obama, the Democrat Party still see this nation not as I’ve just described it to you. They see it as the greatest failure in the experiment of social justice and economic justice and equality that the human race has ever produced. It’s got to change. We have got to stop this. We’ve got to fix it so that everybody ends up the same. We can’t have people doing all that well while some people don’t, even though that has resulted not because people have been oppressed, not because they’ve been stunted, not because they’ve been squashed, because they didn’t have the ambition, they didn’t have the desire, but they’re living their lives, and they’re happy, for the most part. So we have the Democrat Party and Barack Obama who want to take every ingredient that made this the greatest country in the world and even you who are gonna vote for Obama and even you who are buying into this notion that some people have too much and that we need to take from them and give to you, you still expect what? You still expect a grand life. You expect a life of prosperity. You expect greater income; you expect a bigger house; you expect a second car. It’s just that you think it’s going to come from some politician taking it away from somebody else.

If Obama wins and if the Democrats implement this redistribution, what they are going to do is destroy the engine that creates all of this opportunity, and that engine of opportunity will be replaced by a massive federal government to whom more and more citizens will become dependent on their wants and their needs. When the idea that you achieve gets punished, and when you earn too much — could be a hundred grand, 150, whatever it is, whatever Obama decides — when you earn more than that, then your American dream’s over. The American dream will stop for you at whatever Obama’s magic tax increase number is. And when the American dream ends at $150,000, the American dream is over. Obama wants this. Obama wants a large government passing things out according to what he thinks is fair, and the end result of this is creating as many people dependent on a state government, federal government as possible so you’ll continue to have to vote for these people. And what it was that created the greatest collection of human beings in the history of humanity will be altered for who knows how long it will take to reorganize this and roll it back, because it’ll fail.

Americans who demand and have all these high expectations will keep demanding them and having them, and when they find out that the Obama game and the Democrat plan doesn’t produce it, there will be hell to pay down the road, but the damage done in the meantime will be severe. That’s why all this matters. You are still the best resource you have to acquiring what you want in life. Obama is not your best resource. The government’s not your best resource. Joe Biden is not your best resource. Oprah is not your best resource. You and your family, you are the best resource that you have. Don’t give up the free use of yourself to be the best you can be, just for the sake of some change that is actually going to be far worse than you can imagine.