RUSH: This is Brian in Philadelphia. It’s great to have you here, Brian. Welcome.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Nice talking to you.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: Well, we have a new group in Philadelphia of people that want to be bailed out. I don’t know if you heard about it, but it’s the students and graduate students with student loans who feel that when these banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been bailed out that, they deserve the same, that they have to pay back their loans immediately and without any conditions.
RUSH: Can you blame them —
CALLER: No, actually I can’t.
RUSH: — if we’re going to bail out people who can’t pay their mortgages, although that appears to be off the table now.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I don’t know what we’re doing with that. This whole bailout thing has turned to the auto companies, and that’s going to happen. Obama’s going to do this. If it doesn’t happen before this lame duck session is over, Obama will do it, so they’re going to get bailouts. Can you blame students wanting to be bailed out on their student loans? Can you blame anybody for calling Washington, ‘Hey, what about me?’
CALLER: No, absolutely not. I don’t know when it would end, though.
RUSH: Well, I’ll tell you where it ends. (laughing)
CALLER: It ends in four years.
RUSH: It ends with the government in charge of everything they can be in charge of. Now, Barney Frank said yesterday when asked this same question, ‘Where does it end?’ he said, ‘Well, it ends when it stops working. The bailouts end when they stop working.’ Somebody tell me when they work.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: That would be news. When was the last bailout that worked? I don’t know of one. Chrysler. Yeah, but that was a loan, and they paid it back. That was a loan. Remember, that was Lee Iacocca’s big claim to fame here, that they paid back the loans. That ended up not being a bailout. You bail out the student loans. The students are basically saying, ‘Forgive the loans.’ But my point is how can you blame them? This was predictable. This was going to happen. The minute the government starts bailing out Wall Street, the minute government starts bailing out banks, when they start bailing out the auto industry, it isn’t going to be long before… You start giving away money, and you’re going to create a long line for it. I’m not so sure that some of this just isn’t by design, because nobody with a brain would be doing what they’re doing. Nobody that understood the consequences would be doing what they’re doing unless they have a different objective than what is stated.
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RUSH: I want to go back to yesterday, though, for some testimony from a couple of CEOs: Alan Mulally of Ford, the CEO there; Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors. First, Mulally. This is a portion of his remarks.
MULALLY: We suggest the loans be structured in revolving format so exposure to the taxpayer would be limited — and, if used, we would repay them, of course, with interest. We four are hopeful that we have enough liquidity, but we also must prepare ourselves for the prospect of further deteriorating economic conditions in 2009. In addition, the collapse of one of our competitors would have a severe impact on Ford and our transformation plan because the domestic auto industry is highly interdependent.
RUSH: Did you hear that? ‘The collapse of one of their competitors would have a severe impact on Ford and their transformation plan.’ Now, that’s fascinating. I’m just a neophyte here at this kind of stuff, but if my competitors go out of business, I happen to love it. In fact, I’m trying to drive ’em out of business. I thought that was the point. But! But that’s just me. That’s just me. Here is Rick Wagoner, CEO, General Motors.
WAGONER: What exposes us to failure now is not our product lineup, is not our business plan, is not our employees and their willingness to work hard. It’s not our long-term strategy. What exposes us to failure now is the global financial crisis which has severely restricted credit availability and reduced industry sales to the lowest per capita level since World War II. What would it mean if the domestic industry were allowed to fail? The costs would be catastrophic in jobs lost, income lost, government tax revenue lost, and a huge blow to consumer and business confidence.
RUSH: The key there is ‘government tax revenue lost.’ That’s what members on Capitol Hill heard when he said this. (laughs) ‘Ooh, ooh! The government will lose tax revenue? We can’t afford to lose tax revenue! Everybody exists to provide taxes for some revenue to Washington!’ You know what nobody’s talking about? I’m fascinated here by Rick Wagoner laying out what their problem is. It’s not the business plan; it’s not employees. It’s not their willingness to work hard — and, by the way, uh, uh, uh, full disclosure. General Motors is a sponsor in good standing of this program, and we are having a phenomenal relationship with them. And our advertising is working for General Motors, and they’ve been with us for years and years and years. We wouldn’t be in this situation but they’ve only been with us for a year and a half. (laughs)
At any rate, CEO Rick Wagoner says, ‘It’s not the taxes. It’s not the business plan. It’s not our long-term strategy. What exposes us to failure is the global financial crisis which has severely restricted credit availability and reduced industry sales to the lowest per capita level since World War II.’ You know what nobody is mentioning here in all of this, is oil. I think people have forgotten because now you find gasoline at under two bucks a gallon in certain pockets of the fruited plain, such as in New Jersey. In Florida, it’s still over three bucks in some places. That’s because I live there and they know I live there, and whatever. Gasoline is coming down, but it was at four bucks.
That was the tipping point. Would you look at what happened when gasoline hit four bucks — and it was just for a month that it was there. People started worrying about what they could buy. We got stories about people can’t eat. We had follow-up stories about ethanol causing all kinds of food shortages related to corn and so forth. It was a month of sheer disaster and not much of it was wrong. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, as quickly as if rose, was a shock to this country in ways we haven’t been shocked, and it shut people down. Among other things, remember how people started making mad dashes to get rid of their SUVs? Do you remember the story, the multiple stories, ‘The End of the SUV,’ and ‘Funeral for the SUV’? Look at how reactionary everybody is.
Get to four bucks a gallon and everybody thought it was going to keep going up. So they tried to get rid of the SUVs. They were trying to move into smaller cars. Some could; some couldn’t. They were not going to eat as much, or going out to eat. They weren’t going to movies as much. There was sheer anger and panic over this, and I’ll lay you a dollar to a doughnut that that’s had as much an impact on people buying new cars as anything in the global financial market or the credit crunch. Because I will wager that you can still go and buy a car today, and I’ll bet you you can get it financed. I will bet you that dealerships are still open, and I will bet you that you can get a traditional loan or financing for a car. I’ll bet you don’t have to put 50% down.
I’ll bet you can still go out and get zero financing in some places. I bet you can do it. I’ll bet in some places you can get the employee discount. ‘Okay, Rush, so how come auto sales haven’t picked up, if gasoline and oil have come down?’ ‘Cause once it got to four bucks as fast as it did, people aren’t taking any chances. Nobody understands how any of this happened. Most people think everything but the market was involved here. How do you go from an average oil price of 90 to a hundred bucks to 150 in six weeks and then have it stay there for 30 days and then back down to where it’s now under $55? How does this happen? People may not know how it happens, but they know it ain’t the market. It ain’t solely and strictly the market.
So once the price of gasoline got up there to four bucks — stick with me on this, folks — once the price of gasoline got up there to four bucks, everybody knew the market could not sustain that for long. The market could not sustain $150-a-barrel oil. They were talking back then how it was going to go to $200 a barrel, and nobody expected the market to be able to sustain it. The airline business would have to ground airplanes even more than they did. They did do that, by the way. Look at all of the drastic, overnight moves that businesses and people made once oil hit 150 bucks; jet fuel hit whatever it was costing, depending where you buy it; and gasoline was four bucks? Now oil is $55. Gas is under two bucks, but there’s not a mad dash to go buy cars.
There’s not a mad dash to resume lifestyles that existed prior to this massive increase to four bucks, and that’s because everybody instinctively doesn’t trust this price drop ’cause they don’t understand what caused it to skyrocket in the first place. Market forces were largely in play, but people, still, that kind of volatility has not been seen before in most people’s lifetimes. That kind of instability, that erraticism, the market generally doesn’t allow that to happen, both up and down. So what we need to do, the best thing we could do for the auto industry — without going into the debate of bailing them out or letting them go bankrupt, ’cause they’re going to get bailed out. Obama’s going to do it.
If this Congress doesn’t, Obama will do it. It will happen. It will be a payoff to the unions. It will be a payoff to Jennifer Granholm, state of Michigan. It’s going to happen, and it will be a bailout of the unions; it will not be a bailout of the Big Three automakers. That’s why it’s going to happen. So I don’t even want to debate that. But if you want, if you want stability in the automobile industry and every other stability, then we have to continue doing what was a conservative talking point during the election, and that is: ‘Drill here and drill now!’ We have got to as a nation develop and increase our own independent sources of fossil fuels, ’cause there isn’t any alternative.
I don’t care what the President-Select tells you is going to happen in the next ten years. There’s no alternative to running in your car. They may have the Chevy Volt, the electric car. But even if it’s a big hit, they’re not going to be able to produce them fast enough for everybody to get them that wants to, and there will be a line of people to get these things. Oil is the fuel of the engine of freedom and it will be for the foreseeable number of decades. We need our own supply! We need not forget. My point is this. Simply because gasoline is down to two bucks now, or on its way there in a lot of places and the oil price is back down to…
By the way, the OPEC gang is now saying oil is going to go to 40. See that today? Oil price may go to 40 or below. Now, you might be saying, ‘Oh, yeah! (clapping) Yeah, yeah, yeah! All right. all right.’ Fine and dandy, but I’m telling you, go ahead and celebrate all you want. I’m just telling you the people in the oil business are going to be… They’re not going to ask for bailouts, but they’re going to be in the same circumstance everybody else is in: ‘How can we do business? How can we make commitments to find more oil? How can we make commitments to drill more oil when the price is this volatile?’ You know, we were talking about oil shale in Colorado and other places and the Bakken Field.
Well, guess what? All of a sudden at 55 and 40 bucks, they can’t go get it. It doesn’t cost enough. Their record profits are not going to be invested in losses. The oil company may have had record profits, but they’re not going to invest it in losses, and they have said so. When they came up to Washington and testified, they said so. They pretty much pointed out… Look, forget the oil companies. I’m just talking about as consumers and as a country, the auto business, I am just saying I am convinced that whatever you want to chalk up in a global financial crisis — which is basically houses: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Democrat Party. It’s basically that. If that’s led to a global financial crisis, so be it.
But I maintain that it was gasoline shooting up to four bucks that caused the most damage to the automakers. They were already having trouble at the same time, but look at how their sales plummeted when that happened. Look at their sales figures for the quarter in which gasoline hit four bucks, and just because it’s now down to two doesn’t mean people are going to pretend that the $4 never happened. They’re going to be more guarded since they see how rapidly it can climb. So, bottom line, again, to make a long story short (I’m sure for the diarrhea of the mouth here) but the best thing we could do for the domestic auto business is to ramp up the domestic oil business.
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RUSH: Now, one more thing about this oil business. Now, I know what I said made sense. Here’s the problem with it, though. No matter what happens, whether the news is bad or whether the news is good, we are going to have a leftist-dominated government. A leftist-dominated government exists to tax things. So when the oil price goes down to where it is, 57, 55, whatever it is, and if it goes down to 40 — let’s see, gasoline goes below two bucks everywhere across the country, do you know what the left is going to do? Raise taxes on it. Under what concept and what precept? Well, we can’t have people return to their old bad habits. We can’t return to this profligate use, it will destroy the climate, it will destroy the planet. In fact, the Washington Post had an editorial on Sunday called ‘Raise the Gas Tax.’ Let me read to you, ladies and gentlemen, the salient paragraph.
‘In a perfect world, we’d like to see a gas tax that was the equivalent of oil at $100 per barrel. This would send a loud-and-clear signal to drivers to continue eschewing gas guzzlers.’ Now, Mr. Snerdley said that not everybody did know the price of gasoline and oil would come down, that I was one of the few that predicted it. Okay, it’s come down, I don’t care how many people knew it was going to come down, people know it’s come down, people don’t trust it’s going to stay down. It’s going to have to stay down for quite a while before people resume their old habits, but they’re not going to have the money to resume their old habits, because by the time it would take for confidence to settle in, new taxes are coming down the pike. And I guarantee you the left will see these lower oil prices and they’ll see an opportunity for higher taxes, and they’ll see an opportunity for higher taxes on gasoline as well. (interruption) What? What? Right, prices go back up, they’re not going to take the taxes off of them.
If the Washington Post, which will have an ear in the Obama administration, if the Washington Post is advocating that taxes be raised so that people are paying the equivalent of a hundred dollars per barrel of oil, well, what was the price of gasoline at a hundred bucks a barrel? Probably around $3.50. So the Washington Post and the left is advocating a constant price of $3.50 for a gallon of gasoline, national average. So, then you do that, the price is going to go up again on oil. As the global financial crisis eases and people begin to invest and start taking more risk and so forth, it is gonna go back up again. They’ll take advantage of the lower oil price to raise taxes, raise revenue, make expensive alternates, supposedly less expensive. So much opportunity out here and all of it is just waiting to be taxed by people who live to tax you.
Here’s Cheryl in Columbus, Ohio. Cheryl, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’ve listened to you for almost 18 years, so I almost consider you like an old friend, and yet I’m so nervous, you’d think I’d be a little calmer talking to an old friend.
RUSH: Well, you sound not nervous at all.
CALLER: Hey, I just wanted to cover with you, I was watching C-SPAN yesterday, the Senate hearings, and there was this professor from a Maryland university who was testifying why the government shouldn’t give the automakers their bridge loan.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: But I was so struck by his hypocrisy, because, first of all, tenure is better than any union. And then, second of all, he was talking about how the automakers expenses were making them uncompetitive, but has anyone checked how college tuition has gone up? I mean, it’s something like 400% over a certain period of years.
RUSH: Yeah, and you know what’s interesting about that. We never hear the left take their rips at Big Education. Big Education can raise their tuition, can raise every expense they’ve got, they can go out and collect all these donations called endowments from all of these rich egomaniacs who just want their name on the next building at Harvard, or wherever. Tuition can skyrocket and increase in multiple percentages, and all we’ll ever hear from the left is, ‘We’ve gotta find a way to make sure everybody can afford to go to college,’ but it never involves ripping Big Education to lower their tuition. There’s a reason for this. Big Education is a bunch of libs. Big Education pays themselves lots of money off of high tuition, endowments, and so forth. And Big Education, Big Government, they are identical people, same thing.
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RUSH: I want to continue on this business of the auto bailouts and oil and so forth, ’cause I really do believe that if we could stabilize the price of oil, that we would do more for the auto industry than any bailout is going to do or any bankruptcy is going to do. We’re going to get the bailout anyway. Obama is going to do it. Mark my words. It’s not going to be a bailout of Big Oil. It’s going to be a bailout of the United Auto Workers and Jennifer Granholm and the state of Michigan. That will be the purpose. They won’t say that. They’ll say they’re bailing out Big Oil, but that will be the motivation for it, so just steel yourselves to that happening. Regardless what you think of it, it is going to happen. But this volatility in the price of oil leading to volatility in the price of gasoline is what led people to shy away from buying any new cars.
Some people did go out and try to find a low-cost, high-mileage little lawn mowers that you could get out there, but it was amazing to see how much was affected in a profoundly negative way with the rapid rise in the price of gasoline to four dollars, and we’ve learned what the tipping point is. Four bucks, and people start making drastic lifestyle changes. Now, the price has come down now, and this is going to lead to people in Washington deciding to tax it. Because, see, you’ve been used to paying four bucks. You’ve been there, and you survived. You got through it. So they’re going to be people saying, ‘We can raise taxes on gasoline to get it at least up to $3.50. People will put up with that because they’ve become accustomed to it,’ and I think people instinctively realize that the price of oil, of gasoline, in this instability and this volatility can easily rise again.
Obama even made my point Sunday night on 60 Minutes and his interview. By the way, let me preface this with this quote from the Washington Post editorial on Sunday, which is entitled, ‘Raise the Gas Tax.’ They said, ‘In a perfect world, we’d like to see a gas tax that was the equivalent of oil at $100 per barrel.’ Well, bully for you, Washington Post! Who the hell are you? ‘In a perfect world, we would like to see…’ But Obama went out there on Sunday night and he echoed what the Washington Post said. In a 60 Minutes interview, he basically agreed. He said, ‘We go from shock to trance. You know, oil prices go up, gas prices at the pump go up, everybody goes into a flurry of activity. And then the prices go back down and suddenly we act like it’s not important, and we start, you know filling up our SUVs again. And, as a consequence, we never make any progress.
‘It’s part of the addiction, all right. That has to be broken. Now is the time to break it,’ meaning, the ‘addiction’ to oil that we have. We do not have an addiction to oil. I resent the whole connotation. It’s a commodity. We don’t have an addiction to oil any more than we have an addiction to wheat or that we have an addiction to soybeans. It’s a commodity. It’s in the market. It is used. It happens to be I think crucially important. It’s the fuel of the engine of freedom and democracy, development, growth, and all those things. But yet here’s this leftist guy, Obama, saying we have to break our addiction on it. Okay, if we gotta get out of oil, what are we gotta get on? There’s nothing to get on, there’s nothing that replaces it. This is just a long way of saying that even though the gas price and the oil price are down, that fact is going to lead to the people who raise taxes to get a gleam in their eye and say, ‘Oooh, we got an opportunity to tax this stuff at a higher rate now!’
It’d be tough to raise taxes on gasoline at four bucks a gallon. It’s much easier to do it when it’s two bucks, and especially when you have people whose sole reason for political power is to raise taxes. So get ready for that, too — and Big Oil. You know, I mentioned earlier in this monologue, why should they go investigate and drill and try to discover new sources of domestic supply at 40 or 50 bucks a barrel. When it was 125, $150 a barrel, it made sense. CNN, in their little story here, CNNmoney.com: ‘It would be tempting to say they told us so. Back when oil prices were going nowhere but up, public officials, consumer rights groups and newspaper editorials chastised the major oil companies for not investing enough in new production.
‘Big Oil, they argued, was simply lavishing shareholders with massive stock buybacks and dividends at the expense of the motoring public. ‘The results illustrate an industry with plenty of resources to produce more oil in the US, but slow to spend the money to develop them,’ Judy Dugan, research director at Consumer Watchdog, wrote in a statement last August, just after Chevron posted a quarterly profit of $6 billion. ‘In a normal market, with prices for a product rising like they have for oil, manufacturers in competitive markets would be spending like crazy to make more of it,’ Dugan continued. ‘Yet oil companies are able to sit back and make more money by selling less.” That’s not how they make more money — and they don’t ‘make’ more oil. They go out and find it.
They make money by not having to have all these R&D costs. If they choose not to invest in future exploration and development, at least in this country, because the tax on that is going to be exorbitantly high; and now with the oil White House apparatus, it doesn’t make any sense to do it anyway, and they say later in the CNN story, ‘With oil prices now barely a third of what they were just four months ago, it seems they were right,’ meaning Big Oil. ”They have been very good stewards of their investors’ money,’ said Rayola Dougher, senior economic adviser for the American Petroleum Institute. ‘The majors are well positioned to move forward with investments over the next year.” So Big Oil is being praised for business acumen in the Drive-By Media all because the oil price has come down.
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RUSH: Here’s Joe in Orlando, Florida. You’re next on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah, Rush, I didn’t think you went far enough when you said the oil price has slowed down the car sales. And also tipped the balance of the mortgage companies, because a lot of people lost their homes when the prices went up.
RUSH: Yeah, I think there’s some of that, too, because when the gasoline price shot up that much, almost 100, maybe 80% increase in a matter of months, it was a shock to everybody’s disposable income, and some people decided they gotta get to work and they have to eat and they decided to wait on paying the mortgage.
CALLER: Yeah, threw the mortgages off and then that stupid ethanol threw the food prices out of line.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And it just chipped everybody over. Once diesel hit $4.50 in the trucking industry you had to start putting on the fuel surcharges, everything went up.
RUSH: I know — oh, the diesel, we didn’t even talk about that because that was even higher and the truckers were up in arms over that. There’s no question that the gasoline price accompanied by the oil price was a huge shock throughout the economic system, but this mortgage business, you’re talking about people that were paying their mortgages. Mortgage problem is not involving those people.
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RUSH: Here’s Brenda in Chico, California. Hi, Brenda. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: I, first of all, want to say thank God for you —
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: — and thank God for Fox News. I am calling because I wanted to tell you that my husband and I just purchased a 2008 Cadillac Escalade over the weekend and had no problems getting a fantastic rate on a loan and we absolutely love the GM car.
RUSH: How much did you put down on this? Did you have to put a down payment on? What was your financing rate?
CALLER: I had a trade-in, and then I also put $5,000 down. But they told me I could put whatever I wanted to down, and I got a rate of 5.5%.
RUSH: Okay. So the point is that you were able to go out, without any credit in the US system, you were able to go buy a car on credit?
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: And you went out and you bought a gas hog.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Atta way, by the way, I am proud of you. I am proud of you for not buckling down to all this political pressure. You went out there, and you got what you wanted.
CALLER: You know what? I’m turning the tables on the left, because I’m tired of tolerating their craziness and their hate when they don’t tolerate me and my views and my family.
RUSH: That’s exactly right. You know what? We mentioned this earlier today, Brenda, tolerance is a one-way street. We have to be tolerant of all the aberrant behavior that exists on the left. We have to be tolerant of their extremism and their radicalism. We have to be tolerant, and if we aren’t, then it is us, it is we, who are said to be intolerant. They’re the ones that protest and act like spoiled rotten brats when they don’t get what they want, it’s actually worse than spoiled rotten brats. They start engaging in actual intimidation and near criminal activity in order to end up getting what they want.
RUSH: This is Michael in Columbia, South Carolina, you’re next, sir. Nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you. This is really cool to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I have a very quick point.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: I had sort of forgotten about the $150 billion in pork in the bailout bill, of course, ’cause the media conveniently leaves it out of their discussions. But, you know, the folks on Capitol Hill, why don’t they do the patriotic thing and sacrifice and give up that $150 billion in pork to bail out the car industry. Hell, they could bail them out for probably quite a long time with that amount of money.
RUSH: This is an interesting question, and I know you mean it somewhat facetiously. But I’m going to answer it seriously because you have, once again, nailed and identified a serious problem. And that is that whatever the financial circumstance, the government will not, cannot ever do with less. No matter how hard individuals are hurt, they will not do with less. Whenever there is talk of a tax cut, the first thing that is said in reaction to it is how are we going to pay for it? Meaning, where are we going to get it back? If we give tax cuts to one-armed amputees in Chelsea, then who are we going to have to raise taxes on in order to make up our revenue lost? There’s no such thing as the concept of losing revenue in Washington. All money is theirs. They start with the amalgamation, the total dollars and cents of the productivity of the American people, because Washington produces nothing. They look at the GDP as a function of government, they look at the annual production of goods and services and of course the accompanying income, and they look at that as all theirs in terms of, okay, we’ve got this much to spend. They look at taxes as basically what they determine you will be allowed to keep.
They are the source of your money. They actually believe this. They think they are the ones that permit business to function. They are the ones that permit entrepreneurs to start up businesses. They are the ones that permit people to buy houses to deduct the mortgage interest. They are the ones who permit you to not have to report as income your health care benefits at work. They look at every dollar in this country as theirs and what you end up with as something that they have to spend, as a cost to them. So you have a $700 billion bailout, and it’s an emergency, the country can’t survive without it, and yet they had to sweeten the deal with $150 billion worth of pork to get the votes of people who weren’t inclined to go along with this. So it’s actually an $850 billion bailout, but only $700 billion is ostensibly going to be used.
This just reverts back to the whole notion here, folks, that everything in this country seems to be centered around government. It hits me in strange ways, but I saw during the break here at the top of the hour, I saw a news story, a replay of yesterday, Senator Lieberman in front of a bunch of senators after Dingy Harry had gone out and said, ‘Okay, Senator Lieberman is going to stay in our caucus, he’s going to keep his committee chairmanship.’ He moved aside, Lieberman moved to the microphone, and I saw Durbin and the whole Democrat caucus, five or six Democrats behind Lieberman, and I’m watching this, I’m saying, ‘Why do I care? This matters nothing to my life other than what these clowns are going to put in my way.’ Why do I care where Joe Lieberman ends up? Nice guy and all that, but it’s almost getting to the point where these people are royalty. There’s Durbin standing back there and I just wonder how many Americans watch this stuff and engage their own happiness and their own mood by virtue of what they see on television that is happening with the Democrats in Washington?
These people at this press conference were acting like this was the most important thing of the day, as they always do, and it just hit me again. Everybody is just too focused, way too focused on government and what it does and what it can do and whether government’s being penalized or hurt by this or that economic activity. I would love to be able to break this cycle. I would just love to have people, as many Americans as possible, when there’s a problem, look to themselves first. But, man, we’re up against 50 or more years of propaganda and brainwashing to convince people that the health of the government equals their personal health; the health of the government equals the health of the nation. And, of course, the government is not what makes the country work. It is people, freedom and liberty and individuality, seeking their ambitions. That’s what’s always made the country work.