RUSH: Kathy in Potomac, Maryland, I’m glad you waited. You’re next on the EIB Network. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Oh, thanks so much for taking my call and best wishes to you and Kathryn, Rush. Before I get to my point, let me give you a quick idea as to where Rahm Emanuel may be be going. I think maybe he’s going to join Hillary’s campaign.
RUSH: Hmm. Join Hillary’s campaign for president in 2012.
CALLER: Hmm. Yes. Let’s just keep a sharp eye, as you would say.
RUSH: Now wait a second. Let’s just examine, do you think — here is Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to The One, he quits the gig or is forced out and joins Hillary? Do you think that’s going to help Hillary with the Democrat Party?
CALLER: Well, he wants to get things done, Rush. And she’s a doer.
RUSH: Well, now, that’s an interesting perspective, that Emanuel might be tired of Obama ’cause Obama’s not helping him get things done —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — Obama’s a net drag on things.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: You may have a point.
CALLER: All right. But listen, I don’t want to take up a lot of time, I know you have a lot of callers so here’s the reason I called, Rush. Like you, I’m really troubled by the way in which the White House seems to be getting away with corporate shakedowns. And I think the rule of law is under assault because we’ve spent years talking about illegal immigrants as if illegal meant legal, granting rights to illegal immigrants. So what we’ve done is we’ve desensitized people as to the meaning of the rule of law.
RUSH: I don’t think there’s any question about that. Whether it’s illegal immigration or anything else, I think there’s no question that there’s been a desensitization. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a great phrase for it a long time ago called ‘defining deviancy down.’ When you tackle aberrant behavior and you give up, you say, ‘Okay, well, it’s just normal now. Kids are going to have sex when they’re 14 or 15, we just can’t stop it. They’re going to have it. You gotta realize that, Rush, it’s going to happen.’ Okay. So we permit it. It’s become the new norm. And what he meant was a lot of things, criminal activity, too, we can’t stop it, so we just declare it’s the new normal.
CALLER: It’s a lack of moral clarity, too.
RUSH: No question about it. So what are you going to do about it?
CALLER: I want to see more corporate chieftains stand up to this administration —
RUSH: A-ha-ha-ha.
CALLER: — and say we have a rule of law. If they don’t stand up they’re just going to get rolled over and over again, and who’s next? That’s why people are out there in fear hunkering down. They don’t know what industry is going to be hit next.
RUSH: Yeah, or what individual is going to be hit next, meaning what kind of bracket an individual may be in is gonna get hit. But you’ve just swerved into something that explains this. It’s called crony capitalism. For example, let’s just take a nameless Wall Street bank like Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs will get in bed with the administration on some kind of financial regulatory reform as a matter of protection, you go along with the regime, the regime leaves you alone while your competitors get blown to smithereens and you own the market, even though you are inexorably tied to the government. It’s no different that when the White House went out to Big Pharmaceutical and Big Insurance and tried to extort a bunch of money from them for television ads to promote regime agenda items in exchange for those industries being given a pass on some of their behavior. And it’s no different than say a nameless multinational corporation which makes any number of products, one of their divisions heavily invested in new green technology and if you get in bed with this regime they give you plenty of, shall we say, grants, favorable contract bid status to advance your green energy program. At the same time all your competitors get creamed because they don’t have most favored corporate status.
So if you’re the CEO of a corporation, CEO of corporations are not political ideologues, they have an entirely different agenda — it is to keep their business as profitable and as near the top as possible. And if the lay of the land in a particular year is that you have to get in bed with the government to make that happen, then that’s what you do. If you have to donate to that regime, you have to set up for a PAC for that regime, then that’s what you do. I’m with you. I would love for some of these people to stand up. We’d have all loved for BP to have gone in there and say what you’re asking us is against the law. You’re asking us to do things that we can get sued for by our shareholders. And they might have done that. To which the regime said, ‘Don’t worry, as far as anybody knows, we’ll take care of you. Nobody will know. As far as anybody knows, you appear to be under our thumb. But we’ll make sure that we don’t bankrupt you.’ Now, if you run BP, and you’re in a mess like this, and you got an activist regime who hates private sector capitalism, and they promise you not to bankrupt you in exchange for playing ball, what are you going to do? Are you going to go out there and go public, and say what happened? We would all love for that to happen but that’s not what CEOs are, that’s not who they are and that’s not what they do.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, has just said that the White House has done more right than wrong regarding the BP oil spill problem. And again, this is a testament to the polling data that’s out there on this. And it’s understandable. I mean the cumulative effect of the dumbing down of the American society on the role of government, the Constitution, the intricacies of how the private sector works, capitalism and all that combined with 50 years of the Democrat Party and the American left demonizing American corporate entities, then you have an oil spill like this, and the American people think, some of them, that BP is doing it on purpose. I mean you would be surprised the number of people who think that corporations exist to deplete the country. You would not believe the number of people who believe US corporations are inherently and by design evil, that their express purpose is to screw individuals, customers, and the country. This is 50 years of Democrat Party politics come home to roost.
So you have the oil spill out here, and even if people don’t think BP did it on purpose, they clearly believe BP doesn’t care. And they clearly believe the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving and compassionate government does care. Clearly believe this. And so when you see polling data like this, and if you’re Republican, and you’ve got perspirations for higher office, as they say Haley Barbour might, well, okay, you see what the polling data is, American people this or that. The American public does not want to hear how the White House is doing good stuff or the right stuff. Obama, the Democrat Party, are on the ropes. But it is what it is.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Cliff in Spokane, Washington, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Greetings from the Great Northwest.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I hope you enjoyed your brief vacation here and the weather held.
RUSH: You know, it was great out there. I’d been to Coeur d’Alene, Iowa, but I’d never been to Sun Valley. I heard all about it and it was — we got there on Thursday — 30 degrees Thursday night.
CALLER: (chuckling)
RUSH: I mean, there was 4,000 feet elevation up there.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: That’s why it was fun playing golf on Friday-Saturday. But it warmed up and got mid-sixties on Friday and Saturday. It was in the forties. Now, I kind of liked it, it was a nice change of pace. We’re having August in June here if Palm Beach. You know any time lows are 86.
CALLER: (laughing) We’re having a very cool spring — well, into summer now.
RUSH: Yeah, well, we’re just waiting for the hurricanes here.
CALLER: I know you are. Hey, listen, my comment.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I don’t think BP should be responsible for the regime’s decisions — i.e., the stopping of the offshore drilling and all those people down there unemployed because of it. There’s no way that BP is responsible for that, and they’re not responsible for the delayed cleanups, either.
RUSH: All of this is true. Let me translate this folks. What he’s talking about here is there are going to be beaucoup oil workers out of work because Obama has shut down all oil drilling in the Gulf. We have 33 rigs out there and in Alaska now, and BP is been forced — by the way, part of this slush fund, there’s a hundred million dollars BP has to pay so that Obama can give the out-of-work oil workers in the Gulf of Mexico their payment, their checks.
CALLER: That’s wrong.
RUSH: Look, I agree with you, but you and I happen object a minority on this.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: I mean, what you’re saying is it’s not BP’s fault that Obama shuts down drilling throughout the Gulf.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: It’s not BP’s fault that Obama shuts down drilling in Alaska.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: It’s not BP’s fault that Obama refused all of these offers for help from experts at cleaning up oil from foreign countries.
CALLER: You got it.
RUSH: It’s not BP’s fault that Obama waited 59 days to put the military into action. It’s not BP’s fault that the government was lax in doing what it could have done. You know you’re exactly right about that, but the political atmosphere for elected officials say something like that just doesn’t work.
CALLER: Well, Boehner and McConnell and the rest of them gotta get a backbone. They gotta back these guys, apologizing for the regime, because that is wrong. That’s just terrible.
RUSH: Look, it’s very simple. David Plouffe sent out an e-mail to all these Obama supporters from their website, Organizing for America: ‘Barton, we’re going to make a TV ad.’ The Republicans don’t want a TV ad of what Barton said. And they’re gonna get it anyway, regardless of his apology.