RUSH: I want to ask all of you a question, and I would like to be able to ask this question to everybody who is not listening to the program right now. What’s it going to take? How long is it going to be before you all have had enough of the encroachment of your freedom and your liberty? How long is it going to be before you stand up and tell the leftists in this country, ‘Stop, shut up. Go back home. We are not going to let you ruin this country.’ At what point, and this is not even about Obama. I’m not talking about Obama. I saw something in the newspaper Friday after I finished this program. Seattle, Washington, they are thinking of banning bonfires on beaches in Seattle, Washington, because of global warming. I cannot tell you how infuriated I have been and am and was made even more so by that story. Bonfires equaling global warming? At what point, and look, I know that people living in Seattle are primarily liberals, and bonfires on the beach don’t cause any problem whatsoever with global warming. This is absurd!
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‘Seattle Parks and Recreation might do what even this week’s chilly weather couldn’t — douse the long tradition of beach bonfires at [two different beaches]. Park department staff is recommending reducing bonfires at the two beaches this summer and possibly banning them altogether next year. The park board will hear the recommendation Thursday, and the city plans to run public-service announcements and hand out brochures later this month about the effects of bonfires on global warming.’ At what point are all of us collectively going to stand up and just say, ‘Stop’? At what point are we going to tell these people that their ideas are absurd but that our personal liberty is more important, and that it is our liberty and freedom which has made this the greatest country on the face of the earth — and the friendliest to the most nations on the earth in the history of world history, in the history of the planet?
At what point are we going to stand up and say, and laugh, ‘Are you serious? Bonfires cause global warming! The carbon footprint from bonfires causes global warming! And people just going to sit around and say, ‘Okay. No more bonfires.’ In New York, out on Long Island, they have. Bonfires are banned for a certain time each year to protect a bird, the piping plover. There was a story over the weekend about drought in California. It turns out the reason for the drought is a federal judge who made a decision in January to stop the flow of water from the Sacramento Delta to the southern part of the state because a fish had gotten somehow entangled in the pumps. And so for half the year, maybe seven months, the people of California had to deal with less water so that a fish would not be harmed by pumps! I know that I joke about the circumstance here in Florida — all along the East Coast — with the turtle lights and so forth, but it’s all the same.
And it never stops, and it’s happening incrementally. Our liberty, our freedom, is being eroded. It is being taken from us, and we are buying into this because they are doing it and ladling it out with guilt. We have sinned! We have lived too prosperously. We have lived too carelessly. Despite the fact that we are the cleanest major industrial nation in the world. We clean up our messes better than any other nation in the industrialized world that has any significant size whatsoever. The piping plover, the bonfires, and I’m sure you can think of a number of recent examples. In Minneapolis: ‘The Minneapolis City Council and Mayor R.T. Rybak approved changes Friday, to the city’s vehicle idling ordinance that aims to reduce air pollution. The ordinance limits most vehicle idling to three minutes, except in traffic.’ Global warming. You can’t idle your car longer than three minutes. It’s none of their damn business — and note where they’re doing all of this stuff first. It’s in these far leftist states.
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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, let me tackle this bonfire thing. In my normal way of doing this, we’ve tried to refute this on the science of it, or the logic of it, or the spirituality of it, or what have you. But at some point, that’s going to have to change because it’s not working. Well, I don’t think it’s working. I’m not quite certain about this, but I’m optimistic. Let’s look at this bonfire business. In Seattle on two beaches, they’re going to ban bonfires. They’re going to limit them this year and maybe ban them next year. Why? Global warming. Folks, this is Marxism. This is not about science! It can’t possibly be about science.
Turn on your television and look at a wildfire that destroys homes in Southern California, in Northern California. They happen every spring, and how do they start? Lightning! Do we do the lightning? Can we start lightning strikes? Can we stop them? No! And yet, has anybody said we need to ban lightning, because lightning leads to forest fires and wildfires? You talk about carbon footprints? How about natural grass fires that agriculture does on purpose, controlled grass burns? Have you ever seen one of those? I am from the middle part of this country in the state of Missouri. I saw grass fires all the time. They stink! There’s lots of smoke, but they are necessary agriculturally. There are far more ‘pollutants,’ quote unquote, than from a series of bonfires. This is absurd as when Southern California tried to ban outdoor grilling some years ago — this’d be in the 80s, the late 80s — under the theory that everybody at the same time, between a two-hour period say between 5 at the 7 p.m. at night would light up their outdoor charcoal barbecue pits and that the pollution would rock the stability of our climate.
”The United States may require to raise its savings rate while maintaining its traditional openness, which allows US producers and consumers to access goods, services, and capital from abroad at the best conditions.” So now the World Trade Organization wants to control our imports and exports and our personal saving, and who is it that runs the World Trade Organization or anything to do with the United Nations? They are not liberals. They are not Democrats. They are Marxists! They are leftists. Three minutes. You can only idle your car three minutes in Minneapolis. Do you notice where altogether of these things start? They all start in very liberal states. Here’s the story on the water in California. It was from June 7th in the New York Times. ‘Water-Starved California Slows Development.’ This is not an accident. ‘Water-starved California’ is starved because of a federal judge.
‘As California faces one of its worst droughts in two decades, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies. Water authorities and other government agencies scattered throughout the state, including here in sprawling Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, have begun denying, delaying or challenging authorization for dozens of housing tracts and other developments under a state law that requires a 20-year water supply as a condition for building.’ So you keep reading and you keep reading and you keep reading and you keep reading and then you find this: ‘Even more significant, a judge in federal district court last year issued a curtailment in pumping from the California Delta — where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet and provide water to roughly 25 million Californians…’
Now, how many people are in California? There are 37 million, and 25 million of them are without water, primarily south of Sacramento. The reason the judge ‘issued a curtailment in pumping from the California Delta south was to protect a species of endangered smelt that were becoming trapped in the pumps. Those reductions, from December to June, cut back the state’s water reserves this winter by about one third…’ Therefore, no building can be permitted because they can’t guarantee a 20-year water supply. ‘The smelt problem,’ says the New York Times, ‘was a powerful indicator of the environmental fallout from the delta’s water system, which was constructed over 50 years ago for a far smaller population.’ I don’t know how many of you know this, and I don’t mean this as a cut. This is not criticism. But if you were a rational human being and this country was not populated but it was geographically today or 100 years ago like it was then or now, and you were looking at it from a satellite or from whatever vantage point you wanted to, there was no way that you would say, ‘Put the second largest city where Los Angeles is,’ because there’s no water.
There’s no water! You wouldn’t do it. But it’s a beautiful place, and they did it, and the water has to come from someplace elsewhere. The Colorado River. That’s why they built the delta. The northern Californians love to joke that Southern California wouldn’t exist without them and their water, and they’re right. This is not a cut. It’s a tremendous engineering feat that we were able to do as human beings, so it’s all well and good. But a federal judge can shut it all down to protect a stupid smelt! So the atmosphere is worth more than you. Bonfires! Absolutely… I am so close, I am practicing restraint like I haven’t practiced since last night when I was explaining why I’m so mad to somebody. And they said, ‘Rush, do you really think there are people who don’t like this country and are trying to harm it?’
I said, ‘Absolutely.’ Too much of this has gone on for too long. This is not coincidental. These are not well-intentioned — but misguided — people. These are mean people. These are people with a destructive purpose, and their destruction is aimed at the liberty and freedom of the United States population. Because it is only then that they are able to realize their true dream — which is a massive, Big State; a massive Big Government with all kinds of controls over everybody and everything. But they want to cut this country down to size. It’s too big, too powerful, too meeeean. We steal all the world’s resources. And the sad thing and the maddening and the frustrating thing about it is, we go along with it! We go along with it. I could spend the next 20 minutes talking to you about the turtle light thing here on Palm Beach, and I don’t want to make this personal and I don’t want you to think that I’m engaging in all this simply because I have a situation that I want to fix.
I’m going to leave it out because I’ve talked about it enough. This is happening all over the country in so many ways, and we’ve had the stories for 20 years about the curtailment of private property rights because of some protected species — or worse: declaring your property a wetlands and you can’t touch it. And it’s hard to fight. The Democrats and the leftists have incorporated a lot of class envy in this, so even in this country there are people who want people who they consider to be unfairly affluent and wealthy to suffer. They want them to be punished for their affluence. The leftists have been planting the seeds in the minds of people in this country for years, for decades. What’s scary is that for the first time they now have been entire political party, the Democrat Party, advancing their agenda. It used to be they were considered wackos, environmentalist wackos, animal rights wackos, other kinds of ‘extremists.’ Guess what? They are the Democrat Party today! I read a piece over the weekend in the American Thinker, and I’m going to post this.
It’s a long piece. It prints out to six pages. It’s at the American Thinker. It’s by Rocco DiPippo and it is a history of this country from 2001 forward — 9/11 forward. There’s a little stuff before that, but it is excellent. It’s nothing that you don’t know. It’s nothing that you haven’t felt. But it’s on paper and it’s done in such a way that your memory is inspired. You remember all of these things. Let me tell you how it starts — and I’m paraphrasing this. In an America 30 years ago, 40 years ago, do you realize that a candidate such as Barak Obama would not last a week in the Democrat primary after it was learned that his preacher of 20 years hated America? Twenty, 30, 40 years ago, Barak Obama would have been drummed out of the primaries by his own party and by the American people.
And if he had survived that, when we learned that his best buddies are terrorists and people who bombed the Pentagon and the United States, and, when we learned that he has the support and the tacit endorsement of our enemies around the world, he would be gone and people would be outraged. His political career would be over. Today, he’s their nominee. How many of you last night watched this great Discovery program called When We Left Earth? It’s six hours; the first two were last night. They have gotten to the cold storage vaults of NASA. They have 500 hours of film. Some of it is not before seen. Most of it has been if you know where to look. Some of it’s new, only it hasn’t been seen. They remastered it in HD and they started the first two episodes last night. I was alive during all this. I remembered all of it. I remembered every one of those Gemini launches. I remembered the Mercury loses. I remember Gus Grissom losing his space capsule when he blew the hatch early on his Mercury flight. What I had forgotten, even though I instinctively knew it — and what reminded me because I’ve been speaking about it recently — was how damn proud everybody in this country was, including the media, of what we were doing with the manned space program.
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RUSH: So I’m watching When We Left Earth last night on the Discovery Channel. I, of course, as a powerful influential member of the media, am watching it in HD on my big screen and I can’t pull myself away from it, even though I know it all, I’ve seen it. But the things I’d forgotten a little, just how damn proud everybody in this country was and around the world in listening to commentary. They went out and interviewed media people of that time, Jay Barbree, NBC, he was their guy on the spot, so excited, so proud. NBC had a reporter at NASA that was so proud of what this country was doing. Now I know it was an effort inspired by JFK, Democrat and so forth, but that really didn’t have much to do with it.
What is the party that has lied to the American people repeatedly about circumstances involved? It’s not George W. Bush and weapons of mass destruction; it’s not George Bush and intelligence. It’s the Democratic Party which has been taken over by extreme leftists. We have been taught over the years in this country to hate the following: Big Oil. Big Pharmaceutical. Big Retail. Big Insurance. Big Health. Virtually anything in the private sector. We have been told to despise it because it’s out to screw us. It is out to cheat us. In the process, the American will, the American sense of pride in the greatness and the traditions and the institutions of their own country, has been broken down to the point that people are distrustful. They’re distrustful of the things that have made and kept this country great. The only thing we’re told to love, the only thing we’re told to trust, the place we are to go, the place we are sent to get even for things that don’t go right in our lives, the government, the benevolent government and the 535 dolts that run the place. The 535 elected dolts and the literally hundreds of thousands of unelected bureaucrats who over the past seven years with the tacit approval and support of both the Democratic Party and the Drive-By Media have sought to undermine the US national interest at every possible turn not only domestically, but across the oceans.
We’re told to hate the auto industry. The auto industry is destroying our planet, don’t you see? Big Oil is cheating us and destroying the planet at the same time. We’re being told we’re running out of time. We’re being told that we do not have the greatness to deal with these problems; that our greatness is over, that we’re in a constant state of decline, that we need to back up our expectations. Thirty years ago Barak Obama would be disqualified on the basis of one video of Jeremiah Wright. ‘Goddamn America? Screw you, buddy. Nobody says that about our country. You are finished!’ Today we’re told to either overlook it or to try to understand his rage or that he didn’t really mean that. He’s just saying that for the crowd.
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RUSH: Let me read you just a couple of paragraphs from the American Thinker piece by Rocco DiPippo that ran on June the 7th. I printed this baby out at 12:21 in the morning. ‘There was a pre-Lewinsky time, before moral relativism blurred America’s vision, when associating with people like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers would have automatically excluded someone from attaining the [presidency]. Back then, anyone with well-known connections to such America-averse personalities would have been rejected by a super-majority of the electorate during primary season and almost certainly blocked by the Democratic Party before they could have gotten to within a mile of the White House. But those days — when patriotic, true liberals like Joe Lieberman were considered typical Democratic Party politicians — are gone. Now politicians like Lieberman are banished to the Party’s periphery and leftists, not liberals, like Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Jim McDermott, John Kerry, (who served in Vietnam), Jim McGovern, Patrick Leahy, Richard Durbin, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have replaced them.
‘Until recently in our history, a President Barack Obama would have been an impossibility. But given the political and ideological climate that exists today in America, the ascension of a leftist like Barack Obama into presidential politics makes perfect sense. Beliefs like domestic terrorist William Ayers’s and racist, anti-US preacher Jeremiah Wright’s are no longer met with utter scorn or a trip to behind the woodshed, but are embraced, promoted and defended by many Americans. Think MoveOn, International ANSWER, think hordes of young neo-communists and their indoctrinating, puppet-master Marx-spouting professors. Think Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill and his acolytes. Think NYU, Columbia, The New School and Harvard. Most importantly, ponder the makeup and direction of the Democratic Party leadership. Like Barack Obama and his radical friends, it is appallingly far Left.
‘Ideological descendants of Marx and Rousseau now lead the Democratic Party and they have turned it into a disloyal opposition to an increasingly accommodating GOP,’ and that, by the way, hits on a serious problem. ‘[T]hey have turned it into a disloyal opposition to an increasingly accommodating GOP. They have molded the Party into a force working stridently and unashamedly against a Commander-in-Chief during wartime. They have made it a den of treachery devoted to American defeat in Iraq. They preside over an institution advised and influenced by moneyed, non-governmental groups and individuals with unquestionably anti-US agendas who help make the [Democrat] Party a pseudo-intellectual sinkhole filled with perverse, tried-and-failed ideas repulsive to the majority of Americans. Those ideas are shaped into agendas which are then forced on the public by an activist left-wing judiciary and by a major media and arts consortium shot through with utter disrespect, indeed contempt, for traditional American values, religions and institutions.
‘The Democratic Party has devolved into a club for the illegitimately aggrieved, the self-absorbed, the self-hating and the perpetually [angry]. It is a sanctuary where solipsistic malcontents and their disjointed causes find refuge and support. It has long ceased being an earnest gathering of broad minds where man’s timeless problems are examined against the backdrop of the Constitution and solutions to them proposed based on the actual realities of the human condition. It is now the political province of the intellectually deceased, where frightened, lock-step ideologues and other small men and women concoct and promote divisive, destructive, weird and cowardly policies developed within a not-so-quaint, quasi-Marxist stricture of gender, class and race. So what does all of that have to do with the propulsion of Barack Obama… Everything.
‘It could not have happened without the existence of a substantial, organized, internal anti-US Left and the approval and guidance of the Democratic leadership I describe. Obama is in step with that radical element and with that leadership. His views reflect their views, and he is now a central figure in the deceptive, destructive strategy to restore the Democrats to power, a strategy that has been in play since the US Supreme Court declared Albert Gore the loser of the 2000 presidential contest. ‘Don’t call me a liberal,’ says Obama. In a precise, lawyerly sort of way he is being honest — he truly isn’t a liberal, but he is a leftist.’ The piece goes on. It describes what has happened since 9/11. When the left was discouraged and alarmed at the ultimately high approval numbers that George W. Bush had in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and that they began then — and we have talked about it and we have documented it on this program — a systematic plan to destroy his popularity, to destroy every initiative and agenda item that he had, all for the expressed purpose of convincing the American people that indeed their country is a sinkhole.
And it is a sinkhole because of George Bush, a sinkhole because of Republicans and conservatives. They have done their best to demoralize and destroy every institution for good that they can get their hands on, all for the purposes of weakening the resolve of the American people and destroying the confidence the American people in their own country, thereby setting up the 2006 elections and setting up Barak Obama as their standard-bearer. Now, one thing. It has almost happened in a vacuum. Yes, we in the conservative media and those of you who are part of it are fully aware of what’s happened, and you are frustrated and you want to stand up and you want to just — as Buckley did once to history — ‘Just say, ‘Stop!” You’re fed up with your individual freedoms being attacked and your liberty being lost. The question is: When is the rest of America going to see this? When is the rest of America going to stand up and say enough? You’re telling me I can’t do a bonfire when there are eight billion lightning strikes a year that cause massive fires in this country? Go ban lightning before you tell me to ban my bonfire!
There are any number of examples and I don’t want to bore you with the list because we have done this for years, the list of things that constitute subtle but significant losses of property rights and other forms of liberty — inspired and controlled by the leftist-controlled Democrat Party. But it’s only been allowed to happen or it has only been gotten away with because the Republican Party has been acquiescent. The Republican Party hasn’t stood up and said, ‘Stop!’ Nowhere — nowhere, nowhere — from elected Republican leadership. Nowhere from elected conservative leadership has anybody stood up on a daily basis and challenged the lies that constitute the primary reporting of the Drive-By Media in the country for the last seven, eight years. Nobody has stood up and said, ‘No! I’m not going to put out my bonfire. Screw you.’ No elected leadership has stood up and attempted to impugn or laugh at or criticize some of these things. No, because our party has got this weak-spined idea that the way to deal with this is to accept some of these premises and then try to tweak ’em. Back to this TV show on the Discovery Channel last night.
Jay Barbree, NBC news, who covered much of the space program up until recently and still does some consulting work for them, talked about NASA being the most exciting place there is. We were launching Gemini rockets every six weeks. We did some of the most incredible things. We accomplished some of the most unimaginable objectives — and all the while, we had a media echo chamber that was telling us, ‘Yes, these are good things and we should be proud.’ Today, we don’t have that. Today we have a Drive-By Media that echoes and perhaps is intimately involved in structuring, the anti-American, leftist agenda. The eyes of the world were on John Glenn, they reported. People were on their hands and knees on Cocoa Beach praying for John Glenn and the first orbital flight. These things don’t happen anymore, and I believe — I was telling somebody last night — I said, ‘Yeah, I think the media could easily turn the tide here; if the media were once again proud of the country, proud of the institutions and led people to loving their country.’
And the person I was talking to said, ‘This media?’
I said, ‘No, I was talking about that.’
He said, ‘Katie Couric? Brian Williams? These guys?’
I said, ‘No, I’m talking about the institution and it’s capabilities. I’m not talking about this current crop. Of course not this current crop.’
But I do think that the media can rally people to be positive because I am media and we’ve done it here. I know it can be done, because I know that people need leadership and they want it and crave it and they respond to it. That show last night — and there are two more episodes the next two Sunday nights at 9:00 Eastern — shows America at its best. People dropped to their knees and prayed. NASA was the greatest place in the world. These guys, these astronauts, they were all heroes. You know who our heroes are today? You know who the heroes are today? Che Guevera — to the American left. (interruption) Okay, Snerdley, give me one of their heroes. Give me a hero that the American left routinely cites. One of our heroes is Ronald Reagan. What does our own side tell us? ‘Get over him! Forget Reagan! The era of Reagan has passed!’ Their heroes are older than Reagan. We never hear them say, ‘Get over FDR! Get over JFK! Get over Teddy Kennedy.’ Our own side, our own party, tells us to get over Ronald Reagan!
Ronald Reagan is one of our heroes. Not a cult figure hero, a substantive hero. Where are the heroes today? Well, how many hundreds of thousands of them are in Iraq, and what the hell is said about them by the leftists and by the Democratic Party, by John Murtha, by Dick Durbin, by John Kerry? You name it! They are murderers! They are rapists! They are thugs! You think this stuff doesn’t resonate all over the country? And look at the leftists on college campuses, high school campuses and wherever else you find idle time. They hate the US military! They have been taught and brainwashed to hate the US Military, which is protecting their silly right to say these stupid things. They have an official home: the Democrat Party. They have an official house organ: the New York Times, and the rest of the Drive-By Media. And these are the people who are trying to tell you to stop doing bonfires, to have your car only idle for three minutes at a time.
They’re telling you to stop having kids because it’s going to pollute the planet even more! They’re blaming you for your attempt at a better standard of living and prosperity, for destroying the climate. These are negative, unhappy, miserable people trying to spread as much of all three of those qualities to as many people as possible. They do despise this country. They do purposely seek to cut it down to size. They do purposely and, by design, seek to take away — little by little so you won’t notice or care — your freedom. They seek to place that which they have taken from you in Big Government where controls over even more of your freedom will be instituted because in all of this huge giant equation, the only place that is benevolent — the only institution worthy of our respect, in fact our prayers, and getting down on our hands and knees, and saying, ‘Thank God!’ — is for government. Government wants to give us healthcare. Do you realize…?
We need a goal today like they had a goal in the ’60s. We need a goal. Energy and independence, our own oil. Drill it! Drill it here and drill it now! Who’s going to stand in the way? The very people who don’t want our independence. The very people who want us to be dependent on other sources of oil. They say it’s because they’re afraid of pollution. How many oil wells are in the Gulf of Mexico, near the Gulf Coast? How many were damaged or ruined during Hurricane Katrina? How many oil spills were there? Hundreds were damaged or ruined and there were no oil spills! It’s a phony argument to say that oil wells offshore will end up polluting and destroying the country and the environment and the planet. These are people who, while taking away your freedom and liberty — at the same time, by definition because you and I are the ones who make the country work, our ambition, our industriousness and productivity. Take away our freedom to do that and guess what happens? The country’s productivity shrinks. That, they want. It’s not fear we’re so big.
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RUSH: I’m going to read you a little passage here, ladies and gentlemen, a little quote from one of our heroes, Ronald Reagan, whom our own side is telling us to get over. He said: ‘We should always remember that our strength still lies in our faith in the good sense of the American people. And that the climate in Washington is still opposed to those enduring values, those ‘permanent things’ that we’ve always believed in. … But Washington is a place of fads and one-week stories. It’s also a company town, and the company’s name is government, big government. … In the discussion of federal spending, the time has come to put to rest the sob sister attempts to portray our desire to get government spending under control as a hard-hearted attack on the poor people of America.’
To this day, we have a federal budget over $3 trillion. Any mention of cutting it is still said to be aimed at the poor, minorities and women, hardest-hit. We don’t change anything in Washington unless a Reagan comes along. Obama isn’t going to change anything. Obama is going to do what leftists and liberals have done for eons, and that’s to try to grow the government to as large as it can, raise taxes on as many people as possible, and eliminate as much personal freedom and liberty as he can. There’s nothing new about Obama. Reagan was change. ‘The climate in Washington is still opposed to those enduring values, those ‘permanent things’ that we’ve always believed in. … But Washington is a place of fads and one-week stories.’ Does that not describe Barack Obama? We have all of these examples, countless examples of government failing in every mission it takes, be it fixing and restoring and maintaining levees in New Orleans, to reducing poverty, to streamlining healthcare. There is no evidence that government is fit to run it. In fact, the Senate dining room, wait until you hear this. Dianne Feinstein has ordered the Senate dining room to go private. It’s losing money. It loses millions. The food’s lousy and if they don’t go private, Senator’s lunch prices will go up 25%. The House already did it.