RUSH: We’re gonna start in Cincinnati. This is Pam, and I’m glad you waited. Great to have you on the program.

CALLER: Hi, Rush! (giggles)

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: It’s good to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: Yeah. Remember how at the beginning of the show you were saying that, like… Well, I might butcher this. But as a paraphrase, you were saying that you used to look at 60 and 70 years olds and you’d say…

RUSH: I said that I vowed that when I became the age I am, 61, I wouldn’t look at young generation people as…

CALLER: The beginning of the end of the culture?

RUSH: Yeah, the beginning of the end. Reprobates, worthless.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: You know, human debris.

CALLER: I was calling because I wanted to let you know that I’m 27, and I wouldn’t blame you if you looked at my culture and younger (giggling) as the beginning of the end of the culture. ‘Cause it’s really frustrating. Like everybody I know that’s my age, with the exception of maybe one or two people, are literal zombies. It is impossible to have a real debate because it’s just… I mean, they’ve been brainwashed.

RUSH: Well…

CALLER: And a lot of it’s the schools, I know.

RUSH: I have to admit that I think… See, this is what I’ve trying to avoid doing. I’m tempted to agree with you. I remember when I was your age. The older generation looked at us as a bunch of… I don’t know. We weren’t ready for anything yet. We were spoiled rotten. We were “me, me, me” and so forth, and all that. And they looked at the drugs and the music and the ’60s. Remember, I’m a child of the ’60s.

They looked at that and said, “My God, these kids are never gonna amount to anything. They’re throwing their lives away. They’re frying their brains and all this sort of stuff.” And it turned out that half my generation ended up okay. The other half ended up as so self-important and self-focused that they never have grow up. They never had to grow up. So I understand. When I was young, the political divide didn’t exist in young generation people like it does now. They were liberals but they weren’t like the liberals of today: angry, enraged, profane.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Although… Although… Now, wait a minute. See, I gotta catch myself because it really isn’t so. There were people blowing up bank buildings when I was 16 and 17. People my age — 16, 17, 20, 21 — were blowing up bank buildings, kidnapping people, protesting the war and so forth. I just vowed that I would not make a judgment on the future of the country based on where young people happen to be at a moment in time. But I know what you mean. Liberal education has had a much more totally powerful control over young people today than it did even in my day.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: As I sit here and think about this, another reality has hit me upside the head. It’s not the kids today that are the problem, because kids are always a problem. It’s today’s adults that are the problem! It’s today’s adults that I don’t have any faith in or that I wonder about. You know, it used to be when I was young that whether you thought adults were screwballs or nerds or kooks or whatever, you still thought they were adults. They were mature. They were smarter. They were reliable.

You could count on them for wisdom and advice. Today, I think that’s what I am questioning. And who are the adults today? My generation! The Boomers! The Baby Boomers, the most spoiled rotten generation in history. And yes, I’m one of them, but I’m not spoiled rotten. My generation has among it some of the most spoiled-rotten people in the history of the country. I think you look at the kids today, and the biggest single change from my generation when I was young to today is that when I was a teenager or in my early twenties, things weren’t so politicized.

The culture wasn’t as politicized. School wasn’t as politicized. Not where I grew up. The liberals took over education after World War II. It was just starting. What happened was the major universities, prior to World War II, had been bastions of the WASPs, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. After World War II they opened their doors and the “intellectuals” and the multiculturalists poured in there, and that’s when the transformation began, the liberal transformation.

Liberals have not always owned education. No, they haven’t. That’s the point. But certainly entertainment was not nearly as politicized when I was growing up. Today, every actor is a Meryl Streep. I’m reading a novel right now about pre-World War II France. And it centers on a fictitious American actor who is in France making a movie, and he’s being hit on by Germans and Nazis. He’s being threatened and pressured into becoming a Nazi propagandist. In the novel, which is historically accurate, he ends up getting screwed by a journalist.

He gives an interview for what he thinks is promoting his movie. It turns out the story ends up being about how he’s a Nazi sympathizer. And his producers in Hollywood call: “Get the politics out! Everybody goes to the movies. We don’t want your political views.” Now, we’ve always had liberals in entertainment, but it used to be very bad to be a liberal in entertainment. Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, those of the blacklist. It used to be very, very bad to be a communist.

Now it’s a resume requirement that you be a liberal to be in entertainment and that you be public about it. And they don’t care about the box office. Now, sports is still that way. Michael Jordan is a big Democrat and he’s never gonna tell you that. We still don’t know what Tiger Woods’ politics are because everybody buys golf clubs, T-shirts, golf shirts, all that kind of stuff. They all buy tennis shoes and so forth. They want to sell to everybody. They don’t care who. But Hollywood gave up the ghost a long time ago.

I didn’t have any left-wing teachers. I mean, even through high school. I didn’t have liberalism pumped at me each and every day, not like your kids have it pumped at ’em. I did not have it. So that is a transformational change. And the transformational change did not happen by accident. And it is true that most entertainers shied away from politics. Only the biggest names, the Sinatras and so forth, could identify with politicians. But look who they identified with: People that were universally popular, the Kennedys and so forth.

Folks, we used to live in a country where people wanted to be successful. People wanted to be millionaires. Today, we live in a country where people want to receive a government check, and wanting to be a millionaire is said to be bad. Wanting to be successful, wanting to be a millionaire is said to be greedy and selfish. Well, what is more greedy and selfish than living off of other people? And yet that is what is championed today.

Receiving a government check, that is said to be good.

That’s “fairness.”

This is where Obama and the left have taken us. Failure is now accepted, not stigmatized. In fact, in some cases it’s encouraged. Failure is how you excuse being discriminated against. It’s a badge of honor. CNN! Look at CNN, for crying out loud! CNN has a hundred thousand viewers. And within the news business, CNN is treated as though they are heroic because they haven’t given up. They haven’t given up the cause. Despite audience abandonment, profit and so forth, they haven’t given it up.

Failure is accepted.

It’s lionized.

It’s explained away.

In some cases, it’s encouraged.

And it is now subsidized, and it’s subsidized on the basis that the failure people encounter or engage in is somebody else’s fault. It’s sociopathic. “Today’s failures are victims of the 1%. Today’s failures are victims of George Bush! They’re victims of Republicans, victims of the Founding Fathers, victims of an unfair capitalistic culture.” And as such failure, in some places, is a badge of honor. And so we subsidize it. Meanwhile, more and more liberal billionaires are dropping US citizenship and fleeing overseas.

Have you heard about Denise Rich? Marc Rich’s wife is renouncing her citizenship and fleeing the country to avoid taxes, and this woman is a multibillionaire. Eric Holder got the pardon for her husband, Marc Rich, who was a criminal in the commodities markets. He can’t come back to the United States without being arrested and sent to jail. Denise Rich is his ex-wife. She’s a big-time liberal fundraiser, entertainer, social doyenne.

She has homes in New York, Aspen, San Tropez, you name it. She has a big 150-foot yacht and throws some of the biggest parties of the summer off the coast of the south of France. She’s renouncing her citizenship. A liberal Democrat billionaire. This guy, one of the cofounders of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin, a liberal, is renouncing his citizenship. Liberal billionaires are fleeing overseas. The question, ladies and gentlemen, is can we as a country pull together to rid ourselves of this president and the poison that is his administration and his party?

We can’t rely on others to do this.

We have to do this ourselves.

We can’t rely on Republican leadership.

We can’t rely on Romney.

I don’t think the Republican establishment has the slightest clue. In fact, if anybody in the Republican establishment is listening to me, they probably think I’m off my rocker. They’re still stuck in the traditional “We can win this race on the economy.” But I’m here to tell you the sad truth is the economy is not pivotal, because it’s not painful. Unemployment isn’t painful. Forty-six million Americans are on food stamps with more signing up every day. Forty-seven or 48% of them are not paying any income tax.

Three million more are off the unemployment rolls and on disability. It’s, sadly, not a big deal. It’s not something that a whole lot of Americans care enough about to want to change. So can we pull together to rid ourselves of this president and the poison? And by pulling ourselves together, can we rally enough people to vote against Obama and to show them that it is in their best interests for this administration to not be reelected? I just don’t think we can rely on the traditional political establishments to bring this off.

You remember during the primaries you people would call and we would talk about what kind of campaign Romney would run if he got the nomination. We all said, “It had better not be a McCain campaign. He’d better get rid of this first-black-president stuff. That’s four years in the history books. It doesn’t matter anymore. We got the country to save and all that.” We openly asked, you and I, when we would talk and ask each other, “Will Romney treat Obama the same way he treated Newt Gingrich or Santorum?”

He better.

Whether he does it or his super PACs do it, he better. That’s what it’s gonna take.

He can’t just run around and cite economic statistics and expect that to rally people. The polling data shows that isn’t gonna work. Romney should be up by 25 points if this were the America of 30 years ago. Sadly, it isn’t. This has to be a repeat of 2010 where we show up and push back and make things happen with the Tea Party, et al. The other side’s out there selling class warfare, which is snake oil. And the question is: “How much snake oil do we all want to drink?”

Yeah, it’s the adults today that are the problem.

The Baby Boomers and the youth they had and the adults they became, that’s the problem. Not the younger generation. In fact, I frankly believe, ladies and gentlemen, that the younger generations are gonna ultimately be who save us. ‘Cause I don’t think they’re gonna want to inherit this kind of country, and they’ll do something about it. That’s what happens every third or fourth generation, anyway. They say, “I’ve had it! I’m not gonna live the way my parents did. I don’t want to the kind of life my parents had,” whatever it was, and they go about changing it.

Maybe I ought to tell that story. I gotta take a break now, and I want to get more phone calls in, but I evolved a theory about the Baby Boom Generation. We had to invent our traumas in order to tell ourselves how tough life was. In fact, Baby Boomers, we don’t really know how tough life was for our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. We can’t fathom it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Orofino, Idaho. This is Pat. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, I’m glad you finally got to talk to me.

RUSH: Thank you, sir. I’m glad you made it through.

CALLER: Hey, you know, I’m getting kind of tired of liberals always blaming us business workers and producers for all the ills in the world, and I think if they win this next election all of us people that produce stuff ought to go on the dole, just live in the world they want to create.

RUSH: Well, it’s gonna make more business sense. Small business is clearly being targeted.

CALLER: Well, I want to look at these people and say, “Well, you’ve told me not to cut trees for years. You’ve told me I shouldn’t let my cows eat grass, and Lord Almighty, nobody poke a hole in the ground for oil. Well, you intellectuals could just make oil out of thin air. Let’s just live in the world you want to create.”

RUSH: Well, they’re on their way.

CALLER: They’re doing a good job of it. Let’s just throw up and live in it.

RUSH: They’re on the way. These are people with no real-world experience whatsoever who seem to have all the answers. Anyway, Pat, I appreciate it.