RUSH: Laurie in Hershey, Pennsylvania, great to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: I would love to see the reincarnation of the budget deficit awareness ribbon.
RUSH: (laughing) Well, that was a device that worked well on television.
CALLER: Well, yeah, I’d like to see it more at my neighborhood grocery store, just to remind each other, ’cause there are a lot of us, you know, this part of the country, and just to remind each other what we’re working towards. That issue is getting kind of cloudy with all the other stuff going on, scandals, verdicts, decrees —
RUSH: You know, somebody observed to me the other day — this is profound, or it’s amazing what you’ve said. Somebody said to me in an e-mail, or it might have been a text message, but somebody said, “It has gotten so bad that everybody’s just forgotten about the debt,” that so much has happened since the debt was run through the roof that that’s just a side issue now.
CALLER: It is a side issue on the media’s part — well, it always is — but on the
RUSH: — public consciousness. (crosstalk)
CALLER: — home front it’s front and center. We live with it every day.
RUSH: Oh, I know. I know. Public consciousness is the only point —
CALLER: Oh, no, I know, I absolutely agree. But, you know, I’m a mom of three young boys, who eat me out of house and home, let me tell you. And every time I go to the grocery store and every time I have to get them clothes or a backpack or something, you just realize what a tight budget you’re on —
RUSH: I know.
CALLER: — and then I see, you know, Air Force One flying all over the place and this —
RUSH: And the entitlement to royalty.
CALLER: Well, yeah.
RUSH: Barack and his wife have this entitlement to royalty. It’s like thumbing their nose at everybody. By the way, the budget deficit awareness ribbon, for those of you that don’t know what that is, you remember back in the early nineties when there was a colored ribbon for every issue. There was red ribbon for HIV. There was a yellow ribbon for this and a blue ribbon for that. I remember one day on my TV program I came out wearing nine of them, nine or 10 different colored ribbons and I told everybody, “Because I’m wearing these ribbons, I’m a better person than you are, and I care more than you do.”
I said, “I don’t see you guys wearing ribbons, but see these? I care. This makes me a better person than you.” And then we came up with the deficit reduction awareness ribbon, which is a dollar bill folded in the same shape as those other issue awareness ribbons. We had folding instructions, how to fold it to make it look like one of those other ribbons. It was a brilliant invention. And people started showing up in the studio audience of the TV show wearing the things, and they were popping up everywhere. Even members of Congress, there were a couple, maybe more, members of Congress that ran around wearing deficit reduction awareness ribbons. Gives you an idea how long the deficit’s been a problem.
Anyway, we could do that again. We could use the website for this. The opportunities are limitless on this kind of thing. I appreciate your reminding me of that because I don’t really spend a whole lot of time thinking about what I once did or what once happened, either here or on the TV show, because I’m just so focused on the present and then tomorrow that the past is like a been there, done that. So I’m always flattered to be reminded of these things. It’s not a bad idea. And it was clever, too. “What is that? That looks like a dollar bill.” It is. It’s a deficit reduction awareness ribbon. “Oh, wow, that’s really cool. How do I get one?” Well, it’s in your pocket, and here are the folding instructions.