RUSH: The Amtrak crash. Here’s another one. This is falling apart right in front of the left’s eyes but they’re not gonna acknowledge it. But everything they’ve been saying is falling apart. You know, “Infrastructure! Infrastructure!” It turns out that this latest technology that would stop an out-of-control speeding train? It’s there! It’s been installed! It just hasn’t been turned on.

The bottom line is this accident happened because there’s no reason a bureaucracy as large as the transportation department or the federal government should be running the operation. It’s simply incompetent because it’s too big. There are too many people doing too many things with no accountability, no central authority, and things aren’t getting done. And then you have this conductor… Is that what they call these people? Engineer?

He’s out there tweeting all over. A tweet fest of this guy’s has been discovered. He’s apparently a union activist in addition to being a gay activist, and he’s been tweeting and Facebooking, whatever, left and right that the work schedules are causing engineers to work 12/14 hours and he’s worried about engineers falling asleep on the job. These are long-ago tweets, weeks-ago tweets. So it could well be that this was a…

Well, I don’t want to speculate. But it could be self-fulfilling prophecy type of thing.

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RUSH: No, no. Amtrak… What I was talking about is very simple. There’s a report that the safety equipment that could have prevented the accident hasn’t been held back by lack of funding. You’ve seen that. “It was infrastructure! The Republicans didn’t spend enough money!” You’ve seen all that. That’s BS, folks. It’s BS from the first time the syllables were formed in the first brain of the liberal that first uttered it.

The safety equipment and the installation and turning it on has been held up because it’s so complex, they can’t figure out how to make it work, specifically the FCC, who has to release more bandwidth for the GPS system in this braking system to work. It’s installed! It’s ready to go! They just can’t figure it out. And nobody’s busting their rear end to. That’s the thing about bureaucracies: There’s never any urgency.

In fact, the truth of bureaucracies is the less that gets done, the more the bureaucracy is seen as needed. So the modus operandi for bureaucracies is to do as little as they can to get by. If the bureaucracy accomplishes a lot, at some point people are gonna say it isn’t needed. That’s the perverted way they look at it. So much of government and so much of liberalism is misunderstood because at the top of the list of things that are required is self-perpetuation. Whatever you do as a bureaucrat, you do not do anything that will harm your bureaucracy.

You do not do anything that will not perpetuate your bureaucracy. You do not do anything that will result in your bureaucracy having a budgeting cut. The best way to see to all of that is to get as little done as possible while having convenient people to blame. In this case, the Republicans — stingy, extremist, mean-spirited, cold-hearted Republicans — when that’s nowhere near the truth. There’s just no urgency. The equipment’s installed. It just hasn’t turned it on because haven’t figured out a bandwidth problem for the GPS.

It’s there!

Saving lives is not even enough to speed up the process.

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RUSH: First I want to play a couple sound bites, because there is a Republican fighting back on this silly Amtrak stuff about the Republicans being to blame because of lack of funding or lack of compassion or not caring about infrastructure. This is another one of these episodes that is just utterly irresponsible, the way the Democrats and the media are handling this, and it is classic in its illustration that they do not really care about people. Here we have a tragedy, and they don’t even see it.

They see an opportunity.

They see a golden opportunity to rip Republicans and advance their agenda of growing government, when big government is the cause! Big government is the reason that train derailed. Big government is one of the factors. Big government: Out of control, incompetent, unaccountable bureaucracies. It’s not lack of funding. There isn’t anything that’s ever cut. We’re $18 trillion in debt! That ought to be automatically rejected whenever anybody cites it as a reason for anything happening.

Lack of money? That’s the last thing that is relevant. We’re $18 trillion in debt! We’ve spent money that we don’t have and that we’re never going to get back. Yet the Democrats keep talking about budget cuts, and they keep talking about Republicans not caring. It’s just the act opposite. John Mica, who is a Republican from Florida, is finally fed up, and I think this is great. This is what every Republican should be out there doing. This happened this morning on CNN with the clueless Carol Costello.

She said, “You yourself called Amtrak ‘a Third World passenger rail operation.’ Why?” What do you mean, Third World? How dare you say that!

She didn’t say that, but that’s what she’s thinking, ’cause she’s rides Amtrak. She rides Amtrak from Washington to Boston to see her husband, and she was complaining yesterday about doors and windows that don’t close and windows, and engines that stop working and break down, and heating and cooling systems that don’t work and delays. So he comes out and says, yeah. We basically have “a Third World passenger rail operation.” (Costello impression) “What do you mean, Third World train system!”

Because she is not gonna sit idly by and let her precious government be insulted.

Here’s what he said…

MICA: The United States has a Third World rail system. It’s a monopoly run in a Soviet-style operation, Amtrak. (chuckles) Almost every country in the world is bringing in the private sector to invest to create high-speed rail. The Obama administration took $10 billion, and put most of it into California where cows and vegetables are the only thing that are going to be served between Bakersfield and Fresno. It doesn’t even connect into a major metropolitan area. So it’s not how much money you spend; it’s where you spend the money, and we’re spending billions.

RUSH: And then government’s chief defender here, Carol Costello, said, “The House Appropriations Committee voted down a Democrat amendment that would have offered $825 million for the technology known as positive train control. And according to the NTSB, that technology, if it had been in place, this accident wouldn’t have happened.” So here she is just blindly saying, “That $825 million, why, it would have been magic! If we would have just spent $825 million, why, this wouldn’t have happened!” Just totally clueless, and still gets hired.

Anyway, here’s what Mica said to that…

MICA: We’ve given Amtrak between a billion and a billion and a half almost every one of years I’ve been in Congress. They’re spending money on bonuses for executives. They’re spending money to subsidize losing food service. In about a dozen years, they’ve lost a billion dollars in captive food service operation. The entire world is now opening state-supported rail to competition, and —

COSTELLO: Not Japan or China or Europe! The government pays for their systems!

MICA: (chuckles) See, you’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about. In England, Virgin Rail —

COSTELLO: China?

MICA: — is privately operated. In Russia, they’ve actually brought in public-private partners. They have high-speed rail between St. Petersburg and Moscow. Amtrak blocks any competition.

RUSH: And let me give you one other thing to ponder here: How is it possible that Amtrak cannot make any money when terrorists and TSA have made flying such a pain in the rear? And the last we looked a terrorist event has not occurred on a train, has it? Nope. Amtrak has record ridership, and they still can’t make any money. You would think that railroads would be enjoying a golden age here, just on the safety aspect alone. Taxpayers have given Amtrak more than $46 billion.

Amtrak gets a billion and after a year, on top of their outrageous prices to get from the wildly expensive tickets. What he said here about captive food service? How do you lose a billion dollars on catering and food service, when your customers cannot go anywhere else? Do you think they lose on catering operations, concessions at ballparks? Think they lose money there? And you know who’s running those outfits, don’t you? Ha-ha! You know who’s running those things.

I’m telling you, it is just outrageous, and here come these defenders. “But it’s the government, and only the government can make it right! The government can make it fair.” Whatever they come up with to justify the government doing, it’s the government’s the problem. Remember, the system that she’s up here talking about, “That $825 million, why wasn’t it authorized? The Republicans opposed it, and if they hadn’t, a fail-safe system…” The fail-safe, whatever the system is, is in.

The system that would slow down a renegade, runway train, is in. It just hasn’t been turned on. You know why it hasn’t been turned on? Because the FCC too busy out there worrying about net neutrality (which is another misnomer) has not gotten around to approving and finding the spectrum for bandwidth for GPS for the system. ‘Cause there’s no hurry. It’s Amtrak! You want the dirty little secret? Amtrak’s losing money. A Carol Costello points out, the windows and doors stick open or stick closed.

The engines shut down. It’s basically a mess. It’s probably not the cleanest bunch of trains you can get on, and they have no competition. And it’s precisely because they have no competition! It’s just… This is what’s so frustrating to us conservatives, folks, I have to tell you. Because the evidence of government failure is everywhere. The evidence of government incompetence, government waste is everywhere.

Not just Amtrak; I’m talking about everywhere. Whatever government takes over gets worse. The people that run it at government would never be hired for the same job in the private sector. That’s why they’re in government. And it is a very frustrating thing because people still turn to government to fix things. For some reason government’s fair, for some reason government is this or that, and it’s just the nature of bureaucracies. Anyway, been through it, done that.

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RUSH: Here is Dan in Muskegon, Michigan. Great to have you, sir. Thank you for waiting. You’re up next at the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Former mailman dittos to you. I’m wondering, where is the outrage from the independents on the Democrats railing against the Amtrak train that failed, even as people were drawing their last breath, how come the independents aren’t outraged at the Democrats for doing that?

RUSH: This is an excellent question and a question that is born of superior perception and listening skills of the caller. Let me explain. One of the tricks that the Republican — I’m convinced it’s a trick. If it’s not a trick, if we have willingly signed on to this, then our consultants are morons. But he’s asking about something the Republicans have been brought to believe, that the independents do not like bickering; the independents do not like arguing; the independents do not like yelling; the independents do not like raised voices; the independents do not like partisanship; the independents do not like people who are highly opinionated; the independents do not like people who are confrontational.

And the minute any Republican expresses an opinion, the independents don’t like it and run right back to the Democrat Party. See, for some reason the independents are sitting out there undecided. We don’t know why, but it’s just because they’re independents. But it doesn’t take much to send them racing back to the Democrat Party. If a Republican comes along and criticizes Obama, the independents, we’re told, harumpf and say, “Enough of them,” and they run right back to the Democrat Party. If a Republican comes along and questions a Democrat, independents don’t like it.

The bottom line is, the Republican Party’s been made to believe that when Republicans act like Republicans, the independents, who are willing to support them for some other reason, will willingly abandon them and go running right back to the Democrat Party. And the theory is that independents do not like bickering, and they do not like anger, and they do not like this and that.

So the question is, “Well, then, why do the independents put up with all of that from Democrats? Why do the independents put up with riots? Why does that not bother them? Why does the media and the Democrat Party immediately criticizing the Republicans as a cause of a train derailment not bother the independents?” And of course it’s great question.

That’s why I think this is all trick. And it’s an age-old trick. I mean, Republicans have believed this. If you doubt me, have you ever heard a Republican candidate, particularly presidential candidate in 2008 or in 2012 say something like this: “Well, yeah, but if we go after Obama, we have to go after his policy, Rush. We can’t go after him personally, you know what I mean? We go after his policies, but not him, you got it, Rush?” What do you think that’s rooted in? ‘Cause if we go after Obama personally, the independents aren’t gonna like it.

Somehow the independents will put up with us if we only go after his policies, but then we gotta be careful after we go after his policies ’cause we can’t criticize him while we criticize his policies. So that’s why I think it’s a trick. And I think that is why the Republican establishment is hell-bent on being seen as pro-amnesty. I think it’s responsible for a lot of Republican behavior, thinking that behaving in a reasonable and well spoken and nonconfrontational, nonconservative, nonargumentative way, as though we’re all C-SPAN hosts and NPR hosts.

This is the way that we will steal votes from Democrats if we just approach the electorate this way and assure them that we don’t want to kill them and we don’t want to harm them and we don’t want to starve them and we don’t want to take their money. We just assure them that that’s all BS. And speaking to them like this, they should vote for us in droves. That’s the theory.