RUSH: They didn’t run out of anything. They went to New Orleans and restocked, put provisions on, and went back out to sea and waited till they got back into the port of Galveston. I just saw Fox News talk about there’s three cruise ships. There’s a Carnival cruise line, two of them, and I think a Royal Caribbean.

They were supposed to dock somewhere in Texas, Galveston, and were not able to because of the hurricane. So they’ve been going to New Orleans to restock the ship with food, dancing girls, adult beverages, and so forth, stuff to play in the casinos, and they just referred to people on those ships as stranded.

So I wondered, if you’re on a cruise ship, are you stranded? I mean, it’s under power, air-conditioning is working, you’re out at sea. You’ve got pina coladas at an arm’s-length. How are you stranded other than you can’t get off? But maybe you could have gotten off when they got to New Orleans. Anyway, strange things, folks.

Let’s look at some of the news coming out of Houston here. The economic news, by the way, is through the roof. We have a revised GDP that’s gonna be north of 3% economic growth. This is second quarter GDP, up 3%. 2.7 was the original report, now projected to be at 3%. Jobs news continues to come in. Consumer confidence is at a 17-year high.

President Trump is on the way to Missouri today where he is going to make a speech on tax reform to get this whole thing kicked off, and the Drive-Bys on CNBC were just livid when they found out Stephen Miller wrote the speech. Stephen Miller, of course, is a white nationalist, and he’s an anti-Semite, even though he’s Jewish. You haven’t heard they called him an anti-Semite? Yeah, they called Stephen Miller an anti-Semite. I forget why. It doesn’t matter. It was some aftermath of some controversy. It might have been Charlottesville because he wrote a Trump speech.

By the way, folks, I’m sorry to be hopscotching all over the place, but neurons and synapses are firing here in my brain.

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RUSH: Trump’s going to Missouri, to Springfield, and he’s gonna try to get the ball rolling on tax reform today, and CNBC went off on Stephen Miller when they find out he wrote the speech. They think Gary Cohn should have written the speech. And they’re really ticked off that Gary Cohn didn’t write the speech, that Stephen Miller did because Stephen Miller’s a nationalist.

What’s a nationalist? It’s nothing. It’s another word for being an American. Nationalist has become a dirty word that means you care only about your country and you don’t care about the downtrodden and the homeless and the thirsty and the poor from around the world. You don’t care. That’s what a nationalist is. So they’re trying to discredit Stephen Miller as being one of those kind of guys.

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RUSH: Now to Houston. Little news there. “Fourteen people in the Houston area have been arrested on looting charges over the past 48 hours.” Hurricane Harvey’s moved on, the rain has stopped in Houston, and the floodwaters are receding. In some cases they’re receding at a pretty decent clip. Why are you looking at me? Have you not heard? Oh, I thought you were looking at me like you haven’t heard that said anywhere. No, no, the rain has stopped. I mean, have you seen the radar? I mean, the media may be telling you it’s stilling raining there, but if you look at the radar, it isn’t.

Harvey has moved on. Floodwaters will naturally recede at some point once the rain stops. But it’s got a long, long, long way to go, and it’s gonna be devastating when that floodwater recedes and we see what’s beneath the water, the damage is gonna be shocking.

Anyway, there’s a growing body of thought that people should be allowed to loot. The media is putting forth the idea that it’s not really fair to call people trying to survive looters. It’s unfortunate, they said, it tags them with a term that might stay with them for the rest of their lives, and all they are is decent people trying to hang on, trying to survive.

Tom Llamas, the ABC World News Tonight anchor, said, “We are witnessing looting right now at a large supermarket in Northeast part of Houston. Police have just discovered a body nearby.” Apparently after Tom Llamas reported witnessing looting, people went to Twitter and took issue with the fact that he was tweeting about looters before tweeting about the body.

Other people were upset at the idea of characterizing people just trying to get food during a disaster as looters. “This disgusting tweet could only serve to make already traumatized people feel more unsafe. You and ABC, Llamas, should feel ashamed. Pretty sure they’re called this trying to survive. Houston’s been devastated. How do you loot bread and peanut butter?” So the movement is on on Twitter to not allow looting to be called looting.

Now, from the Washington Post, David Von Drehle. “Harvey’s Burdens Will Fall Hardest on the Poor.” You could see this coming 35 years ago. For those of you new to the program, let me tell you a joke. Let me tell you how stereotypical this is. “Harvey’s Burdens Will Fall Hardest on the Poor.” One day God’s watching The Oprah show, and he says, “You know what? This thing with humanity is not working. Humanity is a disaster and I’m tired of the experiment.”

So God called USA Today, he called the New York Times, he called the Wall Street Journal to tell them the world was gonna end in 24 hours. That humanity had blown it, he had blown it, maybe combination two, but it was over. The New York Times asked for an exclusive. They were denied. The way the story, “God to end world” was handled at the newspapers went like this. The USA Today headline: “We’re Done.” The New York Times: “God Says World to End Tomorrow. Experts Await Details.” Washington Post: “God Says World to End Tomorrow. Women and Children Hardest Hit.”

That joke goes back to the eighties. This is how stereotypically you can predict it. So here we have in the Washington Post, “Harvey’s Burdens Will Fall Hardest on the Poor.”

Here’s how it starts. “There’s an insight sometimes credited to W. B. ‘Bat’ Masterson, the buffalo hunter turned Wild West lawman turned hard-drinking gambler who ended up as a pal of Theodore Roosevelt and died a famous New York sportswriter. … The insight goes like this: Everyone gets the same amount of ice in life. The rich get theirs in the summer; the poor in the winter. The catastrophe on the Texas coast makes little or no distinction between rich and poor — for now, anyway.”

But the burdens will fall hardest on the poor. So if you’re in Houston hearing the sound of my voice, if you’re middle class, or God forbid even rich — and I saw some rich homes nearly all underwater — and if you’ve lost a lot of property, if you’ve lost members of your family in this natural disaster you should be comforted by the fact that the poor are gonna have it even harder than you’ve had.

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RUSH: Here is the last paragraph of the gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching op-ed piece by David Von Drehle in the Washington Post, “Harvey’s Burdens Will Fall Hardest on the Poor.” Ready? Closing paragraph: “It is on the tired backs of the poor that the heaviest burdens of the hurricane will fall, and they will bear that weight for the longest time. May the sympathy we feel for them in this hour of disaster harden into something more lasting: respect.” So no matter which of you in Houston have lost how much, it doesn’t matter. There’s always somebody that’s gonna lose more, and you need to remember that. And it’s this…

No, I can imagine (impression), “What’s wrong with that, Mr. Limbaugh? Do you think that’s wrong?” I think what’s wrong here is in the middle of a disaster, they still have to divide people. A disaster is a disaster for all of the people that experience it! But to try to subdivide it and to say that some people have…? It’s politicizing it! That is exactly what it is, and I’m just tired of it. I’m tired of these emotional levers of people trying to advance political agendas on the backs of the poor. I mean, for crying out loud, it stands to reason! There’s nothing inherent… They’re trying… The undercurrent here is: “There’s something really wrong with America.

“It’s really bad. The poor are hardest hit.” It’s a media meme. It is a narrative. It’s a requirement. It’s oriented toward dividing people and promoting guilt and all of these other things. It’s frustrating. Maybe it’s getting to me a little bit more than it should because of the things I have discovered today that the media has been doing. Actually starting longer than today, but just it’s been codified today with some in-depth research about how they’re just out-and-out lying about what Donald Trump is saying — and then he’s got people in his own administration falling for the lies, like Tillerson and Gary Cohn.

The lack of curiosity and the willingness to believe the worst is a frustrating thing.

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RUSH: We start Corpus Christi. Joseph, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Good morning, sir. How are you doing?

RUSH: Very well. Very well. Thank you.

CALLER: Outstanding, sir. Thank you for taking my call. I guess it’s afternoon where you are. I just wanted to call and make a point. When POTUS flew in yesterday, I had rushed home from evacuating and was cleaning up around the area, cleaning up the church. I’m just south of Port A, and I was deriving west of town towards the airport and wanted to make the point that, you know, everybody was busy taking responsibility on hand.

No one was concerned with the president flying into town or necessarily what the first lady’s footwear was. We were in a time of need, so we were getting to work, and I thought that it was a small microcosm example of sort of where we are culturally, how the abundance of free time leads us to kind of a pedantic nonsense headspace. And when it comes time to actually get to work, you don’t have time to worry about footwear or little things that often breed the negative conflict in the media right now. It’s take responsibility, pick up your axe, find a neighbor in need, and get to work.

RUSH: So you were not affected one way or the other by the president’s arrival. He did not do anything to dampen your experts nor lift them much, and you later found out the media was going nuts over the kind of shoes the first lady wore. You didn’t care about that because you didn’t have time to.

CALLER: Exactly, sir. I mean, we’re a very tight community down there, and Corpus Christi was lucky enough, you know, to kind of dodge it. Port A caught the bulk it of it.

RUSH: Right, because the Drive-Bys said Corpus Christi was gonna get the bulk of it.

CALLER: Right, sir. We lost shingles, housed got knocked down, and we needed hands to help pick stuff up and we’ll be rebuilding for a while. But the bigger point was TV’s weren’t queued. We weren’t looking for negatives. It was just, “How can I get out and help?” and it says a lot to the culture down there. As a supporter of our commander-in-chief, you know, of course I would have loved to go to the airfield to see him. But it was important to stay off the roads to find someone who needs help. Kind of in that moment, I saw that we’ve kind of redacted ourselves culturally because we have such an abundance of time to spend listening to a misplaced media when really you should just be taking responsibility and getting after it.

RUSH: No, I understand it. In fact, I understand it totally. You may have heard this, folks; you may have seen it. Grab audio sound bite number 6. CNN ran into a recently rescued woman and her children in a shelter in Houston, thrust a microphone in her face, and wanted to know what it was like and so forth. Here is how that sounded. Question from the reporterette: “You’re with your children. We’ve heard stories of mothers trying to save their children from the rushing waters. Can you tell us…?”

WOMAN: It was four feet of water to go get them food on the first day. Yeah, that’s a lot of s(bleep). But y’all sit here, you all trying to interview people during their worst times. That’s not the smartest thing to do!

REPORTER: (mumbles) Sorry.

WOMAN: Like, people are really breaking down and y’all are sitting here with cameras and microphones trying to ask them what the f(bleep) is wrong with us?

REPORTER: I’m so sorry, ma’am.

WOMAN: Are you really trying to understand with a microphone still in my face?

REPORTER: (mumbles) Sorry.

WOMAN: With me shivering cold, with my kids wet and you still puttin’ a microphone in my face!

RUSH: Right. And what she knows that reporterette’s got a bottle of water and a sandwich waiting for her behind the stage, and this woman hadn’t eaten in a couple of days. She’s trying to get her kids fed and dry, trying to make everybody feel comfortable, and she runs into a bunch of reporters — who are dressed properly and the proper deportment — and she just lost it. And I think that sentiment… Well, I know it was applauded. Everybody who heard this was cheering this woman on, and it’s not the first time something like this has happened. But remember, it’s the media constantly telling us who’s in touch and who’s not and who’s sensitive and who isn’t and who cares and who doesn’t — and in that, they’re always wrong too.