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May 9, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:30
May 9, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Boy, is this going to be fun today, folks?
I have stuff here today.
See, I told you so is all over the place.
Great news about the Democrats.
I mean, it it just dovetails it precisely and builds on some of the things we discussed yesterday.
Greetings and welcome to the award-winning thrill-packed Rush Limbaugh program on the one and only Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We uh again come to you today uh from Los Angeles.
Uh heading home uh to our Southern Command uh headquarters, uh heavily secured uh secret bunker, private location uh in South Florida.
Uh got actually get back tomorrow morning at seven o'clock, so tomorrow's show ought to be a doozy.
Uh giddy as I can be.
Phone number if you want to be on the program today, 800-282-2882, the email address rush at EIB net.com.
Let me give it a little heads up uh as to what's happening today.
I've been working on a formula.
You know, Einstein had uh his uh theory of relativity, uh E equals MC squared.
Uh and I've been trying to figure out, um, because and I'm sure you have too.
Everybody's wondering, how can it be that the mainstream media, the the the drive-by media, uh is losing so much influence and at the same time doing so much damage.
And this requires a mathematical formula.
And I was uh I was uh working on this feverishly on the golf course yesterday afternoon, uh feverishly last night while at the Grand Havana Club, uh, which is a great thing in California.
You can go in there and smoke cigars while having dinner, just like you can do at your house.
I was working on this formula.
I will share the formula with you as the program unfolds today before your very eyes and ears.
Richard Cohen, columnist in the Washington Post, has discovered, it's amazing.
He's just now discovered the boiling rage and a hatred that exists out there.
The Democratic Party has come to the conclusion that it's not good and because he's been personally attacked by these kooks out there in the blogosphere because he dared criticize the comedian that uh insulted Bush at the White House correspondence there.
Said the guy wasn't what's his name, Colbert, said he wasn't funny.
By the way, welcome to those of you uh uh watching on the Ditto Cam.
Now, I I'm looking at the monitor right now.
When you see me there, I'm watching myself just as you uh are watching me.
Um I'm no different than you.
I like looking at me too.
And I look at the monitor here, and I I am not sunburned, and I I I look beat red.
I don't know if it's the monitor here or if we have a problem with this camera that we won.
It was the it was the buried treasure in a box of cracker jack.
So I don't know what the problem we're working on it if we're checking it ourselves to see where the problem is, and and uh we may be able to fix it, we may not be able to fix it.
If we can't fix it, you gotta deal with it.
Nevertheless, welcome.
Glad that you're here.
Also, see, I told you so on Mahmood and his letter uh to President Bush.
And the news the the news about about General Hayden at the CIA uh uh predicted this.
It's falling out exactly as I told you it was going to fall out yesterday.
Russ Feingold will have audio sound bites of this.
Feingold went up to the uh national press club, blamed America for terrorism while claiming that Democrats need to get tougher on President Bush and stand up for exactly how they can protect the country.
The Washington Post has used.
We've talked about this yesterday too.
Washington Post has a story that the Democrats are optimistic as they assemble their agenda.
The problem with the story in the New York Times is there's no agenda.
There's no agenda spelled out.
And there's some Democrats unhappy.
But Nancy Pelosi has run out there and explained exactly what they're gonna do on the investigations front.
So there's uh there's a lot on the table today.
And let me just get started with Mahmood, because this a giant C I told you so.
Yesterday on this program, behind this very golden EIB microphone, I told you this Mahmood guy was smart cookie.
Oh, oil price has fallen to 69 bucks, uh uh under 70 dollars now, and you know why the re Because of Mahmood's letter.
I have I've known for the longest time that when Mahmood wants the price up, he threatens the nuke Israel.
When he wants the price to go down, he does something that might look like a uh uh uh a peace initiative, which is how this letter of his uh uh to to President Bush is being portrayed.
I he just played the drive-by media uh like a fiddle.
And in fact, when you read parts of Mahmood's letter, which I will do for you in mere moments, you will swear you've heard all this before from Democrats.
He almost recites the Democrat talking points, even down to the fact that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So, in order, Iran's president threw a, and I told you the media would love this guy, told you that the media uh could be played by this guy, that he would be looked like uh looked at as the peace broker, the man who cares that Bush should be portrayed as obstinate and uninterested, and that Mahmood's trying to use, and I know their allies are in the Middle East in this country, they're the Democratic Party to drive by media.
So, from the Associated Press, Iran's president threw a deft Trump card into his standoff with the West on Monday when he dispatched a letter to President Bush proposing new solutions to the crisis.
He didn't propose any solution.
He didn't he didn't even reference the the the nuclear problem, which is the primary problem that we have.
Uh, and they refer to this uh letter as a diplomatic overture that vastly complicates U.S. hopes for UN Security Council sanctions to punish the Islamic regime.
I mean, that lead, that first paragraph, I I'm telling you this writer Stephen Hurst, he's out of Cairo.
This guy had to have an orgasm right in this.
He had that, he just loved this.
Praise Mahmood.
Explain how Mahmood's deft uh Trump card uh now screws the United States efforts at the United Nations.
Uh some analysts also saw the letter as a signal of a possible power struggle in Iran.
While Mahmood Ahmadinizad did not disclose what he uh wrote to the American leader, the uh letter's very existence appeared to offer Russia and China handy additional justification.
Well, we know what's in the letter now.
Uh let's see.
So fiddle.
Here's the story about oil prices down a dollar on Mahmood's letter.
Oil fell over one dollar.
Everybody pants with excitement.
By the way, USA Today has a poll.
They went out because it's Gallup, did a poll on who Americans blame for the oil price.
And it's uh 50% of the American people blame the oil companies.
Uh Jonah Goldberg has a piece today in the uh National Review Online about populism.
He's got a great, great lead, great open.
Two plus two does not equal five, but in American politics, if millions of people thought it did, Congress would sanction it because it's a constituency.
It's not a collection of idiots if it think two plus two is five, it's a large number of people need to be listened to.
So 50% of the American people blame the oil companies.
Do you know what responsibility the oil companies have for the price of oil?
Zip zero not uh.
This means that 50% of the American people are dead wrong and haven't the slightest understanding how the price of oil and thus the price of gasoline is determined.
And yet, since 50% of the American people stupidly, ignorantly think it's the oil companies, that's why we're gonna get big oil executives up there and they're gonna get hammered and are gonna get blamed.
Uh it's the say it's the same kind of thinking that drove the port deal.
People had no clue what the port deal was about, but it didn't matter.
There were so many of them.
Didn't matter that they were wrong or ignorant or didn't understand it.
Politicians had to get in gear, and that's why populism is a bad thing, because it has no regard for what's actually true about anything.
And so I factor this into my formula, which I will share with you in mere moments about the um reason the mainstream media, while losing so much influence at the same time can do so much damage.
Anyway, oil fell over a buck on Monday on hopes that tension, hopes.
People are out there oh hoping, ha, ha, hoping that tension over Iran's nuclear ambition will ease after Mahmood made an unprecedented move to contact Washington.
Oh, dialogue.
Liberals love dialogue folks.
I don't care what's being said, they just love dialogue.
One dollar, ladies and gentlemen, off the price of oil, Mahmood getting the credit in the mainstream media.
And then here's another AP story.
Iran letter to Bush criticizes U.S. government.
You want to hear some things that Mahmood said?
Try this.
It lamboosted the letter lambosted lambasted Bush for his handling of the September 11th attacks.
Accused the media of spreading lies about the Iraq war.
By the way, the media agrees with that.
He is he is not criticizing the media.
The New York Times beating itself up over and Judy Miller, that's why she's out, actually, because she bought the lies of the Bush administration about weapons and mass destruction.
And the media feels chagrined and embarrassed.
So Mahmood is uh he's he's he's showing them that he's on their side.
Lamb based Bush for his handling of the September 11th attacks accused the media of spreading lies, and that makes it Bush's fault, of course, because Bush lied to them and well is everybody else.
It questioned the letter questioned whether the world would be a different place if the money spent on Iraq had been spent to fight poverty.
Mahmud Ahmadinjad in his letter to Bush criticizes all the money spent in Iraq, said it would have better spent on poverty.
Would not your administration's political and economic standing have been stronger?
And I am most sorry to say, would there have been an ever increasing global hatred of the American government had you spent the money on poverty instead of the war in Iraq?
Folks, too good to be true.
Here's the Reuters version of it.
On the pretext of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, this Grace's Mahmoud's letter.
On the pretext of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, this great tragedy came to engulf both the peoples of the occupied and the occupying country later.
It was revealed that no WMDs existed to begin with, said Mahmoud in his letter.
Lies were told in the Iraqi matter.
What was the result?
I have no doubt that telling lies is reprehensible in any culture, and you do not like to be lied to.
It's Democrat talking points.
If I were Democrat, I would uh worried about this.
Saddams uttering their talking points.
Now Mahmood Ahmadinijad is uttering their talking points.
I guess they're happy about it.
It's just, but folks, it's this is just too good to be true.
Quick timeout, we gotta take a little break here in obscene EIB profit timeout.
Be right back and continue after this.
America's anchor man firmly ensconced.
The prestigious Attila Hun chair at the distinguished Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Let's see, Iran letter false U.S. Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadinejad has written his letter.
Uh uh didn't make any proposals whatsoever.
Let's go to the audio sound bites there, Altamont.
We'll start here at the top with number one, Russ Feingold, potential anti-war candidate in the 2008 presidential field, urged uh urged fellow Democrats on Monday to show more backbone in challenging President Bush on Iraq.
We must get out of our political foxholes and be willing to clearly and specifically point out what a strategic error the Iraq invasion has been.
Sounds just like Mahmood.
That was Mahmood's whole point.
We have uh what do you have?
Three, we get four sound bites.
In the first one here, uh Feingold says the Democrats have to continue to stand up to Bush, which is laughable.
Uh uh, as though they haven't been doing that all along.
In their minds, what they've been doing apparently has not been standing up, and they need to do more of it.
The greatest passion is for us to stand up on the critical post-9-11 issues.
From Iraq to the USA Patriot Act to the president violating the law by authorizing illegal domestic wiretapping.
President likes to say, in response to this sort of concern, uh that some of us have a pre-9-11 perspective.
Many Democrats and others around this country want us to point out that the White House actually has a pre-1776 perspective.
And that we ought to have the guts uh to point that out.
I don't know who.
Who's the audience this thing?
When the National Press Club, you gotta figure there's some drive-by media people in there.
It's their club.
Well, uh uh domestic wiretapping.
Now, there's a story in the Illy Times today about this.
This is another C I Told You Saw.
Uh, by picking Michael Hayden as the next CIA director, President Bush faces another brawl over his controversial program to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists, including people on American soil, without court approval, but far from fearing such a fight.
The White House walked right into it by nominating the program's leading defender to head the spy agency.
And on page two of this story comes this interesting little tidbit.
Still, some Democrats quietly worried Monday that their party might help the GOP by making an issue of the spy program.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I tell you, the White House wants this fight.
They know it's a slam dunk.
Nothing better than having an Air Force general in uniform up there, being ripped to shreds for talking about how he wants to protect the country and accurately explaining the NSA foreign surveillance program.
Democrats, by the way, now, have posed an idea.
You know, this is a spy program, very sensitive.
We might have to go into executive session for these questions, which means closed session.
Which means nobody would get to see it.
They would only be leaks afterwards.
And the leaks would probably take the form of the tough questions asked by people like Diane Feinsteiner, Russ Feingold, and Leakey, Pat Lahey, and whoever else is on.
But if they don't do this in public, it means they haven't got the guts for people to see what would actually transpire here, that they want to use leaks from a closed executive session.
I usually can't leak on those things, Rush.
You can't leak.
Tell it to Pat Lahey.
I don't think he's on that committee anymore because he did leak about an operation we had uh planned in uh Libya.
So that's that's the game plan.
If they're getting cold feet, they'll go into executive session if the Republicans let them get away with it, and you never know.
Uh given some of the Republican senators.
Now, I think this next I'm not mentioning this, folks, but I know how to read the stitches on a fastball.
I know how to read the tea leaves.
I think I think Fon Feingold is responding to me when I said yesterday that the Hayden hearings will be a winner for Bush.
You're already here people saying that this uh Michael Hayden nomination will be a great opportunity for the White House to show that Democrats are soft on terrorism and you bet the pundits in this town will somehow suggest that this too, just like my censure resolution, will cause the president's numbers to shoot up.
You remember that happening, right?
Uh it didn't happen at all.
But that's what they're gonna say.
And it's not the tape a second.
Nobody joined your stupid censure resolution, and you left the floor, you skedaddled, you got out of there rather than debate it with Republicans.
Nobody joined your stupid.
You know, I was thinking about Feingold.
What has he ever done besides get elected?
Can somebody explain one achievement of Russ Feind other than the censure deal?
He makes good speeches to fire up the kook base.
He's a munchkin.
Resume tape, uh old American.
I take a different view with a major qualification.
My view is that we should appeal to basic American values in the post-9-11 year.
Stop the tape.
Do you know what those basic American values are, Senator?
People like me think you have forgotten them, or if you remember them you disagree with them and are trying to redefine them.
By saying that we will stand up to this administration's mistakes in strategy in the fight against terrorism.
And that we will stand up to this administration's unnecessary assault on the rule of law in the guise of the fight against terrorism.
Well, there you have it.
This is the left-wing kook view.
They're the spy program, hey, Bush doesn't care about finding what spies are doing in this country.
He doesn't care about what Al-Qaeda might be plotting.
That's just an excuse because Bush is Bush and he wants to spy on you.
And of course, the left-wing cooks, that's all they need to hear.
They don't ask, what does he want to spy on me for?
What am I doing in my miserable little kook life that Bush would possibly care about?
Bush is not a voyeur.
Bush is in bed at 9 30 at night.
The last thing George Bush cares about is what idiotic left wing kook liberals are doing.
Besides, they tell us anyway.
They're all over announcing everything they're doing, they're marching in the streets.
What do they need to be spied on for?
The idea that a United States Senator, and it's clear what he's doing.
He's pandering, demagoguing to that base.
He's trying to secure the uh support and a nomination from that group of uh people in Cooksville.
But to set up this notion that Bush actually wants to spy on the American people, for what?
What's he trying to learn?
What's he trying to discover?
Most people's lives, particularly on the Kook Fringe, are so dull and boring.
That's why they're kook fringe leftists.
They're trying to find anything in life to give themselves some sense of relevance, some sense of mattering, some sense of of importance.
So they go out and they march and they beat their chests and they get mad and they throw around all these accusations.
But who in the world, I mean, would you want to spy on a liberal?
I mean, they do everything they do in public anyway.
They don't believe in hiding anything.
I mean, it's boring to watch, discuss.
And I'm sure Bush has much better things to do than that.
Back in just a second.
More fine gold coming up, plus your phone call stay with us.
You never know.
It could happen someday.
We're back 800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Uh back now to what Russ Feingold, a big finale here, the big finish, says that Democrats have to show that 9-11 is just as personal to them as it is to those who use the issue to intimidate them as Democrats.
I say all of this in the belief that somehow we all have to be talking about not this country or that, but how we can best protect American lives at home and abroad.
Stop the tape.
Get serious.
You don't care about if you did, you wouldn't be saying and doing 30 to 50 percent of the things you're saying.
You're trying to undermine victory over this particular enemy, Senator, with everything you're doing.
That's why this doesn't sell.
That's why you can go out there and say, we need to get tough.
We need to show people we you don't need to be intimidated.
We care about America, we care about America's security.
It doesn't sell, Senator.
You just don't have the guys on your side to pull it off.
I mean, you can say whatever you want, but you don't have anybody with any practical experience in any position in the last ten years that you can point to and say, we want to follow the lead of Democrat X. Fact, I have a story here in the stack, folks, about all the domestic spying that Feingold's hero did during World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And at the appropriate time, I am sure the White House is going to bring this out.
They've just they just got some papers out of the National Archives.
So people have been writing a book uh and their papers being written from the book of uh uh as a result of the research that these guys have found.
And he was open uh people's mail.
Um he was doing and he was violating uh what Congress said were statutes that uh said he couldn't do it, yet he had judges that said he could.
It's almost an exact replay uh of what was going on.
And the guy the last that they love Roosevelt, but they can't point to him as an example of how they're gonna lead the country in war.
So who are they gonna point to?
They can say whatever they want, but who are they gonna point to?
JFK, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, who are they gonna point to, folks?
Zilch Zero Nobody.
Play the rest of this, uh Oldman.
This is our most solemn responsibility.
Yep.
And Democrats should be especially clear that we understand the post-9-11 world.
To return to the outset.
Stop the tape.
The very fact that he has to say that Democrats should be especially clear that we understand the post-9-11 world is an admission that they know the Democrats' position in a post-9-11 world is not only not unclear, it's known exactly for what it is, and it's one it doesn't take the post-9-11 world seriously, and thus they can't be trusted.
I think we should show we mean it.
I think we should show that this is just as important and personal for us as it is for those who sometimes try to use this issue to intimidate us.
How are you gonna do it?
You got your ex-president going over to the uh Middle East, ripping our policy in Iraq, ripping the policy in the war on terror.
Who are you gonna point to?
How are you gonna show everybody that it's just as important and personal for you when you have people saying, Can't go see United 93?
It's too soon.
It's too soon.
We can't be too traumatic.
How in the world are you gonna possibly convince people take it seriously?
When you don't have anybody in your party that does.
All right, here's this is it.
This is he answers a question, gets a question of QA, and this is right out of Shelby Steel.
The question is this, and this is the club president, Jonathan Salant.
He said, Can you outline the principles on which foreign policy and national security should be based?
Listen carefully to this, folks.
The first and foremost thing is the safety and national security of the American people.
Number one responsibility is to protect Americans.
Now, the question of how you do that is what I discussed in my speech.
It's being smart.
Stop.
So he's telling his news guy, you idiot.
You ask me this, I just explained it in my speech.
Well, the truth is nobody heard him say it in a speech, which is why they got the question.
But he thinks he said it.
Resume tape there, Oldman.
You're standing this connection between the violation of human rights and a country's the people of a country feeling that somehow the United States helped repress them.
All you have to do is mention the Shah of Iran.
Oh, boy.
And the whirlwind that we reap.
Uh because of our inappropriate support for the Shah.
So I think that is the foundation.
This gibberish.
This is a gobbledygook.
This is uh wandering in vain for a cogent thought.
You understand what he just said, folks?
The question uh could you outline the principles on which foreign policy and national security should be based.
And then he right out of John Kerry's handbook, you're gonna be smart.
Yeah, we're gonna do it smarter and better.
And then he says, it's understanding this connection between the violation of human rights and a country's, the people of the country feeling that somehow the U.S. helped repress them.
It's our fault, folks.
This is right out of Shelby Steel.
This is the guilt that people like like Feingold and other liberals feel.
It's our fault.
We're too powerful, we're too big.
We had slavery, we violate people's human rights.
It's understandable that there would be terrorists.
And we need to incorporate this into our foreign policy so that the next time we get attacked by a terrorist group, we must understand why, and perhaps even acknowledge that we deserve this.
Especially if we can blame it on the former Republican president.
Oh, folks, do you hear what this guy says?
He's asking to be taken seriously on protecting the country in a post-9-11 world and proceeds to blame this country for the fact that people around the world hate us, and that gives them the justification to attack us.
Speaking of Shelby Steele, he was on uh uh John Gibson's show on the Fox Network uh yesterday afternoon, and uh uh this is really I've you gotta get his book.
We're gonna interview him for the uh for the Limbaugh letter uh uh week after next for our next issue.
But I want to give you just a little tidbit here because uh Gibson says, Explain this to me, Mr. Steele.
How does the how does white guilt have something to do with a situation like Iraq?
America as a great Western power, probably the greatest Western power in the world, is stigmatized by the past of the West, colonialism from Europe, uh racism, slavery, segregation in America, and imperialism, so that when we exercise our power in the world,
particularly our our military power, we invoke that stigma and we we come off in the eyes of people who want to hold us accountable in this way as as imperialists who want to occupy and oppress a small brown skinned country.
And so to avoid that stigma and to make people see that we're not occupiers and we're not imperialists, uh, and we're and we're no longer like what the West used to be, we'd practice war with a kind of minimalism that almost leaves a little room for the enemy to continue to fight us.
We don't use all of our power because in using all of our power, we would seem to be the old white supremacist of the past.
Exactly right.
But it gets manifested in far more obscene and dangerous ways in the little gray cells inside the skull of little munchkins like Russ Feingold.
The guilt manifests itself in such a way that we are still committing these atrocities of imperialism and racism and bigotry and homophobia et al, et al at al.
And so when we get hit, part of our foreign policy is learning how to blame ourselves.
And that's your modern-day liberal Wing of the Democratic Party.
Here's one more.
Gibson's next question.
A lot of people would think people of color would think white guilt's a good thing.
It sounds like it would be a good thing, but it's not.
It's the reverse of that.
It's not a guilt of conscience where people struggle with a with a moral dilemma.
It's simply running from the stigmatization as racist.
Whites, after the 60s, after the, as I talk about in the book, the collapse of white supremacy became stigmatized as racist and had to begin to then dissociate from that.
And most of our racial policy in America has been more about helping whites sort of fight that stigma than uh doing anything to to help achieve equality.
Exactly right, because the left doesn't really want equality.
They need victims.
They need oppressed minorities so they can continue to blame white bigots.
They can maintain this overall feeling of guilt.
Uh you know, I think I think this whole notion of guilt, I think it's I think it explains uh public polling on the economy.
You go out and you talk to anybody individually, and the odds are life's never been better.
They're more confident, uh, holding their jobs, it's gonna improve.
Uh I mean, the statistics, the reality indicate this.
And yet, those same people will be reluctant to say that because they think their neighbor, or even people in a different town that don't even know, are not doing well because they've been buying into the drive-by media hit pieces on this.
And so a guilt overcomes them.
They don't want to tell people how good they're doing or how good they think the economy is, because they feel so bad that it may not be that good for other people.
Ergo, you end up with a poll that's totally unrepresentative of the truth.
I mean, Shelby Steele has hit something here that is so I mean, one of the most brilliance to me is simplicity.
It's not saying something totally complex that nobody can understand.
Brilliance is being able to synthesize what people think is a problem they can't get their arms around, and making it so easily understandable.
Uh that i millions grasp it.
And that's what he's done in this book.
This whole concept that we have guilt over our achievement, guilt over our power, guilt over our past, uh, guilt over our prosperity, our size and all explains so much, including opinion polls about such things as the economy.
One more bout uh here.
Question from Gibson.
So uh can you do almost anything in this country if you make white people afraid of being stigmatized as racists?
You have enormous power, absolutely.
Whites simply do not feel they have the moral authority uh to ask for difficult things.
For for example, not a single president of the United States since the civil rights victories has asked black America to do anything on its own behalf in terms of achieving equality.
All of the requests are on white America, what whites what must do, what institutions must do, so forth.
Well, how what programs have to be instituted?
There's never a president who who has enough moral authority to look at his black citizens and say, what happened to you in the past is terrible, but in order to move into the future, here's some things you're going to have to do.
I don't think they have they have the moral authority, they don't have the moral courage.
They don't have the uh the guts, and this is not a uh a criticism uh uh it's fact.
There are a lot of people who do have the courage, and look what's happened, look what happens to them when they say it.
I mean, I can remember back in the heat of the homeless debate.
I would say something as simple as, you know, if train these people to get a job.
And liberals would say, easy for you to say, as though I should feel guilty in in advocating self-reliance and responsibility.
And I'm sure it's happened to some of you when you've been in conversations with people.
So Shelby Steele here right on the money.
There's never a president who has enough moral authority to look at his black citizens and say, hey, what happened to you in the past is terrible, but in order to move into the future, you're gonna have to do some things yourself.
No, what we get is Bill Clinton proclaiming himself to be the first black president, apologizing all over the world for what we have supposedly done to people all over the world.
He is the epitome of what Shelby Steele's talking about, by the way.
Quick timeout, backed right after this.
It's by the way, you know, it's not just uh it's not just stigmatized whites.
Look at what happens to Bill Cosby uh when he makes suggestions uh uh to his uh community, uh if you will.
I mean, they've claws come out, and not even he can get away with it.
And that's the uh that's why race uh slavery, the original sin in this country, and it's it's gonna take a lot of moral courage and guts to get past it with some honest straight talk.
All right, to the phones.
People have been patiently waiting.
We'll start in Houston with Scott.
Welcome, sir.
Great to have you with us on an EIB network.
Thank you, Rush.
How are you?
Fine, sir.
I like to make a comment about the oil companies and what people are saying about them.
Uh I first of all, I don't think they're doing anything illegal.
And I certainly don't think they can influence the price of a barrel of oil coming out of OPEC.
But I think if you understand the industry and the upstream and downstream functions and how companies like Exxon Mobil work, you'll see why it is that they're making so much money right now.
And the fact of the matter is there's this perverse relationship that the higher the price of a barrel of oil is on the market, the more money these companies are gonna make.
Really?
I how does that work?
Uh uh I don't understand that.
Well, you uh I I know you've probably heard the formula on TV, the economists always talk about that if oil's at $75 a barrel, then a reasonable price for a gallon of gasoline is about three twenty.
Yeah.
And it is it's an accurate form uh formula, but the assumption is that ExxonMobil's buying all their oil out on the market at $75 a barrel, and they're not.
They have a tremendous proven reserves.
And any given year, 30 to 40 percent of the oil they refine in the gasoline comes from their own reserves, and they're not paying themselves $75, and it's not costing them $75 to produce it.
Well, I know.
I know they've got they've got they've got reserves, but but uh, you know, the the the reserves they don't use them all up, they don't deplete them and and uh they're they're constantly replenishing.
That's not the primary source of I was being facetious with my question.
Of course, when prices go when the price of oil goes up, everything else up is gonna go up along with it that's refined from oil.
Well, you got you know, Rush, when you look at forty percent of the refined oil comes from their own site, their own production well.
So you know, really if you wanted to look at, and I don't advocate this, I just use it to make an example.
ExxonMobil could have two sets of pumps at their filling stations.
One would be for all the gasoline refined from their own oil that they produce themselves, which they could probably sell for a buck sixty and make a profit.
No, they couldn't.
Yeah, sure they could.
Well, but that but no, the market wouldn't allow that to happen.
Oh, I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, I'm just saying they could dear regulate.
No, you're I know you're you're constructing a mathematical formula here, but that that that that's that's why all these these examples don't ultimately have relevance because they wouldn't work in the market.
Look at what you've just described is why the windfall profits tax doesn't work.
You put a windfall profits tax on oil, big oil will just stock it away in their reserves, and they'll wait to use it when the tax is removed because the windfall profits tax is always temporary, because it's just a populist demagogic move by a bunch of worthless politicians to try to show the American people they're doing something by punishing big oil.
All it does is reduce supply and raise prices, and uh it accomplishes the exact opposite.
But my point earlier here in in going through this survey, I mean you can cite little examples of this, and all the oil companies have reserves, and not all of the oil they refined to gasoline's coming.
You're right from the uh the the $75, now $69 a barrel price being purchased today.
That's not my point.
My point is you have these people go out at USA Today Gallop and they did this survey, April 28th through 30th, about a thousand adults.
Uh would you say you were angry about the recent increases in gasoline prices or not?
And then they 75% angry, uh 25% not.
Uh who are you angry with gas and oil companies?
50%.
President Bush, 26%.
Government politicians not specific, 21%.
OPEC 4%, other four percent.
You don't who's not who's not even listed here, you'd have to put them in the other category, are the futures market.
The people that are that are that are bidding up the price on the futures market, hedge fund guys.
They're the ones that set the world oil price more than anybody else these days, including over OPEC.
But because it would be too complicated to explain that, uh you dump on the convenient enemy, the villain, which is big oil.
And now you have uh with uh my only point is when fifty percent of the people are asked in a poll what they think, it doesn't matter whether they're right or wrong.
If it's fifty percent, that's a large number, and politicians are gonna act on it even if you might as well say two plus two equals five, fifty percent say yep.
Politicians will act on it.
That's what's uh mistaken about this.
Ignorance is leading policy.
We'll be back after this.
They would Try this headline today.
The New York Times optimistic uh comma.
Democrats debate the party's vision.
Yes, they had another meeting, uh, ladies and gentlemen.
The Democrats did, to to uh debate what they stand for.
Uh and and they actually touched on the possibility uh being honest.
Actually touched on that.
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