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Jan. 25, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:14
January 25, 2008, Friday, Hour #3
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Hello, friends.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Program, the nation's most listened to, by far, radio talk show with the most educated and the most informed audience in all of media, including broadcast news channels and nightly news broadcasts.
This according to the Pew Center for the people of the press.
It's Friday.
Let's go.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open live Friday.
Only an hour to go today before we head into the weekend.
It's going to be a tough weekend out there.
There's no NFL football this weekend.
So that means golf.
And the beach.
Well, looking at it anyway.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address, Rush, or El Rushbo.
Sorry, new address, El Rushbo at EIBnet.com.
All right, about this torture business.
We had a caller in the last hour talking about McCain and waterboarding.
And you probably heard the conversation tonight.
The senator said basically a ticking time bomb situation, he wouldn't even resort to torture, which I don't think waterboarding is, but we'll get to that in a minute.
He said he wouldn't resort to torture even in a ticking time bomb situation with a nuclear blast ready to go off, a terrorist knowing where it is because he wouldn't want to diminish us and have us lose face in the rest of the world.
Aside from the erroneous substance of that, why this compulsion to sound like liberals?
But do you know this whole business of torture is so overblown, and so is the ticking time bomb point.
It's the bombs we don't know about that have the chance to find out about.
We would still have the Twin Towers in the Pentagon.
Well, that section of the Pentagon has been rebuilt, but we would still have the Twin Towers if we had gotten everything we knew out of Zakarius Masawi, the 20th hijacker.
But instead, we wouldn't even look on the guy's laptop, much less interrogate him.
We never even got to the point of torture with Masawi.
We were all hung up on civil rights and so forth.
When it comes to the question on torture, you know, what McCain could have said is, look, I know what torture is, and turning down the air conditioning a little bit or playing rock and roll music and even putting underwear in the top of these guys' heads is not torture.
And it's offensive that anybody would say it is.
McCain knows what torture is, and he knows that what we were doing is not torture.
But it was obsessed with sounding like libs at this point, which, and President Bush has done that earlier in his campaign for 2000 on the president.
It puzzles me as to why this happens.
But he chose liberal praise here over the option of protecting the country in the ticking time bomb situation.
Following his arrest, this is from Court TV, by the way.
Following his arrest, authorities searched Masawi's home.
They found two knives.
They found a manual for a Boeing 747.
They found fighting gloves and shin guards in the name Ahad Sabet.
One of the many aliases, bin al-Shib, Yamzi Ramzi bin al-Sheib goes by, written in a notebook.
And while they seized the laptop, they needed a warrant to view the information stored on the hard drive.
The warrant was denied based on the FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a civil liberties statute.
If we'd have found out what was on this guy's laptop when we had this guy, when was it in August that we had Masawi, the 20th hijacker?
So we're not even really talking about torture in terms of protecting the country.
So it's a misguided debate.
But this whole torture argument was being launched by the Democrats to handcuff our efforts in the war on terror.
And there was Senator McCain echoing that lingo.
And I just, whether it's Senator McCain or any other Republican, I just don't understand it unless there's some reason to help or to assist Democrats in hand-tying President Bush, which is doubly difficult to understand that a Republican with Senator McCain's foreign policy expertise and his history and experience would join.
So it's a giant question mark for me.
Now, we got a drive-by caller here recently.
Mr. Sterdley advised me of this during the break here at the top of the hour.
And this is an excellent point.
A caller, by the way, a drive-by caller, somebody calls it, can't stay on the line.
But the caller said, you know, I'm really puzzled here.
Last year, for much of the year, all we heard from the Democrats and the drive-by media was the necessary implementation, a re-implementation of the fairness doctrine.
Because these talk radio guys, they've gotten out of hand.
There's no balance out there, and we have to get fairness back into the public debate.
This has to happen.
And Pelosi and who's his name, Maurice Henshey in New York, and a number of their Democrats were talking about threatening to do it.
It got so severe that Mike Pence, Republican in the House, launched legislation to have a forever ban on the re-implementation of the fairness doctrine.
And it was all because we were too powerful.
And it was all because liberal talk radio couldn't make a dent.
And it was all because, well, the one medium that the drive-bys and the Democrats and the liberals don't control talk radio, they had to shut it up rather than engage us in ideas just like political correctness.
They hear something they don't like, they shut it up rather than engage it.
And the drive-by caller said, now look where we are.
Now we come to January, and these same people who were just hogwallering all over about the fairness doctrine now can't wait to proclaim you, Mr. Limbaugh, irrelevant and dead.
That you are dividing your party and you are losing.
That McCain is beating you.
You can't get your supporters to vote the way you want to.
And I have not told them which way to vote, by the way.
I've not what?
I never have.
Well, in presidential races, I make it kind of obvious who I'm for and against.
But in a circumstance like this, I'm not out there telling somebody, go vote this way.
And I'm not saying, don't do this.
You have to infer that from things that you hear me say, but I haven't said it directly.
And yet they are eager to proclaim me as irrelevant.
And at the same time, they tell me I should shut up.
So I guess the caller's point was there's no need for the fairness doctrine now, is there?
Since I don't count anymore.
I mean, I can't even get these Republicans to do what I want to do or what I want them to do.
And beyond that, in fact, how about all this talk that I'm just in a tank for the GOP?
And now the GOP won't follow along.
It's fascinating.
Speaking of McCain, Paul Campos, Scripps Howard News Service, about three days ago had a piece on the media's love affair with McCain.
And he said, one of the curiosities of American politics is the media's ongoing infatuation with Senator McCain.
A bit of this is based on things such as McCain's opposition to torture.
Unfortunately, we can no longer treat opposing torture like opposing child molestation, i.e., something one assumes is standard equipment in a presidential candidate rather than a luxury upgrade.
Yet most of the journalistic love affair with the Republican senator is based on other factors.
Consider this typical endorsement from the Orlando Sentinel.
While McCain, quote, has stuck to his principles at the risk of sinking his campaign, Mitt Romney has abandoned positions that would have alienated his party's conservative base.
Unquote.
I checked a computer database and discovered that in the national media, Romney is at least six times more likely to be described as a flip-flopper than McCain is.
But this doesn't merely ignore, but actually inverts the truth.
The fact is that no presidential candidate in either party has flip-flopped as egregiously as Senator McCain on such a wide range of issues.
Here's just a small sample of Senator McCain's recent series of remarkable conversions to politically convenient stances.
On abortion rights, McCain has done a 180 from favoring only the most minor restrictions and opposing the overturn of Roe v. Wade to supporting an almost total ban while advocating that the Supreme Court reverse Roe immediately.
McCain has transformed himself from a deficit hawk who mocked supply-side economics into somebody who sounds like he's drunk deeply from the wackiest vats of supply-side Kool-Aid to the point where he now claims raising taxes decreases revenue, a claim so wildly in conflict with the facts.
For example, federal tax revenues have almost doubled in real terms after the Clinton tax increases, but it's either a shameless lie or a product of astounding ignorance.
Raising taxes does decrease revenue if it's done, certainly can.
But in any way, in regard to ethanol subsidies, McCain has gone from treating them as the worst sort of pork to becoming a strong supporter of a program despised by economists but beloved of Iowa farmers and the good people at Archer Daniels Midlands.
Six years ago, McCain sternly condemned Jerry Falwell as an agent of intolerance.
18 months ago, he gave the commencement address at Falwell's University while openly embracing one of the most noxious figures of the religious right.
Now, this is a guy from the Scripps Howard News Service, Paul Campos, from whose piece I'm reading here.
These are just a few examples from a far longer list on topics ranging from immigration to campaign finance reform to gay marriage to accepting support from various sleazy characters that he previously shunned.
Senator McCain has either completely reversed his views or seriously equivocated regarding what they are this week.
Yet the media continue to lavish him with worshipful pens to his supposedly uncompromising commitment to principled leadership, no matter what the political cost.
Part of this is accounted for by lazy autopilot journalism, but part of it is something worse.
When it comes to Senator McCain, many of the sophisticates at the top of the media pyramid are like masochistic spouses who treat open infidelity as a twisted sort of faithfulness.
They love McCain because when he lies to their face, he doesn't even pretend to be doing otherwise.
According to this pretzel logic of a certain kind of journalism, that counts as candor.
When you openly lie to a journalist and don't try to tell them you're being honest about your lie, then that's candor.
All this would be merely amusing if McCain were not such a genuinely tragic figure.
The young man who showed such exemplary courage in the face of his North Vietnamese tormentors has become an old man whose courage abandoned him when he subjected, when subjected to the more subtle tortures of worldly ambition.
Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and can be resided in an email address here.
And this appeared in the Scripps Howard News Service on January 22nd.
All right, brief timeout.
As it's open line Friday, your phone calls are next right after this.
Everybody's a winner, huh?
Chocolate.
Rushlin bought talent on loan from God.
And as promised, back to the phones, Jerry and Wheeling, West Virginia.
Great to have you with us today, sir.
Hello.
It's a nice speak with you, Rush.
It's quite a pleasure.
Thank you.
I've got a question, and then I'm going to hang up and I'll listen to your answer.
I understand how economics works somewhat, and the price of oil today is anywhere between $90 to $100.
It's been up and down.
My question is, being that it's an election year, can someone like George Soros or even the people that sell on the oil, the sheep?
OPEC?
OPEC, yes.
Can they manipulate the prices?
Can they have their buyers come in and buy it at a higher price and just hang on to it till later?
That's my question.
And I'll let you answer this, and I'll get down to Red.
Well, wait a minute now.
I'm not going to let you off the hook that easily.
Okay.
What do you think?
I think it's possible.
I mean, anybody with enough money can do anything.
Can you recall a period of time?
How old are you?
I am 58 years old.
You are 58.
All right.
Well, you're a year older than I am.
So do you recall in any of your adult life when the price of oil was manipulated without withholding it from the market, contrived shortages, to affect elections?
Personally, no, I can't.
The only time I can remember blatant examples of this would be with the contrived shortages of oil being allowed into the country in the 70s to be refined.
But there was not a shortage of oil.
They were just withholding it from us for a host of reasons.
And they did get the price, and it happened rapidly.
It went from 25 cents up to a buck inside of two years.
But, you know, since 1969, when gasoline is about 28, 12, 25 cents a gallon, in 40 years, it's gone up basically $2.80, maybe $3, which is not really a whole lot.
So when you talk about the price of oil, you really take it down to the root level of the price of gasoline because that's how it's going to manifest itself in terms of affecting people's lives.
And there have been investing, eminent Democrats after Hurricane Katrina.
They went into these gouging examinations and analysis.
They had these hearings, and they were just convinced that big oil was playing games by getting the price up there left and right to gouge people.
And they have yet, the Democrats have yet to be able to find one instance of it.
In fact, John Kerry, the haughty John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, suggested during the 2004 presidential campaign that he did two things.
The first thing he did was say that if he were president, he'd be on the phone with OPEC and he'd make sure to get the price down and get the price, whatever had needed to be happening at the time.
Kerry is, oh, get on the phone and I'll make those great.
It wasn't long after that, and he accused Bush of doing the same thing behind closed doors.
I think when you're talking about the price of oil, even the price of gasoline, do you know that everybody expected after Hurricane Katrina, we had the refineries were shut down for a while.
We had some oil wells out there in the Gulf, and people were panicked.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Gasoline prices all over the world.
Tried distribution pripes and systems and it all upset.
And for a while, you know, you can found $6 a gallon gasoline in Atlanta for a day or two.
But do you know what kept the price down?
You know why none of that happened after Hurricane Katrina?
Because we import refined gasoline.
It's so tough to manipulate markets when it's global.
Let's say that George Soros does try to impact the price of oil.
George Soros may have it in for Republicans, but the CHICOMs couldn't care less about George Soros.
If George Soros starts monkeying around or tries to, and the only way he could do this would be on the commodities market, which is where these fluctuations in the price of oil are taking place.
When you, you know what you ought to, I'll look this up because this is fascinating.
We need to go into what the speculative price of oil, the futures price of oil right now is, you said between 90 and 100 bucks a barrel.
Go to the government's publications, and I'm not sure which publication this is, but it's out of the Office of Management and Budget, and find out what we're actually paying per barrel of oil that we import.
It's nowhere near $90 to $100.
That's just the futures market price.
But it always astounds people.
I don't think with global mark, oil is the fuel of this world functioning.
And when you try to up the price artificially somewhere, it's going to have an effect somewhere else down the line.
I don't think anybody could sustain a full-fledged world increase, dramatic increase in the price of oil.
I just don't think if it were possible, it'd be happening all the time.
And it doesn't happen all the time.
And I know what you're saying.
You think that the Democrats or Soros might do this to impact the economy and give the election to Democrats since Bush is in office.
They're going to try things like this, but they really don't have too far to go.
Most people think we're in a recession anyway when we're not.
Open Line Friday rolls on back to this.
By the way, there's a huge fire out in Las Vegas, a three-alarm fire at the Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino.
And they got fire trucks and departments there and so forth.
It looks, you know, I'm just telling you what it looks like.
It just looks like a scene from the Middle East on your average day.
It looks like the fire is spreading down.
It's at the top of the hotel, the very top floor and so forth.
It looks like it's moving down on one side of it.
Thick, thick black smoke.
They're getting all the residents out of the hotel, moving them to other hotels.
Audio sound by time.
Let's go back to the debate.
The debate last night here in Boca Raton.
Tim Russert said to Mitt Romney, Governor Romney, do you trust Senator McCain and Mary or Mayor Giuliani on the issue of being tax cutters?
I trust these two gentlemen and I respect them greatly.
Now, I also support the Bush tax cuts.
Senator McCain voted against them originally.
He now believes they should be made permanent.
I'm glad he agrees they should be made permanent.
I think he should have voted for them the first time around.
The Bush tax cuts help get our economy going again when we face the last tough times.
And that's why right now, as we face tough times, we need to have somebody who understands, if you will, has the private sector, has the business world, has the economy in their DNA.
I do.
I spent my life in the private sector.
I know how jobs come and I know how they go.
And I'll make sure that we create more good jobs for this nation.
And one way to do that is by holding down taxes and making those tax cuts permanent.
One of the things that amazes me, I listened to this.
Of course, this makes total sense to me.
It obviously makes total sense to me.
I said it, and I imagine other people watching the debate.
And they say, you know, they'll think that government, like Hillary Clinton, could run health care better than somebody who's actually in that business.
Hillary Clinton could run the oil companies better than somebody that actually is in that business.
And of course, people that have never had any experience running business at all in government.
And do you realize how many people think that government should dispense some of these services and run some of these businesses?
Frank, we've got Sylvester Salone on the phone just back from Las Vegas.
Sly, welcome to the program.
It's great to talk to you again.
Oh, thank you very much.
A real privilege.
I watched your movie the other night.
I watched it.
I guess I watched it Wednesday night.
Sly, my staff, I came in and told everybody about it.
It was about this time in the program yesterday.
I started telling everybody about the movie.
And I got so passionate about it, they said, you better stop.
You're giving everything away.
Oh, no.
Listen, thank you very much.
I was actually, when we were making a film, I was thinking about after you had seen Rocky Baba, I said, I really wanted to give you the other side of life, a real contrast and try to be true to the Rambo ideal and what he represents to a lot of Americans.
Well, why did you pick, why did you choose to premise this movie on what's happening in Burma?
I mean, here's Rambo.
He's retired living in Thailand, capturing snakes for people.
We have no idea how he got there.
Why did you decide to focus on that?
Well, I originally had him coming back to America, and I was going to deal with the Mexican border situation and MS-13.
Then I thought that really wouldn't resonate around the world.
Then I said, why don't we go back to the Vietnam War?
That had the most traumatic effect on his life.
So he's kind of drawn back into that jungle where he feels safe.
It's almost kind of like his second family, an indifferent family, but a family, the jungle of the indifference.
And then I called Falls to a Fortune magazine and certain factions over the U.N.
I said, what is the most underreported human rights violations on the planet?
A real hell on earth that no one knows about.
And they said, Burma.
I said, why?
He said, well, the Burmese pay millions of dollars every year to lobbyists and PR firms in Washington to basically squelch what's going down over there.
They have the longest-running civil war in the world, 60 brutal years.
Now, your portrayal of the, and you wrote this, and you had, from what I was able to count in the credits, it's like 10 or maybe 11 different production arms and elements.
That's true.
Okay, so that tells me that it took a lot to get this made.
Exactly right.
Okay.
Okay, so your portrayal of the doctors and the nurses from the church group to go in and try to help the sick.
I mean, it's so right on the money, and I was stunned to see it from a Hollywood movie.
But you've always had the ability to get away with this kind of thing in your work.
But, I mean, it was just right on the money.
At times, I was standing up and laughing at it, and other times I was just, I found myself getting angry.
I don't want to give too much of it away, but when after you save 20 people's lives, the guy tells you he has to report you because it's never right to take a life.
He wouldn't even be alive.
And those people are alive and amongst us today.
Very much so.
And I actually did a lot of research on these.
They actually believe what they're doing is right and that someday there's going to be this mystical moment and we're all going to join hands and sing we are the world.
And when the truth is, Rambo says, you know, war is natural.
Peace is an accident.
That's a fact of life.
It's unfortunate that we can start a war in five minutes, but it takes us 100 years to make peace.
So what comes more natural?
So he's trying to tell these people all the medicine, all the Bibles, all the optimism and this naivete doesn't work in a savage world.
And, well, I'm not going to tell anybody whether they learned the lesson or not, but you portray them flawlessly.
Now, I want to ask you about this because I've, after I saw it, and I watched it a couple nights, after I saw it, I saw the first reviews.
The Variety Review said that it's missing a plot.
The review that I read in the New York Post today, it was also not glowing, which I think is fabulous news for you because I don't spend a lot of time reading movie reviews, but the ones I do always seem to be critical, and those movies just do buffo.
If I could be really candid with you, if my name was Scorsese or Coppola, right away it'd be taken a certain way.
I represent something, especially to the liberal press.
When Ronald Reagan came out and jokingly said Rambo's a Republican, the die was cast.
So people cannot even interpret the movie.
I find it incredibly irresponsible that when this savagery is going down, like USA Today gives it one star, they don't even review the idea of what is happening in Burma.
They couldn't care that the monks were slaughtered.
It's just like whatever Stallone represents to a kind of like right is might, let's squash him immediately and make this sound trite and it's just a vehicle for a man who should be sitting in his wheelchair retiring.
The odd thing is, there's a lot of hope out here, Rush, because the majority of the people that went to see Rambo were 28 years old to 40.
And the people who are going to see this movie are the younger generation because they're looking for a representation of what real values are, what it means to be a man, and as Rambo says, you know, live for something or die for nothing.
You know, it's like you have to take a side and really stand up and be willing to walk the walk.
And these people just don't walk the walk.
I am the antichrist to what they represent.
I mean, what they stand for.
And it's sad because I sometimes want to write them and go, you know, if you just looked into the Burmese situation, rather than scathing me, you could have written something positive because by the time this article is written, probably about nine children have been murdered.
And all you've accomplished is just throw another rock at me and it really has no more impact.
I mean, I've been rocked for the past 30 years.
That's the only unfortunate thing is they don't look at the political ramifications of trying to be positive.
They just go after what they think I represent, which is hard, right, core, jingoistic, you know, irrational, savage instincts.
And it's completely wrong.
I try to walk the balance in this film when you show both sides.
Well, but you know, even if it has been all that's true, but even though you've risen above it with the content of your movies, your movies reach people.
You connect with your audience.
They love the movies, and these critiques are not going to matter.
They don't matter that much.
These people cannot kill a good movie and they cannot make a bad movie.
No, that's true.
Actually, and then I started to think about it.
I said, well, maybe if this person really did like your film, then you've missed.
You've done something wrong.
You've now joined them.
Well, congratulations on it.
I know.
Let me ask you, when I mentioned the reviews and the critics, I got a little rise out of you.
How important is that?
Maybe I'm wrong.
Is it more important than I think to the success of your movies?
You've got a franchise.
Rambo's a franchise.
No, not really, Russ.
It's like it's just that when people have a certain kind of self, an agenda that really goes out, let's just be negative and not see things as they are.
And that always bothered me.
If at the end of every critique, just like when you have a child and you criticize a child, say, okay, now here's the way we think you should do it.
Here's the way we think it would be better.
If you're going to be destructive in criticism, you should also be constructive at the very end.
Say, hey, why don't you try this?
At least it may not be right, but at least it gives a fair and balanced reporting.
But the most important thing is I really wrote it for people to enjoy.
It's an action film that also hopefully brings about a little awareness to a situation that's so sad.
Well, it's also, this is a you bring mercenaries in for them.
Rambo's usually been a one-man show.
You bring some assistance.
And why'd you do that, by the way?
Well, I think to be realistic that Rambo gets at a certain point that when you do it as a one-man army, I think it's now it's kind of you're into fantasy land.
To realistically carry out a situation like this, I thought I'd bring in mercenaries.
But the mercenaries also represent people that have kind of like been shown as soulless, and you can buy and sell them.
But by the end of the movie, you've learned that Rambo could have never succeeded without them.
Because as they say, they send in the devil to do God's work sometimes.
Well, Greg.
Well, you know, you stick to your guns because while you're sitting there talking about what they think you ought to do and who they think you are based on some political identity, just tell them to look at their own box office receipts and say, what makes you people think you know what you're doing?
There you are.
There you go.
It's so great to be talking to you again, and I thank you very much for liking the film.
And I hope your audience enjoys it too.
They will.
If I do, they will.
Well, if I do, they'll go see it.
Thank you.
Audience, not mind, not robots, independent thinkers like you and me.
But look, thanks for your time.
Oh, yeah, I got to talk to you.
I was talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger last night.
He came to the premiere.
He said, Rush is the man.
This is one man that, like, he could get a rise out of me, and I never went a debate with him.
Okay.
Well, thank you.
I'm surprised he said that.
No, he did.
He really respected you.
He says, I'm telling you guys, that's one powerful individual.
I swear.
Well, that's curious.
Look, Sly, thanks for passing it.
Thanks for sending me the movie, too.
I appreciate having a chance to see it.
And all the best with it.
Thank you very, very much.
Sylvester Stallone is Rambo.
And I think it's tonight when it debuts and premieres and starts.
The runtime on this thing, I should tell you, the runtime is minute 20, minute 26.
The rest of its credits.
An hour 26.
Did I say minute?
I meant to say it's 86 minutes.
I get verbal dyslexia.
It runs about an hour 23, hour 26.
There's a slow credit roll.
At the end, it takes it up to an hour and 33 minutes if you want to sit and watch a whole credit roll.
There's some gaps in it.
Like I said yesterday, here's Rambo out there in the middle of the Taiwanese, the Thai jungle.
He's in Thailand, just out in the middle of nowhere capturing snakes to stay alive.
And out of the blue comes this bunch of doctors and nurses just walking into this bedraggled place that he lives with no explanation of how they got there.
No explanation of where they came from.
Well, there might be explanation of where they came from, my hearing.
This was not captioned, so I couldn't hear the whole thing.
They just walking out of the blue.
No indication of how the hell they found the guy.
And then after they're captured, the guy from their church who sent them shows up in a Palm Beach sport coat and a white pair of pants in the middle of the jungle trying to hire Stallone or Rambo to go get these.
How did he get them?
There are little things like that that are left out of this.
But, you know, the end, they don't matter anymore very much to the way this whole thing plays out.
But that's my two cents.
I'm not a professional movie reviewer.
All I can tell you is I liked it, and I didn't once think of getting up, and I didn't once look at the watch.
Back in a second.
Serving humanity simply by showing up here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies to St. Joe, Michigan.
And Bill.
Thanks for waiting, sir.
Hi there, Rosh.
Megadenos.
We could have an innocent stimulus package if we would let it be known that we're going to start drilling for oil.
The oil futures would fall like a rock, and people wouldn't have enough money to spend, and we wouldn't be sending it over to our enemies.
What do you think of that idea?
Well, I went through a lot of this yesterday.
I must have spent about 20 minutes on this yesterday.
The five myths of foreign oil dependence and so forth.
But as far as the stimulus is concerned, I went through a whole list of things.
Yes.
Including, if you really want to stimulate the economy, get the federal government to suspend gasoline taxes.
Do you know what percentage of the gallon per gallon price you pay is taxes?
Try 50 cents time you get federal, state, and local.
Suspend gasoline.
If you really want to stimulate the economy, you want to do it now?
There are all kinds of things.
But yeah, we ought to be drilling for our own oil for any reasons, security reasons, the fact that we depend on foreigners alone.
Most of our oil comes from Canada and Mexico.
We're not primarily dependent on the Saudis, contrary to what everybody thinks.
Beyond that, as I said brilliantly and eloquently in this monologue, we're a growth economy.
We lead the world, and conservation is not going to lead to growth.
Conservation's fine in and of itself.
We need, and we've got plenty of, our own oil in a number of places.
The very people demanding that we stop being dependent are the very people preventing us from getting our own sources out of the ground.
Robert in Leeds, Maine.
Welcome, sir, to Open Line Friday.
Hello.
Yes.
Hi, Rush.
First time caller, longtime listener.
Thank you.
I wanted to mention to you about when I first seen the New York Times article about Clinton and McCain, my first reaction was that Hillary had a running mate, and I was a little shocked.
The second comment I have is about the infatuation the media has with John McCain.
And my whole theory is on the fact that I think they're banking on that if a Democrat does not get elected president, that their good buddy John McCain will be.
And it really isn't going to be this, you know, any different.
It's going to be status quo for them.
Well, yeah, that theory has been advanced that because there's no question, like the Times endorsing McCain, they're not going to vote for McCain.
They're not going to endorse McCain in the general, and Democrats criticizing Clinton, so forth, they're going to vote Clinton.
These media people are not going to vote for McCain.
I think, in addition, they like McCain because he talks to him, invites him on a bus.
He will, at times, he's a maverick because he criticizes President Bush.
You've got to understand the drive-bys and the Democrats hate Bush.
When any Republican comes out and criticizes Bush, they are universally loved.
Plus, he puts them on a bus, talks to them, answers their questions, and so forth.
But there's another reason behind this, and that is that, let me put it to you this way.
No drive-by media newspaper is going to ever endorse a conservative.
It's just that simple, folk.
It's just never going to.
The timing on this is horrible.
I just got a story cleared the wires that inside Hillaryville at the campaign headquarters, they are just miserable.
That's the story, that there is no happiness in there at all.
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