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July 11, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:19
July 11, 2008, Friday, Hour #2
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Hey, it's open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show, and this is Mark in for Rush.
Uh he's having he's having some major dental surgery.
He was uh he was given the choice between uh uh listening to a John Kerry speech or having major dental surgery, and he opted to go to the dentist.
But Rush will be back in on Monday, and in the meantime, uh it is open line Friday.
So if you want to call 1800-282-2882, you can talk about anything you want.
You want to talk about Phil Graham saying America is a nation of winers, you want to whine about Phil Graham, and now's the time.
If you are a Obama supporter, I I particularly want to hear uh from people who are changing their middle name to uh Hussein.
Uh you may remember there was this little story uh a couple of weeks ago uh that uh identified No, but people with boring whitebred names like uh, you know, I don't know, Mandy Robinson.
No, no offense, by the way, to members of the Mandy Robinson community who are listening.
I I like uh I like uh the name myself.
In fact, I think I dated a Mandy Robinson uh back in high school.
Anyway, uh but uh apparently all these people with whitebred names like Mandy Robinson now changing their name to Mandy Hussein Robinson uh out of solidarity with the coming of the new Messiah.
Um so uh apparently, just like Mohammed is the uh most popular boys' name in Brussels and Amsterdam and Malmo, Sweden, Hussein is now going to be the most popular boys and girls name uh in every single uh corner of the country.
So if you want to call up, if you're one of those people, call up.
You want to try and trip up the substitute teacher today, 1-800-282-2882.
Um I must confess I'm uh uh a little below power.
The last time I was here, uh I was I'd just flown in uh from Australia, and uh Mr. Snerdley asked me, he goes, uh uh you he was worried about I might be jet lagged.
And he goes, uh so when does jet lag from Australia kick in?
And I go, generally it kicks in ha ha ha haut midday Eastern on Thursday.
Uh uh so anyway, uh the next morning I wake up, the phone's ringing, and it's 1128.
1128, and I'm on air in half an hour.
And uh so I I I leapt out of bed and I was running through the streets of Midtown Manhattan like uh Billy Crystal at the end of when Harry Met Sally, but without uh uh Frank Sinatra singing it had to be you uh as I was running through the streets and instead of uh it was just RF and Mr. Snerdley waiting for me instead of uh instead of Meg Ryan.
And not that I'm complaining, actually.
I think uh they're both kind of cute compared to some of uh some of the things Meg's been in these days.
Anyway, so I got no complaints about that.
Uh but anyway, I got here, uh I got here like uh two minutes before the show started.
I was having my fur uh my first coffee during the first break.
I was uh brushing my teeth during the second break.
Uh I was uh putting in my special Jesse Jackson protective underpants in the third break.
Uh I I basically winged the whole thing.
And people people kind of liked it.
They said, Well, that was great show.
You sound really up on the subject.
You must have been in early doing show prep and all the rest of it.
And I didn't like to tell him the truth.
And so this morning um I got into uh got into the office at uh like five in the morning to start doing show prep and uh uh well basically I peaked about uh about eight, so I'm well past my best by now, but you know, we'll try and we'll try and keep going and and and uh and do what we can.
Uh we were we were talking in the uh in the last uh hour about this business of uh of uh Barack Obama uh saying that we should be more sophisticated, more bilingual.
He finds Americans embarrassing that uh, you know, the only uh the only phrase they know in French is uh merci beaucoup.
Uh by the way, that is the only phrase you'll need to know in French uh under Barack Obama's presidency when uh Obama is president, uh he's gonna go to the European Union.
Uh they'll tell him what uh they want him to do, and he'll say merci beaucoup and do it.
So it should work out just fine.
The Merci beaucoup foreign policy.
Uh but he has been, you know, he he thinks it's embarrassing that uh that Americans uh don't know uh uh useful foreign phrases.
Uh and I mentioned uh a phrase I thought might be uh useful to Jesse Jackson in French if he ever happens to want to uh perform emergency surgery uh and he happens to be sitting next to a French guy on TV.
Um uh that was uh if I remember Je veux des coupées les Noir de Monsieur Obama and uh and and somebody emailed me and said, oh yeah, that's anyone can do it in French.
But what it is what is it in German?
So if the Reverend Jesse Jackson is listening uh and he wants to know if he wants to whisper an aside to some guy on a German TV show, uh I believe, and my German isn't that good, but I believe it's uh Ikmuchte Abschneiden detestikul von Herr Obama.
Uh and uh that is that is uh that is the uh a very useful phrase if you're the Reverend Jackson and you're touring Germany, that is a phrase that will open any door.
Ich muchte Abschneiden detestikul von Herr Obama.
Um and uh uh and uh we're now in the uh what is it, the uh I think the third day of that uh that controversy.
Uh and uh uh and uh I hope I hope that uh uh I'm showing we can move on by uh by uh adding a little sophisticated foreign continental European content to it.
You know, uh uh Bo Snadley, who is this show's official Obama criticizer, famously said uh a couple of days ago that Barack Obama is the first black Clinton.
But uh you know, I'm I'm with Jesse Jackson on this condescension business.
I think it's worse than that.
I think he may be the first uh black John Kerry.
I mean, which I think it's even more even more amazing uh if you think about it.
And uh what does it say about America?
It says this is a great country.
Uh John Kerry is, you know, a Boston Brahmin, he's been to the most expensive schools and all the rest of it, and yet a guy uh whatever, you know, uh I never quite understand what uh Barack Obama's background.
He his uh father's Kenyan and his mother's Canzon, which sounds like some sort of screw up at a uh uh at a an alphabetic computer dating agency.
So anyway, the can the Kenyan Cansan Hawaiian Indonesian or whatever he is, uh can his family comes here, his immigrants in most modest circumstances, and he can be as condescending as a Boston Brahmin.
I think that speaks well for America as the land of opportunity.
Now we're gonna be talking about uh education later in this hour.
I also wanted uh to talk about something else that I mentioned uh uh uh to uh to a caller about half an hour ago, and that is I think cultural liberalism.
Uh I think that is the real uh problem that we are facing in the United States.
I love the I love this country.
I believe that this is the last best hope of mankind when Barack Obama says he wants to remake America, uh I don't want him to remake it.
As I say in my interview with Rush in this month's Limbaugh letter, uh if it ain't broke, don't get Barack Obama to fix it.
Uh basically, uh I'd like some of the more recent legal innovations that have been introduced in this country removed, but basically the way this country was set up in 1776, I think is terrific, and I don't think it needs uh a lot of Barack Obama type change.
But the problem is most people are not political, because they live in a free society.
And if you live in a free society, you can concentrate on all the stuff you really like.
I don't know what it, you know, whatever you happen to like, you might like golf, you might like uh tap dancing, you might like stamp collecting.
You get on with what you like, and politics plays a peripheral part in your life.
And the trouble is for those people who don't think about politics a lot, uh liberalism is becoming the default uh in this society, because so many of the other areas of life have become uh infected by liberalism.
If you go to school, uh you know, it doesn't have to uh uh Churchill in the 30s complained the British universities were full of uh like crazy professors who hated uh hated their own country, uh essentially, who were at odds with their own country's history.
Well it's one thing when it gets to the universities.
Now we've got that essentially, I think, down in uh way down inside the system uh at kindergarten in grade one.
It's not that uh teachers hate their country, but it's that essentially a fake phony uh mumbo jumbo multicultural vision uh of uh the United States has been imposed on historical reality.
Uh when you have uh when you have uh not just school teachers, but when Congress passes a resolution uh saying that the founding fathers got most of their ideas from the Iroquois constitution.
No, they didn't.
They didn't get anything from the Iroquois constitution.
If you'd said to those guys, uh, hey, the Iroquois have got some great idea, they didn't want to know.
That's not who they were.
When that's as crazy as uh Saddam Hussein's education system teaching that Saddam Hussein was descended from the great Saladin.
That it was a lie.
That was a fiction, and if you think that's nuts, uh it's no more nutty than pretending that the United States Constitution uh derives from the uh Iroquois uh constitution.
So when we uh so when when we talk about cultural liberalism, uh we're talking about all these areas in which people who aren't political essentially have adopted a default liberalism on issues like the environment.
You know, this thing Obama wants to lower the sea levels, low wants to lower the ocean levels.
I don't know what that requires.
Uh but I would guess it's going to be expensive.
I don't think there's uh I don't think you can have a small government fiscally conservative approach uh to lowering sea levels.
I think it's going to be expensive.
And why?
Why?
Uh at the present rate of sea level increase the Maldive Islands will be underwater in the year 2500.
2500 that is uh 492 years away.
So it's not imminent.
I like the Maldives Islands uh in the Indian Ocean very uh very pleasant place very nice people but if the worst happens and they are underwater in the year 2500 there's about 350,000 of them we could evacuate them all and uh move them to uh move them to the south of France uh and being sunny Muslims they'll fit right in uh by that point.
The year 2500, that is how imminent the threat of the so-called rising sea levels is.
Rush mentioned the other day they now got this glacier out of control in California.
Supposedly, you know, we're all supposed to be a threat from global warming.
They got glaciers forming everywhere.
They're going to be glaciers.
It's bad enough.
If you want to know my view of it, I think it's when, you know, these places like Tampa started getting ice hockey teams, you know, which, believe me, it's no yeah the the basically the history of the National Hockey League is the Canadian teams uh moving to the southern United States so you go up to Quebec City they don't have a hockey team anymore the Nordiques are now in I don't know where they are they're in uh they're in St. Louis or they're in San Diego why does San Diego have a hockey team?
Essentially, global warming is as cockamamie an idea as playing ice hockey in the southern United States.
There's no ice.
There's no global warming.
There is no global warming.
And yet we are invested in a kind of insane delusion that is the default position.
If you oppose global warming, if you oppose the whole kind of climate change thing, people think that you're some kind of crazy extremist denier.
So the default position for people who don't think about politics much has become liberalism.
And we have to try and convert not the mainstream left-wing kooks, but we have to convert more and more of those cultural liberals and persuade them.
Because once you actually lay out the facts on them, they say, oh, yeah, that seems reasonable to me.
The cultural liberals, I think, are a big growth opportunity for conservatism.
And as I always say, one of the greatest lines ever is from Margaret Thatcher.
A marvellous woman, one of her best lines is this, the facts of life are conservative.
The facts of life are conservative.
And when you try and buck them, and it doesn't matter whether you buck them in obviously insane ways like the Soviet Union or Cambodia, or just kind of benignly insane ways like Western Europe and Canada and the Democratic Party, when you try and buck the facts of life, you generally end up with a huge mess that it takes you generations to recover from.
So we need to get out there and talk to the cultural liberals and persuade them of that great truth.
life are conservative.
More straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh show this is Mark in for Rush he'll be uh back on Monday Mark Stein sitting in uh let us go to Liz in Waco, Texas.
Liz, thanks for waiting.
You're live on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Hi Mark I'm so excited to talk to you.
I'm excited to talk to you Liz.
I love your part of the world you're not far from President Bush are you?
Um not too far.
No that's good.
Uh now you may see more of him uh after January over over at the ranch in Crawford.
What's what's on your mind?
Well I just have uh a curiosity here um as a former British subject um I wanted to hear your take on a couple of things and we hear some stories out of Britain lately like um high officials saying that you know Sharia law can coexist with British law and a story recently about two schoolboys suspended for refusing to create a during a multicultural exercise.
I I want to hear your take on this and by the way I really miss your call on the Yeah, well, that's that's a very uh good point.
These two kids in an English school, uh the the school is having an exercise where you've got to pretend to be Muslim.
Because let's face it, if you uh rehearse for it, it'll all seem uh go a lot smoother when it actually kicks in and happens in a couple of years' time.
Uh and so two of the kids refuse.
They refuse to bow down and pray to Allah because they're not Muslims.
And uh the school punishes them, the teacher punishes them.
You imagine this in any other circumstance.
If you were at an American grade school uh and you were ordered to uh worship the Lord Jesus Christ, uh the people people would be going people would give be going bananas.
I think we're gonna be I think Britain's uh Britain's decline, the end of Britain, the death of Britain is one of the great tragedies of the early twenty-first century.
But they are genuinely uh I think they are genuinely doomed.
They simply do not want to rouse themselves to resist half this stuff.
You mentioned these high officials uh wanting to introduce Sharia.
The Archbishop of Candry, my book, by the way, uh America Alone, the end of the world, as we know it.
I was I was accused in that book when I was talking about the Islamification of Europe of being alarmist.
Uh what happened uh well after the book comes comes out.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican community, announces that Sharia is inevitable, so Britain might as well get on and introduce it.
Uh the Lord Chief Justice, who is the equivalent of uh uh uh Chief Justice Roberts at the uh at the Supreme Court here, the Lord Chief Justice in Britain says that we need to introduce Sharia and he says, Oh, don't worry, we're not gonna introduce, you know, uh any of the uh cutting your hands off for stealing.
Uh we're not gonna introduce uh any of the compulsory female circumcision.
Don't worry, that would be out of the question.
It's just uh Sharia light.
We're just gonna get on the Sharia Express and ride a couple of stops down the line.
But don't worry, don't worry, we're not gonna go all the way uh and be uh and be having the uh the full-blown amputating your hand uh because you happen to hold up a liquor store or any of that.
This is this is a country uh that is, I think, in serious cultural decline.
Um it's it's uh no more profound than is going on in some other uh other uh parts of Europe.
Uh a Swedish cabinet minister said, we need to be nice to the Muslims when we're in the majority, so that they'll be nice to us when they're in the majority.
Well, good luck with that, pal.
Uh a Dutch cabinet minister said there would be nothing wrong with Sharia, nothing wrong with Islamic law if the Dutch people voted to introduce it democratically.
Yes, there would be something wrong with it.
I like the guy, uh Peter Costello, an Australian cabinet minister, who said, uh if you want to live under Sharia, I can understand that.
And there's lots of countries for you to go and live in.
You can go and live in Iran, you can go and live in Yemen, you can l go and live in Sudan.
Uh but it's not gonna happen here.
So if you want to live under Sharia, uh I'll point you to a cab to the airport and you can go and find somewhere that's got it, because it's not gonna happen here.
And until Western nations recover that kind of cultural confidence, uh essentially uh they will be uh colluding uh in their own suicide.
I mean, i radical Islam is a weak enemy.
It's not the Third Reich.
It's these crazy people, they can't they can't do it.
They can't invent the s the planes that they fly into buildings.
Uh all they can do is hijack them.
But it what it has, uh compared to this uh kind of civilizational death wish at the heart of countries like uh the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and Sweden and all the rest of them, is it has tremendous will, and they figure that if you've got will, then the fact that you don't have technology, you don't have innovation, you don't have a big strong military, none of that matters uh because you you're strong where it counts, uh, which is uh basic civilizational uh confidence.
Uh and it's a tragedy to see that the s the news in in Britain gets crazier and crazier.
And this thing the other day, uh kids, the the whatever they're called, the race relations commission is now alerting teachers to watch out for kids as young as three who express squeamishness about foreign food.
You know, if you if you uh are given uh you you know the kids kids get very picky, they like uh fish sticks and uh a couple of other things, and a grilled cheese sandwich.
You go to the kids' menu, whatever kind of restaurant you go into, whether it's an Italian restaurant, Japanese restaurant, the kids' menu is always the same.
It's like fish sticks and cheese sandwich, grilled cheese sandwich, a couple of other things.
Pizza, pizza, but nothing fancy on the pizza, just cheese and tomato on the pizza.
Uh Because kids are picky.
But they're they're now saying, oh, no, no, no.
It's not just because they're kids.
It's because they're racist.
You go and give them something on some aubergine coolie that you got from John Kerry's personal chef, and the kid goes, ugh.
That doesn't mean that that doesn't mean just that the kid doesn't know what it is and doesn't like it.
It means he's racist.
And that's what they're doing.
That's what they're doing in the United Kingdom now.
The race relations people want you to watch out for racism from your three-year-old kid uh because he doesn't like foreign food.
This is a civilization that has got a death wish.
Uh and essentially, you cannot uh you cannot continue down that path uh for long.
We think it's all a joke, but it's not you have thirty, forty years of this stuff, and basically you forget why you're meant to be in business.
And that's what's happened to Britain.
That's what's happened to Western Europe, that's what's happened to Canada, and it's what's happened to significant parts of America too.
More straight ahead.
Hey, great to uh be with you.
Um Rush will be back Monday, he's having a little dental work today, but I am uh I'm glad to be sitting in for him.
And uh let's uh go to John in Sacramento, California.
John, it's open line Friday, and you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Fantastic.
Good morning, Mark.
Uh it's a pleasure to have you on the show as well.
Ditto's to you.
Mega dittoes to you too, John.
Doing a fine job.
Uh I I called today to talk about a uh an online poll uh about who's to blame for four dollar gas and just how myopic this poll was, just how it drives people at a given direction is basically propaganda.
But it came through out of uh money and markets.com, which is a subsidiary of the Weiss group, you know, and uh basically the link that you look at, the first one is uh uh says who's to blame for four dollar gas, and it has a picture of a of a mean looking chic and then President Bush right in the middle and an oil company logo.
And then you move on.
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Okay, no, that's that's a good that's a good stuff.
The mean chic, President Bush and the oil company logo.
So you go through there where you have to put your name in to vote, and it's got another picture of a of an oil exec looking, you know, peevishly greedy.
Uh the oil company logo again, President Bush right in the middle, um, some stockbroker guys, and that's the next link that takes you to the actual poll.
Right.
The poll itself is absolutely juvenile.
There's only five answers you can check.
And this is what they sound like.
Uh the falling is uh who's to blame for four dollar gas?
The the falling dollar, because oil is priced in U.S. dollars, so when the dollar falls, it allows other countries to buy more oil, which drives up demand and prices.
Uh that's the first answer.
Uh B. No one, it's just a free market.
C, emerging countries like uh China and India who are buying every barrel they can lay their hands on.
D, OPEC and big oil conspiring together so they can rake in even bigger record-breaking profits.
And E, we the consumer who choose to buy gas-guzzling SUVs instead of using public transportation or a more fuel-friendly car.
That's it.
And who and who uh who's winning so far on that uh the lousy selection?
I don't know because I could not bring myself to vote instead.
Okay, well, listen, listen, I'll tell you why I came to this country.
I came to this country because I wanted to drive a car I could get in.
You know, you you uh you you uh you fly to uh Europe, uh you get you get out the airport of Paris, you pre-booked your your big fancy rental car before you get get off at Charles Gold Airport, and they drive you out to this thing.
It's the size of a cup holder in your Chevy Tahoe.
Uh I love this.
I love the I love this uh I love America.
I love I love it symbolizes America.
The big SUV symbolizes American reach for the skies optimism.
When they first started having drive-thru lanes, the drive-thru lane was like uh whatever it was, five foot four, because that was what the tallest station wagon had to go.
They have to keep raising the height of the drive-through lane as the SUVs get bigger and bigger.
And you get you watch all these um uh uh Americans, uh uh foreigners over in Europe, they're getting all stooped and bent from you know the French guy, he puts his back out, climbing into the little Renault or Citroen to drive over to his mistress.
He's so hunched by the time he gets there, he's no longer he can he he he's he's he's all bent up, he's in got terrible back pain.
Uh the the SUV, this idea that the the Democrat solution uh uh you know, drive smaller cars and wait for a following wind, that is not an American answer.
Uh secondly, the Congress, Congress, uh this no PEC bill, where they say it shall be an illegal and a violation of this act, according to Congress, to limit the production or distribution of oil.
They don't mean here.
They mean uh the OPEC countries.
They want to sue OPEC for not producing enough oil.
This country could be energy independent.
When they say we can't drill our way out of this crisis, no.
Uh maybe we can't drill our way uh uh from four dollar uh a gallon gas down to, you know, eighty-seven cents a gallon gas, but we could certainly drill our way down from four dollar gas uh down to two buck fifty gas if it weren't for the fact that we have voluntarily decided uh to actually sit this thing out.
Well, that's exactly right.
And they left out supply, they left out Congress, you know, they left it all out.
And so I wrote them back and said, I can't do this, I can't even I can't even do this because the right answer is Congress, radical environmentalists, and all of the above, just just like you said.
So I didn't even vote, and I wrote 'em and let them know how I felt.
And and what and what is the dem the Democrats.
Well, I love about the Democrats.
If you say to them, okay, like uh you're right about this oil, we don't want to have unsightly drilling in the Arctic uh national mosquito refuge.
We appreciate it's got the world's most pristine uh mosquito herd, we can't possibly disturb them.
Uh so we uh will we won't we won't drill for oil there.
You're absolutely right.
How about nuclear?
And they go, "Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no nuclear.
Nobody under eighty remembers Three Mile Island.
Uh these the these ridiculous stories from uh whatever they are thirty-five years ago now, the French are all nuclear.
They don't care.
They're uh they're uh their big uh whatever it is, they're the French Navy's big carrier is nuclear.
It when it cruises into your port, it l pollutes your port.
You'll die, you'll keel over from cancer two years after the French carrier has sailed on.
That's how toxic it is.
And the French celebrate it.
They say we are we're we're proud to be nuclear.
You know, uh Barack Obama may want to be French, he doesn't want to be French in the nuclear sense.
Uh so you say, okay, no, they say, oh, coal mining, kind of unsightly coal mining.
We say, well, can we go back to wood-fired steam trains?
Uh wood wood fired trains, cross-cut the Atchison Tobico and the Santa Fe, wouldn't it be great?
Wood-fired trains.
And thus, oh no, no, no, no, we can't have clear cutting.
We can't have clear cutting in America's forests because it might interfere with these raging out of control fires that have now become such a popular feature of life in the southwestern United States, uh and which they don't have in Mexico, by the way.
If you look at the uh look at the satellite photo uh that shows California ablaze across the across the Mexican border, nothing's happening because uh believe it or not, they still have forestry management in Mexico.
Yeah, so much for Washington State Russia's PEP P was Washington State's potential ban on on beach campfires, and now you have all these fires in California, so Rush nailed that one too.
Thank you, Mark, for having me.
My my pleasure, Gene.
Yeah, yeah, don't fall for any of those uh uh phony baloney polls.
The fact is uh it's disgraceful.
Uh you know, President Bush said on whatever it was, September the twelfth, two thousand one, you're either with us or you're against us.
You're either with the terrorists uh or you're with us.
You're either with us or against us.
The fact is we have checked the both of the above box, uh, because uh the principal beneficiaries of our decision uh not to drill in the uh in the in the Gulf of Florida or in the uh in the Arctic National Mosquito Refuge, the basic beneficiaries of these uh uh of this are these uh Saudi Sheikhs who basically uh get this money.
Uh Saudi Arabia's principal export isn't oil, it's ideology.
All the oil is is the means to fund the export of the ideology.
Uh so they uh when the price of oil goes up, they build more mosques, more madrasas, install more radical imams uh on every main street across the planet.
Uh so the fact is when President Bush says you're either with us uh or against us, uh Americans have ticked the both of the above box, and we are supporting both sides, and we are f effectively funding both sides in this war.
Uh what we need to do uh is uh accept the fact that uh uh innovation is what gets you out of uh what ends your f dependency on foreign oil.
Uh in innovation is what will dep uh uh end the oil age.
As uh famous Saudi cabinet minister said uh, you know, the Stone Age didn't end uh because they ran out of stones, and the oil age isn't gonna end because we run out of oil.
Oil will be superseded by something else.
Uh and it's ridiculous that we don't want to have serious investment in that.
You know, you look at your car.
Your car is uh if you go back to the Ford model T, you know, uh the the car has changed a lot.
I mentioned cup holders.
I love cup holders.
My my SUV has got like thirty-seven cup holders.
Now, if I had a Ford model T, it it had no cup holders.
The idea of drinking in your automobile had not occurred to Henry Ford.
Uh it had a rumble seat instead.
Uh they that used to be kind of cute in the uh in the nineteen twenties, you'd flip down the rumble seat and and you and your girl would kind of make out in the rumble.
And they don't have rumble seats anymore.
I'd like I I'd like an SUV that had uh 37 cup holders and a rumble seat.
But effectively uh everything has changed.
You've got a C D player now.
You go look at rugged trucks, and they've got C D players.
So, like if you're you know, like my neighbor was saying, uh I sound like a fairy when I was hosting for Rush.
Um I like to drive around in a big truck, but because I'm a bit of a you know sissy boy fairy type, I like to listen to a Judy Garland C D in my big rugged pickup.
You can do that now.
This is an amazing country.
And yet, and yet the one thing that hasn't changed since uh since the Ford Model T is the basic technology uh that that powers that vehicle.
Everything else has changed in the car.
Everything else is changed in the car, but not the basic technology.
Uh and and that is really how we're the only way we're going to end this.
This this Obama thing, you know, uh, oh, you know, we're simply not credible.
Uh we can't go around uh with our thermostats set to 72 degrees, driving our big SUVs and eating as much as we want.
That's what Obama said.
You know, that he said that doesn't give us credibility with the Europeans.
That's not leadership.
As I said, you know, his definition of leadership is finding out what the Europeans want and then doing it.
Well, I'm sorry.
I don't think it's the business of the European Union to set American thermostats.
Uh I don't think it is American to say no, things have got to get smaller and worse.
Uh it is American to say things are going to get bigger and better.
And I I want one day to be out in my yard and suddenly it's like a total eclipse, and I can't see a thing.
It's pitch black.
And it turns out it's just my neighbor driving by in his brand new SUV, blocking out all sunlight for six neighboring townships.
That's the American way.
That's the American sp uh spirit.
The Democrats want things to get smaller and worse, and uh we want them to get conservative and better.
Uh this is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
More straight ahead on Open Line Friday.
The Rush Limbaugh Show on the EIB network and Mark Stein in for Rush.
Rush will be back on Monday.
Uh Linda Chavez uh joins us now.
You uh you know Linda, uh writer and uh broadcaster, and uh uh and also uh someone who uh who spots some of the uh trickier uh and less quantifiable things that are happening out there, uh ripples on the political pond.
Uh Linda uh uh wrote uh the other day about dumbing down higher education uh and about this uh this this rather cunning plan to downplay uh uh the role of the SATs.
Uh Linda, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Um it's great to be with you, Mark.
It's uh it's good to it's good to talk to it's good to talk to you.
As I understand it, you reckon the uh the universities want to uh uh downplay the SATs uh in effect to find a way uh to circumvent uh voter uh voter rejection of affirmative uh action and racial preferences.
Absolutely.
Uh voters in the states of California, Washington, and Michigan have all voted to eliminate uh racial quotas and racial preferences in their public education systems.
And lo and behold, almost as soon as that was done, people started talking about changing the requirements for getting into college and essentially eliminating any objective standardized tests that would uh measure uh what a student knew and whether or not they were going to be able to compete in college.
Yeah, and whatever people say about the SATs, a lot of people say, well, you know, they don't measure this and they don't measure that, but they're now essentially the only objective measurement of who gets into college and who doesn't.
No, that's right, because uh grades are very, very subjective.
And of course a student could have a straight A average from a very mediocre or poor school, and it could mean very little.
Uh and this B student at a much more competitive uh demanding school uh might actually know more than that A student.
So what the standardized test does is basically allows you to look at uh the student and find out what that student knows and it's the best predictor of first year grades uh out there and uh it's been used for many many years and it's uh I think something that is very useful to college administrators and there's no reason to abandon it.
Now why do they want to abandon it then?
Uh uh i it's simply because they don't want uh in effect uh to be constrained in in uh in who they are allowed to accept they basically uh want to feel free to build what they call a quote diverse student body according to their own uh their own particular fancies.
Well Mark I had up a group called the Center for Equal Opportunity in False Church, Virginia and for a number of years we've actually taken a look at the admission status for public colleges and universities around the country.
We've done this in more than uh uh uh six dozen or seven dozen schools around the country and what we have found is that uh on average black and Latino students uh do not score as well as whites and Asians and what's happened is that uh schools in the past before states began to outlaw racial preferences would just ignore these differences and we're not talking about minor differences.
We're not talking about somebody, you know, who scores 1,200 as opposed to 1,250 on the combined SAT score.
We're talking about huge differences, 200 and 300, in some cases even more than 300-point differences on the exams.
And so what they're trying to do now is simply to eliminate consideration of the exams altogether in order to be able to go about doing what they did for 30 years, which is taking race into account and admitting students in their some sense of their ideal racial composition rather than looking at students based on their merit.
When this business was first introduced, the justification for it was that it was a kind of temporary correction of an historical wrong.
But we've now, as you say, we've now had it for 30 years.
If you listen to, say, Michelle Obama, she still sounds pretty aggrieved by the fact that she got to go to Princeton didn't particularly have a good time there and still brings it up in every other speech.
I mean, is it actually doing the intended behavior?
beneficiaries of this program any favors uh uh sending them to schools when as you say they've got uh certain colleges when you say they've got these big three four hundred differences in SAT scores.
Well you know I think it's even worse than than uh some people have described it as I think it's basically racist to assume that if you are black or if you are brown that you can never measure up to the same standards that other people have to measure up to what it says to the Latino kid in high school or to the black student is you can be out partying you can watch television all day you can be out on the basketball court don't worry about studying don't worry about learning your vocabulary because it doesn't matter what you get on your SAT test.
We're going to give you a slide.
And of course you know even if that were true even if it were possible to admit you to the school what we found in our studies is that uh those students who were admitted with lower grades and low lower test scores uh didn't manage to stay in school.
They had uh abysmal uh records in terms of actually graduating and so you know it's it's it's these shortcuts don't work.
Um in the end when you go out to get a job somebody wants to know whether or not you can do that job.
And it's you know affirmative action is not going to save you.
No and and and that that's that that point you made is is is an important one.
Basically if uh maybe some of these uh guys had gone to uh uh just an an average college instead of getting a pass and going uh to some top rank place, maybe they would actually have graduated better, done better and gone on and had uh and had a better life.
And Mark we actually have some empirical evidence of that now.
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