All Episodes
Previous Next
July 11, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
July 11, 2008, Friday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, it's Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show and this is Mark Inferrush.
He's having some major dental surgery.
He was given the choice between 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 It is Open Line Friday.
So if you want to call 1-800-282-2882, 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 particularly want to hear from people who are changing their middle name to Hussain.
You may remember there was this little story a couple of weeks ago that identified people with boring whitebread names like, you know, I don't know, Mandy Robinson.
No offense, by the way, to members of the Mandy Robinson community who are listening.
I like the name myself.
I think I dated a Mandy Robinson back in high school.
Anyway, apparently all these people with whitebread names like Mandy Robinson now changing their name to Mandy Hussain Robinson out of solidarity with the coming of the new Messiah.
So apparently just like Mohamed is the most popular boy's name in Brussels and Amsterdam and Malmo, Sweden, Hussein is now going to be the most popular boys and girls name in every single 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.
I must confess, I'm a little below par.
The last time I was here, I'd just flown in from Australia.
And Mr. Snerdley asked me, he goes, he was worried about I might be jet lagged.
And he goes, so when does jet lag from Australia kick in?
I go, generally it kicks in about midday Easter on Thursday.
So anyway, the next morning I wake up, the phone's ringing, and it's 11.28, 11.28, and I'm on air in half an hour.
And so I leapt out of bed and I was running through the streets of midtown Manhattan like Billy Crystal at the end of When Harry Met Sally.
But without Frank Sinatra singing, it had to be you as I was running through the streets.
And instead of, it was just RF and Mr. Snerdley waiting for me instead of Meg Ryan.
And not that I'm complaining, actually.
I think they're both kind of cute compared to some of the things Meg's been in these days.
Anyway, so I've got no complaints about that.
But anyway, I got here.
I got here like two minutes before the show started.
I was having my first coffee during the first break.
I was brushing my teeth during the second break.
I was putting in my special Jesse Jackson protective underpants in the third break.
I basically winged the whole thing.
And people kind of liked it.
They said, wow, that was a great show.
You sound really up on the subjects.
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 I got into the office at like five in the morning, start doing show prep.
And well, basically, I peaked about eight.
So I'm well past my best by now.
But we'll try and keep going and do what we can.
We were talking in the last hour about this business of Barack Obama saying that we should be more sophisticated, more bilingual.
He finds Americans embarrassing.
The only phrase they know in French is merci beaucoup.
By the way, that is the only phrase you'll need to know in French under Barack Obama's presidency.
When Obama is president, he's going to go to the European Union.
They'll tell him what they want him to do, and he'll say, merci beaucoup, and do it.
So it should work out just fine.
The Merci Bocou foreign policy.
But he has been, you know, he thinks it's embarrassing that Americans don't know useful foreign phrases.
And I mentioned a phrase I thought might be useful to Jesse Jackson in French if he ever happens to want to perform emergency surgery.
And he happens to be sitting next to a French guy on TV.
That was, if I remember, je veux des coupe les noir de Monsieur Obama.
And somebody emailed me and said, oh yeah, that's anyone can do it in French.
But what is it in German?
So if the Reverend Jesse Jackson is listening and he wants to know, if he wants to whisper an aside to some guy on a German TV show, I believe, and my German isn't that good, but I believe it's Ich Muchte Abschneiden detestikul von Herr Obama.
And that is the 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.
And we're now in the, what is it, the, I think the third day of that controversy.
And I hope that I'm showing we can move on by adding a little sophisticated foreign continental European content to it.
You know, Bo Snadley, who is this show's official Obama criticizer, famously said a couple of days ago that Barack Obama is the first black Clinton.
But, you know, I'm with Jesse Jackson on this condescension business.
I think it's worse than that.
I think he may be the first black John Kerry.
I mean, which I think is even more amazing if you think about it.
And what does it say about America?
It says this is a great country.
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, whatever, you know, I never quite understand what Barack Obama's background is.
His father's Kenyan and his mother's Kansan, which sounds like some sort of screw-up at an alphabetic computer dating agency.
So anyway, the Kenyan, Kansan, Hawaiian, Indonesian, or whatever he is, 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 going to be talking about education later in this hour.
I also wanted to talk about something else that I mentioned to Akaulo about half an hour ago.
And that is, I think, cultural liberalism.
I think that is the real problem that we are facing in the United States.
I love this country.
I believe that this is the last best hope of mankind.
When Barack Obama says he wants to remake America, I don't want him to remake it.
As I say in my interview with Rush in this month's Limbaugh letter, if it ain't broke, don't get Barack Obama to fix it.
Basically, 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 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 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, liberalism is becoming the default in this society, because so many of the other areas of life have become infected by liberalism.
If you go to school, Churchill in the 30s complained the British universities were full of like crazy professors who Hated their own country, 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 way down inside the system at kindergarten, grade one.
It's not that teachers hate their country, but it's that essentially a fake, phony, mumbo-jumbo, multicultural vision of the United States has been imposed on historical reality.
When you have not just school teachers, but when Congress passes a resolution 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, hey, the Iroquois have got some great idea, they didn't want to know.
That's not who they were.
That's as crazy as Saddam Hussein's education system teaching that Saddam Hussein was descended from the great Saladin.
That was a lie.
That was a fiction.
And if you think that's nuts, it's no more nutty than pretending that the United States Constitution derives from the Iroquois Constitution.
So when we talk about cultural liberalism, 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, wants to lower the ocean levels.
I don't know what that requires, but I would guess it's going to be expensive.
I don't think you can have a small government fiscally conservative approach to lowering sea levels.
I think it's going to be expensive.
And why?
Why?
At the present rate of sea level increase, the Maldive Islands will be underwater in the year 2500.
2500, that is 492 years away.
So it's not imminent.
I like the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, 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 move them to the south of France.
And being sunny Muslims, they'll fit right in 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've 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 these places like Tampa started getting ice hockey teams, which believe me, basically the history of the National Hockey League is that Canadian teams 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 St. Louis or they're in San Diego.
Why does San Diego have a hockey team?
Essentially, global warming is as cockamami 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 in them, they said, 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 marvelous 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.
The facts of life are conservative.
More straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
This is Mark Inforush.
He'll be back on Monday, Mark Stein sitting in.
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?
No, not too far.
No, that's good.
Now you may see more of him after January over at the ranch in Crawford.
What's on your mind?
Well, I just have a curiosity here.
As a former British subject, I wanted to hear your take on a couple of things.
We hear some stories out of Britain lately, like high officials saying that Sharia law can coexist with British law.
And a story recently about two schoolboys suspended for refusing to pray to Allah during a multicultural exercise.
I want to hear your take on this.
And by the way, I really miss your call on.
Yeah, well, that's a very good point.
These two kids in an English school, the school is having an exercise where you've got to pretend to be Muslim.
Because let's face it, if you rehearse for it, it'll all seem go a lot smoother when it actually kicks in and happens in a couple of years' time.
And so two of the kids refuse.
They refuse to bow down and pray to Allah because they're not Muslims.
And the school punishes them.
The teacher punishes them.
You imagine this in any other circumstance.
If you were at an American grade school and you were ordered to worship the Lord Jesus Christ, people would be going bananas.
I think we're going to be, I think Britain's decline, the end of Britain, the death of Britain is one of the great tragedies of the early 21st century.
But they are genuinely, I think they are genuinely doomed.
They simply do not want to rouse themselves to resist half this stuff.
You mentioned these high officials wanting to introduce Sharia.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, my book, by the way, America Alone, the End of the World, as we know it, I was accusing that book when I was talking about the Islamification of Europe of being a Lamist.
What happened after the book 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.
The Lord Chief Justice, who is the equivalent of Chief Justice Roberts 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 going to introduce any of the cutting your hands off for stealing.
We're not going to introduce any of the compulsory female circumcision.
That would be out of the question.
It's just Sharia light.
We're just going to get on the Sharia Express and ride a couple of stops down the line.
But don't worry, don't worry.
We're not going to go all the way and be having the full-blown amputating your hand because you happen to hold up a liquor store or any of that.
This is a country that is, I think, in serious cultural decline.
It's no more profound than is going on in some other Parts of Europe.
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.
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, Peter Costello, an Australian cabinet minister, who said, 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 go and live in Sudan.
But it's not going to happen here.
So if you want to live under Sharia, 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 going to happen here.
And until Western nations recover that kind of cultural confidence, essentially they will be colluding in their own suicide.
I mean, radical Islam is a weak enemy.
It's not the Third Reich.
It's these crazy people.
They can't do it.
They can't invent the planes that they fly into buildings.
All they can do is hijack them.
But what it has compared to this kind of civilizational death wish at the heart of countries like 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 because you're strong where it counts, which is basic civilizational confidence.
And it's a tragedy to see that the news in Britain gets crazy and crazy.
This thing the other day, kids, 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 are given, you know, the kids, kids get very picky.
They like fish sticks and 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.
Because kids are picky.
But 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, 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 because he doesn't like foreign food.
This is a civilization that has got a death wish.
And essentially, you cannot continue down that path for long.
We think it's all a joke, but it's not.
You've 30, 40 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 be with you.
Rush will be back Mondays having a little dental work today, but I'm glad to be sitting in for him.
And let's go to John in Sacramento, California.
John, it's Open Line Friday, and you're live on the Rush Limbo Show.
Fantastic.
Good morning, Mark.
It's a pleasure to have you on the show as well.
Dittos to you.
Mega dittos to you too, John.
Doing a fine job.
I called today to talk about an online poll about who's to blame for $4 gas and just how myopic this poll was and just how it drives people a given direction.
It's basically propaganda.
But it came through out of moneyandmarkets.com, which is a subsidiary of the Weiss Group.
And basically, the link that you look at, the first one says, Who's to blame for $4 gas?
And it has a picture of a mean-looking chic and then President Bush right in the middle and an oil company logo.
And then you move on.
Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Okay, no, that's a good start.
The mean sheet, 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 an oil exec looking peevishly greedy.
The oil company logo again, President Bush right in the middle, some stockbroker guys, and that's the next link that takes you to the actual poll.
The poll itself is absolutely juvenile.
There's only five answers you can check.
And this is what they sound like.
The falling, who's to blame for $4 gas?
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.
That's the first answer.
B, no one.
It's just a free market.
C, emerging countries like 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's winning so far on that 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 fly to Europe, you get out the airport at Paris, you pre-booked your big fancy rental car before you 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.
I love this.
I love this.
I love America.
I love it.
The big SUV symbolizes American reach for the skies optimism.
When they first started having drive-through lanes, the drive-through lane was like 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 watch all these Americans, 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's all bent up, he's in terrible back pain.
The SUV, this idea that the Democrat solution, you know, drive smaller cars and wait for a following wind, that is not an American answer.
Secondly, the Congress, Congress, this NOPEC 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 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.
Maybe we can't drill our way from $4 a gallon gas down to 87 cents a gallon gas, but we could certainly drill our way down from $4 gas down to $2.50 gas if it weren't for the fact that we have voluntarily decided to actually sit this thing out.
Well, that's exactly right.
And they left out supply.
They left out Congress.
They left it all out.
And so I wrote them back and said, I can't do this.
I can't even do this because the right answer is Congress, radical environmentalists, and all of the above, just like you said.
So I didn't even vote.
And I wrote him and let him know how I felt.
And what is the Democrat?
Well, I love about the Democrats.
If you say to them, okay, like, you're right about this oil.
We don't want to have unsightly drilling in the Arctic National Mosquito Refuge.
We appreciate it's got the world's most pristine mosquito herd.
We can't possibly disturb them.
So we won't drill for oil there.
Absolutely right.
How about nuclear?
And they go, oh, no, no, nuclear.
We don't remember Three Mile Island.
Nobody under 80 remembers Three Mile Island.
These ridiculous stories from whatever they are 35 years ago now, the French are all nuclear.
They don't care.
They're big, whatever it is, the French Navy's big carrier is nuclear.
When it cruises into your port, it 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 proud to be nuclear.
You know, Barack Obama may want to be French.
He doesn't want to be French in the nuclear sense.
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?
Wood-fired trains, the Atchison Tobico and the Santa Fe.
Wouldn't it be great?
Wood-fired trains.
And they're saying, 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, and which they don't have in Mexico, by the way.
If you look at the satellite photo that shows California ablaze across the Mexican border, nothing's happening because, believe it or not, they still have forestry management in Mexico.
Yeah, so much for Washington State.
Russia's pet peeve was Washington State's potential ban 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 pleasure, Gene.
Yeah, don't fall for any of those phony baloney polls.
The fact is, it's disgraceful.
You know, President Bush said on whatever it was, September 12th, 2001, you're either with us or you're against us.
You're either with the terrorists 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 because the principal beneficiaries of our decision not to drill in the Gulf of Florida or in the Arctic National Mosquito Refuge, the basic beneficiaries of this are these Saudi sheikhs who basically get this money.
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.
So they, when the price of oil goes up, they build more mosques, more madrasas, install more radical imams on every main street across the planet.
So the fact is, when President Bush says you're either with us or against us, Americans have ticked the both of the above box, and we are supporting both sides.
We are effectively funding both sides in this war.
What we need to do is accept the fact that innovation is what gets you out of what ends your dependency on foreign oil.
Innovation is what will end the oil age.
As a famous Saudi cabinet minister said, you know, the Stone Age didn't end because they ran out of stones, and the oil age isn't going to end because we run out of oil.
Oil will be superseded by something else.
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, if you go back to the Ford Model T, you know, the car has changed a lot.
I mentioned cup holders.
I love cup holders.
My SUV has got like 37 cup holders.
Now, if I had a Ford Model T, it had no cup holders.
The idea of drinking in your automobile had not occurred to Henry Ford.
It had a rumble seat instead.
That used to be kind of cute.
In the 1920s, you'd flip down the rumble seat and you and your girl would kind of make out in the rumble.
And they don't have rumble seats anymore.
I'd like an SUV that had 37 cup holders and a rumble seat.
But effectively, everything has changed.
You've got a CD player now.
You go look at rugged trucks and they've got CD players.
So, like if you're, you know, like my neighbor was saying, I sound like a fairy when I was hosting for Rush.
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 CD 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 the Ford Model T is the basic technology that powers that vehicle.
Everything else has changed in the car.
Everything else has changed in the car, but not the basic technology.
And that is really how the only way we're going to end this.
This Obama thing, you know, oh, you know, we're simply not credible.
We can't go around 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, 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.
I don't think it is American to say, no, things have got to get smaller and worse.
It is American to say things are going to get bigger and better.
And 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 spirit.
The Democrats want things to get smaller and worse and we want them to get conservative and better.
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.
Linda Chavez joins us now.
You know, Linda, writer and broadcaster, and also someone who spots some of the trickier and less quantifiable things that are happening out there, ripples on the political pond.
Linda wrote the other day about dumbing down higher education and about this rather cunning plan to downplay the role of the SATs.
Linda, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
It's great to be with you, Mark.
It's good to talk to you.
As I understand it, you reckon the universities want to downplay the SATs, in effect, to find a way to circumvent voter rejection of affirmative action and racial preferences.
Absolutely.
Voters in the states of California, Washington, and Michigan have all voted to eliminate 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 measure 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 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.
And this B student at a much more competitive, demanding school might actually know more than that A student.
So what the standardized test does is basically allows you to look at the student and find out what that student knows.
And it's the best predictor of first-year grades out there.
And it's been used for many, many years.
And it's, 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?
It's simply because they don't want, in effect, to be constrained in who they're allowed to accept.
They basically want to feel free to build what they call a, quote, diverse student body according to their own particular fancies.
Well, Mark, I head up a group called the Center for Equal Opportunity in Falls Church, Virginia.
And for a number of years, we've actually taken a look at the admissions data for public colleges and universities around the country.
We've done this in more than six dozen or seven dozen schools around the country.
And what we have found is that on average, black and Latino students do not score as well as whites and Asians.
And what's happened is that 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 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, you know, 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 beneficiaries of this program any favors, sending them to schools when, as you say, they've got certain colleges, when you say they've got these big 300, 400 differences in SAT scores?
Well, you know, I think it's even worse than 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 those students who were admitted with lower grades and lower test scores didn't manage to stay in school.
They had abysmal records in terms of actually graduating.
And so, you know, it's these shortcuts don't work.
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 that point you made is an important one.
Basically, if maybe some of these guys had gone to just an average college instead of getting a pass and going to some top-ranked place, maybe they would actually have graduated better, done better, and gone on and had a better life.
Mark, we actually have some empirical evidence of that now.
California, which abandoned racial preferences in 1996, has now had more than 10 years of being able to look at what the impact has been.
And what they found is that same number, in fact, more black and Latino students are going to the university in California than did in the past.
And more of them are graduating because, as you say, they are matched with schools where their preparation actually puts them sort of at the median, lets them compete with students who are similarly prepared rather than putting them into situations where they are bound to fail.
Well, thanks for talking to us, Linda.
We're going to hear what the listeners to the Rush Limbaugh Show have to say about that.
1-800-282-2882.
And we'll watch what voters do on some of these other racial preference issues come November.
Linda Chavez on the Russian Limbaugh Show.
1-800-282-2882.
It's Open Line Friday.
More in a moment.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Another hour of fun still to come.
▲
Export Selection