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July 17, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:08
July 17, 2008, Thursday, Hour #2
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Thank you, Johnny Donovan, Jed Babin, sitting in for Rush today.
We really, really appreciate this opportunity.
Thank you, Rush, for trusting me with your microphone.
We're switching topics.
Ladies and gentlemen, we need to do something to bring down the price of gasoline that you pay at the pump every day.
Now we know what Harry Reid thinks about it.
Coal makes us sick.
Oil makes us sick.
It's global warming.
It's ruining our country.
It's ruining our planet.
Well, that's what he said on a little Fox News cut that got posted on the Internet.
And the Republicans say they got 400,000 hits on that before July 4th.
But is anybody actually doing something about this?
Well, yes.
Well, yes.
The good news is there are some serious people in the United States Senate.
And fortunately for us, one of them is Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, the Republican from Kentucky, who joins us right now to talk about the Gas Price Reduction Act.
Senator, thanks for taking the time to join us.
Well, thanks, Jed.
It's good to be with you.
And I just might say for a moment, I've gone today from being sad to now getting ready to be mad.
Sad, of course, because Tony Snow's funeral was this morning, and many of us were there and had a chance to celebrate his life and say goodbye.
And now I'm back in the Capitol.
And Tony, as Tony would advise us, life goes on and there are important things to be done.
And we are turning in the Senate shortly to the issue of energy.
Unfortunately, Jed, as you suggested in your interview, some people up here are not very serious about it.
I mean, the bill that the majority leader is calling up deals with speculation.
And frankly, there's nothing wrong with taking a look at the futures markets, and that's a part of the bill that most Republicans are for.
But nobody really believes that we're going to solve this problem until we do something serious.
Well, let me interrupt you there for a moment, Senator, if I may.
Now, I heard Mr. Reed saying, I think it was yesterday, that this oil speculators regulation bill contends that that would bring the price of gasoline down by 30 percent.
Now, I've not heard any economist, far less a credible one, any business analyst, far less a credible one, agree with that.
Have you?
Well, let's quote the richest, most famous Democratic businessman in the world, Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett said it's not a speculation problem, it's a supply and demand problem.
But look, we're willing to sort of concede the point that maybe we ought to look at the futures markets.
But now, let's do something about the problem.
The goal here is to find more and to use less.
There are at least two ways in which we can find more that I think can achieve bipartisan support.
Number one, we need to open the outer continental shelf where states want to have it opened.
Give a state option.
Right now, 85 percent of the outer continental shelf is off limits.
Just look at what happened to gas prices.
I don't know what their oil prices are doing today, but they went down the last two days after the president eliminated the executive branch moratorium on offshore drilling.
But, of course, the congressional ban still stands.
We think, at the very least, you ought to give states the option.
There's at least one state I'm familiar with, and there will be others who want to do it right now, Virginia, represented by one Democratic senator who's a supporter of this, and one Republican.
We need to get rid of the moratorium on oil shale that was just put in by this new Democratic Congress last year through your listeners that aren't familiar with oil shale.
In three western states, we have three times the reserves of oil that they have in Saudi Arabia in oil shale.
We need to get rid of that moratorium and let that technology come forward.
Now, you have the bill, the Gas Price Reduction Act of 2008.
Those are two features of the Gas Price Reduction Act.
We also, frankly, think we ought to do more on the other side as well.
As I said, we both want to find more and use less.
We've got incentives in there for battery-driven cars, and we're not too far from the day when all of us, many of us, will be plugging in our cars overnight and recharging them.
But this is fundamentally a supply and demand problem.
The American public gets it.
Over 70 percent of Americans think we ought to use more of our own resources.
We're the only country in the world that is so skittish about using offshore reserves.
Well, it seems to me that not just the offshore reserves, but the oil shale, as you point to, and places like the Bakken deposits in the Dakotas.
You know, there's a lot of things we have.
Why is it that America is so oil-rich and we're insisting that we treat ourselves as if we're oil-poor?
Well, I think there were a couple of incidences that we overreacted to.
There was the oil spill in Santa Barbara back in the 60s.
It was a horrible thing.
Everybody saw it.
It made a deep impression.
But we overreacted.
The technology has come a long way in the last 40 years.
We are drilling in the Gulf of Mexico now.
And Jed, I bet your listeners already know this, but during Katrina, the worst storm ever recorded in American history, not a drop of oil or gas was spilled from any of those rigs in the Gulf.
So it's safe.
It's safe.
And what we're doing is simply saying, you know, I'd frankly be willing to go further than this, but we're saying give the states the option 50 miles out to open up the Outer Continental Shelf if they would like.
Why would states do it?
They get revenue off of it.
Sure.
And, you know, look, I think the futures markets, I don't mind taking a look at the futures markets, but they haven't had anything positive to speculate about.
You know, if they saw that we were doing something like the impression they got that the president was trying to do something Monday when he lifted the executive branch moratorium, I think there would be a positive reaction.
I'm sorry.
I know you talk to Mr. Reed probably every day, and you've got last time I heard it was you and 42 Senate Republicans, and there's probably a couple of others that have signed on since then.
Is there any plan, is Mr. Reed going to allow you to bring this to the floor, or is this going to die because he's too busy working on the oil speculators?
No, we're going to turn to the subject.
The subject he wants to talk about is just speculators.
But in the Senate, one person doesn't get to dictate what we do.
And I believe that there are enough Republicans who will stick together to force the majority to have an open amendment process, give us a chance to either get a good positive result for America, or, frankly, Jed, if they simply refuse to do anything significant on the number one issue in the country, we'll just have to take it to the American people this fall.
But my first choice, actually, is to do something, to get an accomplishment, to begin to send these gas prices down.
And that's only going to happen if we indicate a willingness.
You know, we are the world's third largest oil producer now.
The Saudis are number one.
The Russians are number two.
We are number three.
We are sitting on a sea of oil, both on and offshore.
Most of it is locked up.
It is time for us to take charge of this situation and get our destiny in our own hands.
Look, we all hope to be able to get beyond fossil fuels someday.
That is going to happen someday.
But we are going to be using fossil fuel for several more fossil fuels for several more decades until we transition to the next form of energy.
And we need to be producing all of these other alternatives, moving forward on them.
But to just stick our heads in the sand and think we can conserve our way out of this problem is astonishing.
You know, the Democratic nominee for president, and he hadn't backed off of this, has said essentially, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's very accurate, my paraphrasing, that his biggest problem with $4 a gallon gas was that we got there too quickly.
Well, look, he'd rather us be there quickly or slowly.
It's too expensive.
Yeah, he'd rather us be the frog in the pot getting boiled and not noticing the increase in the heat.
Yeah, you know, and if you live on the upper east side of Manhattan, with all due respect to our friends in New York, you've got public transportation alternatives for the vast majority of Americans, particularly middle and low-income Americans.
The price of gasoline has a major impact on their ability to get their kids to school, to go to the grocery store, to function, to get to work.
Well, good on you for trying to do something about it.
We've only got a minute or so left, Senator.
I don't want to let you go without switching to the other favorite topic that you and I have talked about many times before, the issue of judicial confirmations.
As I recall, and please correct me if I'm wrong, in the last two years of his term with the Republican Congress, President Clinton got something like 15 courts of appeals judges confirmed.
And I think we're way behind.
You guys are way behind on that.
We are.
We are indeed.
And this is a violation of a commitment from my friend, the majority leader, who said that we would meet the average of the last three presidents, each of whom ended up with the Senate and control of the opposition party.
We only have 10, and we need to do five more to be treated, to have President Bush treated as well as President Clinton.
Is there any plan?
Is there any way this is going to be a good idea?
Well, we have been making it difficult for them to function here in the Senate.
Our tools are limited, but what I don't think you ought to be able to get away with is making a commitment to the American people and to me in particular here in the Senate and not keeping it.
Yeah, I mean, our leader hadn't kept his commitment.
Well, it seems to me, and obviously you know vastly more about it than I do, but one of the things that makes the United States Senate work or not is the ability of the members to believe each other, to take each other's word.
I mean, if you can't take Harry Reid's word, how can you get anything done?
I like Harry Reid personally.
We've worked together every day, but he has not kept his commitment on judges, and I think that the majority will rue the day that they have violated their word on such a major and important issue.
Now, you're up to, what is it, 10, so you'd need five more before the August recess or before signing the documentary.
No, we need five more before President Bush leaves office.
And right now, they are hunkered down and digging in, and it appears as if their goal is to just violate their pledge.
Now, you've got some folks already in the box, so to speak, I believe.
Well, there are plenty.
There are a number of well-qualified judges in committee.
Some of them have been sitting there for two, three years.
Give us a couple of examples.
Well, Peter Keisler for the D.C. Circuit, unanimously well-qualified by the ABA, rated, been sitting there for a couple of years.
A fellow named Conrad, who is a district judge in North Carolina, unanimously well qualified, well qualified by the ABA, sitting there in the committee for well over a year.
Now, they've got them bottled up in committee.
And it's an outrage, particularly since they pledged to do otherwise.
Well, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the United States Senate, we wish you well with that.
If there's anything as important as judicial confirmations right now, I don't know there's anything more important.
There may be a lot of other important things you all are doing, but gas prices and dealing with these confirmations, it sounds to me like you've got your work cut out for you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Jed.
Enjoyed being with you.
Thank you, sir.
We'll talk to you again soon.
All right, this is Jed Babin sitting in for Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882.
Maybe there ought to be a little more pressure on hapless Harry Reid to get some of these confirmations done.
Got to take a quick break and we'll be right back to your calls.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh.
Stick with us.
Welcome back, everybody.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh, the Rush Limbaugh Show, 800-282-2882.
We just talked to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the United States Senate.
He's got a bill, the Gas Price Reduction Act of 2008.
I think that is worthy of passage for one principal reason.
It may not produce oil right away, but think about all these terrible speculators that Harry Reid wants to regulate.
It will throw the fear of God into them a little bit.
And I think the pressure on speculation will drive the oil prices down.
I think if you talk to responsible economists and oil experts, they'll tell you the same thing.
If there is a hint of substantially more oil reserves coming on the market as this bill would produce, that drives the price down faster than anything you're going to do.
And this whole business of the Democrats refusing, refusing to act to bring gasoline prices down this year, that's something every single member of Congress who does not support this bill should pay for in the fall.
Every member of the House is up.
One-third of the Senate is up.
Let's send them a message.
All right, let's go to the phones.
800-282-2882.
How about Chris in Cleveland?
Welcome to the show.
Hi, I was talking about what you're talking about, driven on drilling on the Continental Shelf.
Yeah.
What I was going to say, kind of goes to what you were just saying: of, you know, if it's going to take X number of years to get a return on this oil, it's not really this return that's giving us the advantage.
It's the speculation on this return.
And it's basically we're being blackmailed by the oil companies.
They've wanted to drill there for 10 years.
We wouldn't let them.
Well, wait a minute.
How is that price high up?
Wait, you think they are driving the gas price high up?
You know, this is not a result of anything but greed in the oil companies.
Come on.
This is a result of supply and demand.
If it was a supply and demand issue, why don't we have rationing?
There's really no shortage of gas.
There's a perception of shortage of gas.
Sir, Chris, that is just absolute, utter baloney.
It's an international market.
You're speaking just like Harry Reid does in ignorance.
This is not a market that is hermetically sealed within the borders of the United States.
This is an international market.
You've got the Chinese increasing their oil consumption by leaps and bounds every month.
Last year, the International Energy Agency forecast a 2.1 million barrel per day increase last December.
That's what they forecast.
It's even more than that now.
And you know why?
Because China has increased its crude consumption 18 percent this year.
There's a supply and demand issue that is driving the market forces.
This is why the Democrats always fail.
This is why liberals always fail in dealing with it because they're not capitalists.
They're socialists.
They think that they can regulate the markets.
They think that they can control things by saying, oh, well, the greedy oil companies, let's penalize them.
What are you going to do, sir?
What are you going to do to drive up the supply?
Are you just going to tell the windfall profits tax Pelosiites that they should succeed?
Is that what you're proposing?
You want a windfall profits tax on the oil company?
No, I don't think the oil companies are necessarily the problem.
What I think is I think it's similar to the housing problem in the United States in the last year.
You have people in the middle that are making a percentage on the transactions.
But this, again, again, sir, sir, sir, there again, you are thinking like a liberal.
I don't know if you'll confess to being one or not, but we love to have liberals call here because we like to teach them lessons.
And the lesson is the oil market is not an American market.
It is produced in, I don't know, 20 or 25 nations around the world.
Many, many nations consume oil.
The Chinese are buying up every drop of oil they can find.
This is an issue of supply and demand.
It's pretty much that simple.
And no matter what you do within the four corners of the United States, that's why I think it's so utterly laughable that we have the Democrats talking about suing OPEC to drive down the cost of oil.
What are these guys thinking?
You've got a NOPEC bill out there saying, well, we're going to outlaw the oil cartel.
What effect is that going to have on other countries?
None.
They don't have to follow our regulations.
They don't have to follow our laws.
That's one of the things that you have in international commerce.
So the simple fact is we have one oil market in the United States, but it's only part of a much larger oil market, and that is what we are seeing the effects of.
I mean, I don't know what liberals, why they just can't understand that.
We're not talking about just Exxon and mobile and a few others out there in Shell and whatever.
These guys don't control the global market on the price of oil.
Ask a question.
What percentage of the global market of oil is purchased by the United States?
Do you have any estimate on that?
Well, I would only tell you we get about 20 million barrels a day.
I think we probably purchase, I don't know, 30, 40 percent, something like that.
It's quite a bit.
We purchase a lot.
I think the solution is one that not many American people are going to stomach.
I think what the United States has to do is say, if you're going to keep gas prices that high, we're not going to buy as many gallons in the United States.
If we have to ration, we'll ration.
And when we talk about that, Mars, all I can tell you is that is what we hear from people like Al Gore and Harry Reid.
This is the kind of thing that we pay a penalty for.
What are we going to do?
We're going to ration gasoline.
We're going to penalize ourselves.
We're going to paralyze the American economy simply because Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of these lame brains just don't want to deal with the facts of the global market.
I am appalled.
I am absolutely appalled.
I'm not shocked.
I'm not surprised.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh got to take a break in just a little bit.
We're going to continue with this.
We're going to continue with this because we need to understand.
This is a global market.
We have to deal with it globally.
Jed Babbin for Rush, 800-282-2882.
We'll be right back.
Thanks, Johnny Donovan.
Going on again, ladies and gentlemen.
Jed Babbin for Rush, 800-282-2882.
You know, there's another element to all of this.
The Democrats, not only do they not want to bring down the price of gasoline that you're paying, not only do they not want to open offshore drilling, they're going on with all of their little games about punishing speculators, trying to impose windfall profits taxes and get the prices up and penalize the oil companies.
They're also at the same time, and it would be funny if it weren't so doggone serious, they're now saying that maybe they want to do another round of tax rebates.
Well, the president did, well, he paid us rebates, a lot of the people who have incomes in the medium to lower range.
And effectively, every family got enough to buy an iPod.
So we have an iPod in every year.
Now the Democrats want to up the ante.
They may want to do more.
They're tank talking now.
Nancy Pelosi is talking about a second stimulus package.
Well, what would it be?
Yeah, it's going to be earmarks big time.
They want to do infrastructure.
They're going to do tax rebates to communities to build bridges and roads and all those things, to give money, to buy votes.
And of course, they're not going to pay for it with real tax money.
Well, I guess they will eventually because they'll raise our taxes if they get the White House next time around.
But in the meantime, in the meantime, what are they going to do?
They're going to borrow money for it, of course, increasing the national debt, wrecking our economy even more than they have so far.
And the situation comes down to, well, George Bush gave every family an iPod for every ear.
I guess now Nancy Pelosi and company want to have a Prius in every driveway.
That will solve the problem, won't us?
Won't it?
Won't it solve the problem?
We'll have very good hybrid vehicles just not using that much gasoline.
It makes one want to weep.
Jed Babin for Rush Limbaugh 800-282-2882.
Let's go to how about Angel in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, Jed, how are you?
I'm good.
I'm just laughing at your last caller, Chris.
I am, by vocation, an economist.
Ah, the black arts.
Yes.
And I was director of environmental technologies during the late 90s and, you know, right up until 2001.
So you had the personal responsibility for greening our planet, and the decimation of our atmosphere is all your fault.
I would guess I'll take the blame.
But the problem was, and what I wanted to say before was the president's already lifted the executive ban on offshore drilling.
Right.
It's up to Congress now.
Correct.
But he still has to take the next step at the cabinet level, revamp the regulations at the EPA, DOE, Department of Energy, to streamline the system so people will want to expand current refineries.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
And, you know, Angel, I don't mean to cut you off, but we have limited time.
And the point really comes down to that's precisely correct.
I mean, we have not built a new oil refinery in this country since, I believe, 1976.
We don't, yeah, we have to have more capacity.
And, you know, the fact of the matter is, even if we had more capacity right now, we don't have enough oil to put through new refineries.
So we have to build nuclear plants.
We have to do a lot of different things.
And we have to do them now.
You know, the fact of the matter is the president and the Congress need to do something to take the burden off.
That's opening up offshore drilling right away and getting some of these things that are going to depress the price of oil in play.
And if we don't do that before the election, we're going to have $5 a gallon gasoline.
We're going to have $150 a barrel oil.
And that's not going to be pretty for this economy.
Hey, good call.
Thanks for it.
Let's go to Bill in Jacksonville, Florida.
Welcome to the show.
Hi.
I just wanted to make the point that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in trying to punish the or regulate the speculators are akin to punishing your doctor who diagnoses your cancer and thinking that you've treated the cancer by doing that.
In other words, just to punish the speculators who are telling us that we have no supply to meet the demand.
Well, yeah, Bill, I'm not quite sure that I'll go along with the analogy, but it's kind of like Abraham Lincoln once said.
You know, you can't enrich the poor by impoverishing the rich.
More people paying taxes, more higher taxes on the oil companies are not going to produce a single more barrel of oil.
Harry Reid.
Regulating the speculators does no good at all.
Well, that's a lot of people that tell us that we have too little supply.
That's my point.
I think you're right.
I think you're absolutely right.
And that's one of the big problems we've got.
The Democrats are not listening.
They believe in government.
They don't believe in the market.
And this all goes back to, God bless him, the late President Reagan.
Government is not the solution to the problem.
Government is the problem.
If we got government out of the way of offshore drilling, if we got government out of the way of building new refineries, sure, there need to be some regulations on them to make sure that they don't just pillage the countryside.
But all this stuff can be done safely.
All this stuff can be done without damaging the environment.
And all we hear from the Democrats is more and more and more, more regulation.
Not more freedom for the market, but more regulation of the market.
And that's a principal difference.
People need to remember this fall when you go to the voting booth.
One of the principal things we have going for us in this country is free market capitalism.
Like my buddy Larry Kudlow says every doggone day, if we let the market do its thing, if we let the capital get developed, if we let people invest, if we let people actually build the things that we need to import, to drill, to produce more energy, these things would happen, and they'd happen with astonishing speed.
Yes, there's one more elephant in the room, and that is the Bush tax breaks and the permanency of them.
The very fact that they expire in two years has curbed investment so much here in this country.
I mean, when it wins, when they had eight years, they felt good to the investor.
When they have two years left, there's no point in investing.
Well, and that's why Bill, you're absolutely right, but you put on top of that Barack Obama wanting to raise capital gains rates to a fair level, whatever the bloody heck that means.
And if we look at Ireland, which I was hearing about this morning, they've dropped their capital tax rate from 38 percent to 12, and they're the fastest growing economy in the world, and they're not offshoring jobs.
And that's absolutely right.
The Celtic tiger is really pretty much of a model for most countries.
They're having a big problem over there right now about their housing market being in severe decline.
They do have their own problems over there.
They're not as vibrant as they once were.
But that's a market cycle.
Yes, absolutely.
You know, Bill, great, great call.
Thanks for it.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's the big point.
Free market capitalism works.
Democracy works.
Democrats don't.
And they don't want you to work either.
In fact, they don't want you to be able to afford gasoline to get to work.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh 800-282-2882.
How about Roger and Vera Beach?
Welcome to the show.
Good afternoon.
You're doing a great job hosting the show for Rush.
Well, thank you.
I am so excited to be here.
I'm about ready to jump out of my skin.
It's a great honor to be subbing for Rush.
Go ahead, sir.
Well, I want to make two quick points.
I do want to take issue with the minority leader a little bit.
He should be holding a press conference.
Every time he can, I've never seen him hold a press conference on this bill and say the Democrats are holding this up, this bill, and he can say very simply, releases the federal government out of the way of offshore leases.
The states can do what they want and, as you said, generate revenue from that.
The minute that happens, he can simply explain that once that happens, that will bring the price down.
The fact that he even tacitly agreed with the majority leader that something needed to be done with speculators just made my skin crawl.
And then this guy, what's his name, McCain, who's running as a Republican?
Now be good.
Why wouldn't he be sponsoring that bill, going to his Democratic buddies that he likes to reach across the aisle with, get a couple of them on board, and run this thing to the White House and make Obama and make Hillary Clinton vote against it.
All right.
Well, you know, you've got a lot of good points in there.
Some of them I agree with, some I don't.
Let me just respond real quickly.
Number one, I like Mitch McConnell personally.
I talk to him a lot.
He's a really terrific guy.
Well, yeah, right.
And he got on the Rush Limbaugh show.
I mean, thank you, H.R.
I mean, this is the guy who really turns out.
He's a workhorse, not a show horse.
This is not a guy who is big and flashy.
He doesn't play rock bands when he walks into the room.
I will suggest more frequent press activity.
I will call his press guy this afternoon on my way back to Washington.
And I'll suggest that.
I think that's a good idea.
The thing about Mr. McCain, I agree with you also on that one of the things that Mr. McCain could do and should do, and I wish he had started months ago.
Mr. McCain could get an awful lot of us Republicans, us conservatives, we conservatives.
I'm the editor, I ought to know.
The point of the matter is, Mr. McCain could get a lot of us together to rally around him by doing some simple things, putting stakes in the ground and getting people to rally around them.
When I'm talking about stakes in the ground, he's a sitting senator.
You know, he's talking about, for example, he has learned the lesson on the illegal immigration thing.
He says we want to close the borders first.
Okay, let's introduce a bill, Mr. McCain.
I can't do it.
You can.
Introduce a bill telling us how you're going to do it.
Introduce a bill saying the Bush tax cuts are going to continue for X number of years.
Introduce a bill to maybe help Mr. McConnell sign on to Mr. McConnell's bill.
Mr. McCain has not co-sponsored it yet.
He said he'd vote for it.
But the real issue here is Mr. McCain can do a lot.
He can come to Washington, spend a week or two there, introduce a bunch of these bills.
They'll never pass, of course.
Harry Reid won't let them pass.
But there are things which he could do to put these stakes in the ground.
Conservatives are just waiting with bated breath to rally around Mr. McCain.
The thought of an Obama presidency is anathema to us.
We know what this guy will do to our economy.
He'll wreck it.
We know what he'll do in the war.
He'll lose it.
We need more.
All we need is a little leadership from John McCain.
And the other thing Mr. McCain can do, the other thing Mr. McCain can do very clearly is point out one thing.
And, you know, he doesn't even need to do it.
Let me do it right now, right here for him.
And I'm sure Rush has said this.
I've heard him say it again and again and again.
The most compelling thing that differentiates Barack Obama from any of the Republican field is what we would do with the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court next year, five out of the nine members will be over the age of 70.
If you conservatives out there, if you're still thinking about, if you can't still find a reason in the back of your head to vote for John McCain, just think about that.
If for nothing else, we know John McCain.
He said again and again he would nominate judges on the order of Antonine Scalia and Sam Alito and John Roberts.
That's all you need to know, ladies and gentlemen.
If you're still looking for a reason to vote for John McCain, vote for the Supreme Court.
All right, we're going to have to take another one of those break things.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh, having more fun than I think I've ever had before.
800-282-2882.
We'll be right back.
Thanks.
Welcome back, everybody.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882.
Small correction about what I was saying earlier.
The gentleman who called and talked about how the black people among the hostages were released by the Iranians in the 1979-1980 hostage crisis.
Apparently, about eight of the hostages were released.
There were two, I believe, or rather one that was kept.
I contend, though, still.
They did not do that because these people were black.
They did it for political gain in the United States.
The Iranians play us like a cheap fiddle on the propaganda wars.
One of the things we need to think about is how we defeat their ideology, how we defeat them on the media battlefield.
This is the way they play us all the time.
And this is something that a new president, perhaps even Barack Obama, A new president named McCain could actually win that battle.
I will remember one of my very first conversations with General Peter Pace when he became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And he was saying in a document he issued at the time, a document called the Chairman's Guidance.
Each new chairman of the Joint Chiefs issues that upon taking command.
And Pete Pace put in his guidance that the ideological war was important as the kinetic war.
The words are as important as bullets and bombs.
I don't think much of anybody else, certainly nobody outside of the Pentagon, has really taken that to heart.
And I wish Pete Pace were still in a position to make that happen.
This is another thing we've got to be concerned about.
Instead of having, again, that dusty old fraud, Jesse Jackson, running around and trying to get hostages released, we need to think about going on the offensive, on the offensive in the ideological war.
All right, back to the subject.
Back to your calls.
Jed Babbin for Rush, 800-282-2882.
Let's go to Jeff in Houston, oil country.
Welcome to the show.
Hi, I'm calling because of the Sherman Antitrust Act and this illegal governmental institutionalized monopoly that they have put on our energy market by not allowing us to drill.
The Sherman Antitrust Act.
Well, yeah, the problem with that, Jeff, is the Sherman Antitrust Act is aimed at private companies.
The government can't violate the Antitrust Act.
Oh, no, You look in the Department of Justice on page at the Sherman Antitrust Act, and an unlawful monopoly exists when only one firm controls the market for the product or service.
One firm, not one government agent.
Hold on just a second.
All right.
Not because the product is superior, but by suppressing competition, which they are doing.
Well, I'm sorry, Jeff.
I'm not sure if you're a lot of companies to compete free from private and governmental restraints.
Jeff, it says in that act.
Buddy, I love you.
I love you.
The problem is governmental restraints are not what the act is aimed at regulating.
I'm not an antitrust lawyer, but I've been a trial lawyer for, well, I'm a recovering lawyer now, but I've been a trial lawyer for three decades.
And I've never seen anybody say that the government can violate the Antitrust Act.
That's just not what it's designed to control.
Hey, Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh.
Got to take another quick break and come right back to you.
We're at 800-282-2882 on the excellence from broadcast, the excellence in broadcasting network.
I'm still too excited to be here.
Jed Babbin, be right back.
Welcome back, everybody.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, 800-282-2882.
Let's go to Jim in Cincinnati.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you for taking my call, Jed.
It's my pleasure.
So you told your kids about ANWAR in the 90s, right?
When Clinton vetoed the opening of Anwar, all of my kids and their spouses were saying, oh, well, that's the right thing.
I said, if you've got something the size of this room and you mess up one square foot to get a million barrels a day, so what?
Well, so what?
Oh, he's right.
I said, you're going to pay for it.
And what do they say about it now?
They don't want to talk to me about it.
Jim, you know, no man is a prophet in his own land.
I've been there and done that with my four sons.
My heart goes out to you, buddy.
I've got two other comments.
One, we talk about oil on federal land.
That oil belongs to the citizens of the United States, and the Democrats are keeping the citizens from having it.
We need to pay the oil companies to get it for us.
Yep, there you go.
The second thing is, is Operation Chaos doubled the number of my gray hairs.
The last thing I wanted to see was the Clinton in the White House, but Rush was absolutely right.
I would like to see Clinton or Rush ferret out about 50 potential conservatives, whether they're Democrats or Republicans.
And I would like him to ask all of his listeners to send each one of those guys who are running against liberals $10.
Jim, I hate to cut you off.
We're going to a hard break.
Jed Babman for Rush Limbaugh.
Sorry about that.
We'll be right back.
We're going to talk about the Air Force tanker mess.
I'm an old procurement puke.
I think I know how to deal with this.
We're going to talk about that.
Protectionism?
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