Rush Limbaugh Program - January 2, 2009, Friday, Hour #2

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 2, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program

36:15

January 2, 2009, Friday, Hour #2

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey, happy new year, America.
	This is Mark Stein, InfoRush.
	America's anchor man is away.
	And this is your undocumented anchor man here for the whole show.
	Rush will be back on Monday.
	But even though Rush isn't here, some things never change.
	Live from New York City.
	It's open line Friday.
	Yeah, open line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
	You know how it works.
	Monday to Thursday, Rush rules the roost with an iron rod.
	But on Friday, he uh he lets the inmates run the asylum.
	Whatever you want to talk about, whatever you want to talk about.
	Uh do you think the bailout is too small?
	This is bothering me, you know.
	I I didn't like the sound of that $700 billion uh when it was first mentioned back in September.
	$700 billion bailout for whatever it was, the banks back then.
	I think that was before GM and uh Ford uh wanted their piece of it.
	And um $700 billion is like a sort of strange number, isn't it?
	And I love I love the lady from the uh Treasury Department who explained that the way they'd chosen the $700 billion was because they wanted like a really big number uh but not too round, because it wouldn't sound, you know, convincing enough.
	So they didn't want to say one trillion dollars, and they didn't want to say uh $500 billion.
	Uh but $700 billion is like humongous uh but not too round so that it sounds unconvincing.
	It sounds as if they've just pulled it out of the air, which in fact they had.
	But unfortunately for us, they didn't pull enough money out of the air.
	Uh so now they're coming back for more.
	I gather, by the way, the Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, has already spent the money that Congress allowed him to spend.
	He's now promised all these other people standing in line for the uh for the bailout, uh, that they're gonna get theirs, but he hasn't actually got any uh hard cash still to give them.
	So we now need a bailout for the bailout.
	We've got to have a bailout for the bailout.
	Here in the United States, a bailout is stand.
	We do not we do not have a big enough bailout.
	We've got to have a big enough bailout.
	And uh the uh Congressional Progressive Caucus uh is now saying we need to go immediately to a one trillion dollar recovery plan.
	Uh the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, I don't know what they are, by the way, I just don't like the sound of them.
	Uh the CPC co-chair, Representative Lynn Woolsey of California said, quote, anything much less than one trillion dollars would be like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.
	So that's 700 billion.
	700 billion, it sounds a lot to you.
	Makes that a lot to you.
	But i if you're a congressional legislator, that's just a squirt gun, man.
	What was it they used to say?
	Uh back in the days when uh in the early days of big government, a uh a million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.
	Now, you know, uh uh a a uh a trillion here, a trillion there.
	You're talking about nothing.
	You're talking about peanuts, man.
	We are gonna need we you cannot get the number of z you cannot buy a calculator that's gonna you can put enough zeros on on the end to figure out what this bailout is gonna is gonna cost us.
	We've got to bail out everything.
	Got to bail out everything.
	Uh and the problem for me, you may have heard uh I believe he was a Polish uh pol Polish caller.
	Uh HR confirms that.
	Polish caller called into Rush the other day, said, What the hell is going on with America?
	This is why I scrammed out of Poland.
	Most of us who have come to America have uh come from places that have tried all this stuff uh in the past.
	Uh, you know, uh uh i it's it's nothing new, any of this.
	Uh you think you think it seems weird that the uh the the government should be uh should should should be owning automobile manufacturers?
	It doesn't seem weird in East Europe in Eastern Europe.
	I remember uh uh doing a uh television film in in Hungary just after the fall of communism and uh MTV, not the you know, the thing that shows uh, you know, Michael Jackson uh prancing around, but uh the uh MTV stands for Madhya Television.
	It's the Hungarian State Television Network.
	And they uh put a Hungarian limousine at my disposal, which sounded pretty fancy until I got into it.
	The it was one of those things where the exhaust the exhaust comes up straight out from under the car and into the rear passenger seat.
	So uh like I was wreathed in a cloud of black smoke after going like 120 Yards in this thing.
	That was a a uh an automobile manufactured by the Hungarian government.
	The government should not be making your car.
	Uh the problem is uh that these things uh uh uh they don't just make your car in Eastern Europe, they made it um in uh in Britain.
	Britain in the 1970s.
	People think of Britain as being, you know, by the standards of these things.
	Obviously, Britain isn't uh as f uh regarded as a bastion of freedom and individual liberty as the United States is, but we don't think of it as a communist basket case.
	In the 1970s it was a communist basket case.
	The the BBC made a film about uh uh the famous Cambridge spies.
	These were these were the guys, uh Phil B. Burgess and MacLean, who worked for um MI uh MI5, the domestic intelligence uh agency, uh, and all turned out to be communist agents.
	Uh you uh what's the guy called in uh if you watch the James Bond films, M. M, uh who's the head uh who's James Bond's boss, played by Judy Dench currently.
	Uh one of these guys was in line to become M. In real life he's called C. Don't know why they changed the the letter for the James Bond films, you have to take that up with uh uh with Ian Fleming.
	But he's called C in real life, not M. Uh and the guy in line to become C was a communist agent.
	And the BBC made a film about them in the 19 uh at the end of the uh 1970s and uh about them living their post traitorous life in retirement in Moscow in drab Soviet era apartments.
	And they think to yourself, well, where can you go to film drab Soviet era public housing?
	And they picked the town of Dundee in Scotland, because by the 1970s, Dundee in Scotland was indistinguishable from a Soviet basket case state.
	In Britain in the 1970s, everything was nationalized.
	The the steel industry was British steel, the coal industry was uh British coal, uh, and the car manufacturing industry was called British Leyland.
	You you think of the they used to make a lot of cars in Britain, the famous names uh Rover, Jaguar, uh uh Triumph, uh, and eventually they'd all been merged into one and they were owned by the government.
	The government made your car when it was in the mood.
	Uh it was very hard to actually get them to make your car on a regular basis.
	They would do like they do here, they'd announce the uh new models, and you would say, Wow, that looks great, the f what a fantastic car.
	You know, they would do uh uh the uh what the uh uh the same kind of fancy car ads that you see uh here in the US, they'd show the new Jaguar, the new rover, the guy sitting in the seat with the hot looking babe in the passenger seat, and they'd be going around the hairpin bends in the south of France and the new thing, and they say, go and get your new rover, go and get your new Jaguar.
	And then you went to the showroom uh to get your new rover or your new Jaguar, and you had to put your name down on a six-month waiting list.
	It was like uh it was it was like it was un indistinguishable from the uh Soviet era housing uh and putting your name down for a an apartment uh in Moscow or Leningrad.
	Uh and and there was a famous man who was like the first most famous man in the country, who was like the equivalent of the UAW.
	Uh he was uh the the union leader called uh he was called Red Robbo.
	He was uh the car workers guy, and he was a communist uh, and that's why they called him Red Robo.
	But he was going in to like see the Prime Minister every week, uh every two weeks as the government frantically tried to persuade uh the uh the unionized car workers to get back to uh stop being on strike uh and to go back to making a car.
	The print unions were on strike uh all the time in Britain, uh which uh nobody would notice here in that town in Connecticut where nobody's buying the newspaper anywhere, if the print unions went on strike nobody it'll be like uh they'd say uh hey, hey, the uh they haven't been bringing out the newspaper for six months.
	Uh who knew uh the uh but in in uh in those days people still read the newspaper and the and the print unions were always on strike.
	Uh the the country was bankrupt.
	At one point they had to uh the the elect the electricity guys were on strike, uh the T V had to shut down uh I think it was at nine o'clock at night.
	Nine o'clock at night, because they didn't have enough electricity uh for the BBC uh after after nine o'clock at night.
	So you remember, you think back to America in the 70s, and it's like a glorious golden I like sure you had Jimmy Carter, but you still could watch TV after nine o'clock at night, and yes, you had like cheesecloth shirts, and uh but you could still go and buy a car in in a week or two.
	And yeah, yeah, yeah, you still had uh, you know, the partridge family, but you uh you know, life was not total hell.
	For a lot of the people living in the United States now, uh the 70s, uh not just in Eastern Europe, but in Western Europe and Britain and a lot of other places was hell.
	And now all the policies that drove those countries into stagnation and hyperinflation, uh President elect Obama uh is uh is wanting to introduce here.
	And that's the real danger, I would say.
	That's the real danger.
	You know, people say, I get a lot of people say to me, yeah, you know, Obama's a Marxist, Obama's a socialist.
	It doesn't really matter what Obama is.
	Uh who knows what he is, really.
	I mean, he's been very and it whatever he is, he'll he'll he uh if it suits him, he'll he'll detach himself from whatever that position was.
	You know, he sat listening to that guy in church for twenty years and it didn't bother him, and then when it became inconvenient, poof, the guy's out the door.
	Uh but but the bigger problem is that the remorseless left wing drift, uh just incrementally, almost imperceptibly, the left wing drift that goes on in uh this society uh toward the kind of societies they have now in uh Scandinavia uh and in Belgium and in Germany and France.
	And that way lies stagnation.
	Uh that way uh lies uh the decline and the sapping of American will and the deterioration of American uh energy.
	And and take it from if you don't want to take it from me, take it from that Polish guy who called in uh uh uh a couple of weeks back.
	Uh that for for those of us who came to this country, this is the last stop.
	There's nowhere else to go.
	Uh until Obama introduces his plan to lower the uh oceans and the lost city of Atlantis emerges from the waves.
	America is the last stop.
	We have come to this country uh because Canada, uh the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and a lot of other places have all tried this stuff and it does not work.
	Uh it leads incrementally, almost imperceptibly, to long-term decline.
	And I don't want that to happen in this country.
	That's why I'm here.
	That's why I stand for individual liberty, I stand for entrepr the entrepreneurial spirit, uh, and I stand for the self-reliant citizenry on which this great republic was founded.
	Uh one-eight hundred-two eight two-282.
	It's open line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
	Mark Stein in for us with more straight ahead.
	Mark Stein on the EIB network, uh, Infrarush, Russia's back Monday.
	1800-282-2882.
	Arian in Los Angeles, thanks for waiting.
	You're on the air at the EIB network.
	Happy New Year's.
	Top of the morning theorem.
	Yep, top of the morning to you.
	Top of the morning to you, Bigara.
	Yeah, listen, I want to ask you something.
	Now, before I tell you my point, I want to make sure I don't make any assumptions here.
	I assume at one point you believed, or still do believe, or believe whatever, yes, that if democracy came to Iraq, it might spread throughout the region, yes?
	Uh I don't use the word democracy.
	I do use the word liberty.
	Liberty, liberty.
	Fair enough.
	And by the way, that is a fair argument.
	I hope you're right.
	And I think maybe if democracy is in the Middle East, that might be better.
	Maybe, yes.
	Here's what I don't understand, though.
	A lot of people who come up with this argument either don't know or care or realize there is a democratic country right in that region.
	It's right by Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, not that far from Iraq, and not that far from Saudi Arabia, the world's largest democracy, and in my opinion, a legit democracy.
	Uh do you know which democratic country I'm talking about?
	Are you talking about India?
	Yes.
	So here's my question to you.
	I have two questions, at least for now.
	Number one, is it fair to say democracy really hasn't spread from India throughout the rest of the region as much as you some of us would like it to.
	Well, the the interesting thing is uh democracy doesn't spread uh in the liberty, I'm sorry in in that in that sense.
	Uh one way to look at it is imagine uh the the British invested a lot of time in India in building uh that uh that uh the the the uh the the bulwark of uh of democracy.
	If India had been like the Middle East, uh if it hadn't had uh the uh the British rule up to nineteen forty-eight, it would look like the uh Middle the Arabian Peninsula does today, would be a sort of uh crazy quilt of uh uh uh of kleptocrat uh that's not uh sultans and uh and uh and um uh and various psychotic dictatorships.
	Well hold on, hold on.
	That that's not fair.
	Uh uh I hope this doesn't come into a new sub-argument.
	You know, I'm an Indian guy, my parents.
	No, no, I'm not I'm not no India.
	No, but I'm listening hear me out, hear me out.
	Yeah.
	India you have to go by its history.
	You could be right, maybe it would be like the Arabian Peninsula, yes.
	But you can judge a country by its history.
	And throughout India's long and tragic history, there have been plenty of times where people of all faiths can live in this country, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever, and live in relative peace.
	There have been times where there have been violence.
	I don't know if I'd go that far to say it would be like the Radian Peninsula.
	But when I called you, I I wanted to ask you.
	No, no, but uh just just to do just to deal with that point.
	I I think that w one of the conditions for real democracy.
	I don't by democracy I never mean.
	I never mean holding an election, you fly in Jimmy Carter and the UN observers, uh they say the election is free and fair, and they fly out, and the next day the guy gets back to killing all his enemies.
	I understand.
	Uh uh India has all those things.
	Uh it it it had i i i I take your point that it has a different history from the Middle East, uh, but a lot of those things uh were not present in in its uh in its tradition.
	But I think uh but you know, I'm not I'm I'm not arguing about uh the benefits of British colonialism because the British the British had the Middle East too.
	The British cr invented Jordan and Iraq and they uh botched the job.
	So these things can go either way.
	Yeah, forgive me for trying to cut you off.
	I just don't know how much time I have as a follower.
	No, make have have your second point.
	Okay.
	Two I just have two simple questions.
	Uh I assume number one you agree that in the last few decades, democ democracy, liberty, whatever, yes, really hasn't spread from India as much as some of us would like it to throughout the rest of the Middle East, right?
	No, it certainly hasn't spread from the Aaron.
	Okay, now here's my the here's my basic question I want to ask you.
	If democracy really or liberty or whatever yes hasn't really spread from India throughout the rest of the region, as some of us would like it to, why do you think it'll spread from Iraq if it hasn't spread from India?
	Well, I don't I don't as I said, I don't believe it does spread.
	It's a difficult thing to create to grow genuinely free societies in arid soil where they have never been known is one of the hardest tasks ever.
	If you look at the history of the European Empires, uh they went all over the world, they came to the Americas, they went to Africa, they went to Australia and the Pacific.
	They all sailed around the Middle East.
	They they understood uh that the Arab world was a tough nut to crack.
	Uh and the uh and by the time the European Empires got their hands on the Middle East after the first world war, uh they were too uh exhausted to do anything with it.
	Hence the botched creation of states like uh Syria.
	And Iraq is a problem with that argument.
	Uh yeah, there's there's a problem with that argument.
	I'll tell you what your problem the problem is.
	Uh you are right that certain soils in that region in general have not had democracy.
	Yes, but you use the word Arab.
	There are plenty of countries in that region which I assume you want democracy to go to.
	They're not Arab countries like Pakistan, like Afghanistan, like Iran.
	And these are countries that have a history in that region of being linked to India and have lived in peace at times.
	Yes.
	No, I think I think it I think Iran uh I think if if you look at Iran I think Pakistan, the creation of Pakistan was a disaster and it has got worse over sixty years.
	Iran uh was in many ways uh under the Shah a uh flawed society, but one uh that was showing signs of uh uh i in which Islam had reached an accommodation with modernity.
	Uh you cannot, you can't democracy doesn't spread.
	It's not like some Eurasian milfoil in in a pond that it just takes it over.
	You have to do the hard work of ceding it.
	And that doesn't come naturally to the United States, because the United States uh is a country that takes the view that if if uh free men want to live in freedom, they will choose it for themselves.
	Sometimes it isn't as obvious.
	I'm confused about something because that that's why when I called your show, I asked you if democracy, or as you said, liberty can spread.
	And you kind of implied that I hope you don't think I'm fighting with you, but you kind of implied that you think it can spread or go from Iraq.
	But now you're saying that if you don't think of it as spreading.
	No, I don't.
	I think you build it.
	I think you build it.
	Iraq is the least worst state uh in that part of the world.
	Jordan, uh which uh again is one of the more benign Arab states, nevertheless has a deformed political culture.
	And the trouble is uh that that that part of the world was allowed to marinate in its pathologies and uh uh and uh and by the time of September eleventh was exporting its pathologies uh to the rest of the planet.
	That has to stop.
	And liber liberty, liberty is the honorable weapon in America's arm armory.
	Uh this this discussion will will go on, uh Arian, because it is the big question uh over our time.
	You know, whether uh America uh believes only in, if you like, in cheeseburger imperialism in exporting cheeseburgers and Britney Spears records and all the rest of it, or whether uh it's willing to do the hard work of helping seed free societies in parts of the world that has uh never known them.
	That's still an open question.
	Uh Willem Moore straight ahead, open line Friday on the EIB network.
	Hey, that's uh that's kind of mellow for the day after new year.
	That's that's that's the way we are.
	We're easing gently into the new dawn of the Obama era.
	Mark Stein in for Rush, rush back Monday, 1800-282-2882.
	You know, um uh we were talking uh at the top of the hour about this this kind of uh incremental decline, which is uh, you know, it's not the uh it's not the uh the wildest topic to start the year with, but it's something is like something I worry about.
	Um the idea that somehow rampant, untrammeled capitalism read in tooth and claw uh is what has brought us to the current situation is complete nonsense.
	It's complete nonsense.
	It's this kind of incremental uh distortions, small incremental distortions uh of market capitalism, like this whatever it's called, the Community Reinvestment Act, uh which uh came in thirty years ago, basically to give people who wouldn't qualify for mortgages uh mortgages, basically to destroy the relationship of uh destroy risk assessment, which is the foundation of capitalism.
	You know, if you go in uh to your banker and you say, I'd like to uh borrow half a million dollars, and uh and he goes, uh what for?
	You want to start a business, you want to buy a home, and you go, uh no, I was thinking of spending it on Coke and hookers.
	He'll say, uh no, sorry, I'm not gonna give it to you.
	That's risk assessment.
	That's risk assessment.
	That is the bedrock of capitalism.
	If you have the government intervene in risk assessment, uh you distort the market.
	You don't do it in a big way.
	This like Community Reinvestment Act thing 30 years ago wasn't a big deal.
	And then in the 90s they add to it and they add to it and they add to it.
	And uh and eventually it's like barnacles on the rusting hulk of capitalism.
	And capitalism can no longer function because it's got too many barnacles on it.
	Uh and that is what that is what this country has.
	Um sixty-nine thousand uh four hundred and twenty-eight.
	Sixty-nine thousand four hundred and twenty-eight.
	That's the number of pages uh in the uh 2006 edition of the Federal Register.
	That's the rules and regulations you have to comply with if you're stupid enough to start a business.
	Uh I I uh flew back to my home in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago, and I go into the office uh the day after I get back, and my assistant is in the middle of filling in this form.
	And uh like I'm impatient to get going, start the day, do some productive work that will generate income uh and uh and will raise revenue and enable me to grow my business and hire more employees and all the rest of it.
	And she's filling in this form.
	So after about ten minutes of watching her, I say, well, what the hell is that?
	And she goes, it's a form from the Department of Labor that she's been sent, and she's got a f uh fill in uh under penalty of uh, you know, whatever it is, whatever they do with it now.
	Uh so she's got to fill in the form.
	Question 13 or whatever it was is in the course of your work, do you work with uranium?
	I'm a writer, you know.
	I'm uh I I I don't you know, so she's answering the question, do we work with uranium a lot around here?
	No, of course we don't.
	I'm a writer.
	How many people does the United States government ask that stupid question to before they get a positive answer?
	They send it out to me, they send it out to your hairdresser, they send it out to your grocer, they send it out to your car salesman, and we're all sitting there every day going, uh uh do in the course of your work, do you in the course of your business, do you work with uranium?
	No.
	Uh well, I I what I what what answer are they expecting?
	Yes, I work with uranium.
	I'm a column, uh, I'm a guest host on the Rush Limbaugh show.
	I like to uh I like to work with uranium just to get myself pumped up And ready to go on air.
	This is uh this is uh I I work with the uranium uh because the uh the whole column writing business wasn't working out, but fortunately I got a call from Muck Munakhmadinajad and he said we'd like to outsource the Iranian nuclear program to you.
	So I've got the uranium down in the basement.
	The federal government is asking uh every business in the country whether people work with uranium.
	This is a complete waste of time.
	And anyone who goes into business in this country uh is dealing with this nonsense uh every day of the week.
	Uh you know, if you really wanted to sort out the problems in this country, you would lower the corporate uh tax rates.
	Um, our corporate tax rates in the United States are a third higher than Sweden.
	Uh Sweden.
	The socialist utopia.
	Is it asking too much to ask that uh United States corporate tax rates uh be uh competitive with the Scandinavian socialist utopia?
	Uh th this is this is the uh this is the real problem here.
	I mean, you know, Sweden uh may uh is got these world companies what's this furniture what's the furniture store called?
	IKEA.
	IKEA.
	You know where you go along and uh you buy this cheap furniture and you uh then spend the uh whole week trying to put the thing together, and in the amount of man hours you have invested in in trying to uh assemble the piece of furniture you bought from IKEA, you could have gone to Sotheby's and bought a Queen Anne antique chair at auction for the cost of the mana as you got trying to put the cheap furniture together from IKEA.
	IKEA is a world company from Sweden uh where corporate tax rates are a third lower than the United States.
	That will again it's not a big thing.
	I and and it's an unsympathetic argument.
	But because everyone thinks corporations are faceless beings.
	They're not corporations.
	A corporation doesn't pay tax.
	Human beings who own the corporation and who work for the corporation, and ultimately the ones who buy the products of that corporation pay the tax.
	So every time some class warrior in the Democratic Party is saying we need to increase corporation taxes, we need a windfall profit tax and all the the co there's no such thing as a corporate corporation doesn't file a tax return.
	Uh you don't go in uh, you know, to Globo Corp HQ and the Globo Corp HQ is uh sitting there with a pen in uh in in in its uh right uh in in in its right hand uh wing of the building filling in the tax return, it's human beings to whom that corporate tax gets onto.
	And U.S. corporate taxes are too high.
	Uh and if and if the Republican Party cannot stand for simple economic liberty uh to keep U.S. uh.
	corporate tax rates competitive with Sweden, uh then that that is surely the least we're entitled to uh to ask of uh to ask of them.
	Uh and they don't, and they don't.
	And that makes me very sad.
	Let's uh uh let us take a call from a fellow foreigner.
	Uh Donald is calling from Ontario, which is in the Dominion of Canada.
	Donald, welcome to the EIB network.
	Thank you, Mark.
	Which which part of Ontario are you in, by the way?
	Because if if you win a regular U.S. uh jurisdiction, they put the town up, but but they've just told me you're sinister exotic foreign province.
	So which part of Ontario are you in?
	Southern Ontario, near Detroit.
	Oh, are you uh you in Windsor?
	No, across the border or uh further east from Windsor.
	Oh, right.
	Okay.
	Well that's uh that's that's the trivial pursuit question.
	Which which direction do you drive from Detroit to get to Canada?
	And you drive South East.
	Southeast.
	That's the You're in the bit of Canada that's south of the United States.
	Uh uh thanks for joining us, Donald, and uh happy new year to you.
	You still celebrate New Year uh up in Canada or has it been abolished by the government?
	No, we're still celebrating New Year's and uh uh because I thought it might be like Thanksgiving that you'd like get it around November the third or something, but you still get it on the regular uh old uh time frame, do you?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Happy New Year to you, Donald.
	Thank you.
	I wanted to appre uh uh express my appreciation for your writing.
	I've appreciated it.
	And I do a lot of public speaking, and I've quoted quite a bit from your book America Alone, but I could never use the title.
	I had to use the subtitle, the end of the world as we know it.
	Because uh as soon as you mention America, of course the blood pressure goes up here in Canada and and uh faces turn red and no, no, that's true.
	That's an incendiary word.
	You know, when I uh had my little difficulties with the uh human rights commissions up in up in Canada and up in British Columbia, uh the the the time I knew when I was in trouble, when initially when the cases started, uh the CBC uh uh would use phrases like uh Canadian uh writer Mark Stein or Canadian born writer Mark Stein.
	Uh and then uh just before the trial in British Columbia, it changed to uh American resident writer Mark Stein.
	And I knew when they used the evil A word to uh applied that to me, I was dead.
	I was screwed, it was over.
	You know, the minute the the minute the uh CBC uh TV network applies the dreaded uh A word to you, you know you have been put in the role of designated villain.
	So I'm glad you're helping get get the message uh out there, uh Donald.
	Are people to uh uh uh leaving aside the unfortunate title, are people taking it uh seriously?
	Uh well I hope so.
	Uh there are many people here that uh do love America and uh do appreciate what President Bush did.
	Uh the level of hatred for him has been uh amazing to me.
	Yeah, that is that is true, and it is uh unbecoming.
	Uh and I think it's also it's also idiotic.
	You know, the idea when I drive around uh uh uh in these uh in these uh college towns and you're behind these uh things with stickers saying 911 was an inside job.
	I mean, this is insane talk.
	If 911 was an inside job, what about the Bali nightclub uh bombings?
	Uh what about the Bombay bombing uh a week ago?
	What about the London tube bombings?
	The idea that somehow Bush and Cheney cooked up this racket.
	Uh that is a level of derangement uh uh uh and an investment in derangement uh that nobody, no serious person should be uh should be willing to entertain.
	Thanks for your call, uh Donald, and uh happy new year to you uh in your little bit of that country north of the border that technically happens to be south of the border.
	From uh calling from uh near Detroit, uh near Windsor, Ontario, that was Donald.
	Uh this is the EIB network, Mark Stein in for Rush.
	Rush is back on Monday.
	1800-282-2882, open line Friday and more straight ahead.
	Happy New Year to you.
	This is uh Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
	Rush is gonna be back on uh on Monday.
	Fight and fit, raring a go.
	Looking forward to uh the uh coronation of King Barack and uh uh uh and to um, you know, uh holding out as uh the voice of dissent in the new harmonious landscape that Barack is uh building for us.
	You know, this trillion dollar trillion dollar bailer now.
	They're like trillion dollars basically the floor.
	Uh you know, I was saying you you the trick with 700 billion, you've got to you've got to choose a big number but one that's not too round.
	Uh here, I think a trillion dollars is way too round.
	You know, you need to call it 1.56 trillion dollars.
	And then people think you've actually done some math and worked out and figured out what it is you're gonna need.
	When you actually look at what they're spending this trillion dollars on, uh uh at least 100 billion dollars allocated to green jobs creation, including at community level.
	Construction of libraries in rural communities in order to expand broadband access.
	Nobody needs that.
	Nobody needs that.
	Uh federal arts and writers project, this is great, to create jobs for American artists, writers, editors, researchers, photographers, and others.
	Because, you know, there are just not enough uh left-wing uh artists and writers and filmmakers out there right now.
	And no matter how many left-wing uh movies and plays and uh art exhibitions they come up with, uh there's still some people who can't get a piece of the left-wing arts action.
	So we need to have a federal arts and writers project uh to create jobs for American artists, writers, editors, researchers, photographers, and others.
	This is what Roosevelt did, by the way.
	Any any good come out of the Federal Writers Project, Federal Arts Project?
	No, it's all uh it's all unreadable, unproducible stuff, seventy years on.
	Tim Robbins made a film about what was it, the thing, uh, Cradle Will Rock.
	He made a film about the production of the cradle will rock, which was the big Roosevelt-funded uh play uh in the 1930s.
	And the reason he made a film about making it is because you can't do the actual play now, because it's a piece of junk.
	Uh American American uh novels, uh if you go back to the 1930s, uh you didn't need a subsidy for Gone with the Wind, uh you didn't need a subsidy for uh gold diggers in 1934, you didn't need a subsidy for as time goes by.
	Uh those things are self-sustaining.
	Uh the idea of uh uh of federals a federal subsidy project for useless writers and artists uh who can't actually make a living in the marketplace uh is not where this uh not where this country needs uh to go.
	And similarly with a lot of this other stuff, you know, what what the government needs to do is stop impeding uh the resourcefulness of the citizenry.
	Uh everyone thinks that countries uh die, uh the countries decline instantly, that you can kind of chart a moment when it happens.
	It doesn't.
	It doesn't.
	It happens a little bit by bit over a generation or two generations.
	Uh and you suddenly realize what has happened is that people uh people have changed, uh and people, as they have in Europe, in the end, lose even the survival instinct.
	Uh European politicians explain to their voters that they can't afford six weeks of paid vacation.
	They can't afford uh in France, they're trying to tell people who retire at 53 and then use government health services for another four decades, that this is uh what is it, the eco crowd say?
	Unsustainable.
	Of course it's unsustainable.
	You shouldn't even need uh common sense tells you that if you educate a guy, if he's at college until he's thirty, and then he works for, oh, you know, a decade and a half, and then he takes retirement and is paid by the government and lives till 97.
	Common sense will tell you no society in human history uh has uh created a form of government whereby that math can add up.
	Uh and yet uh n Sarkozy, everyone uh thinks is the great right wing hope when he starts telling uh telling the French people they've got to cut it out, they gotta uh maybe give back some of these six weeks paid vacation and the thirty-five-hour work week and all the rest of it.
	Uh in the end, in the end, even though the survival of their society is at stake, uh the French and the uh Germans uh will not get serious about giving up those benefits.
	And you remember that famous line, Gerald Ford.
	Uh a government that is big enough uh to give you everything you want is big enough uh to take away everything you have.
	And that's true.
	But there is an important intermediate stage, and that is that a government is that is big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back uh when times go bad.
	And that's why the worst thing of all, the worst legacy of all uh of the Bush years was the creation of the prescription uh drug entitlement.
	Any time somebody uh creates an entitlement, uh that is a huge problem.
	Because tax cuts, you know, they they put sunset, they sunset the tax cuts.
	You get them for a couple of years and then they take it away from you.
	But an entitlement is forever, and it's unpredictable.
	And nobody can predict uh where it's gonna go, except what we do know is it's always going to cost more and more and more money, and there are going to be fewer people to prop it up.
	So what you have on the demographic profile in Europe uh is you have more and more retirees uh with these lavish benefits and fewer and fewer workers uh actually uh doing work and paying taxes to support the retirees.
	So eventually uh that drives emigration.
	Uh uh Los Angeles is now something like the eighth biggest French-speaking city in the world.
	Los Angeles has got tons of French immigrants uh who got out of their own country, because if you're a young Frenchman, if you're if you're like a pimply French guy, uh pinch pimply French burger flipper, you don't want to be supporting entire gated communities of fifty-three-year-old retirees.
	Uh you you get you you get on the boat and you leave.
	Uh uh Germans are leaving, Dutchmen are leaving.
	They're going to they're going to countries where their economic energy is being rewarded.
	And we do not want to, we do not want to end up uh in the same situation uh as those European countries.
	More of your calls straight ahead.
	Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
	Mark Stein at the EIB network sitting in for Rush on Open Line Friday.
	Uh I just saw this poll from Rasmussen that a majority of Democrats, 55%, say Israel should have tried to find a diplomatic solution with Gaza first.
	Uh you know, from Gaza, they were getting 20 rockets a day lobbed into uh Israel and into straight into civilian areas.
	Very hard to find a uh diplomatic solution when you're on the receiving end of 20 rockets a day.
	That's how fifty-five percent of Democrats uh view what's going on at the moment.
	Uh more straight ahead, open line Friday, your calls 1 800 282 2882.

▲