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July 9, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:42
July 9, 2009, Thursday, Hour #3
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Yes, America's Hank Command is away.
This is Mark Stein, your undocumented anchor man, no supporting paperwork whatsoever.
Mark Davis is gonna be in tomorrow, and then Rush returns fighting fit on Monday to take you through the whole of uh next week.
Uh we've uh we were talking earlier about uh Obama at the uh G eight summit, and it is interesting to me the differences that are beginning to emerge between uh what Obama is doing and what uh most of the rest of the developed world is doing, and then what uh the uh the uh developing countries themselves, the the the next generation, the Indians and China's, uh how their thinking is going.
And uh you you know what I miss about these summits, it's like the one thing Obama seems to have made go away is all these like anti-globalization riots, uh uh mentioned at the beginning of the show.
Used to have them all the time.
The minute you'd have a G eight summit, uh these guys would come in and trash the town.
Obama seems to have made that um go away.
I was at the uh what was it, the 2002 G eight summit, and um there was an anti-globalization nude protest and uh uh it was an anti-globalization nude protest.
And it so it's basically like a it's like a strip routine in the street.
You know, and like if you're like me, I was there uh for my uh newspaper, covering it for my newspaper.
Normally it's very difficult if you like go to a strip club, then putting it on expenses because they ask for a receipt and if it says the electric pussycat lounge or whatever, then there's a whole big issue with it.
The accounts department are all over you, it's a terrible.
But uh if you've got the anti-globalization protesters just uh stripping in the street, um they uh th they they did the whole thing and then they had the big final they were denouncing Bush.
So it wasn't like they were dancing around to the poll to man I feel like a woman or whatever.
But they th so they were just denouncing Bush and then they had the big final pants drop and uh across the row of uh of uh of uh uh of bottoms, uh which were very highly variable.
I mean this well, we're not talking like the Radio City Roquettes here as a line of bottoms, they were highly variable.
But they spelt out B-O-Y, C-O-T-T, T H E G P. Uh and I couldn't figure out what that meant.
He's like boycott the G Ph.
Didn't make any sense.
And uh it's like boycott boycott family doctors.
What kind of anti-globalization thing is that?
And uh I asked one of the asked one of the girls uh who was uh doing the nude protest, and she said she looked at me as if I was an idiot.
She said, it's not boycott the G P, it's boycott the gap.
And I said, Well, look at the line.
I said that where's the A gone?
And uh and she said that uh the unfortunately the the uh lady with the A, actually was a guy within the A, the A of Gap hadn't hadn't put it on properly, and uh and and it and the A had slipped inside of it, so to speak.
So the uh so they were standing around exposing their bottoms saying boycott the GP, uh meaning boycott the gap.
The gap being the uh the clothing store, doing what they got against the gap.
Uh but uh but they but the they were uh I suppose it's better if you're the gap that they just stand outside uh naked, uh because then it does remind people that it's useful to buy clothing, and so they go into the store and buy clothing.
Uh so it's better than when they're just like torching Starbucks or torching uh McDonald's or whatever.
But I uh uh th the whole anti-globalization thing seems to have died now.
It's I find it interested uh interesting.
If you're if you're one of these lefty activists, uh give us a call.
What's what's your game?
What are you doing now?
Uh I mean, in the old days you'd hear, well, there's a uh there's a World Bank meeting in Seattle.
Right, we'll be on the plane, we'll be there, torturing the uh city.
Uh w it's uh now it's over in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Great, we've got to book the plane we're gonna be where we've all the lefty activists gone.
Uh they seem to have given up on that.
Uh but what's interesting is that when you get inside the meetings now, uh the differences that are emerging between uh President Obama's way of doing things and uh the rest of the world.
Uh uh what we've seen is uh that the uh the the other Western nations are reeling back on their commitments uh to do uh uh global warming emissions reduction and all the rest of It, because they understand that it has immediately catastrophic impacts for no discernible uh e uh f for no discernible impact on the planet's climate uh but with uh quite a lot of immediate impact uh close to home.
And this is this is I think the difficulty with environmentalism is that in many ways it's it's an indulgence.
You can afford to save the planet uh when uh when uh times are good, when everybody's got tons of money.
Uh you can afford to think globally.
Uh but what matters when times are bad is uh what's happening locally.
Uh and I think that's what the Europeans have got the got the measure of, and uh to a certain extent, and even more dramatic extent, uh the uh the the developing countries too, the poorer nations uh meeting in Italy have explicitly rejected any targets on emission cuts.
Uh the president arrived uh and the so-called draft agreement uh provides for a complete abandoning of targets.
The world's seventeen leading polluters, so called.
Now what do you call them 17 leading polluters?
Uh they're also seventeen nations that to one degree or another are are critical to the global economy.
These seventeen leading polluters have now abandoned targets in a draft agreement for the meetings here.
But negotiators embraced a goal of preventing temperatures from rising more than three point six degrees Fahrenheit.
Now that's completely meaningless.
They're saying this is like one of Obama's pledges to create or save four million jobs or whatever he was offering to do back uh around the time of the stimulus one.
It's a completely meaningless statistic.
The the negotiators have now embraced a goal of preventing temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Do you know how long that's gonna take?
You would have to be a real Al Gore believer uh to think that temperatures are going to go up 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit uh and that anything uh members of the G7 and the so-called 17 polluter nations do are gonna have anything to to say about that.
In the course of the twentieth century uh the uh global temperature rose about one degree over that hundred year period.
Uh it rose about one degree, a little over one degree.
Uh now they're saying, well, don't worry, because we've signed an agreement to prevent temperatures rising more than three point six degrees.
In other words, uh even if things go bad, that's going to take like a quarter of a millennium.
That as a government target, uh as a uh as a a target agreed between nations, that's completely meaningless.
Uh and what has happened here is that uh is that Obama is far more out of step with the rest of the world than so-called unilateralist cowboy Bush was.
Uh the uh Europeans, uh the Australians, the New Zealanders, uh not to mention China and India, uh have uh essentially moved uh a lot closer to the Bush position now than they are to the Obama position.
Um and uh and China and India explicitly refuse to commit to specific goals uh for slashing their emissions by 2050, because they do they are not living in Madison, Wisconsin or Berkeley, California, and they would like to get a shot at living that life.
They would they would like, uh as I said yesterday, to to have the intermediate stage between pre-industrial poverty and post-industrial poverty.
They would like to enjoy the immediate stage of wealth and comfort and a middle class lifestyle.
And they can't do that if they sign on uh essentially to these f this this uh environmental fetishism uh that is a product of uh Western uh wealth uh and Western prosperity.
Now uh what's uh that's an entirely rational thing.
What's more interesting is the way the uh Western other developed nations have looked at this thing and realized that they can't make it work either.
It's a luxury, it's an indulgence.
Uh the whole environmental thing is an indulgence.
I always find it interesting uh we were talking earlier about whether America is an imperialist nation.
Jeremy w objected to American imperialism, and I was saying America is the least imperialist nation on the planet.
And one reason you know that is when you listen to people going around saying uh, oh, Bush scares me and Americans are doing this and Americans are doing that, is precisely because America is not a conventional imperialist nation.
It's not uh let's not uh let's talk about uh whether you want to talk about the British Empire, whether you want to talk about the Russian Empire, whether you want to talk about the Third Reich.
If you lived in Poland in the nineteen thirties and you were caught between the Soviet Union and uh the Third Reich, both of those had serious designs on your territory.
They wanted to take your country away from you.
And it's precisely because America is not that kind of threat uh that uh that uh the the left concocted this this vision uh that uh oh no no no, you don't have to worry about America invading you, you don't have to m worry about America sending its tanks in and taking over your country.
Just Americans eating and going to the beach is destructive enough.
Just an American eating a cheeseburger will be enough to destroy the planet.
Just an American having a big car will be enough to destroy civilization and life on this planet as we know it.
And that in itself, that whole crazy theory is a reflection of what a benign hegemon the United States is.
Because if the America was a conventional great power, it would be invading places and taking countries away from them and running those countries.
Uh and instead, because it's such a non-threatening global hedgeman, we've had to invent this this fear, this fear that just you, yes, you having your having your air conditioning turned up too high.
That's gonna destroy the entire planet.
I mean, everywhere.
It's not like the Third Reich.
I mean, Hitler just invaded this or that individual country.
But America, America will destroy the whole planet just from its consumption and its lifestyle.
Uh and uh when you when you think about it, on the face of it, the idea that lifestyle is a threat to the planet is patent nonsense.
Complete nonsense.
Uh but if you're a certain kind of guilt-ridden white liberal in an advanced society, it's an attractive theory.
It's uh it it goes along with the whole self-flagellation thing uh and and and your own feelings of uh moral supremacy, because unlike your benighted neighbors in their SUVs and all the rest of it, uh you haven't fallen for it.
But if you're actually a country on the way up, if you're China or India, this thing is nuts, and you're never gonna sign it.
You're never gonna sign it.
You look at the amount of factories they add in China every year.
You look at the amount of factories they add in India every year.
And the reality is that never mind Canada and New Zealand signing on to these Kyoto type things, but America doing cap and trade isn't gonna do anything to counter the new factories that come online in India and China uh every year.
So this fetish, this absurd eco fetish, this uh ecochondria is uh a byproduct of prosperity.
And now that prosperity is on the way out, uh European countries have figured out already that they can't afford uh afford it any longer, uh and Obama is out of step.
And that's the that's uh that's the lesson of the G eight, uh that that uh this current meeting, that he's going up for cap and trade just as the New Zealanders have suspended cap and trade, uh, and just as uh China and India have flatly refused to have anything to do with this uh this kind of crazy scheme.
Uh so we'll talk about that straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein sitting in on the Rush Limbo Show.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network.
Let's go to Joe in um Gurney, Illinois.
Uh that that sounds like the way it's gonna be uh when socialized healthcare kicks in.
Oh, the Gurney's in Illinois.
Uh Gurney Gurney, Illinois, Joe.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hey Mark, thanks for having me.
Um listen, uh I I think there's a a real lesson here for everyone about how the uh the rhetoric controls the uh the agenda.
Um trade when it ought to be called cap and hoard.
What it does is it puts a cap on the entire country's overall production of carbon.
Right.
So let's say that you've now got your carbon credits and you're a small business owner or whatever it is you make, you make.
And you find yourself in a situation where you're ready to expand.
Well, you have to go out and find somebody who's got some carbon credits for sale.
The problem is that everybody who has carbon credits needs them.
They're gonna be hoarding them.
They're not going to sell them because they need those carbon cr carbon credits themselves in order to expand their own company.
Yeah.
That's a that's a that's right.
In other words, you you might be able to expand your business, but you'd only be able to do it through somebody else's carbon credits, which would mean they would have no leeway to expand theirs.
Exactly.
And if you when you you when you look at it in that light, what's going to happen is you're going to start seeing those very few times when when businesses are expanding when they when they when they are selling their their carbon credits, they're going to sell them to the highest bidder.
And the party that's going to be the highest bidder is going to be the biggest corporation.
That means Joe's manufacturing plant, which makes waste paper baskets, is not going to get carbon credits.
Yeah.
Because government motors outbid another company, outbid Joe's company, for the carbon credits that were for sale.
Exactly.
More and more of those carbon credits end up in the hands of the much, much bigger companies.
And the small and medium-sized companies, the ones with the new ideas and the ones to get them on track faster, won't be able to afford the carbon credits where the big mega corporations will be able to keep the price so high that they keep the small and medium-sized competitors out of the game, effectively.
Right.
That's what all environmental regulation is about.
Right.
It's about keeping small competitors from jumping into the marketplace with whatever their innovations are.
great example of that is the environmental impact statement it's nothing to a company like Walmart to put out an environmental impact statement when it wants to put up a shop who wants to put up a store.
It's nothing at all for them to to have they got an army of lawyers who do nothing but draft environmental impact statements.
But if you've got a relatively small company uh a hardware store that have to spend the money on an environmental impact statement that cuts into their overhead so much they can't afford it.
So small company from competing with the big one.
Yeah so what you're ha what you'll wind up with and this is what we get to when we're talking about Walmart uh Walmart uh getting into bed on some of this stuff is that uh the big mega corporations will understand it's in their interest to play along with government because apart from anything else uh it it puts some of their smaller and uh medium sized competitors at a disadvantage.
Uh and I'm not sure that uh that there's any way around that unless you're like Al Gore who uh buys his carbon credits from himself.
If we could all Al Gore buys his carbon credits from something called uh generation investment management LLP, which is quote, an independent private owner managed partnership established in two thousand and four with offices in London and Washington DC that for a fee will invest your money in high quality companies that are attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment uh climate friendly investment plans uh and who's the chairman and
founding partner Al Gore so if you have Al Gore buys his carbon credits from Al Gore well that works out great for him.
Uh unless you're in that situation unless you're in that situation uh the point that Joe made is is right that uh if you want to expand and you need to buy carbon credits from somebody else because you you you've used up your limit.
You've used up your government limit, government imposed limit.
The guy selling those carbon credits will have an incentive to keep the price high.
And your big competitors, Global Megacorp Inc., will have an incentive to pay more for them.
It'll be worth paying more for carbon credits as a way of keeping you, Joe Schmo, mom and pop business, out there stuck, unable to advance, unable to expand your business.
crusher it's a growth crusher on the businesses that everybody claims to like all those like boutique businesses we were talking about all your your your your Vermont teddy bear company and all the rest of it you're only gonna get global megacorp type stuff because global megacorp are going to be the only ones who can afford to buy these uh carbon credits when they want to expand.
This is uh a concoction that could only be designed by an administration with uh uh l limited if any uh experience of uh starting businesses growing businesses it's what happens when you put a community organizer in charge of the United States of America and it is gonna kill uh American capitalism if it is not stopped.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network more on the Rush Limbaugh show uh coming up straight ahead and don't forget Mark Davis will be in on Friday.
Yes great to be with you Mark Davis in tomorrow and Rush back on Monday.
Let's go to Jerry in Milwaukee.
Jerry you're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hello Mark uh the reason I I support cap and trade and the reasons for a number of reasons.
Uh one we spend billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars in the United States treating the p the effects of air pollution.
Uh lots of agriculture healthcare costs these are tens of billions of dollars the cost that we occur yearly.
We uh help armed nations indirectly with Iran but nations like Saudi Arabia and then Hezbollah and Hamas through oil petrol dollars.
Now I know cap and trade is that focused on oil but a a cap and trade system would reduce dependence on foreign oil.
Oh, no.
OK, let's just let's just take that one as as a start.
The General Accounting Office in Washington has just released a report saying that reliance on electric cars will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and in effect will just shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.
That's if we just rely on, say, the present fossil fuels, if we impose new if we get new alternative energy, solar, wind, new types of coal, cleaner coal, then yes, then we'll be.
be re less reliant on fossil fuels overall and we would have more alternative energies so so wa so wait a wait a minute let's just see if I understand you here.
If you want to have an uh uh electric car, half the country's electricity uh right now comes from coal-powered plants uh so when you go to an electric car at the moment at the moment you're just uh uh basically trading one uh uh greenhouse gas for another well I'm not necessarily saying we should have electric cars I think hydrogen fuel cells are cars maybe we should look at more in the future I'm saying that our fuel fossil fuel source overall should change within the next twenty years
from fossil fuels and I'm ready to admit to something like nuclear energy I think we should incorporate that too.
But wait, but but let's go back to the dictator's point.
Because you're right.
Right now we're funding both sides in the war on terror as well as a lot of other people including Hugo Chavez.
You know right now whenever you go uh and uh gas up you're putting tons of money into the pockets of the Saudis who uh whose principal export is not oil but ideology.
So they use the money you put you use at the at the gas station to fund radical madrasas and all kinds of other things all over the world.
In that case uh why do you uh why why not uh support more uh oil production at home in the United States in the Arctic that national uh wildlife refuge offshore what what's wrong with that?
I don't disagree Mark with um CERN drilling in the with an offshore of the United States.
I don't disagree.
My approach is multifaceted.
It's more drilling, more nuclear energy and more alternative uses.
So wait a minute wait a minute more nuclear so you want to go the French route.
I'm not I don't disagree with nuclear I I think that's approach that we could mix in with solar with wind with and and more energy efficient appliances.
We have to look not just at that we have to look at the healthcare costs we spend every year on treatment of air pollution.
People have to but but air pollution has dramatically decreased since the early nineteen seventies when this thing first became an issue.
But we still spend tens of billions of dollars every year.
That fact still remains we still spend a lot of money yeah but that's but that's let's let's look at it let's look at it that way.
Where do Places have lousy air pollution.
If you go to those Chinese industrial cities I was talking about earlier, they have the permanent cloud over them all day, every day.
If you were in London in the 1950s, if you watch a black and white Sherlock Holmes movie, they're always talking about those London pea super fogs that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are always wandering around in.
That wasn't a fog.
That was industrial pollution hanging over the city.
That's gone now.
They've cleaned up their air.
The places that are uh that are pollute uh uh polluting are poor places.
Uh people clean up their air when they become dynamic, wealthy societies and they don't want to live uh in smog.
Uh and that's why we we cleaned up our air since the early uh since the early 1970s.
Why do we need cap and trade to uh artificially uh impose costs that will mean we won't be rich enough uh to do all these aesthetic uh improvements to the environment?
It's not aesthetic improvement.
I mean, there's health care costs from it.
Now the hell the cle air is cleaner.
I agree with that, but we still have costs derived from that.
These are costs affected by everyone.
It affects the overall general economy, it affects society.
These are costs we can reduce if we take action.
And cap and trade allows industries to make decisions on how what new technologies they want to create.
It gives an incentive for them.
Is isn't it truer to say that camp and trade actually takes decisions, rational decisions away from individual companies and imposes a government standard on this?
Well, that's the reason why one of the reasons why we have government is because there are costs from industries.
Industries pollute.
And those and industry should pay somewhat of the cost from their pollution.
Now you want to reduce pollution because that cost is everybody pays that cost.
And in a higher health care premiums and reduced productivity, reduced lifespan.
That's why you have government to extend.
And it's just a lot of people.
But there is no different.
According to uh uh the way things stand at the moment, the people who are going to be uh th uh uh basing themselves before the eco-gods are the countries that have the highest lifespan.
So clearly, whatever uh w what what whatever the United States, whatever Canada, whatever New Zealand, whatever the United Kingdom, whatever France, whatever Germany are doing wrong, they all have the high the longest life spans on the planet.
So clearly, in the scheme of things, there is no uh in terms of in terms of health outcomes, you're much bigger off you're much better off uh living in a polluting industrial society as you would see it, uh, than in some bucolic uh primitive society where you're just working in the fields like in Somalia where male life expectancy is forty-eight.
Well, I'm not urging we live in a nation like Somalia.
I want to live an industrialized nation, and our country is rich enough where it can reduce the the emissions through new technology, just as it's done for the last forty years since the EPA.
I don't want to go back to the sixteenth century or something.
No, but here's the thing.
Here's where you're going wrong.
You say we're rich enough to be able to do this.
And that uh that's the thing I used to I used to hear all the time.
In in effect, we're rich enough to be able to indulge ourselves on this.
Uh and we're not anymore.
We're not.
There are simply not enough rich people who can uh assume the costs of a government bureaucracy that reg that will regulate uh every uh home you build uh from Maine to Hawaii and will determine how environmentally friendly it should be.
Mark, are let me ask, are we rich to indulge yourself with the health care costs we're paying now or to arm nations like Saudi Arabia and indirectly Iran by higher oil prices?
Well, I I'm not in favor.
I'm not in I'm not in favor.
Uh by by the way, I uh just just so we're clear on this.
I'm not in favor of giving money to the Saudis.
Right.
Uh I I would be in favor of uh uh of increased production at the Alberta oil sands, for example, uh whatever one feels about Canada, it's a reasonably friendly country most of the time and certainly uh isn't isn't funding radical madrasas.
I mean the last thing I know I didn't wander uh through Fairfax, Virginia and see a radical Canadian madrasa on the street corner.
It I'd be interested to know what was going on if there was.
Uh I am in favor.
I'm in favor of uh increased production of the Alberta oil s uh tar sands, which um most environmental groups are not in favor of.
I'm in favor of production in the Arctic N National Wildlife Refuge, Where most people who live north of 60 on this continent are also in favor because they understand that if you want to progress uh your your local society uh in parts of Alaska and uh the Yukon and the Northwest territories, you you need real uh you need a real economic base up there.
In other words, prosperity, capitalist prosperity makes your life uh nicer.
Uh Saddam Hussein uh destroyed uh the uh Iraqi marshlands.
Uh uh Chaochescu, I've never seen grass the color that I saw it in Chaochescu's uh Romania.
Uh he d he he he basically destroyed the environment there.
And big government big government does that.
Uh big government uh is no friend to the environment.
What is a friend to the environment is individual liberty uh and economic prosperity because free peoples uh when they make enough money want to live in nice neighborhoods, and that's what I'm in uh favor of.
But it's nice to get you a call uh and uh we will talk more on this uh subject straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Uh get a lot of hostile calls.
I I I like it.
I like this.
Keeps keeps you on your toes, keeps you keeps your brain from getting complacent.
Let's go to Jim in Cranston, uh, Rhode Island.
Jim, you're on the uh Rush Limbaugh show.
How are you, Mark?
I'm doing I'm doing great.
How are you?
First, I have to give you a compliment.
You're the best replacement host.
You're a quick wit, you're intelligent, quality.
No, no, no.
You're you're supposed to be uh one of these hostile calls.
But I gotta beg I beg to differ with you on the colonization.
Okay, you're getting up to the big butt.
You're uh I I love I I love you, but.
Okay, here's here comes the buttons.
That's it.
Okay.
Okay, it's a setup.
But anyway.
Good for you.
Okay.
See, the US is an imperialist nation.
But they don't make the mistake of England and colonize.
They pay off the despots and get them to do their bidding behind the scenes.
You know, it's just like the World Bank.
The World Bank is not a f a friendly uh uh uh internet uh of uh of anyone.
What they do is they loan money to these poor countries, okay.
And it's the loans are on paper.
Even if they give the money to the despots, they don't care.
Because once the the the the uh uh these countries can't pay back the money, then they say, oh gee, uh it's time for you to pay back.
If you can't, we'll take your minerals.
Now let's let's let's walk back some of the some of this stuff, Jim.
Uh I will I will grant you, and I think this is true, uh, that uh that uh that the United States has tried to do foreign policy on the cheap by uh in but the Middle East is a very good example of this.
The State Department, the fellas in the striped pants at Foggy Bottom, uh decided they were going to prioritize stability.
They're the gre world's greatest stability fetishists, so these so-called realists in the Middle East.
And they created uh the the situation we have today, where they give uh uh Mubarak uh billions of dollars, and what do they get for that?
They get Mohammed Atta flying through the window of the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning.
Uh and in a sense, you you uh uh you are correct there that in that in trying to No, but but you've got to understand one thing.
If they give Israel so much money, which they do, then they have to give it to other Arab nations too, or else it's gonna people are gonna call it foul.
I d I don't think that I don't think that's the reason to long before long before I mean, for example, uh Saudi Arabia as a strategic partner of the United States predates uh Israel.
Uh if you go back to the late 1920s, uh the uh the British reckoned that uh uh that uh that uh uh uh King uh what was he called?
Absolutely.
Uh no, no, no, the one before that.
But uh the first the founder of the Saudi dynasty, I've had one of those mental mental blocks.
Uh but he he uh he basically was too crazy.
They want to do business with him.
Uh Roosevelt sent his guy out to do business with him and uh said uh you'll keep uh and and the king told him you'll keep away from uh you you you can uh have a say in our oil and all the rest of it and keep away from everything else.
Now that turned out, I would say to be the single worst American foreign policy decision of the century.
It's predates the founding of the state of Israel uh by fifteen years uh and it uh and it uh not only was it of no I don't believe was of any real benefit to the United States, but it it it it summed up the way Washington uh of what happens when you are a non imperial power, where you try to do a lot of this stuff on uh on the cheap.
But you know, the general point I'm making, which is absolutely correct, is that America is the most benign superpower in history.
Now you talk about institutions like the World Bank.
All these institutions, most of them were set up in after the Second World War, the American moment, at the dawn of the American moment, 1945.
What did America do?
It set up all these international bodies at which it artificially diminished its own voice and artificially uh amplified the voices uh of uh relatively insignificant and uh powerless countries.
Uh America is so non-imperial that instead of doing uh what conventional imperialists do, which is garrisoning ramshackled dust-blown colonies in the middle of nowhere, it garrisons its wealthiest allies.
Where does the United States Army live?
It lives in Japan and it lives in Germany.
Uh two of the wealthiest countries on the planet, guarded and protected and secured and guaranteed by the United States.
Uh that is not conventional imperial behavior, however you care to describe it, Jim.
Here's the thing.
See, the front office is the people of that particular country.
But the people pulling the strings, uh just like uh uh Axelrod pulling the strings for Obama, okay?
No, but Obama's not a stupid person, but Axelrod does not want him to get off message and start ad living because he'll get himself in trouble.
So that's why the teleprompter's there.
And the same thing with these countries.
These various countries, the front office are these people from these countries.
And they're despots uh primarily, and and and but the United States is pulling the strings.
Well, uh I I won't I won't go that far.
I'm not gonna go that that far with you, Jim.
That's an interesting that's an interesting point.
But again, that is not the d definition of imperialism.
That is that in fact you can just as easily argue that is the definition of a country uh that retains its streak of isolationist republic uh and does not want to uh do uh does not want to impact on the world in in the ways that conventional imperialists do.
And I I have a disagreement.
John Bolton, for example, who is a great American and uh man I admire tremendously, but John Bolton, when he uh when he discussed the situation in uh he he often quotes uh conversation between the Mexican uh the uh uh US ambassador in London and the British Foreign Secretary in nineteen fourteen, uh, when the US ambassador uh told uh Sir Edward Gray they were talking about Mexico, and he says, well, you know, we'll just go in there, we'll prop up a new guy, uh he catches our eye and gets into trouble, we'll go in and whack him.
Uh the new guy comes along and he goes into trouble, we'll go in and whack him.
Uh and we'll keep doing that for as long as it takes.
The problem with that situation is that as I mentioned earlier, you now got half the population of Mexico living in uh California and Arizona.
That uh it's tougher and it's harder to impose your will and export your values on the world.
Uh but in the end it pays off in the long run.
And it's not a question.
This cynicism, this uh Middle Eastern cynicism, the State Department cynicism, you just find you find the dictator who's most pliable, and you shower him with money.
Mubarak is not a friend of the United States.
The House of Saud is not a friend of the United States.
And in the long run, uh over the course of half a century, uh all that all Middle Eastern stability did was bring us uh nine-11.
So I'm not in uh I'm not in favor of that.
But thanks for your call, Jim.
Great to have you with us on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
More straight ahead.
Uh Mark Stein sitting in for rush on the EIB network.
Hey, uh Mark Stein in for Rush.
I have had a great time, always have a great time here.
It's a great honor to fill in for America's Anchorman, the indispensable voice of American conservatism, uh, especially for a a foreigner like me, because this is definitely one of the jobs that Americans will do.
Mark Davis will be here tomorrow.
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