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Aug. 21, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
August 21, 2009, Friday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Yeah, I like that.
Cash for caskets.
Cash for caskets to replace the whole notion of death panels.
You know, you could use a Darth Vader-like figure assigning caskets to some seasoned citizen in a wheelchair or what have you, and the family of the seasoned citizen smiling, being given a check or some cash.
Or maybe you could put Geraldo in there.
You know, he's the Grim Reaper.
He doesn't shows up on Fox and people die.
That's how I knew Michael Jackson was actually dead was when Fox put Heraldo on there.
That's how you knew.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Remember, my friends, as long as I'm here, it doesn't really matter where here is except to taxing authorities.
Telephone number here for Open.
Open Line Friday, 800-282-2882.
And the email address is LRushbow at EIBNet.com.
Great to have you with us.
Been a great week here.
We're about to wrap it up.
We'll get to your phone calls here.
And remember, Open Line Friday, whenever we go to the phones, the content of the program is yours.
Talk about whatever you want.
It's a golden opportunity.
Very few hosts would open up the screening possibilities as I do.
You should take advantage of it.
All right.
Now, here's more evidence of a civil war that is brewing.
The civil war of the fringe left angry at Obama making deals with big pharma and Rahm Emmanuel supposedly demanding bipartisanship, trying to get Republicans, the blue dog conservative Democrats, so-called, get them on board to try to get Republicans in the Senate.
And the fringe left is all upset about this.
They want to say, hey, just do it.
We don't need the Republicans.
And they're right, by the way, about that.
The reason Obama wants, and some Democrats want Republicans to go along with this, is so that they can share the blame when all hell breaks loose, when this thing actually is enacted.
Now, Paul Krugman, who's an economist, a columnist at the New York Times, unhappy with the BAMSTR.
Now, Krugman, he's one of these guys Obama's talking about in August, all weeweed up in the Beltways.
According to Bob Gibbs, the spokesman for Obama, Paul Krugman's a bedwetter.
And when Krugman starts writing like this, I mean, there is trouble there.
The title of this is Obama's Trust Problem.
According to news reports, the Obama administration is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives, liberals.
Well, I'm shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.
A backlash in the liberal base.
I don't, you know, he keeps using the word progressive here, and it's liberal, statist, socialist.
There's nothing progressive about these people.
They want to take us back to the Stone Age.
Environmental policy, this healthcare policy, the kind of cars we drive.
They want to take us back to the relative Stone Age.
So they're not progressives.
A backlash in a liberal base, which pushed Obama over the top in the primaries and played a major role in his election victory, has been building for months a backlash in the liberal base building for months.
The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it's also a proxy for broader questions about the president's priorities and his overall approach.
The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale.
It was picked up by the Brett girl, John Edwards, during the Democrat primary and became part of the original Obama health care plan.
And yes, not that they wouldn't have come up with it on their own, but we really do owe this current iteration of public option health care to John Edwards.
What a legacy.
One purpose of the public option is to save money.
Be careful, Paul.
You're putting a lie to Obama's death panels here.
Experience with Medicare suggests that a government-run plan would have lower costs than private insurers.
It does?
I thought Medicare was going broke.
What am I missing?
I feel like I'm on a different planet from Barney Frank.
Experience with Medicare suggests a government-run plan would have lower costs than private insurers.
In addition, it would introduce more competition and keep premiums down.
It would do no such thing.
It would wipe out the private sector.
These people are some of the smartest, stupid people, the Ivy League grads.
And let's be clear, writes the ferret-like Paul Krugman.
The supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham.
I understand why they're mad.
I understand why they're mad because here's Obama since Sibelius out, public option, not that big a deal.
Left has a cow.
Obama goes out, and I don't know what she's talking about.
Public option, it's in there.
Then he says, but it's not the centerpiece.
Left goes ballistic again.
What do you mean not the centerpiece?
Of course it's the centerpiece.
And Obama says, well, maybe we don't do the public option.
Maybe we do co-ops.
And they go ballistic again, and that's what Krugman here is saying is a sham.
And he says, it's not just my opinion, it's what the market says.
Stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the gang of six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan.
Now, see, this is another thing.
When shares of stock go up, liberals get livid.
When companies become more valuable, liberals get livid.
Until the idea of the public option came along, a significant faction within the party rejected anything short of true single-payer, Medicare for all reform, viewing anything less as perpetuating the flaws in the current system, which is Medicare.
Why would you take a program that's nearly bankrupt and say this is the foundation for expanding health care?
At any rate, I keep digressing because every sentence here demands digression.
The public option, he says, which would force insurance companies to prove their usefulness or fade away, settled some of those qualms.
That said, it's possible to have universal coverage without a public option.
Several European nations do it.
And some who want a public option might be willing to forego it if they had confidence in the overall health care strategy.
Unfortunately, the president's behavior in office has undermined that confidence.
On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure that liberals thought they had elected comes across far too often as dry.
A technocrat talks of bending the curve, but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform.
Mr. Obama's explanations of his plan have gotten clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula.
His speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee.
Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed liberals with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy.
And then there's the matter of the banks.
Krugman writes, I don't know if administration officials realize just how much damage they've done themselves with their kid gloves treatment of the financial industry.
Just how badly the spectacle of government-supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.
But I've had many conversations with people who voted for Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money.
When I press them, it turns out they're really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus.
But that's a distinction lost on most voters.
So there's a growing sense among liberals that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked.
And that's why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar.
Now politics is the art of the possible.
Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.
But there's a point at which realism shades over into weakness.
And liberals increasingly feel the administration's on the wrong side of the line.
It seems as if there's nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke.
Charles grassly feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will pull the plug on grandma.
Two days later, the White House declares it's still committed to working with it.
It's hard to avoid the sense that Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can't be appeased, who take, I don't, I, this, this is mind-boggling.
Obama's not trying to appease anybody.
He's sending out thugs to beat up people at town hall meetings.
He's calling them unruly mobs.
He had a snitch website, run out of the administration.
Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops than the GOP leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.
So progressives, liberals are now in revolt.
Now, Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process, he lost it, and now he needs to win it back.
Here we've got the most leftist, radical president in our history behaving as a leftist radical, and the other leftist radicals think they've been punked.
Probably they don't like being called bedwetters.
I guess it's a purity test.
But remember, the interesting thing, they don't want Obama working with Republicans.
Now, these are the same people that were demanding bipartisanship all through the Bush administration.
Even remember early on, we kept hearing from the Democrats the power of the minority.
We must rely on the power of the minority.
We got to have bipartisanship.
Now, they want no part of bipartisanship.
And the myth is that Obama's trying to get some.
Back to Joe Connison, who is upset at Rahm Emanuel.
He's got another piece at salon.com.
Now more than ever, bipartisanship is for suckers.
Remember how they had to share power with Bush as a minority?
We had to share power.
It was only the right thing to do for democracy.
Connison says Obama, Republicans want Obama to fail.
He needs to stop seeking consensus because it makes him look weak.
Whether there was ever any prospect of significant Republican support for Obama's recovery and reform agenda is a moot point.
Certainly the potential for obstruction and worse in a party dominated by Rush Limbaugh and William Kristol.
And then later on, even John McCain, the Republican who could truthfully boast of working with Democrats on serious legislation, often did during his presidential campaign, now indulges in sourly partisan posturing.
My gosh, I can't, they even, they feel like, they feel like McCain has done a brutus on them.
McCain's now a traitor.
He had the story yesterday, which I thought was laughable.
McCain is now seen voting with his party.
And it was a news flash.
It was a bulletin.
McCain now voting with Republicans.
He's a double agent.
Now we got Joe Connison upset that McCain is actually voting with the Republicans.
Upset that Obama it's Twilight Zone.
But doesn't matter.
I'll take it.
When Krugman and these guys start talking about Obama having lost trust, when the kook fringe base starts getting mad at you, that's not good for you if you are also a kook fringe kind of politician, which most of the Democrat leadership is.
So it's amazing to listen to these people.
They actually think that Obama and Rahm Emanuel are going out of their way to incorporate us in their plans.
Meanwhile, Obama goes on radio and television to start talking about this one lone voice, meaning me, that's shouting out all of the civil and polite discourse out there.
So, bottom line, keep the pressure on.
Keep showing up at the town meetings.
Not time to get giddy.
We haven't won anything.
They can still pull this off.
Andy McCarthy, by the way, my buddy, has another great piece, National Review online today, nationalreview.com.
Killing Obamacare.
Death panels cut to the chase, which is the only way Democrats can be stopped.
And his point here is: keep shouting.
Tell everybody exactly what the plan is.
And remind everybody that this can happen tomorrow if the Democrats unify.
They can get this done the first day they come back, if they want to.
And for that reason, we have to assume that at some point they are going to get it done.
And it's up to us to keep the pressure on to stop it.
Coco, I want you to link to Andy's piece right now.
It's at National Review Online, but I want to put it on the website so it'll link to it from our site as well.
It's called Killing Obamacare.
And it's just another tremendous piece.
I got to take a break.
We're a little long here.
We'll be back and get to your phone calls when we come back.
Sit tight.
We'll be there.
Open Line Friday, Rush Limbaugh, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations.
We go to Atlanta, Indiana.
And this is Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the program.
Woohoo!
I can't believe we're talking to you.
Hey, Rush, how are you?
Fine and dandy.
Thanks much.
I wanted to tell you what Obamacare will be like.
I've got an HMO, and my daughter's got a special medical condition.
She needed to see a specialist.
My insurance company denied her.
I have an HMO.
So we went into a grievance process.
The panel was composed of three people who had never even heard of what my daughter had.
They denied her, and then we went on to a second level of grievance.
They denied her again, and then a third level.
So at this point, we decided, let's go to the Indiana Department of Insurance.
I was so thankful that they were there.
They were independent.
They, you know, they weren't being paid off by the insurance company.
And they were for oversight.
In Obamacare, there'd be nowhere to go.
There would be no oversight.
My other point was: in the process of going through this panel, they asked me questions that were totally irrelevant to my daughter's medical condition, like, did she go to school?
Where did she school?
Why did I make that choice?
You know, things that have nothing to do with that.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
What was the purpose of that?
And I, oh, there was a lot of those questions.
And I kept thinking to myself, geez, these are questions that my HMO is asking me.
And I'm answering them because I'm desperate.
I want those medical bills paid.
But can you imagine the questions Obamacare panels would have?
That's my point.
And also, my 16-year-old loves you.
She schedules her day, her homeschooling schedule as much as possible around you.
Could you just say hi?
That warms my heart.
That warms.
Yeah, what's her name?
Alyssa.
Hold on a second.
Just say hi, honey.
I'm such a big fan of you.
I listen to you.
So Obama and his friends can get really, really mad.
Even if I can't listen to you, I still leave my radio on tote energy, so Obama will get really mad.
She's so excited.
That's all right.
She didn't say anything to her.
She didn't take a breath.
I don't think she did.
We've been waiting for two hours and 11 minutes, and she's so excited to talk to you.
Anyway.
Well, now, wait, what?
What is her name again?
Alyssa.
She just went, you told her to read Mark Levin.
She has a reading issue, and you told her to read Mark Levin, so she found it on tape.
And she just does, you know, whatever.
She's trying to educate herself as best she can in conservatism so that she can be able to have discussions with liberals.
See, this is the kind of stuff that gives me hope for the future.
It is hope.
It is absolute hope.
So anyway, thank you for what you're doing.
I don't know where we would be without you.
Well, thank you very much.
Bye.
Bye, Alyssa, if I could say her name.
I made my day.
I appreciate that.
Matt, Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Hello, sir, and welcome to Open Line Friday.
Hey, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
I've been listening to you since I was 14 years old, and they told me back then when I was in school that it would lead to no good.
But hey, you know, I made it.
Well, you're a rush baby that survived the experience.
I know, imagine.
Now, if we can only survive Obama.
Listen, I'm a car dealer, and you were talking earlier about the effects, how Medicare will have lower prices.
I don't think anyone has to look any further than cash for clunkers to see what's going to happen to prices.
We have seen since Cash for Clunkers was announced, not started, but announced, that some of our competitors slowly started raising their base prices in anticipation for what was going to happen with Cash for Clunkers.
And since the program has been in effect, a lot of our competitors, and including us to some degree, had to raise our prices because they knew what we were going to be dealing with.
I need to ask you a question.
Do you work for an Obama-owned company?
Possibly.
Yeah.
No, is it General Motors or Chrysler?
You work with General Motors or Chrysler?
Yes, I do.
Okay.
Well, so you work for an Obama-owned company.
So what you're telling me is that Obama, running his car companies, decided to end up raising prices because the competitors did.
Exactly.
Well, we had no choice.
Right.
You can do that because the hapless customer walks in thinking he's getting $4,500 rebate or at least assistance in buying the car so you can jack it up the price.
If your competitors do, you can do it too.
But why wouldn't you lower the price if your competitor is raising it?
Well, you would think so, but unfortunately, with the government assistance or intervention, as we like to call it now, our cost has gone up just to deal with the problems.
First of all, submitting all the paperwork.
I mean, our guys that are out selling the cars, we had to institute all of these new policies, how to get the paperwork right because we are out, you know, several hundred thousand dollars.
Oh, this is wonderful.
See, taking automobile salesmen, turning them into bureaucrats.
Basically, yes.
And the cost has gone up.
Well, you know, there are all kinds of stories out there about how the Chrysler and General Motors are not the cars that people are buying with the cash for clunkers program.
And what nobody is factoring in here is that people do not want to buy a car from Obama or an Obama-bailed out company.
Hey, welcome back, Rushland Boy and the EIB Network.
I'm looking for something on Muammar Gaddafi because you won't believe this, folks.
By the way, Gaddafi was the original birther back in 2008.
No, he was.
Back in 2007, he predicted that Obama would go soft and deny his Muslim roots and become too white.
And yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is, I found it here.
When was this from?
September 2008.
It was a YouTube clip.
Gaddafi insists Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Obama suffers inferiority complex.
It might make him behave whiter than the white.
He should be proud of his African Muslim identity.
Muammer Gaddafi.
And that's, to me, that qualifies as the original birther.
The reason I bring this up is that you won't believe this, but we, you know, ladies and gentlemen, was a powerful, influential member of the media.
I am wired into all news sources.
And I get all of the ABC news breaks, new breaking news from ABC, all these things.
And ABC just issued a breaking news alert.
This qualifies as an alert.
Let me read this to you.
Breaking news from ABCNews.com, Obama calls Heroes Welcome in Libya for release of Pan Am 103 bomber highly objectionable.
That's breaking news.
That's really tough.
Oh, hey, highly objectionable.
Heroes Welcome.
Highly objectionable?
And it's breaking news in Chicago.
This is Phil.
Great to have you with us on Open Mind Friday, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Actually, I'm calling from Minnesota.
I'm originally from Chicago.
And I just wanted to tell you that I have fond memories of my dad walking in our backyard.
He had a cigar in his mouth, and he'd have his radio headphones on listening to Rush.
And from time to time, he'd shout out, here, here.
Tremendous.
That's great.
Now, and my point is, having grown up in Chicago and having lived there and lived under the tyranny that is Chicago politics, I just want to comment on what I've heard this week with people saying, okay, it's over the top what we're doing when we're going to town hall meetings.
We're making too much noise.
No, we have to be relentless because they are ruthless.
We have to continue to organize, continue to make noise, and continue to be heard.
Exactly.
And because behaving in this polite, civil manner is how we got stimulus package.
Exactly.
And that's the way they do it in Chicago.
They just ram it down people's throats, and eventually people lie down, and we cannot lie down.
We have to continue to fight.
I know the aggressor sets the rules, but the evidence is in.
It works.
This kind of behavior at the town hall meetings works.
It's based on substance.
It's not based on phony anger.
It's not ginned up.
It is what it is.
I think people see it.
That's why they're trying to caution us to dial it back.
We don't want to anger the precious independents.
The dirty little secret is, it's the independents that are abandoning Obama in record numbers.
Here's a story from CNNmoney.com.
The female economy, what women want.
Women control half the wealth in the U.S., say the authors of the new book, Women Want More.
So why are companies still ignoring them?
And naturally, a chick reporter does the story, Suzanne Kappner.
Female economy, what women want, half the wealth they control.
Why are companies still ignoring them?
Are companies ignoring women?
Where do these premises come from?
Here's the way this thing closes: the balance of power will change in favor of women, and so will the way products are developed and marketed.
For God's sake, the whole culture's been chick-ified.
What are these people?
Products are developed and marketed the way products are developed and marketed in favor of women.
Women will gain share in politics.
They'll have more say over the political agenda.
That's the scariest thing I've read in a week.
And I don't mean it in a sexist way.
No, no, no.
Don't misunderstand me here.
You know, Ann Coulter makes a joke that if we really want to save America, take the vote away from women because it is women who vote for socialist things because they're nurturing and caring, and we've got to take care of each other.
They vote for big government policies that do this.
She says the only way to save America is take away the vote.
She doesn't really mean it, but the liberals get agitated.
The female economy will contribute to leading the world out of the economic crisis, is the way this ends.
Yep, shop till you drop, baby.
That's it.
Just go shopping.
Manicure, pedicure, whatever.
Consumerism works every time it's tried.
Whatever happened to Buying American, Julie Halpert, Newsweek, Web Exclusive.
Whatever happened to Buying American?
It's about cash for clunkers.
No mention in the article about the number of people who will not buy a car from an Obama company.
They don't want to buy because they don't want to buy from a bailed-out company and they don't want to buy a car from a company run by Obama.
Big oil lobbying is up 82%.
This is some businessinsider.com.
Look at the money that big oil is spending here in a desperate effort to keep taxes from ruining the country.
And that's basically what they're doing.
Big oil is lobbying to make sure that there are no major tax increases on them.
Professor Richard Linzen, MIT, says that carbon dioxide is irrelevant in the climate debate.
Linzen, nobody disagrees with this man to his face.
He has instant credibility.
MIT, his work has been peer-reviewed.
He states, we now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small.
We know why it is small.
And we know that it is having very little effect on the climate.
All of this data leads to the conclusion that the United Nations IPCC models are not only wrong, they're so far off the mark as to be laughable.
In other words, the whole bedrock, foundation of man-made global warming CO2, this MIT, Professor, effective CO2 on temperature is small and limited.
And we have the story here.
It's at theexaminer.com.
We'll link to that at rushlimbaugh.com.
John Zogby has a piece today based on his polling data.
And it kind of depresses me because if it's true, it illustrates the end of the country.
And that's why I don't believe it's true.
It's called The Way We'll Be, Life Without Frivolities.
Large numbers of U.S. adults are cut back on driving, eating out, going to the movies, and traveling.
It's no surprise that this type of discretionary spending has taken a hit, but these trends are not just the result of a 20-month recession.
The recession has added to the count of people who are cutting back, but many Americans had already decided to live with less before the bottom fell out of the economy.
And that's been an ongoing trend as more Americans move away from material frivolities and take pleasure in simpler things.
And now that a recession is forcing many others to also live within limits, how many will discover that they never really needed all those material things to be happy in the first place?
This is not going to please the women who are poised to take over and run the economy with consumerism.
That thought should worry consumer-oriented businesses and encourage those who believe the nation and world are on an unsustainable course.
Quote, in every economic turndown in U.S. history, we've eventually restored or improved our standard of living.
And we all hope this recession will follow that history.
But what may be changing for the long term are people's economic expectations and lifestyles.
In the way we'll be, I wrote that we are moving from a nation of excess to one of tangible limits on spending, on the exercise of power, even on our hopes and imaginings.
Yeah, everybody but the government.
The government has shown no limits whatsoever.
And it's the government in showing no limits that is the government's the entity taking things away from everybody.
How in the world can you look at this economy and look at how much capital has been taken out of it and then say, well, people are willingly dialing back.
They've got no choice.
He's basically saying that the way we used to define the American dream is over.
I refuse to believe it.
It isn't happening.
And let's pay attention to a little-known fact.
Few of you have heard of a bill.
You might have heard of it, but I don't know you realize the absolute devastation it would cause.
Speaking of the economy and speaking of dialing back lifestyles, the fact of the matter, if this is happening, it's being done on purpose, not by consumers, but by the people who run the so-called recovery.
I'm talking about the Waxman Market Climate Change Bill.
It's one of the administration's agenda items, implementing cap and trade limits on tens of thousands of businesses, if not more.
And if you believe in global warming, you believe that government should put a cap on the amount of energy and emissions that each of them can produce.
If businesses are very productive and profitable and want to grow, they're going to have to trade for other people's allowances of carbon credits.
And people like George Soros and Goldman Sachs are going to get commissions on the trades.
And then there's an energy cost on that expansion that's imposed by the government.
It has to be paid for by somebody.
And as always, the somebody's us.
It's the Heritage Foundation, the one organization I know and trust that has a full breakdown on just what this bill is going to cost you.
And it isn't pretty.
You can see it.
Support the Heritage Foundation.
Become a member as little as $25 a year.
A lot of people give more than that, but you can get in for $25 and immediately become a fellow, in a sense.
You have access to every bit of research they do.
You can see it at askheritage.org.
They sit around their thinkers.
You can become smarter by thinking along with them.
The Heritage Foundation doing the greatest work inside the beltway that is being done on these crucial issues.
We'll get to more of your phone calls when we come back, folks.
Sit tight back before you know it.
Hey, we're back.
Rush Limbaugh and the EIB network.
And I want to remind you, go to rushlimbaugh.com right now.
The piece that we have up there, we have two things.
We have a Wall Street Journal story on the Veterans Administration death book, 53 pages for veterans that's oriented toward making them make a decision to die.
It really is.
And Obama reinstated the VA death book.
George Bush had suspended it.
The whole 53-page PDF format book is there along with the Wall Street Journal story and a great piece by Andy McCarthy today on the whole Obama healthcare situation as it stands now.
Barb in Montana, a cell call.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Hey, thanks, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, ma'am.
I got to say hi to my folks back in St. Paul and also to our friend Corey who's mowing hay right now back in Livingston.
And we're just driving through southern Montana.
And I had to call because I'm excited as heck that Brett Favre is playing quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings.
And I'd rather watch him play and struggle with his retirement issues than watch a quarterback that's been convicted of a felony.
Okay.
You want to compare Favre to Michael Vick?
No, I'm not comparing it.
It's not even in the same category, but I'm just excited that he's there.
I know a lot of people don't like watching him struggle with that retirement thing, but I don't care.
I'm a Viking fan, and I've always loved Brett Favre.
Let me talk to you about this since you're a Viking fan.
Let me talk to you about this as a fan.
Now, I agree.
I think I was playing golf the other afternoon, and one of the guys came, you think the media is going overboard talking about this Favre?
Yes.
I think they're going overboard talking about Vic.
Yeah.
But I'm going to tell you something.
I'm going to tell you something.
The way this went down, the other players on this team have just been told in no uncertain terms that they don't matter.
Brett Favre was told by the Vikings, if you're going to play for us, you've got to come to the OTAs.
You have to come to the mini-camps.
You've got to come to training camp.
I don't want to do it.
He didn't go to any of that, and they still paid him $10 to $12 million this year.
Yeah.
Now, they had two quarterbacks, Tavaris Jackson and Sage Rosenfelds, and those two guys have just been told, you don't matter.
The only difference between you guys and a bag of manure is the bag.
We've got Brett Favre.
And, you know, this coach, Childress, is going to need one of those two guys because Favre's not going to make it the whole season.
He's going to need one of these two guys.
And these two guys, it's going to have to require their professionalism to be motivated and get in there and do it.
But if I'm a one of the big stars of the Vikings, Adrian Peterson, running back.
If I'm Adrian Peterson, I've just learned I don't have to go to training camp either.
If I'm the whole team, I don't need to go to training camp, and I can still start, and they'll roll out the red carpet for me.
I just, you know, I think it's, you know, I've met Brett Favre and I like him, and I just, I think it's sort of sad that people are going to remember him more for his, I'm retiring, I'm not retiring, I don't know what I'm going to do, than the one Super Bowl he won.
Yeah, I know, but I still like watching him play.
Well, that's bottom line.
It is the NFL.
Brett Favre and Brad Childress can't raise your taxes.
The owner can raise his prices, but the players cannot raise your taxes.
And that's about, if you like watching him play and you're a fan, then that's fine.
That's what they're counting on in Minnesota.
They did this for the fans, but it's going to be a lot of fun.
But your point is taken, Rush, I understand your point completely.
Yeah, it depends on what kind of locker room guy is, too.
He can go a long way to mitigating some of this anger if he doesn't go in and be a separatist, if he becomes one of the guys and so forth.
Remains to be seen.
It's clear he has wanted to play for the Vikings for a long time.
So I wish him the best.
No, that team, he wanted to go to Vikings last year.
He had to settle for the Jets.
He wanted to go to the Vikings because he wants to ram it to the Packers, which is understandable.
Hey, you know, it's sports, it's entertainment.
All this is fine.
It's not earth-shattering stuff.
I just, you know, I look at it from the standpoint of what message does a team send every other player with this kind of special treatment, a guy who was not on the roster.
I talked to Jimmy Johnson once, and he said, you don't treat players the same.
We didn't treat Marino when he coached the Dolphins the way they treated every other players, but you do it subtly.
And when you're on a team with a guy like Marino, then you understand that after he's put in 13, 15 years and all the passing records he's had, he's a hard worker team guy.
They're importing a guy here who's being treated better than anybody currently on the roster.
And that's, to me, it's just a potential for problem.
I look at it managing employees, managing a business, getting the most out of them.
And I don't know that this is the best way to do it.
But I appreciate the question.
Great open line Friday question.
The kind of question Snerdley would have found were he here.
And speaking of the VA death book, there's a story here today in the stack I've been trying to find.
I can't.
VA executives a total of $24 million in bonuses while veterans are going through the hell or going through getting medical treatment.
And you got this book coming out.
U.S. postal workers were among 10 people charged with operating a lotto-style gambling business out of offices at the U.S. Postal Service.
I wonder if FedEx and UPS run gambling operations out of their offices.
Yeah, well, if they do run gambling offices, I'm sure they're better.
Better run.
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