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Sept. 2, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
September 2, 2009, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, indeed.
America's anchorman is away today.
And this is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein, sitting in no supporting paperwork whatsoever, because that's the easiest way for us foreigners to access all the great free health care we can get here.
I'll be here today and tomorrow, Thursday, and the great Walter Williams will be in on Friday, and then Rush returns Monday.
Always an honor to be here.
I'm from the Foreign Exchange student wing of the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a terrific exchange program.
Guys like me get to come and study at the Limbaugh Institute.
And in return, a minor Kennedy cousin gets to study at the Edward M. Kennedy Memorial Seminary and Drive-Through Beatification Shop in Bally Shannon.
I've been overseas mostly in London.
Just got back yesterday.
But as I said, mostly in London, the hip replacement I put in for in 1988 finally came through.
But I'm just back, so I missed most of the Kennedy coverage.
And no, I didn't.
Well, there's another six weeks to go, I think.
But anyway, what is it the Obama administration call it?
An overseas contingency operation.
So the minute the Cabelot prostrations start up, it's always good to have an overseas contingency operation that you can duck out for.
So I was overseas.
But I love the way when a Kennedy departs the scene and these news anchors go into Camelot mode, and they all start quoting lyrics from the show, you know, the one brief shining moment and fleeting wisp of glory.
The one song from the score they never seem to quote is How to Handle a Woman.
It's kind of odd that when they're doing this Camelot racket.
I see this talk that Senator Kennedy's widow might succeed to his Senate seat or his nephew, Congressman Joseph Patrick Kennedy II, not to be confused with Senator Kennedy's son, Congressman Patrick Joseph Kennedy II.
So we may have, and I don't follow Democrat politics that closely, but we may have an all-Kennedy primary in Massachusetts.
Joseph Patrick Kennedy II versus Patrick Joseph Kennedy II versus the little-known Kennedy cousin, Joseph Patrick, Patrick, Joseph, Kennedy, Schlossberg, Smith, Shriver, Lawford III.
It's a good thing America got rid of that whole hereditary ruler thing back in 1776, I think.
But speaking of demise, did you know that in Europe you can invest in American death?
You've heard all that stuff from the Democrats about how American life expectancy is lower than France's and Germany's and Sweden's and so forth.
We talked about it the last time I was sitting in for Rush a couple of weeks ago.
And not surprisingly, in Europe, that stuff has got out.
And investing in the likelihood of you, Mr. and Mrs. America, keeling over, kicking the bucket, buying the farm, has become pretty much a sure thing.
Yeah, I'm talking about individual Americans kicking the bucket, not the country as a whole.
The country as a whole isn't due to kick the bucket until midway through Obama's second term.
So you don't have to worry about that immediately.
It's not imminent yet.
But Europeans are now able to invest in American death.
And the German magazine, which sounds great because we've heard so much about the lousy life expectancy here in the United States that investing in Americans dying would seem to be pretty much a shoo-in, but it hasn't worked out like that.
De Spiegel, the German magazine, says betting, headline, betting on US life expectancy proves risky.
Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions manage complex funds that buy up American life insurance policies and pay their premiums in return for their payouts.
But angry German investors are finding that Americans aren't dying as quickly as expected and that only the bankers are making the buck.
You lousy Americans, why can't you even die?
Is there nothing?
Is there nothing that goes right?
So the German investors are all German retirees.
They live longer, but they spend their last years broke because they invested in American death plans.
Gisbert Sobella and his wife invested 16,000 euros, about 23,000 into the fund.
In 2007, they received a small dividend.
Since then, the Bavarian couple has received quarterly statements, all of which notify him that unfortunately there will be no dividend payments this quarter.
So it would appear that bankers' betting on the demise of anonymous Americans hasn't borne much fruit.
Many thousands of investors have had similar experiences.
Quote, at the Deutsche Bank branch, they told me it was a booming business, said a 50-year-old executive assistant who was looking to securely invest a severance payment for her retirement.
Today she's worried about her savings.
In a call to the fund, she was informed promptly and unequivocally that her contract stipulated the possibility of a total loss.
The real issue is related to the fact that Americans aren't dying as fast as they were expected to.
All over Europe, penniless non-agenarians are living in hell because they invested their retirement savings in you lousy Americans keeling over at 58.
Why can't you just get on with it and die?
Bad news, bad news in Germany.
But we don't want to talk about death.
We don't want to talk about death.
There's lots of good news out of Germany.
A German court has ruled, a Berlin court has upheld rulings in favor of parents who sought to name their son Jihad.
A variation on the Arabic for holy war.
The Superior Court upheld two lower court rulings allowing the day on grounds that it is recognized for males in Arabic-speaking countries, which of course Germany will soon be any day now.
But that's nice, lovely, lovely little, lovely little name, Jihad.
And they said, well, you know, it's quite a common name in Islam, and one shouldn't look to take any pejorative view of this.
And there's good news too for American babies.
The California Cryobank's donor look-alike service now offers would-be parents the chance to search for prospective donors based on which famous face the sperm donor most closely resembles.
So right now, you could have, if you want to have your baby, you could just simply ask for a Brad Pitt.
They say incredibly, I don't quite believe this, but they say that one of the most popular names when people are looking for a look-alike baby is Ben Affleck.
The actor who did so much.
He he remember at one point during the Kerry campaign, he was touring with John Kerry.
Ben Affleck, I think apart from that one film, what was that first film he made?
Goodwill Hunting.
Apart from that, everything he's done was a total bust.
That thing in Pearl Harbor, remember he was in Pearl Harbor?
He bored that film to pieces.
The theater I saw it in, they were rooting for the Japanese Air Force.
They said, No, no, he's over to your left.
But apparently, a lot of parents are going for the Ben Affleck sperm when they go to the California Cryo Bank and the Donor Lookalike, donor look-alike service.
That's great news, by the way.
That is American ingenuity.
There was a story a couple of weeks ago that in the whole of Canada now, which is a population of 30 million people, there are only 33 sperm donors.
Because this is a good lesson in free market economics.
The governments made it illegal for you to sell your sperm.
And as a result, the whole thing, the whole market dried up.
They just, you can give it away.
You can give it away.
As many men are happy to do, by the way.
But you can't sell it.
So there are now just 30 sperm donors in the whole of Canada.
So you can't have, you can't go.
It's no point.
I don't know what the Canadian equivalent of a Ben Affleck is, a William Shatner.
Let's say you wanted to have your baby look like William Shatner.
You can't go to a sperm clinic in Canada and say, that's great.
Would you rather have the William Shatner or the Leslie Nielsen?
And they'll say, you can't make that kind of choice.
You can go along to the one in California and pick out the Ben Affleck or the Brad Pitt, but you can't go to the one in Winnipeg and say, no, I don't want the Leslie Nielsen.
I'm holding out for the William Shatner.
Because there's only 30 sperm donors for the whole of Canada.
So they have now had to outsource.
This is the ultimate outsourcing, by the way.
I don't mind call center.
I don't mind a call center in Bangladesh or whatever.
But when you need to outsource sperm donation, I think that is a sad comment on society.
Canadian women have now been subjected to the ultimate indignity.
They're having to use American sperm.
80% of babies born by sperm donation in Canada now are conceived by sperm from North Florida and Georgia.
And so America is taking over, is annexing Canada one sinister little North Floridian sperm at a time.
They're like, if you go to like Niagara Falls, go to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, you can see them.
It's like salmon leaping up there onto the Canadian, onto the Canadian side.
And this is, this is, there is a metaphor here.
Somewhere buried in this, there is a metaphor for what happens when you have an over-governmentalized view of life.
So that's the story there.
By the way, they've just changed.
Speaking of babies, because we talk about, I've been talking about babies, the nice little baby boy G had born in Germany, the way everybody in California is getting the Ben Affleck sperm.
So there's going to be millions of little baby Ben Afflecks wandering around in California.
The way the poor Canadians are all gradually turning into Georgian crackers simply because they're now utterly dependent on a sperm supply from Georgia and North Florida.
And in Britain, they've now, on the official register of births and deaths, have now made it legal not to have a mother and father on the birth certificate, but in order to be more sensitive and accommodating of gay couples, you can now have two fathers or two mothers.
Or depending on, I think there was, I think the landmark case was in fact a couple, Barry and Tony from Chelmsford in England.
And they had been trying for a child for years and nothing seemed to work.
And then they figured out this might be because they were both men.
And so They arranged with a nice lady in California.
You know, they did the whole sort of fallopian timeshare thing and they got the whole thing sorted out.
And the California court allowed both men to be registered as the father of the baby on the California birth certificate.
And this is now apparently quite common.
You can have as many persons and as few genders as possible on the birth certificates that are occurring now in the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom, and everywhere.
So that's good.
All adds to the general gayety of life.
And speaking of which, I see that Ben and Jerry's have introduced to celebrate the dawn of gay marriage in Vermont yesterday, a special gay marriage ice cream because they thought it was appropriate to mark the occasion called Hubby Hubby.
It's usually their flavor is called Chubby Hubby, but they've introduced a new gay version, Hubby Hubby, and they said they're handing it out free across Vermont.
So if you're driving up I-89 or I-91 and you're flagged down and somebody offers you the, says, why do you flag me down?
It's to give you the gay marriage ice cream.
Don't worry, that's perfectly normal in Vermont.
That's nothing to worry about.
If you're just generally accosted in the Green Mountain state and given the gay mountain...
Twice.
Yeah, HR says, is it the same ice cream?
Or does it have twice the number of nuts?
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Almost all the gay ice cream jokes are undoable.
I'm not like Rush with his mean-spirited Barney Frank planetary joke.
You know, I don't go there.
It's like, so I'm not going to do all that stuff about, no, what was the name of the original flavor, Tootie Fruti?
I'm not going to do any of those kind of cheap, cheap gags.
It's inappropriate.
It's a nice thing.
Ben and Jerry have introduced Vermont's first gay ice cream.
And HR's mocking this, and he can do his cheap cracks.
But this is a date that will go down in history.
Make a note of it.
September the 1st, 2009, Vermont's first gay ice cream.
This is what keeps America at the cutting edge.
We're not going to talk about a lot of gay ice cream issues unless you feel there's a particular angle there you wish to explore.
1-800-282-2882, we will discuss some of the other great changes covered up that President Obama and his pals have planned for us straight ahead.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
I'll be here tomorrow and don't forget the great Walter Williams comes in on Friday.
You may have seen a column in the New York Times by David Brooks called The Obama Slide.
He soured on Obama and David Brooks is one of these impeccably moderate conservatives who thought Obama was just the greatest thing until recently.
There's a piece in the current New Republic, current issue of the New Republic, called The Courtship, which is the story of the romance between Barack Obama and David Brooks, dating back to the time in the spring of 2005 that David Brooks arrived for a chat with the then new Senator Obama at his office.
As they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn't take long for the two men to click.
I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, Brooks recently told me, but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don't know political philosophy better than me.
I got the sense he knew both better than me.
So like he was in love with Obama from the word go.
It was love at first sight.
This is what David Brooks said of that first encounter.
Quote, I remember distinctly an image of, we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, Brooks says.
And I'm thinking, A, he's going to be president, and B, he'll be a very good president.
So look, this is a useful tip.
If any of you ever happen to be interviewed by a New York Times columnist and the guy just keeps staring at your pants, don't panic.
Don't go into one of those gay panic modes where you think, oh my goodness, is he going to get out the Ben and Jerry gay ice cream next or whatever?
What is it?
It's perfectly normal.
It means he thinks you're a hell of a leader.
And of course he may, you know, I don't know how you can tell from the crease in somebody's pants that they're going to be president.
Although I guess if there are a lot of moments in Bill Clinton's life when he'd be sitting opposite him on the couch and he wouldn't have any pants, so you couldn't admire the crease in them.
But at any rate, David Brooks was in love with Barack Obama for a large part and has been for a large part of the last four years.
He wrote a column back in 2006, before it emerged that Obama would even be running for president called Run, Barack, Run.
Now he's saying, this guy is in deep trouble.
He's sliding off the cliff.
Can his presidency be saved?
And he identifies the fault as this.
The administration hasn't been able to pull it off, by which he means retain the affection of so-called independents and moderates.
From the stimulus to health care, it has joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress.
This is David Brooks' analysis in the New York Times of what's wrong, gone wrong for the Obama administration.
Jay Nordlinger at National Review quoted the British prison doctor, Theodore Dalrymple, who used to visit all these people in prison, who used to tell him that I fell in with the wrong crowd.
And Dr. Dalrymple said, in all the years he met these prisoners, they'd all, quote, fallen in with the wrong crowd.
He met tons of people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but he never met anybody who actually belonged to the wrong crowd.
He never met the wrong crowd.
And that's basically the David Brooks argument.
Poor old Obama has fallen in with the wrong crowd.
No, he hasn't fallen in with the liberal leadership.
He is the liberal leadership.
He is the wrong crowd.
The idea that somehow he just got kind of misled and fell in with the wrong crowd, and that's why his healthcare plans and his stimulus and all the rest are in trouble is completely preposterous.
This is his political philosophy, a vast expansion of continent-wide statism.
This is Barack Obama's political philosophy, the one David Brooks likes so much, in action.
We're going to talk about that straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to be with you.
Rush back on Monday.
Walter Williams here on Friday.
I was talking about this David Brooks column in the New York Times, where Brooks says he's fallen out of love with Obama.
The pant leg is still perfectly creased, but it just doesn't do it for him anymore.
The guy's in big trouble.
What does he need to do?
As Brooks sees it, the thing is he's lost the American center, the centrists, and he needs to be more centrist, centrist, centrist, centrist.
As Brooks concludes, this is a country that has always been suspicious of centralized government.
Most Americans still admire Obama and want him to succeed.
But if he doesn't proceed in a manner consistent with the spirit of the nation and the times, voters will find a way to stop him.
The president's challenge now is to halt the slide.
That doesn't mean giving up his goals.
It means he has to align his proposals to the values of the political center.
Fiscal responsibility, individual choice, and decentralized authority.
I love all those things.
Fiscal responsibility, individual choice, decentralized authority.
But where does, where does David Brooks get the idea that these are so-called values of the political center?
The crisis for America, the danger for America in the years ahead, is that fiscal responsibility, individual choice, and decentralized authority are conservative values.
They're no longer bipartisan values.
The Democrats no longer even pay lip service to this thing.
The fact that we're sitting here having spent the last few months talking about the governmentalization of one sixth of the American economy in order, in effect, to reward people who simply can't cope with fiscal responsibility and individual choice, tells us that those values no longer resonate with large chunks of the American electorate.
Brooks can't quite bring himself to address this.
These are conservative values.
That may be unfortunate.
It might be a better country if they were bipartisan values and accepted by all.
But the fact is that the people who argue for fiscal responsibility, individual choice, and decentralized authority are conservatives.
And that's why the only case against Obama that works is the conservative case against America.
And to listen to a man who the New York Times thinks is a great thinker and has hired for one of the most prestigious columnist roles in the nation, unable, even in the depths of his disenchantment with his hero Obama, not realize that what we need to do is actually get back to those bedrock conservative values and restore them and make them centrist again.
And you don't do that.
You don't do that when you can't even tell the truth.
The crisis of America is that far too many so-called moderates and independents and all the people who regard themselves as non-mean-spirited, non-partisan, non-of the unpleasant things, they don't do, they don't make any of the unpleasant cracks about people that mean-spirited conservatives make and all the rest of it.
The fact is there's been a great retreat from the principles of fiscal responsibility, individual choice, and decentralized authority.
If Obama gets his way, by the time of the next federal election, a majority of adult Americans will no longer pay federal income tax.
They'll have been removed from the federal tax rolls entirely by one piece of sleight of hand or another.
So in effect, they will be able to vote themselves more lollipops from the ever smaller band of people who still pay federal tax.
What kind of fiscal responsibility does that teach?
What about individual choice?
If you're not prepared, if you're not prepared to accept the reality of individual choice about something as basic as your own health, if you say, no, no, no, I don't want to, I don't want to have the problems of making decisions about whether I need this procedure or whether I need that, why can't the government just handle all that?
only having this discussion because of the great retreat from individual choice and fiscal responsibility and decentralized authority that has taken place in the United States in recent years.
In a way, America is just catching up to this.
A lot of other Western nations, Canada, Britain, Western Europe, got on board with this direction many decades ago.
They're already there now, and it's caused them huge problems in a way, not just the financial ones.
It's beyond that.
It gets right to the core of what it means to be a nation and whether you can even survive as a nation.
But the fact of the matter is that what Brooks tries to pass off as centrist values are not centrist values in the American political landscape.
They're explicitly conservative values.
And that's why the pushback against this president, when you look at these tea parties, is not coming from so-called moderates and independents.
It's coming from, in many respects, small business people, people who are in the middle.
They're essentially the demographic that's caught between the ruling class and the dependent class, between the Ted Kennedy class and all the people that the benign paternalism of good King Ted was designed to help.
Because for the Obamas of this world, how do you advance your political agenda?
You do it by building a coalition between the government class, between the ruling class, and the dependent class.
And if you have enough bureaucrats and you have enough government, you have enough dependents who go to the office where the bureaucrats are and collect their checks, if you can build that coalition between the dependents and the bureaucrats, you can be in power forever.
If you look at a lot of European countries, that's essentially the governing party's alliance.
It's the party of government bureaucrats and the party of people on welfare.
If you look at Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, where about 75% of the economy is actually government spending, it's a permanent alliance between the ruling class and the dependent class.
And the people who are going to these tea parties are that ever-shrinking sliver of people in between those two blocks.
They're the dynamic sector of the economy.
They're the small businessmen, not the big businessmen, not the Archer Daniels Midlands types who've got a problem and all they have to do is place a call to their guy in Washington and he fixes it for them.
But just guys who run small businesses and the tax burden and the regulation on those businesses required to support the bureaucratic class and the dependent class is simply too much.
And that's why they're at tea parties and that's why they are mad.
1-800-282-2882 on the Russian Imbo Show.
This is Mark Stein sitting in Farash.
We'll take your calls straight ahead.
Mark Stein in Farush on the EIB network.
The Wilmington News Journal in Delaware, which is the Vice President Biden's home state, has a front-page story in this morning about the exciting new jobs created by the stimulus.
And you may have seen all these, as you drive around, you see all this highway construction going.
Well, you don't actually see any highway construction, but you see cones and signs for where highway construction will be in place.
And you see this little logo they've got onto it.
This piece, this next 300 yards of scarified pavement is brought to you by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, putting America back to work again or whatever.
So it is a classic Obama thing.
You know, there's no work going on, but he's actually got it brandoed and branded and logoed, and the marketing guys have come up with this fancy sign for it.
And presumably, at some point, they've like dug up all the pavement and they've left it all scarified, and you have to drive around the cones to snake by.
Presumably, at some point, guys with road graders and whatnot will actually be on there performing some bits of highway reconstruction, one truss.
And at that point, we'll need flaggers.
Those guys who stand there with the sign that say stop, slow, you know, you can go, you can don't go.
And they will need and they will stand there, and we will drive by this next bit of highway skimming brought to you by the Obama stimulus package.
Now, what is this doing to stimulate the economy?
Well, according to the Wilmington News Journal, they've now got flagging school.
This is schools where you go to learn how to hold the sign saying slow one way and stop the other way.
They say federal stimulus projects have created record levels of road work across the country.
Hey, isn't that great?
And that means there's an ever greater demand on flagging school where you go to learn how to become a flagger.
So they've now increased the amount of money they're stimulating the flagging industry so that you want to be assured with all this highway construction going on that these are fully federally accredited flaggers.
So that's what Obama is investing in: flaggers for highways.
And right now, I don't know what it is.
It's a couple of weeks at flagging school.
But I'm sure once the federal stimulus money really kicks in, it'll be a six-year course like everything else in America.
So that is great news.
Incidentally, I saw my in New Hampshire not so long ago, I saw my assistant's old doctor, retired doctor, standing holding one of those flagging signs saying stop and slow.
I don't know what happened there.
He did like the idea of where Obama's healthcare plans were taking, so he decided to get out of the high-priced medical business and into the flagging business.
But I don't know whether that's yet a widespread trend.
Mark Snyder, sitting in for Rush of the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Let's go to Philip in Dallas.
Philip, you're on the EIB network.
Great to have you with us.
God bless you, Mark Stein, for your contribution to the national conversation.
Well, I'm planning.
We sinister foreigners have to do our bit to keep things going, too.
Well, you're far less sinister than many of the people who donated to Obama, I would imagine.
So anyway, I wanted to ask you: Rush and the Republican Party in general have been held accountable for Russia's statement that he hoped Obama failed.
And by Solowinski's rules, we're supposed to hold people accountable to their own rule book.
I was wondering when someone from the press would hold Obama accountable for openly stating that he wanted America to fail in Iraq.
Because he did an interview in September of 2008 with Bill O'Reilly, and he admitted that we had succeeded beyond our wildest dreams in Iraq with the troop search.
Right.
And then ABC's Terry Moran asked him, if he had to do it over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?
And Obama said no.
No.
He rejected the decrease in violent attacks.
He rejected the decrease, tremendous decrease in deaths of American soldiers.
He rejected the stability that the troop search had brought just because he opposed George Bush.
Yes, and you make a good point there that Rush, everyone harps on about Rush saying he wants America, he doesn't want America to fail.
That's what they portray it as.
He wants Obama's massive expansion of statism to fail because it will be bad for America.
That's what Rush wants.
What Obama and Harry Reid and others said on Iraq was that in effect, because it was George W. Bush's war and it was politically convenient for them to oppose them, that they were willing to invest in American defeat in Iraq.
And that's actually why he's got onto all this trouble now in Afghanistan, which we'll talk about a bit later.
Because what the Democrats did was basically talk up Afghanistan as the good war in order, simply as a kind of rhetorical dodge to enable them to attack Bush for going into Iraq.
Their whole thing was Iraq was a massive distraction from Afghanistan, whereas the real war is.
And now that Bush, in his final months in office, presided over the surge and made Iraq manageable, and the focus is once again on Afghanistan, Obama has a problem because he's now being called to deliver on his assertion that Afghanistan is where the effort should be in Afghanistan is the real war.
But you're absolutely right.
We had a situation where, and I believe he was the first, we had a, even among the Democratic primary candidates, who was explicitly advocating American defeat in Iraq, in a major war.
And that has surely got to be more serious.
That's when the war is on, when the war's ongoing.
It's one thing to say we don't want to get into a war before it's happened, but once you're in a war, you have two choices.
You can win it or you can lose it.
And too many senior Democrats decided we're going to get into the side that wants to lose it because it's politically convenient for us.
Rush, when he talks about Obama failing, he's talking about health care policies that have not yet been implemented.
He was talking about a stimulus package that hadn't yet been passed.
He was talking about cap and trade that hasn't yet been inflicted on every household and every small business in America.
And it's entirely legitimate to say, I want this president to fail because I don't think those policies are right for America.
And if they're put into effect, they will destroy America.
And America will not be what it is.
Rather than that's an entirely valid position in a multi-party democracy to take.
And it's entirely different from what senior Democrats did when you're in a war.
Once it's gone, you can have your own view on the war before it starts.
But once you're in it, you've got two choices.
You can win it or you can lose it.
And too many Democrats embrace losing it as a politically convenient strategy.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
You know something that's very odd, by the way.
You're looking at Obama's strategy.
He's decided to go and give a big speech to the children.
I mean, the school children, not just the rest of us, which is the way he normally talks to us.
But he's been having diminishing success with his grown-up speeches, where he goes here and there and gives his speeches in healthcare.
So he's going to have himself pumped into every single school in the country, every single public school in the country, on September the 8th and give a kind of welcome back to school address by the president.
This has never been done before by any president.
President Obama is going to beam himself into every schoolhouse in the country and give an address to school children.
And I don't know how you feel about this, but it doesn't seem quite right to me.
I notice when he was inaugurated, that more and more schools actually broke.
They went in the school gym and watched the inauguration.
And the justification for that, when people said, Well, wait a minute, did you bring all the kids into the school gym to watch President Bush's inauguration?
They said, No, no, no, but this is an historic moment because this is the first African-American president, so bringing all the kids in to watch his inauguration.
Well, now, these same schoolhouses, who I don't think would have been that eager for President Bush to beam himself into addressing the school children, are going to be having Obama giving them a personal message on September the 8th in every classroom in the country.
Something's not quite right about that.
It doesn't seem entirely consistent with the idea of education.
And it seems to be closer to what is a consistent part of the model here that he learned in Chicago from William Ayres: that essentially the public education system is a useful tool for getting children to be good subjects of the big government state when they grow up.
We'll talk about that and lots more of your calls straight ahead.
Mark Stein, sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show, 1-800-282-2882.
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