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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 anchor man, 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 uh tomorrow, Thursday, and the great Walter Williams will be in on Friday, and then Rush returns Monday.
Always an honor to be here.
Uh I'm from the foreign exchange student wing of the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a terrific exchange program.
Uh 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 I've been overseas um mostly in London.
Just got back uh yesterday.
Uh, but uh as I said, mostly in London, the uh the hip replacement I put in for in 1988 finally came through.
Uh but I'm just back.
Uh so I miss most of the Kennedy coverage.
Uh and uh no, I didn't.
Well, there's another six weeks to go, I think.
The uh but anyway, what is it, the Obama administration uh call it?
An overseas contingency operation.
Uh so the minute the Cabalot prostrations uh start up, it's always good to have an overseas contingency operation that you can duck out for.
So I I was uh uh overseas.
Um but I love the way when 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 uh uh of glory.
The one song from the score they never seem to quote is uh how to handle a woman.
It's kind of odd that when they're doing this this uh this camelor racket.
Um I see this talk, I see this talk that uh Senator Kennedy's widow might succeed to his Senate seat, uh, or his uh his nephew, uh Congressman Joseph Patrick Kennedy the second, uh not to be con not to be confused with Senator Kennedy's son, Congressman Patrick Joseph Kennedy the second.
Uh so we may we may have, and I don't follow Democrat uh politics that closely, but we may have an all-Kennedy primary in Massachusetts.
Uh Joseph Patrick Kennedy the second versus Patrick Joseph Kennedy the second versus the uh little known Kennedy cousin, uh Joseph Patrick, Patrick Joseph Kennedy Schlossberg Smith Shriver Lawford III.
Um it's a good thing America got rid of that whole hereditary ruler thing back in 1776, I think.
Uh uh but um speaking speaking of uh demise, did you know that in Europe you can invest in American death?
Uh you 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 uh the last time I was sitting in for Rush a couple of weeks ago.
Uh 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, uh, has become a pretty much a sure thing.
Well, no, the the Yeah, I'm talking about individual Americans kicking the bucket, not the 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 uh but but Europeans are now able to invest in American death.
Um the German magazine, but is it which sounds great because uh we've heard so much about the lousy life expectancy here in the United States that that investing in Americans dying would seem to be pretty much uh uh a shoe in, but it it hasn't worked out like that.
De Spiegel, the German magazine says betting headline, betting on U.S. 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?
It's is there nothing is there nothing that goes right?
So the German German investors are all German German retirees.
They live longer, but they spend their last years broke because they invested in American in American death plans.
Gisbert Sabella 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 nonigenarians 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 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.
Variation on the Arabic for holy war.
The Superior Court upheld two lower court rulings, allowing the name on grounds that it is recognized for males in Arabic speaking countries, which of course Germany will soon be any any day now.
But that's that's nice, lovely, lovely little uh lovely little name uh jihad.
Uh and they said, well, you know, it's uh it's quite a common name in Islam, and uh one shouldn't uh one shouldn't look to um take any pejorative view of this.
And there's good news too for American babies, the California Cryobank's donor lookalike service now offers would-be parents the chance to s search for prospective donors based on which famous face the sperm donor most closely resembles.
Uh so right now uh you could have uh 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 lookalike baby is Ben Affleck.
The uh the actor who uh who did so much, he he remember one point during the Kerry campaign, he was touring with John Kerry.
Uh Ben Affleck, I think apart from that one film, what was that first film he made?
Uh 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.
Uh the theater I saw it in, they were rooting for the Japanese Air Force.
They said, no, no, he's over to your left.
It's uh the um so uh but apparently uh a lot of uh a lot of parents are going for the Ben Affleck sperm when they go to the California Cryobank and the donor looker like uh donor looker like service.
Uh into that 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 sperm donors.
Uh because the this is where this is a good lesson in free market economics.
Uh the government's made it illegal for you to sell your sperm.
Uh 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.
Uh, but um you get but you can't sell it.
So they're now just 30 sperm donors in the 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.
Uh a William Shatner.
Let's say you wanted, let's say you wanted to have a uh your baby look like William Shatner.
You can't go to a sperm clinic in Canada and say, that's great, uh have uh would you rather have the uh the William Shatner uh or the Leslie Nielsen.
And they'll say, you can't make that kind of choice.
That's you can 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.
They because there's only thirty 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 calling 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.
Uh uh Canadian women have now been subjected to the ultimate indignity, uh they're having to use American sperm.
Eighty percent of uh 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 uh one sinister little North Floridian sperm at a time.
It 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 uh onto the Canadian onto the Canadian side.
And this is this is uh there is a metaphor here.
Somewhere buried in this, there is a metaphor for what happens when you ha when you have an over-governmentalized uh view of uh view of uh life.
Uh so that's that's the uh that's the story uh there.
By the way, they've just changed.
Speaking of babies, because we were talking about been talking about babies, the nice little baby boy G had born in Germany, uh the way everybody in California uh is getting the Ben Affleck sperm, so there's gonna be millions of little baby Ben Affleck's wandering around in California, the way uh the the way the poor Canadians are all gradually turning into Georgian crackers simply because of the simply because they're now utterly dependent on a sperm supply from Georgia and North Florida.
Uh and in uh Britain, they've now on the official register of births and deaths uh have now made it uh legal uh not to have a mother and father on the bur birth certificate, but in order to be more sensitive and accommodating of gay couples,
you can now have two fathers or two mothers, uh or depending on I think there was I think the landmark case was in fact a couple uh Barry and Barry and Tony from Chelmsford in England.
And uh they had been trying for a child for uh years and nothing seemed to work.
Uh and then they figured out this might be because they were b both men.
Uh and so they uh so they arranged with a nice lady in uh California, you know, they did the whole sort of fallopian timeshare thing and they got the whole thing sorted out.
And they uh 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.
Uh you can have as many persons uh uh uh and as few genders as possible uh on the birth certificates uh that are uh occurring now in uh the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom uh and everywhere.
So that's that's good.
All adds to the uh general uh general gaiety of life.
And speaking speaking of which, I see that um the s the Ben and Jerry's have introduced uh uh uh uh to celebrate the dawn of gay marriage in Vermont yesterday, a special gay marriage ice cream, because uh they 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, uh hubby hubby, and they said they're handing it out free across Vermont.
So if you're driving if you're driving up I-89 or I-91 and you're flagged down uh and somebody offers you uh the says uh uh wh why did why do you flag me down?
Uh it's to give you the gay marriage ice cream.
Don't worry, that's perfectly normal in Vermont.
That's that's nothing to worry about.
Uh if you're if you're just generally accosted in the Green Mountain state and given the uh game gay mountain.
Twice Yeah, HR says, is it the same ice cream?
Uh or does it have twice the number of nuts?
It's yeah.
That's that's pretty much it.
Almost all the 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 I don't go there.
It's like uh so I'm not gonna do all that stuff about no, what was the name of the original flavor, Tuti Frutti.
I'm not gonna do any of those kind of cheap uh cheap gags.
It's inappropriate.
It's a so it's a nice thing.
Ben and Jerry uh have introduced uh Vermont's first gay ice cream.
And and uh HR's mocking this, and uh he can do his cheap cracks, but this is a date that uh they will that will go down in history.
Make a note of it.
September the first, two thousand and nine, Vermont's first gay ice cream.
This is what this is what is this is what's keeping this is what keeps America at the cutting edge.
Uh we'll talk we're not gonna talk about a lot of gay ice cream issues unless you feel there's a uh there's a particular angle there you wish to explore.
Uh 1-800-282-2882, we will uh discuss uh some of the other great changes uh covered up uh that uh President Obama and his pals have planned for us uh straight ahead.
Mark Stein sitting in for rush on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in for rush on the EIB network.
I'll I'll be here tomorrow, and don't forget the great Walter Williams uh comes in on on Friday.
Uh you may have seen a column in the New York Times by David Brooks called the Obama Slide.
Uh he soured on Obama.
And David Brooks uh is one of these impeccably moderate conservatives uh who was uh who thought Obama was just the greatest thing until 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 uh David Brooks, dating back to the time uh in uh the spring of 2005, uh that David Brooks arrived uh for a chat with uh the uh then new Senator Obama at his office.
Uh 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.
And I'm thinking, A, he's going to be president, and B, he'll be a very good president.
Uh so it look, this is a useful tip.
If any of you ever happen to be interviewed by a New York Times column, and uh you you the guy just keeps staring at your pants.
Don't panic.
Don't don't don't go into one of those gay panic modes where you think, oh my goodness, is he gonna get out the Ben and Jerry gay ice cream next or whatever?
What is this?
It's perfectly normal.
It means he thinks you're a hell of a leader.
Uh he's uh 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 gonna be president.
Although I guess if uh the there are a lot of moments in uh Bill Clinton's life when you'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 uh at any rate, David Brooks was in love with uh with Barack Obama uh for a large part and has been for a large part of the last four years.
He wrote a column uh uh back in uh 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?
Uh and he identifies the fault as this from the s the administration hasn't been able to pull it off.
Uh uh 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.
Uh this this is David Brooks's uh analysis in the New York Times of what's wrong gone wrong for the Obama administration.
Uh Jane Ordling of National Review uh quoted the uh British prison doctor, Theodore Dalwymple, who used to visit all these people in prison who used to tell him that I fell in with the wrong crowd.
And uh Dr. Dalwimple said in all the years he he met these 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 uh poor old Obama has fallen in with the wrong crowd.
No.
He hasn't fallen in with the liberal leadership.
He is the liberal readership.
He is the wrong crowd.
The idea that somehow he just got kind of uh misled uh and fell in with the wrong crowd, and that's why his health care plans and his stimulus and all the rest are in trouble is completely preposterous.
This is his political philosophy, uh a vast expansion of uh 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 in the New York Times uh where uh Brooks says he's now he's fallen out of love with Obama.
The the pant leg is still perfectly creased, but it just doesn't do it for him anymore.
The guy's in big trouble.
Uh what does he need to do?
As Brooks sees it, the thing is he's lost uh 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.
Uh 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?
Uh the crisis for America, the danger for America in the year uh in the years ahead, uh is that uh fiscal responsibility, individual choice, and decentralized authority uh are uh conservative values.
Uh they're no longer bipartisan values.
Uh the the Democrats no longer even pay lip service to this thing.
The fact that we're sitting here uh having spent the last few months talking about the governmentalization of one-sixth of the American economy uh in order uh in effect uh to reward people who simply can't cope with fiscal responsibility and individual choice uh tells us uh that those values no longer resonate with large chunks of the uh uh American uh electorate.
Uh Brooks can't quite bring himself to address this.
Uh, these are conservative values.
Uh that's 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 uh are conservatives.
Uh and that's why you have to that's why the only case against Obama that works is the conservative case against America.
And to listen to a man who uh the New York Times thinks is a great thinker and has hired as uh for one of the most prestigious uh columnist roles in the nation, uh unable, even in uh the depths of his disenchantment with his hero Obama not realize uh that what we need to do is actually get back uh to uh 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 uh is that far too many so-called moderates and independents uh and all the people who regard themselves as non-mean-spirited, nonpartisan, none of the unpleasant things.
They don't do they don't make uh any of the uh uh uh any of the unpleasant uh cracks about people that mean spirited conservatives make and all the rest of it.
Uh the 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, uh a majority uh of uh uh of adult Americans will no longer pay federal income tax.
They'll have been uh they'll have been uh removed from the federal tax rolls entirely by one uh uh uh uh 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 ta uh teach?
What about individual choice?
If you're not prepared, if you're not prepared uh to accept the reality of individual choice about something as basic as your own uh uh health, uh if you don't if if you say, no, no, no, I don't want to I don't want to have the problems of making decisions about about whether I need this procedure or whether I need that, why can't the government just handle all that?
We're only having this discussion because of the great retreat uh from individual choice uh and fiscal responsibility and decentralized authority that has taken place uh in the United States in in recent years.
And in a way, America is just catching up to this.
Uh a lot of uh other Western nations, uh Canada, uh Britain, uh Western Europe, uh got on board with this uh this direction many uh decades ago.
They're already there now, and it's caused them huge problems, uh in in a way, not just the financial ones.
It's uh it's beyond that.
It gets right to the core of what what it means to be a nation and whether you can even survive as a nation.
Uh 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.
Uh and that's why the pushback uh against this president, when you look at these tea parties, is not is not coming uh from so-called moderates and independents.
It's coming from uh, in many respects, uh small business people, uh people who are in the in the middle.
They're they're essentially the demographic that's caught between the ruling class and the dependent class.
Uh between the Ted Kennedy class and all the people that the benign paternalism of uh uh of Good King Ted was designed to help.
Because b because uh for the Obamas of this world, uh how do you advance your political agenda, you do it by building a coalition between the government class, between the ruling class uh and the dependent class.
And if you put if you have enough bureaucrats uh and you have enough uh government uh you have enough dependents who uh go to the office where the bureaucrats are and collect their checks, if you can build that coalition uh between the dependents and the bureaucrats, uh you can be in power forever.
If you if you look at uh a lot of European countries, that's essenti essentially the governing party's alliance.
It's the party of government bureaucrats and the party of people on welfare.
Uh if you look at um if you look at Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, where about uh seventy-five percent of the economy is actually government spending, uh it's 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.
Uh they're the dynamic sector of the economy, they're the small businessmen, not the big businessmen, not the Archer Daniels Midlands types uh who 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 uh uh uh and the tax burden and the regulation on those businesses required to support the bureaucratic class and uh the dependent class is uh is simply too much.
And that's why they're at Tea Parties, and that's why they are mad.
Uh 1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
This is Mark Stein sitting in for Rush.
We'll take your calls straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Uh the Wilmington News Journal in Delaware, uh which is uh the Vice President Biden's home state has a front page story in this morning about the exciting new jobs created by the stimulus.
Uh and you uh you may have seen all these uh as you drive around, uh 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 on to it.
This this piece, uh this this uh this this next three hundred yards of scarified pavement is brought to you by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, uh putting America back to work again or whatever.
So it as 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 round the cones to snake by uh presumably at some point uh guys with um with road graders and uh whatnot will actually be on there uh performing some bits of highway reconstruction.
One one trusts.
And at that point we'll need flaggers.
Those guys who stand there with the sign that says stop slow, you know, you can go, you can don't go.
And they will need uh uh and they will uh and they will stand there and we will drive by the uh this n this next bit of highway skimming brought to you by the uh Obama stimulus package.
Uh now th it 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 s hold the sign saying slow one way and stop the other way.
Uh, they say federal stimulus projects have created record levels of road work across the country.
Hey, isn't that great?
Uh and and uh 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 uh the amount of money uh they're stimulating the flagging industry.
So that uh uh you want to be assured with all this highway construction going on that these are fully uh 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.
Uh, but I'm sure once the federal stimulus money really kicks in, it'll be a six-year course like everything else in in uh in America.
So that is that is great news.
Uh incidentally, I saw my uh 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.
I don't know what happened there.
He did like the idea of where Obama's uh health care 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 Snide sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Uh let's go to uh 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 I'm playing.
We sinister foreigners have to do our bit uh to 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 uh the Republican Party in general have been held accountable for Russia's statement that he hoped Obama failed.
And uh 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 uh Terry Moran asked him, if you 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, the tremendous decrease in death of American soldiers.
He rejected the stability that the troop search had brought just because he opposed George Bush.
Yes.
And and you you make a good point there that uh Rush uh everyone harps on about Rush saying he wants uh he wants America he he doesn't want America to fail.
That's what they portray it as.
He wants Obama's uh massive expansion of statism to fail because it will be bad for America.
That's what Rush wants.
Uh what uh Obama uh and Harry Reid and others uh said on Iraq was that uh uh in effect, because it was George W. Bush's war and it was politically convenient for them to oppose them, uh, that they were willing to invest in American defeat in Iraq.
And that's actually why uh he's got onto all this trouble now in Afghanistan, which we uh w which we'll talk about uh uh a bit later, because what he is what it what the uh Democrats did was basically talk up Afghanistan as the good war in in uh in order uh simply as a kind of uh rhetorical dodge to enable them uh 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 uh Bush, in his final months in office, presided over the surge uh and made Iraq manageable, uh, and the focus is once again on Afghanistan, uh Obama has a problem because he's now being called to deliver on uh his assertion that Afghanistan is where the effort should be in Afghanistan is is the real war.
But you're absolutely right.
We had a situation where uh and I believe he was the first.
We had a uh even among the Democratic primary candidates who was explicitly uh advocating American uh defeat uh in uh in Iraq, in a major war.
And that has surely got to be more serious.
Uh 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 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 gonna get into the we're gonna get into the side that wants to lose it because it's politically convenient for us.
Uh Rush, when he talks about Obama uh failing, he's talking about health care policies that have not yet been implemented.
He's we 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 uh 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.
Uh rather than uh th that's an entirely valid position uh in a multi-party democracy to uh to take.
And it's entirely different uh from what uh senior Democrats did when you're in a war, uh once it's gone, you can be 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 uh 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.
Uh he's he's decided to go and give a big speech to the children.
I mean the school children, not uh just the rest of us, which is the way he normally talks to us.
But he's been having uh diminishing success with his grown-up speeches, where he goes uh here and there and gives his speeches in health care.
So he's gonna have himself pumped into every single school in the country, uh every single public school in the country on September the eighth and give a kind of welcome back to school address by the president.
This has never been done before by any by any president.
Uh President Obama is gonna beam himself into every schoolhouse in the country and give an uh an address uh to school children.
And I I don't know how you feel about this, but it doesn't seem quite right to me.
Uh I notice on his uh 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, uh these same schoolhouses, who I don't think would have been that eager for President Bush to beam themselves beam himself into addressing the schoolchildren, uh are going to be having Obama uh giving them a personal message on September the eighth In every classroom in the country.
Something is uh something's not quite right about that.
Uh it doesn't uh it doesn't seem entirely consistent uh with uh with the idea of uh uh education.
And and it seems to be closer to what is uh a consistent part of the model here uh uh that he learned in in Chicago from William Ayres, that essentially the public education system is a useful tool uh for getting children uh 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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