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June 10, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:38
June 10, 2010, Thursday, Hour #3
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Let's see what we've accomplished so far on today's program.
We've introduced the Rush audience to Sharon Angle, who we think has a really good chance of beating Harry Reid.
Do you understand how big a deal that would be?
If Harry Reed goes down in Nevada, what that says?
It's as powerful a statement as the Democrats losing Massachusetts.
We also let everybody know about the impact that some conservative economists think is going to have and going to occur when the bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year.
I want to move on.
The point I'm about to make I think is really good.
I don't know what you think, but I think it's really good.
President Obama has been trying to deal with the oil spill with one goal in mind.
How does he look good?
Or how does he not get blamed?
That's the sole goal.
It's why the tone changes all the time.
It's why his own actions change all the time.
Do you realize he hasn't even talked to the chairman of BP?
He hasn't called him up and asked him.
Why would you not do that?
During my show prep today, I was at why wouldn't he do that?
Why wouldn't he call the chairman of BP?
Now the Gibbs yesterday is press secretary who's got to explain all of this stuff.
Well, you know, the we it's our understanding the boards of directors really make all of those decisions.
Well, did he call anybody a member of the board?
No.
We don't know why he didn't call anyone a BP other than it probably never occurred to him to do so.
He's the president of the United States.
We have a disaster going on in the Gulf.
We have a corporation that is front and center on that, and the president of the United States has never talked to the head of BP.
It never occurred to Obama that he might look better if he called the head of BP.
And all he's concerned about is how he looks here.
This is why they change the tone.
This is why he trotted out on morning TV on Monday and said he was going to quote, kick some ass or find out whose ass he needs to kick.
His crude statement, that wasn't just a slip.
That wasn't a mistake.
He chose those words specifically because he wanted to convey a different tone.
They were telling him, you've got to appear tough.
So he talks a little tougher and uses some crude language.
Well, I want to clue him in on something.
You don't get to decide what your image is.
That's what everybody else does.
You can't be perceived as being tough simply because all of a sudden you talk tough.
There's a story in the news today that I think really brings that one home.
It's in the uh, I think it's in the Wall Street Journal.
Maybe USA Today.
Maybe the New York Times, maybe somewhere else.
General Motors wants to drop the nickname Chevy.
They've decided that the company should be known as Chevrolet.
And even though people have been calling Chevrolets Chevies for decades, they think strategically there ought to be one brand.
There was one name that they're going to use for their product.
So they're telling all of their dealers, don't in your marketing use the term Chevy.
Don't use Chevy in a slogan.
In our own advertising, we're only going to use the word Chevrolet.
They can't make that decision.
Nicknames are ne who who's the last person that you know that gave himself a nickname?
Nobody gives themselves a nickname Prince.
Everybody gets their nickname from someone else.
You're tagged with it.
I when if you go back and write the history of Chevrolet and find out the first time the word Chevy was used, I guarantee you it wasn't anyone in that corporation.
It's a name people started to use.
Federal Express didn't start calling itself FedEx.
The public did.
The public said I'm going to FedEx this.
Go back with Coca-Cola.
I'm willing to bet it was the public that created the term Coke.
People decide nicknames.
People make these decisions.
So with President Obama sitting up there, I'm going to appear to be Tough, that doesn't work.
The public is going to decide if you are tough.
I'm going to appear as though I'm in charge.
The public will decide if you are in charge.
I'm going to appear leaderlike.
All of this stuff is being done to create an impression.
The problem is you can't create those impressions.
The impressions come the other way.
People are taking stock of this and they are rolling their eyes.
The response to this oil spill has been ridiculous.
It's all political.
I don't think most Americans ever felt that this was something that should be cleaned up within three days.
They understand that oil spills are big problems.
They didn't think the federal government could sweep in and fix it immediately.
But the administration reacted as though by deflecting the blame to BP and saying that none of this was their responsibility, they'd never get any blame for anything here.
All they've been doing is trying to manage the whole thing.
Well, there are consequences to that.
I have not been one of those people who thinks that this oil spill is the worst thing that ever happened.
In time it will be forgotten.
Now that time might be years, but the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, is going to survive this.
Oil is a natural substance.
The ocean is going to have an ability over time to deal with this massive slick.
Eventually the spill will be totally capped, the leak will be over, and we will be able to move on.
The planet is not in long-term peril because of this oil spill.
It's unsightly, it's brutally ugly, it's got all sorts of consequences for tourism in that part of the world.
But it's not exactly at the same level in my mind as the potential of Iran getting nuclear weapons.
Nonetheless, there is a public ramification from this.
If this spill results in the United States deciding we're not going to be serious about offshore drilling anymore, that would be the real tragedy of this accident.
President Obama's decision to declare a moratorium on deepwater oil drilling is a political response aimed at making him look good, but has terrible public policy implications.
The other side of this argument needs to be articulated.
Calling off deep water oil drilling, whether it be temporary, temporary or long term, cuts off a portion of this country's energy supply.
Secondly, it harms the states that are already hurt the worst by the fact that the spill occurred.
Louisiana's economy is dependent on the tens of thousands of jobs associated with offshore oil drilling.
The governor of Louisiana, Bobby Gindal, is strongly critical of this moratorium.
Even Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landro is saying this moratorium is a mistake.
So now Obama's here.
Well, okay, I've got to make it look like I'm in charge, like I'm doing something.
We'll declare a moratorium on drilling.
Suddenly there's backlash.
What's his response?
Again, it's political.
The government, the Obama administration is now demanding that BP pay all of the costs associated with all of the oil workers who are idled because of the moratorium.
There's no legal precedent that says that one company has to pay employees of all sorts of other companies because of an accident that occurred.
They're never going to be able to make this stick, but he gets a good headline.
He's getting tough with BP.
It's all being done for image.
What I want to talk about in this segment is the real practicality of this.
Oil drilling means upon occasion, there's going to be an accident.
That's the grown-up real world.
You can't drill for oil and guarantee that you'll never have a leak or never spill any.
This incident proved it.
But the technology has gotten better and better.
It hardly ever happens.
We can either be children and say, oh, we might spill some oil and call off deep water oil drilling.
Or we can make a prudent and sensible decision to do everything in our power to drill safely, but continue to drill.
There is no real alternative in our economy yet for oil.
It would be nice if we had one.
It would be nice if the electric car technology was fully embraced by everyone, and that we had enough electricity on the grid that everybody was running an electric car, and that the electric cars all had ranges of 800 miles without without needing a new charge.
It would be nice if there was some other fuel out there that could substitute for oil, but there isn't one.
In the meantime, we are stuck with oil.
And to say that we're going to stop drilling because we've had one spill of this magnitude from an offshore platform in decades is not responsible.
It's not sensible.
The one thing it is, however, is devastating to all of the people who work in this industry.
Offshore oil drilling is one of the few areas of the American economy that's been thriving in this lousy economy we've been in.
The companies that are involved in this are enormous.
And it isn't just the people that are working for the oil companies.
It's those that are involved in constructing the platforms.
It's all the industries that service these giant oil rigs.
There are tens of thousands of people in Louisiana and Texas alone who work here.
To call this off and say we're going to kill the deep water oil drilling industry because we've had one spill is a ridiculous overreaction.
And it's being done because the president of the United States make needs to make it look like he's done something.
He can't stop the leak, he can't clean up the ocean, he can't even pick up the phone and call the head of BP, I'll put a stop to this.
Well, there's damage being done to this as a result of this.
The same people who say we can't drill on land in Alaska are now going to say we can't drill in the middle of the ocean because something bad might occur.
But they've got no alternative for us.
Do we want oil prices to go back to a hundred dollars a barrel?
Do we want to shut down the American refineries?
Do we want to put this entire industry out of work?
When you're the president, when you sign up for that job, you don't have the same luxury that you do when you're a liberal academic sitting over there at Harvard or the University of Chicago, where you can pontificate that we need to move beyond oil.
This is a real actual problem.
And to shut down this industry as a way to try to tell the American public that you're doing something is reckless and irresponsible, and it is being done for the worst motivation.
It's to make a president who hasn't done anything on this issue look like he's doing something.
Well, he's not.
The one thing he's doing is making things worse by crippling an industry and putting people out of work.
1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number.
If you should I ask for people who disagree?
No.
If you agree with me, 1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number.
If you disagree with me, call up Obama and tell him you're proud of him.
I'm Mark Elling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
No World Cup coverage on today's edition of the Rush Limbaugh program.
The entire world can be in a tizzy about this.
We've moved on.
No World Cup coverage.
I'm doing the program tomorrow.
Might do some World Cup coverage then, but don't hold your breath on that.
Hockey coverage.
Great goal by Patrick Patrick Kane last night.
Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup.
Congratulations to them.
First time they won a championship in about 49 years.
Not a lot of success with the sports teams in Chicago, as we people in Milwaukee like to point out, in which they respond, Well, you don't have any success with your sports teams up there, which we really don't.
BP spilled a lot of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
I don't want to sit here and sound like an apologist for BP.
As oil companies go, I'm not even a big fan of BP.
BP is one of those lefty oil companies.
Read their ads over the last five years.
Renewable energy and they're into the ethanol and the whole thing.
They've always tried to pass themselves off as this environmentally friendly energy company.
You're an oil company.
Who are you kidding?
You make your money by selling oil, by drilling for oil.
That's what you do.
You don't have to pass yourself off as something else.
But they didn't intend to have the leak occur, and whether or not they should be doing a better job capping the leak, and whether or not they should have been ready to be able to contain the leak, is in my mind neither here nor there.
It happened.
What I'm dealing with is a president of the United States who was not prepared for this, whose administration was not prepared for this, and is trying to recover points politically by prop by implementing a disastrous public policy decision.
Just reading today's Wall Street Journal.
The Obama administration ratcheted up its demands on Wednesday that BPPLC cover all costs stemming from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, including millions of dollars in salaries of oil industry workers laid off because of the federal moratorium on deep water drilling.
Millions of dollars in salaries.
That's millions of dollars that aren't generating any tax revenue for the United States.
That's millions of dollars for families whose workers are idled.
He did that.
BP didn't put a moratorium on deep water drilling.
The Obama administration did that.
It is reckless.
It is not reasonable.
We had a coal mining disaster several weeks ago.
We didn't shut down all the coal mines.
We have problems.
There isn't an industry in America that doesn't have problems and there aren't safety concerns.
We need to grow up here.
If you're going to drill for oil, there may occasionally be a problem.
But until you come up with a substitute for oil, we need oil.
You want to call off all the drilling?
Okay, let's just ship it all over from the Middle East.
More oil is spilled in shipping than in drilling.
He's got no answer here.
He's taking a political cheap shot that is affecting people's lives.
Fort Myers, Florida, and I think Lon, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark, how you doing?
I'm great, thanks.
All right.
I just had a little comment here about the uh moratorium on the uh the oil drilling.
Um I'm a carpenter contractor here in Fort Myers, Florida, and uh that would be kind of like me having an accident on the job where uh one of my employees uh cut his finger off with a skill saw.
And uh I come up with a great idea of putting a moratorium on the on circular saws.
No more circular saws, they're dangerous.
What we're gonna do, we're gonna go back to the uh hand saw.
Well, it would be it would be the same response.
So what's that?
It would be the same response.
Yeah, it'd be like, well, you know, uh there's no more uh be no more accidents now because uh we're gonna use the handsaw, we're gonna get the job done faster, it's gonna go easier, and our cuts are gonna be better.
Well, and a lot of people want to react that way.
See, if this was a new industry, if this was a virgin industry, something we just started we just started doing, that would be one thing.
If we had never drilled in deep ocean water before, you could wow, we don't have a handle on this.
Maybe we need to step back for a moment.
We've been deep water drilling for decades.
This is not something that's brand new.
The moratorium isn't going To teach us anything.
We're not going to know any more about not spilling oil in deep water drilling in seven months than we know right now.
This was done for purely political reasons.
He had to do something.
It allowed him to stand up and issue an executive order.
But there are consequences associated with it.
Oil is already starting to inch up.
I think crude is around seventy-four dollars a barrel now.
These people are out of work.
If you want to send a signal that we are serious about our energy independence in this country, you've got to lift this moratorium.
But do understand why he did it.
He didn't know what else to do.
He didn't call up the chairman of BP because he didn't know what to say.
He had to do something, so he issues an order that is undermining the energy independence of this country.
I'm Mark Delling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
During the uh commercial breaks, we feed some of the uh old promos on the Rush program.
Do you know how many times I've heard dueling bozos now?
Every time I come here, you play it's still my favorite one.
We can't play it on the air anymore because it's so dated.
I mean, is Hollings even alive?
I don't know.
It's great stuff.
It always makes me.
You could hear these things, you'd really like it.
I'm Mark Belling, I'm sitting in for Rush.
We're talking about President Obama's handling of the oil spill.
I do think some conservatives have been a little off base in saying that the federal government should have taken care of this problem immediately.
The federal government has never been able to fix anything by snapping its fingers.
The federal government is all screwed up.
The federal bureaucracy is a mess.
There's a reason why we couldn't immediately make New Orleans all better after Katrina.
There's a reason why it takes the post office three days to get a letter from Milwaukee to Los Angeles.
The federal government in general isn't very good at anything.
It's not reasonable to think that we could have cleaned up, we could have stopped this oil spill immediately, and it's not reasonable to think that it could have instantly been cleaned up.
I think that it's unfair to put the same standard on President Obama that the Democrats put on President Bush with Hurricane Katrina.
But it's the Democrats that have created this notion that the federal government is the answer to everything.
It's the Democrats that are telling us they ought to run health care.
They can't, as is being proven here, run anything.
Their response to the financial crisis is this terrible banking regulation bill.
And trust me, I am no apologist for Wall Street or the banking industry.
I'm one of their critics.
But the answer to everything, well, we need more regulation.
Is there anything in the United States of America more regulated than offshore drilling?
There may be something, but I'm not sure what it is.
This is the most heavily regulated sector of the energy industry.
Massive permits, massive federal inspection, massive bureaucracy is involved in this.
The federal government micromanages every aspect of offshore oil drilling.
Yet this accident occurred.
More regulation doesn't solve anything.
Sometimes stuff happens.
The problem I have with the president is that his response has been so off-tone that he's been looking for a way to salvage his own image rather than deal with the elements of this that the federal government can and should be assisting with.
That's why all of a sudden, on Monday, the president starts using crude language about BP.
That's why yesterday the administration is coming out saying BP should pay for every laid-off oil worker without regard to what company they work for, what industry they're in, BP ought to do this, even though there's no legal basis for it.
And it's also why the president has declared a moratorium on deep water drilling.
It's all about how he looks.
It's all about his attempt to try to make it look as though he's somehow in charge of all of this.
Well, his initial response was slow.
His first trip to the Gulf was belated.
The fact that he's not talked to Hayward, the chairman of BP, indicates that this is nothing at all hands-on.
The president's totally disinvolved.
Now that he's getting feedback from the left, and his pollsters are telling him that he doesn't look good, he suddenly changes the tone and he issues all of these orders.
I think a big part of the problem here...
is that the president is again being ill served by his clownishly amateur staff.
I've been talking about this on my own show in Milwaukee all the time.
And I mentioned it starting last year on the occasions I fill in for Rush.
President Obama has surrounded himself with a weak inner circle.
You know, they ridiculed President Bush, all a bunch of oil guys, bunch of old goats.
They knew what they were doing.
Who here knows what he or she is doing?
Who's the chief of staff?
Ram Emanuel.
He's the guy that was supposed to make it look as though President Obama was on top of this.
He didn't give the president good advice.
Nobody is serving him here.
They don't know what to do because they're all a bunch of ankle biters whose entire career has been spent on the peanut gallery criticizing everyone else.
Now that they're in power, they don't know what to do.
Plus, I really think there's something else going on here.
Have you seen a lower profile from Ron Emmanuel than any chief of staff ever the last couple of months?
Does the president himself not seem distracted?
I believe they're all obsessed with the Blogoevich trial that just started in Illinois.
They're all deeply involved in that democratic operation.
Tony Rezco, the guy, the corrupt fixer who was in with Blagoevich, was the guy that bought Obama's proper the property next to Obama's house the same day Obama bought his.
Rahm Emanuel was a point man and a go-between between the Clinton administration and the officials in the state of Illinois.
He then became a member of Congress.
He's a powerful member of the Democratic machine.
No one knows what's on all those tape conversations.
No one knows what any of the witnesses are going to say.
And none of them know what Flakoyevich is going to say.
I think they're distracted by what's going on back there.
And that's why they've seemed so distant with regard to the oil problem in the Gulf.
Now, in an attempt to recover that, he's issuing all of these directives and he's suddenly talking tough, beating up on BP, all well and good.
The criticism I offer here is when that rhetoric turns to action and the action is counterproductive and destructive.
We need to lift the moratorium on deep water drilling.
We need to get the oil flowing again.
We need not to be issuing orders aimed at helping the president bolster his image.
But we need to manage this the best way we can.
To New Orleans itself and Wanda, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hi.
You're doing a great job sitting in for Rush.
Thank you.
I am from New Orleans and I agree with you 100%.
This is all political as far as Obama is concerned.
We here in New Orleans don't want a moratorium on the deep water drilling.
That's making the problem worse.
Our fishermen are now out of work because of the oil and now he's going to declare a moratorium on the oil industry.
Well, that's doubling the problem and making it that much worse.
I think that maybe some people are not aware that so much of the offshore oil industry is centered in Texas and Louisiana.
Some in Alabama and Mississippi, but Louisiana and Texas, that's the area where so many of these companies are based and where so many of the employees are located.
What struck me is that even Democratic politicians in Louisiana are saying lift this moratorium.
Our people are out of work.
I mean, when Mary Landrieu, who's the Democratic senator, comes forward, this isn't just me saying this.
He's taking a situation that's been an environmental problem and is turning it into an economic disaster that is not necessary.
But I did hear that Senator Landrieu did say that this is not the answer.
It is not the answer to do what he's doing.
It's just going to make problems worse.
Our economy is going to go down to nothing.
We're not going to have anything because now we don't have the seafood industry.
Yeah, I mean, if a school bus crashes, you don't shut down every school bus.
If if some if an airline has a terrible plane crash, we don't ground all the aircraft.
He's doing this, though, because it creates the impression that he's doing something.
Thank you for the call.
And as I said with regard to General Motors, you don't get to make your impressions on the public.
The public's going to decide whether or not you're in charge or in command.
This is just phony.
It's an attempt to make it appear as though he's got his hands on this issue when he clearly has not.
For a president who hasn't even talked to the head of the company that was responsible for the oil spill, or at least whose operation it was to turn around and shut down every other oil operation in the Gulf, to shut down all of our deep water drilling, is silly.
It's dangerous, and it has a real life impact on the people working in that industry, and it's going to have an impact on our own oil and gasoline supply if it goes on for much longer.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Do I get to plug tomorrow's topics?
Yes, I will be here tomorrow.
One of the things that I want to talk about is how the president is going to use, and in fact is just starting to use the oil spill as an excuse to pass cap and trade, which they're going to have a new name for because cap and trade, cap and tax didn't sell with the public the first time around.
I want to deal with that tomorrow.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
I was going to move away from this on today's program, and I'm getting defied.
Something else I want to say about it.
The way I approach every issue when I do my own local program, to the point that I bore my audience by saying this all the time, is I always put myself in the other guy's shoes.
Then I evaluate what they're doing.
So I'm gonna put myself in President Obama's shoes.
He's the president of the United States.
We have a major problem.
There's a spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and it looks like it's going to be big.
What would I do?
Obviously, the first thing I do is I consult the experts that I have in the administration to see how bad this is going to be and what the ramifications are.
Now I decide whether or not there's a federal role.
This thing's moved on, however, week after week after week.
And I'm trying to fathom how if I'm the guy that's in charge of the country, I could go all of this time without talking to the guy that's in charge of the company that is front and center on the leak in the spill itself.
How does that not happen?
Why would you not do it?
The only way you wouldn't do it is if you somehow think it's a bad idea for you.
But if you're actually running the country, if you're actually the president, that's a call you make.
There isn't a governor in this country.
If he or she had an oil spill in their own state that wouldn't call the head of the company that spilled the oil.
Why would you not do that?
It's what presidents do.
Even if it's for no other reason than to state, I want you to know that we're going to be on you on this on the cleanup, or I want you to know that you're going to have our support, or I want you to know that we need to coordinate our efforts, even if it's just symbolic happy talk like that, you still make that call.
It's what you do.
This guy runs BP.
Obama supposedly at least runs the United States government.
To not make that call to the head of BP is weird.
Who's supposed to make that call?
The Secretary of Energy?
Rama Manuel?
We know they're not going to let Biden make the call.
Who knows what he would say?
But this is a president that routinely, in fact, all the time, talks to heads of corporations.
When he wants to beat up on them, when he needs them for a photo op, he calls up the Wall Street heads, he calls up the banking heads when he wants to ball them out.
He didn't know what his tone was going to be, so he didn't call the head of BP.
And Hayward is doing every hey or Tony Hayward, who's the uh CEO, the chairman of BP is doing everything in his power to make himself look bad.
He makes these silly comments about how I want my life back, and so on.
I'm not trying to stand up for BP, and I'm not trying to suggest that Obama really would have had anything to offer had he made this call.
What I am trying to say is that the president's calculus is always how will whatever it is that he's thinking about doing make me.
Appearances are everything with this crowd.
This is why you have the change in tone.
This is why you have the president suddenly acting like he's proactive.
It's why the president finally held a news conference a couple of weeks ago in the middle of this.
He wanted to look like he was in charge.
And somehow in this calculation, they've decided that him picking up the phone and talking to the head of BP wouldn't advance how he looks.
The left is obsessed with this.
As I said with regard to Chevrolet, you don't get to decide how you look.
The people looking at you make that decision.
The president right now looks like he's not in charge.
His administration appears to be passive, and he's acting as a political opportunist.
That may not want to be how he wants to appear to look, but as I said, he doesn't get to decide how he looks.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Pensacola, Florida, which is on the Gulf.
I think Lynn, you're on EIB.
Uh yes.
I was looking at the uh headline today in our local news, and it says Chris polls the lead.
And Chris is a real big buddy of Barack Obama's.
Yeah, Charlie Christ is the governor of Florida who is elected as a Republican, now he's running for the Senate.
Well, it became clear that when it became clear no Republican was going to vote for him and decided to run as an independent.
Yeah, Chris is a guy who's been one of those who's sort of a naysayer on oil drilling.
I'm guessing he's going to say I told you so, huh?
Well, Dad, and as soon as the news uh starts showing the slime on our beaches in Florida, Chris is going to come out of this like a shining star, and everything's gonna happen and it's all gonna get cleaned up.
Yeah, thank you for the call, Lynn.
She is right about that.
See, Pensacola is uh on the Gulf Coast, but the state of Florida itself does isn't anywhere near as big a beneficiary of offshore drilling as Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and especially uh Texas.
Uh so Charlie Chris may indeed benefit off of this.
The point that I'm making is that we need to understand that we can't allow problems with an energy source to say that the energy source is going to be off limits for us.
I would turn the tables on those who say, say, this is proof you can't drill in the ocean for oil.
Then what's the reason we can't drill an Anwar?
What's the reason that we can't drill in parts of the United States that have been declared off limits?
Why can't we do that?
I think the president himself is merely looking for a way to make it appear as though he has some command of this issue.
What he has done is make things worse.
With regard to the political points he's trying to score here.
He's always focused on what does this mean for me?
Well, if you're choosing to seek the job of running the government of the country, at some point it has to be about something bigger than you, as President Bush, I think demonstrated.
Tomorrow we're going to talk about how they're going to use this to try to raise taxes on us right and left.
I'm Mark Belling.
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