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July 19, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:48
July 19, 2010, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And are you ready to start a full week of broadcast excellence, ladies and gentlemen?
Well, it's the time to do it, the place to do it, the Rush Limbaugh Program, and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address LRushball at eibnet.com.
Once in a while, it doesn't happen very often.
Once in a while, you stumble across an article, an essay, that demands to be widely disseminated.
This one that I stumble across is from the July, August issue of the American Spectator.
And its title is America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution.
It's by Angelo Codevilla.
Ladies and gentlemen, it prints out to 16 pages.
Have you read it, Snerdley?
It prints out to 16 pages.
There is no way.
I mean, I could read the whole thing to you, but and only I have the ability probably to do that without boring you to tears and sending you elsewhere.
But I'm not even going to try to do that.
It's even, it is so good.
It is so timely.
It is so thorough and complete, it's difficult to cherry-pick.
It's difficult to pick a couple or three pull quotes to give you an idea.
And the reason this appeals to me is that it dovetails with something that I have been for 20 years been trying to explain on this program.
And it's come to a head now with the election of Obama.
And for 20 years, I have gotten the question, Rush, why don't the Republicans do X?
And I have struggled to come up with answers to this question.
Every time I'm asked, I search for a different answer.
One of the things I've always settled on to try to explain to people is that people never really get out of high school.
That the whole concept of the big click and wanting to be part of it dominates everybody's life.
The quest for power, the quest for acceptance, the quest to be in the in crowd, however it's defined.
I've told you over the years that one of the reasons the Republicans are, whatever the way they are in Washington, is because Washington is a culture and a place that is run and dominated, not just politically, but socially.
And I've always said that this is crucial to understand because this is the big click aspect.
Washington is dominated politically and socially by Democrats, by the left.
The Republicans also live there.
Everybody wants to get along with who you live next to.
And in Washington, the center of power in the world, everybody wants to be in the ruling class.
The ruling class is the subject of this piece by Angelo Codevilla, who is professor emeritus at Boston University.
It is just a wonderfully written and crafted piece.
Here's a couple pull quotes, but again, getting into various pull quotes will not do this piece justice.
Today's ruling class from Boston to San Diego was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance as well as tastes and habits.
And this resonated with me because in explaining Obama to everyone, I said, this is how he was raised.
This is how he was educated.
This is what he believes.
America is the problem in the world.
So do members of the ruling class.
The ruling class, it's important to understand, is not based on merit.
In fact, the ruling class contains many educational failures.
People who would otherwise have flunked out of college, were it not for their connections to others in the ruling class.
Another pool quote.
Getting into America's top schools is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile.
Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges.
And it is an open secret that the best colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages, which explains in part why we've never seen Barack Obama's transcripts or his writings or anything else from Harvard or the Harvard Law Review because they don't exist.
He was put in that position for reasons having nothing to do with merit.
And the people in the ruling class do not rise on the basis of merit.
They rise on the basis of connections, saying the right things, thinking the right things, doing the right things according to the code that is established.
We in what Mr. Codevilla calls the country class, meaning not the Hick class, but the country.
We are the country.
The ruling class is a minority.
And I have touched on this.
We are being ruled, i.e., governed by a minority.
Less than 10, 15% of Americans agree with the thought process, the philosophies, the goals and objectives of the ruling class.
And we in the country class, we believe in merit.
We rise or fall based on merit.
We believe that a good GPA is what's necessary to get you into college.
We believe that performing well on the job is how you get promoted and how you get paid well.
Not true in the ruling class.
In fact, that is looked down upon.
It's sort of like the old money versus new money business.
The old money inherited from robber barons of the past, great wealth.
The people who inherited it don't do anything for it, but it has great lineage.
People who have earned great wealth rather than have inherited it are shunned by the old money people because it's working class to have earned money.
It's just not done.
It's considered gauche.
It's considered filthy.
And it's much the same way with merit throughout the ruling class.
You don't have to be the best.
In fact, if you do the right things and say the right things, you can be an abject failure meritocracy-wise and still be promoted.
This resonated with me in so many ways.
I grew up wanting to be in radio, and I always thought when I moved to New York in 1988, my objective was to become the most listened to person on radio.
Not top five, not top 10, but the most listened to.
And I did it, and it didn't mean anything.
It didn't count for anything with those people.
And yet there are people who never have had any audience, who still don't have any audience, who are widely accepted members of the ruling class, who are considered very powerful simply because they walk the walk, they talk the talk, they kiss the right rear ends and do all of this.
But the point is these people are a minority and they have no relationship to the rest of us in the country class.
And somehow we are now being ruled by these people.
We're not being governed.
We're being ruled by them.
And they have certain beliefs right now.
Among them is that the United States is the problem in the world.
Among them is that those of us not in the ruling class haven't the smarts, haven't the ability to know what's best for ourselves.
They have to do it for us.
There's a story that explains this, or that this explains, I should say, in great detail.
It was a Washington Post story on Sunday.
And I had a lot of people send this to me.
Rush, Rush, Rush.
Look at this.
Look at Trent Lott's quotes.
Look at this.
What are the Republicans doing?
Same old question.
I was inundated with email about this.
Here's the headline.
And it's by Shaleg Murray.
Republican lawmakers GERD for rowdy Tea Party.
So who wants to join Rand Paul's Tea Party caucus?
Senator Bob Corker, Republican Tennessee, said, I don't know about that.
I'm not sure I should be participating in this story.
Republican lawmakers see plenty of good in the Tea Party, but they also see reasons to worry.
The movement, which has ignited passion among conservative voters and pushed big government to the forefront of the election debate this year, has also stirred quite a bit of controversy.
Voters who don't want to privatize Social Security or withdraw from the United Nations could begin to see the Tea Party and the Republican Party as one and the same.
Rand Paul, the GOP Senate nominee, Kentucky, floated the idea of forming an official caucus for Tea Party-minded senators in an interview in the National Review as one way he would shake up Washington.
Michelle Bachman, one of the movement's favorite incumbents, filed paperwork on Thursday to register a similar group in the House to promote Americans' call for fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution, and limited government.
And there you have the Tea Party.
And that threatens establishment Republicans.
And people say, why?
How in the world could this threaten established Republicans?
We think this is the ticket to victory.
We think there's never been a greater opportunity to contrast what we believe with what is happening.
We are watching our country be bankrupted right in front of our eyes.
And they're smiling and laughing at us while they do it.
And the Republicans, in one degree, to one degree or another, are joining in.
Some Republicans worry that Tea Party candidates are settling too comfortably into their roles as unruly insurgents and could prove hard to manage if they get elected.
Really?
So here the Tea Party represents the salvation.
Remember when I have said, and you know this, that Reagan was considered an embarrassment to the Republican upper class.
They agreed with Tip O'Neill.
Reagan was a dunce.
They couldn't do much about it because the guy won landslides.
But they had no appreciation for him.
These are the people who are embarrassed of the pro-life movement because they have to go to Republican conventions with those people.
And their friends in the Democrat side of the ruling class tease them and give them grief over being in a party with a bunch of hayseed hit pro-lifers, which is not, Which is not acceptable thinking, pro-lifism, not acceptable thinking in the ruling class.
So, some Republicans worry that Tea Party candidates are settling too comfortably into their roles as unruly insurgents and could prove hard to manage if they get elected.
Rand Paul, who beat Republican establishment favorite Trey Grayson in Kentucky, told National Review that he would seek to join forces with Republicans Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who are unafraid to stand up and who have blocked numerous bills advanced by both parties, deemed by the pair as expanding government.
Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, and here we get to the meat of the piece, now a Washington lobbyist, warned that a robust block of rabble rousers spells further Senate dysfunction.
We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples here.
As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.
And he's not even in the Senate.
He's now a lobbyist.
So all of you looking at the Tea Party thinking it's the Republican Party's salvation, the Republican members of the ruling class are just as threatened by the Tea Party as the Democrats are.
Because the Tea Party is outsiders.
The Tea Party's not in the big click.
The Tea Party does not want to be in the big click.
The Tea Party wants to wrest power away from the big click.
The problem, and as Mr. Codeville's piece points out, is what vehicle?
What vehicle does the Tea Party use?
It gets really interesting.
This I will share with you at the end of the piece.
The only vehicle available to the Tea Party right now is the Republican Party.
And what do they do?
How do they, and we have, you and I, have we not?
We have been saying, well, somebody's been to a third-party route, and clearly this piece demonstrates that's a failure.
But others have been saying that the future of the country depends on the conservative movement retaking the Republican Party.
And now here we have people like Trent Lott, everybody's assumed as a conservative all along, now being threatened by the arrival of a Tea Party caucus.
We don't need any more Jim DeMint around here.
We're going to co-opt.
We're going to co-opt these people as soon as they get here.
But Lott said he's not expecting a Tea Party sweep.
Yeah, he said, I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people.
So he thinks that you, the American people, will see the Tea Party for the rabble-rousers they are and will not elect anybody from the Tea Party or anybody who believes things the Tea Party believes because you really do not want Washington shaken up.
You like the ruling class running the show.
Senator Robert Bennett, Republican in Utah, who failed to survive his party's nominating process after running afoul of local Tea Party activists, told a local AP reporter last week the Republican Party had jeopardized its chance to win Senate seats in Republican-leaning states as Nevada and Kentucky, and potentially in Colorado, where Tea Party favorite Ken Buck has surged ahead of Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton in the primary battle.
Bennett warned that such candidates are stealing attention from top Republican recruits like Mike Castle in Delaware and John Hovind in North Dakota, both of whom are favored to win seats held by Democrats.
But it is not in the cards for these Tea Party people to win.
And this explains it in part.
This piece, now it's at the American Spectator.
We'll link to it at rushlimbo.com.
And as I say, I'm going to be talking about it extensively during the program today, along with all the other things in the news.
It's 16 pages, much too long to read in its entirety here.
But it explains so much and it is so thorough and it dovetails so nicely with some of the theories I have evolved to explain or answer your questions.
Why don't the Republicans do X?
You notice that Trent Lott displays more anger and more hostility toward any potential new conservative members of the Republican Party than he would ever display to even the most radical of his Democrat congressional colleagues who led the charge to get him out of leadership in the Republican Party.
But he was taken care of.
He's now a lobbyist.
It all works out.
The ruling class takes care of its members who follow their own rules.
Geithner, perfect example.
He's never held a real job in his life.
Doesn't have the slightest clue how to fix anything.
He wouldn't know how to fix a broken light bulb.
He wouldn't know how to fix anything that's broken.
The men in the country class are the fixers, and they are looked upon with disdain.
Quick time out.
Back with more after this.
Trent Lott's resignation became effective at 11.30 p.m. on December 18, 2007.
On January 7, 2008, it was announced that Trent Lott and former Senator John Brawl, Louisiana, Democrat, had opened their lobbying firm about a block from the White House.
The ruling class takes care of its own.
And the ruling class is Democrats and liberals in Washington and everywhere.
New York, Washington, Washington is the power capital of the world and the financial capital of the world as well.
The ruling class also does not work.
The ruling class is involved in nonprofits.
The ruling class seeks their wealth from government.
And more and more and more people, there's a story today in the Washington, I forget where it is, it's in the stack.
While the rest of the country in the summer of recovery is hurting, Washington is expanding.
Washington's doing great.
The people who live and work in the ruling class in Washington are prospering because government is prospering.
Government is prospering because government is raiding the private sector.
Government's raiding the country class, if you will.
The way this piece starts out, as over-leveraged investment houses began to fall in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democrat parties of major corporations and opinion leaders,
stretching from National Review and the Wall Street Journal on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, all agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy toxic assets was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's systemic collapse.
They all agreed.
You and I did not.
You and I fought this bailout.
Remember, they told us 24 hours.
If we don't do this, the country collapses, the economy collapses.
It finally took two weeks of persuasion by the ruling class to convince enough people because the Republicans, conservatives in the country were not buying into it, didn't believe any of it.
The majority of the American people did not want the bailout, yet it happened anyway.
And look what it got us.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
One of the many leaders of the country class.
From Angelo Codeville's piece, The American Spectator, July, August, 2010 issue.
When this majority, us, discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections to the TARP bailout seriously, that decisions about our money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term political class came into use.
Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries, but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond our understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the ruling class.
And in fact, Republican and Democrat officeholders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country.
They think, they look, and they act as a class.
Although the election of 2008, after the election in 2008, most Republican officeholders argued against the TARP program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry,
against the several stimulus bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by logic of partisan opposition.
After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations.
Differences between Bush's, Clinton's, and Obama's are of degree in that kind.
Moreover, 2009-2010 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes if only they were allowed to.
Well, this resonated with me because I plaintively say, why do you continue, you Republicans, why do you continue to accept their premise on everything and then deal with it on the margins?
Why do we accept the premise that there must be a health care overhaul?
Why do we accept the premise that there must be a stimulus package?
Why do they set the agenda?
This piece is partially the answer.
They're all part of the ruling class.
The Republicans want to be even more accepted in the ruling class.
They want to be even more powerful.
They want to be considered part of it.
They want to be in the click.
And as such, they do not wish to make any waves.
Senator Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about global warming for the sake of getting on the right side of history.
No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place.
Peter Jennings, after the House elections of 1994, the American people threw a temper tantrum.
Peter Jennings, as all of the nightly news anchors are, part of the ruling class.
No participant in talk radio will ever be a member of the ruling class.
And the day that a talk radio personality becomes a member of the ruling class is the end of that talk radio personality's career.
No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children.
The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.
Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust.
Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others.
But until our own time, America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter.
The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the southern aristocracy, and the hard scrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another.
Few had much contact with government, and bureaucrat was a dirty word for all.
So was social engineering.
Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the oranges of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed.
But all that has now changed.
Today's ruling class from Boston to San Diego was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas, gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as uniform tastes and habits.
These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins against majorities and the environment.
You must believe in this, or you cannot be in the ruling class.
Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters, speaking the in language, serves as a badge of identity.
Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money, because as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct.
Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into their private sector.
Some, like Secretary Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job.
Hence, whether formally in government or out of it or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.
It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
There's a story.
This piece, when you read it in total, will have you reacting to everything you see in dominant media, mainstream media, in a different way.
By the way, the media, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, they're all part of the ruling class.
They're not journalists.
They're all part of the ruling class or want to be part of the ruling class.
So Jim Vandehey and Zachary Abramson on yesterday, Abrahamson, in Politico, Reality Gap, U.S. struggles, D.C. booms.
The massive expansion of government under President Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators, and contractors for years to come.
The housing market, boosted by the large number of high-income earners in the area, many working in politics and government, is easily outpacing the markets in most of the country.
This is in Washington.
And there are few signs of economic distress in hotels, restaurants, or stores in the Washington area.
As a result, there is a yawning gap between the American people and Washington's powerful when it comes to their economic reality and their economic perceptions.
A new political poll conducted by market research and consulting firm Penn Shoan underscores the big divide.
Roughly 45% of Washington elites said the country and the economy are headed in the right direction.
Only 25% of the general population said they felt that way.
A sample of Washington elites was aware of its propitious situation.
74% of those surveyed said the economic downturn has hurt them less than most Americans.
They should be self-aware, given the economic indicators for people who live and work in the area.
Victor Davis Hansen on July 17th, it'll post here at the National Review Corner.
It's surreal to see President Obama play the class warfare card against Republicans while on his way to vacation on the tony Maine coast.
And even more interesting to note that now gone are the days when the media used to caricature Bush One for boating in the summer off the preppy-sounding Kennebunk port.
The truth is that the real big money and the lifestyles that go with it are now firmly liberal Democrat.
One can use an array, entire array of evidence.
The preponderance of Wall Street money that went to Obama over McCain, the liberal voting patterns of the high-income Blue State congressional districts, the anecdotal evidence of a Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or George Soros, or the ease by which an eco-populist like Al Gore buys estates and creates corporations, or the rarefied tastes of men of the people like John Edwards of Two Nations fame or John Kerry of multiple estate residences.
Bill Clinton was perhaps the first liberal president to embarrass progressive populists who by rote caricatured those who played golf or amassed millions in post-presidential huckstering.
The point is that Barack Obama's them rhetoric against those who supposedly make tons of money and won't pay enough in taxes to fund the Obama technocratic classes' redistribution schemes seems almost fossilized.
In short, Obama had better get the populist photo ops down a lot better since his calls to soak the rich from the 18th hole or the coastal vacation home look increasingly ridiculous.
Well, they look increasingly ridiculous to us, but they are applauded by Obama's fellow members of the ruling class.
Look, I could spend the whole show on this piece today.
I could spend the next two hours and 15 minutes dissecting this and relating it to things that I have said over the past 20 years or news items that happen to be prominent today.
It's that good.
It is that thorough.
And it is that explanatory.
And most importantly, it is easily understandable by all who read it.
Here's what I said January 19th, 2009, on TARP.
However, this is the danger.
When the government gives you money, they do have some say-so over how you use it.
In fact, in most cases, if somebody gives you money, they're going to try to exercise some control over either how you use it or when you give it back or how you pay it back.
One of those two things.
When somebody gives you something, you owe them big time.
Even though you think it's not a loan, you get a gift here in the areas we're talking about.
You're in for it.
But aren't we creating?
Aren't we just redoing the same thing that got us all in this mess in the first place, letting incompetent, unqualified members of Congress tell the banks what they must do and how they must run their business.
So we're not bailing out banks.
It's clear now we're not bailing out banks.
We're taking control of them.
That's what this is.
That's how I described TARP on January 19th, 2009.
If you'll recall back then, none of us supported that bailout.
We didn't buy the unified claims of disaster that were coming from all corners of the political and financial worlds.
There, the unison was just too much.
And they were all saying the same thing, and even the members of the ruling class financial media.
Neo, if we don't act in 24 hours, it can't be.
And Cavuto was saying, I don't buy it.
I don't buy that we're in that great a danger.
Nobody's shown me the evidence of it.
We still had to do it.
And the Republicans joined right in.
McCain joined right in with making all this happen.
It's a great peace.
Once again, the ruling class, Angelo Codevilla, American Spectator, the July, August, 2010 issue.
We've linked to it at rushlimbaugh.com.
Sit tight, those of you on the phones are coming to you in the next hour, I promise.
The two classes, the ruling class and us, the country class.
And the ruling class is a minority.
It's 10 to 15% of the thinking of the country, if that.
The two classes have less in common culturally.
They dislike each other more and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's northerners and southerners.
Nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, prayed to the same God.
By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God who created and doth sustain us, our ruling class prays to itself as saviors of the planet and improvers of humanity.
Our classes' clash is over whose country America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom, about what.
The gravity of such division points us, as it did Lincoln to Mark's gospel.
If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.
Who are these rulers?
And by what right do they rule?
How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to the privileged classes to one in which at best they might have the chance to climb into them?
What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?
The most widespread answers by such as the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks are schlock sociology.
Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector.
Similarly, fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a new occracy, a new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization, including the multinational manager, the technologist, and the aspirational members of the meritocracy.
Those of us who think doing great things will get us into the big click.
In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with even bigger government, and above all, by a certain attitude.
Other explanations are counterintuitive.
Wealth, the heads of the class do live in our big cities, priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Beacon Hill in Boston, as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder.
But they're no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate, just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associate with physicians and physicists.
Rather, regardless of where they live, their social intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative non-profit and philanthropic sectors and public policy.
What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.
They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevards.
These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to the former and identify morally with what they supposed to be the latter's grievances.
Brief timeouts.
You see, I could go on with this the whole show.
I'm still on page three, and I haven't even shared everything on pages one and two with you.
Back in a sec.
Membership in the ruling class depends much less on high academic achievement.
It depends on something far more important.
And that is a willingness to say, act, believe, and recite the things the ruling class believes, whether you're a failure at what you do or not.
Anyway, there's stuff in the news outside of this.
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