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March 31, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
March 31, 2011, Thursday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's anchor man is away, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in, happy to be with you.
No supporting paperwork whatsoever.
But you will be relieved to hear that operational control of the Kinetic Scope Limited Rush Limbaugh Show has been transferred to the international community.
I'm glad to be here.
I'll be here tomorrow.
And don't forget that only when everything is transferred to the control of the international community is it legitimate.
That's what uh that's what President Obama has assured us, and uh I'm happy to take him at his word for it.
Just be just before we uh uh we we I want to uh just say one other thing about this this business of b because they're lawyers and doctors, they're professional people, it's safe to arm these guys.
Uh uh John from Killen in Texas.
Uh and if you know Texas, you'll know where Killeen is uh near, he said um uh he said here at Fort Hood, too, we armed one of those doctors to find out who he was too, and that's of course a reference uh to the US Army psychiatrist who killed fourteen people uh at Fort Hood,
Texas, uh, and in effect got got wafted up into the position where he was uh able to do that, major Hassan, because at every step along the way, uh political correctness prevented everybody from pointing out that the guy was an obvious nut.
Uh his superiors worried that he was psychotic, but they thought it wouldn't look good uh to to report uh one of the few Muslim psychiatrists in the United States Army to his uh to to uh to to report him for being psychotic.
And so they didn't report him.
They promoted him to major and they transferred him to Fort Hood and uh uh and they uh and they found out what happened.
And there's an interesting point about all this.
We have money no object government.
Money no object government.
Uh Major Hood, what's fascinating about Major Hood is that he was being monitored by not just one but two anti-terrorism teams, because it's money no object government.
And neither of them uh spotted the fact that he was an uh an obvious loon jihadist who was likely uh who who was not uh who was objectively an enemy of the United States, who was uh who who was committing uh in effect committing uh treason.
He was a treasonous uh treasonous figure.
And he was being monitored by two anti-terrorism teams.
You know, most countries they just have him monitored by one.
So if they if if they fail to spot him, at least they fail to spot him at half the price that we failed to spot him uh in the United States.
This money no object government.
Uh money no object government.
And that is um and that goes for our foreign uh our foreign intelligence too.
How much do you really think the CIA knows about these guys?
Uh the the CIA, you know do you know all the budget business going through?
Uh a couple of weeks ago, a a new item turned up in the budget, a request from the CIA for an emergency appropriation of five hundred and thirteen point seven million.
That's a half a billion dollars.
And you were thinking, okay, what's that for?
What's that for?
Toppling Kim Jong-il, maybe?
Taking out the Iranian nuclear program?
No, it was an emergency payment to stop the CIA pension fund going bankrupt.
And if they don't get the money, by next year, 2012, the CIA pension fund will go bankrupt with unfunded liabilities of six point four billion dollars.
This is the CIA, the most lavishly funded intelligence agency on the planet, and we forgive them a lot.
Uh, you know, they failed to see the collapse of the Iron Curtain coming until it happened.
They failed to spot that Pakistan was going nuclear until it happened.
But when an intelligence agency fails to spot that its own pension fund is bankrupt until it happens, uh then maybe they're in the wrong business.
You know, maybe they should maybe they you know, would you really want to buy intelligence from an intelligence agency that doesn't spot its own pension fund is bankrupt until it you don't need to have a man in deep cover in the insurance agency.
You don't need to get one of your somebody from the clandestine division uh to uh to parachute into uh behind the lines of the insurance agency uh and find out that your pension fund is bankrupt.
Uh they didn't find out their own pension was bankrupt, and that's the CIA.
So what is the likelihood that the CIA actually has a clue about who it's helping out in Libya today?
Mark Steinin for Rush, uh we will we will talk about that, and we will also talk, because that is a budgetary issue.
As I said, these are budgetary issues.
One of the reasons why you start blundering around like that is because of this whole money no object approach to uh to government.
Uh the United States uh the the problem with the United States in a nutshell, I would say, is that we think it's still nineteen fifty.
Uh that the Second World War has just ended, everybody else is been bombed to smithereens, we're the last man standing.
We got all more money than we know what to do with.
We can afford to uh basically pay uh for other countries to to fight wars.
In this case, uh the Arab League and Monsieur Sarkozy and David Cameron in London decided they'd like to knock off Gaddafi, uh, but they decided that they'd like to send the bill uh to the United States taxpayer.
Um that oh and because we think it's 1950 and money no object, uh we're happy we're happy to do that.
That's a that's a big part of the problem.
I was in London, I got back a couple of days ago.
I was in London uh on Saturday for the big riot.
There were there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of London demanding an end to government cuts.
There aren't actually any government cuts, but they're still demanding an end to them.
It's like just on the off chance that there might be a government cut, we might as well object to it now.
It's like it's like preemptive strike in what's going on in Wisconsin.
Uh it's a preemptive version of what's happening in Wisconsin.
And so I I I'd had a lovely couple of days in London.
I'd had beautiful room overlooking Green Park, one of the royal parks in London.
It was beautiful spring, you know.
I was thinking, oh, it's wonderful, eternal undying.
Was looking, I was looking out out of my window at the uh the the uh cavalry riding by, changing of the guard.
Beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
And then on the Saturday morning, there's all this noise, and I'm like wakes me up and I can't figure out what's going on.
I call down to reception, I say, what's what's with all this noise?
What's going on?
And the the uh the fellow on reception says, I'm most terribly sorry, sir.
There's uh there's there's uh there's hundreds of people rioting down Piccadilly uh uh smashing the r the windows of the writs and to trashing department stores.
I do apologize if it's disturbing you, so I'll see what I can do about it.
But he wasn't unfortunately wasn't able to he wasn't able He was he wa he wasn't able to uh he wasn't able to stop the riot.
So they smashed up everything, they lit fires in Trafalgar Square.
Uh it coincided with what's that big thing, the environmentalist guys have Earth Hour.
You know that where you meant to to turn your lights out.
You you you meant to turn your lights out.
Well they did a grand job uh because like once glittering uh storefront windows were absolute darkness.
Uh the uh the only lights were uh the the rioters, the mob uh burning burning fi having burning fires, burning refugees in the street.
Now these are anarchists.
These these were people who call themselves anarchists, anarchists.
Do you remember anarchy in the old days?
Anarchists, anarchists in the good old days used to be anti-government.
These are big government welfare funded anarchists anarchists demanding more government.
How crazy is that?
This is uh this is the way and and and to be honest with you, I preferred the I preferred the welfare-funded big government anarchists smashing the place up to the nice protesters, the hundreds of thousands of people who just gathered to call an end to the cuts that don't really exist.
Uh d demanding in demanding that they're unsustainable pensions, unsustainable welfare carry on in perpetuity.
This is where the big government state ends.
Uh with the with uh the kind of riots uh that I saw in London on Saturday, that we've seen in France, that we've seen in Greece, uh that we're gonna see in Spain any day soon, that we may yet see in Ireland, in which government workers and government welfare dependents and government anarchists of all crazy things uh take to the streets to demand that the unsustainable benefits and pensions and welfare checks that they're getting be maintained in perpetuity.
This is where the big government state ends.
And we don't want to get to that stage.
We don't want to get anywhere near that stage.
And what is worrying to me uh is that we do not s is that with every month that passes uh that we do not that we do not make for sure.
We're like drifting.
The other we're heading towards Niagara Falls, and Greece and France and Spain and Ireland and Portugal and the United Kingdom are all ahead of us going towards the falls.
And we can still pull for shore.
Greece can't pull for sure.
Greece is going over the falls.
Portugal's going over the falls.
We can still pull for sure.
And every month that goes by when we don't pull for sure makes it makes it more and more difficult for us for us ever to do it.
Now we're we're talking, we're looking at a so-called government shutdown coming up, a so-called government shutdown.
And and the question for the Republican Party here is, can you win this battle?
We know what Chuck Schumer and Howard Dean think.
Chuck Schumer and Howard Dean thinks if it comes to a government shutdown, they're gonna win.
Because the executive branch determines uh what are so-called essential services and what aren't.
So they can cancel certain things and they won't be working, there'll be chaos at the airports and whatever, and you'll be able to blame it all on the Republicans.
They think they can do that because the executive branch determines what stays open and what doesn't, uh, and because they will have the media on their side.
But the and so the question now uh is whether enough of the country understands the scale of the crisis here.
Enough of the country understands the urgency of the crisis.
Because we know uh what the uh we know what the what the president thinks.
The president w makes these rhetorical ticks nodding towards the fiscal crisis.
Uh but he but but uh but but he doesn't propose anything serious to do.
Rush mentioned this the other day that uh that he's willing to cut a hundred and twenty-five million dollars out of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.
Uh that's because we've got officially a one point seven trillion dollar deficit on this year's budget.
That's that's just this year's budget.
Uh and the president, to sh to portray himself as a man bold enough to take the tough decisions to restore the healthy finances of this republic, says he's willing to cut 125 million dollars out of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.
Because otherwise, our 1.7 trillion dollar deficit would be a deficit of 1.700125 trillion dollars, and that would never do.
That would be completely unacceptable.
So so the president is taking the tough, courageous decisions to reduce the deficit of 1.700125 trillion to a nice clean round 1.7 trillion.
At this rate, at this rate, we are going over the falls with Greece and Portugal and the United Kingdom and Spain and all the rest of them.
And if you don't want to uh and if you uh and you the time invested in arguing about the hundred and twenty-five million dollars of the Great Lakes Restoration budget, or Harry Reed's money for the cowboy poetry festival in uh wherever it is, Elko, Nevada.
We can uh if we fight back and forth on every little it'sy bits of it of cowboy poetry federal funding.
And that, by the way, that phrase has never existed in any language in the c entire course of human history, quote, federally funded cowboy poetry, unquote.
That's an innovation of our time.
That's an innovation of our time.
And the fact that those combination that combination of words can be used with all seriousness by the uh Senate majority leader of the world superpower is uh is an indication of the depths we're in.
We can argue about cowboy poetry, we can argue about Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, and by the time we've won the argument on the cowboy poetry, we will be over Niagara Falls.
So we need to move the goalposts in this conversation.
We need to move the center of the conversation fast.
Uh we we need we need to we need to uh emphasize the urgency of this, and it should be a given that the cowboy poetry and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative are out of there.
The Great Lakes can take care of themselves.
When this country is collapsed, when it's Mad Max on I-95, when it's a wasteland, there will still be the Great Lakes.
The Great Lakes, don't worry about the Great Lakes, they can take care of themselves.
It's time to look after the United States of America.
Mark Stein in for Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for rush on the EIB network, 1-800-282-2882.
Let's go to Andrew in London, Ontario, who's been waiting an awful long time.
And I said to H.R., I said, Oh, I know an Andrew in London, Ontario.
I said about a minute ago, I said, uh I know an Andrew in London, Ontario.
In fact, it turns out to be that uh that very same Andrew.
Uh welcome to the Rush Limbo show, Andrew.
I should explain to non-Canadians that uh Andrew was my piano accompanist when I appeared in London, Ontario.
He was a piano playing imam uh who accompanied me when I sang Marshmallow World, because of course every act needs a piano playing imam.
So Andrew, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Thank you, Mark.
It's great to be on, and I do miss that imam costume.
Well, you can you can uh if it turns you on, you can climb into it any time you like.
It's uh I I was rather hoping you were wearing it right now.
It kind of turned me on.
Uh but uh it's great uh great to have you with us.
And Andrew, uh I'm uh th I'm glad to be able to speak to you.
You were uh very seriously ill, in fact, over the uh uh the Christmas uh vacation uh period um uh uh uh in part because of the uh the whims of uh the Canadian healthcare system, and it is good to to know that you're well enough to call hateful uh right wing American talk shows that would be banned in Canada and uh and glad to have you with us.
What's what's on your mind, Andrew?
Well, i it's one of these things I I was I was thinking about this whole Libya situation, and and and I can't help but wonder, you know, regardless of what people think about the US's presence there, how bad is it that Canada is taking the lead on on a global mission because the US wasn't doing anything?
And I think that's more problematic there than anything else in this debate, uh just about how much of a lame duck Obama is on foreign policy.
Yeah, he his whole thing is that uh that that uh he demonstrates uh leadership by forswearing it.
Uh he he feels that what Amer what the world is looking for at the moment is American leadership that understands that real leadership means uh uh having the confidence not to lead and to and to put the w the non-war under the hands of General Bouchard, who is the Canadian general who is now apparently running running the war, which as you say is a very uh is a very strange uh is a very strange state of affairs.
Exactly.
And I don't want to downplay, I mean, Canada's military role in the past.
I mean, Canada's obviously been great in Afghanistan, but I mean if you look at when uh when the US went into Iraq and could really use Canada's help, we weren't there.
No, that's that's true.
But you know do you know something?
Uh th there is a great Canadian military tradition.
You know this, Andrew.
Uh uh the great Canadian military tradition continues.
Uh the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry did a magnificent job in Afghanistan.
Uh three of their snipers, the Pentagon wanted to award them the Silver Star because of the fantastic numbers of kills they got.
These guys were the best snipers in town.
They were killing people from incredible distances.
The Pentagon was really grateful to have these three guys from the Princess Patricia's with them uh and wanted to give them the silver star.
And uh you may remember Monsieur Chrétien's ministry in Ottawa uh decided to nix uh nix the award until it eventually leaked.
But the the reason they they they vetoed the award is because they didn't want it getting out that uh Canadian soldiers still actually killed people.
That uh that you know, we're supposed uh the the the the whole thing, oh no, no, no, we're the nice people who wear the blue helmets and do the UN thing.
Who knew that we uh still issue them with guns?
Uh and and in fact uh they did an incredible job.
They killed bad guys, which is what soldiers do.
And the Canadian government was televised.
Even the Canadians say no, no, no, it's we're peacekeepers.
We're it's not a war, we're peacekeepers.
It's we don't even want to admit when we're doing something good for the world.
No, have you got a five dollar bill in your pocket, Andrew?
Uh because I think that's what I paid you for playing the piano, isn't it?
If you've got a five dollar if you've got a five dollar bill in your pocket, that's the one that supposedly honours the Canadian Armed Forces.
Pull it out of your pocket, turn it over.
Not one of those soldiers on there has got a weapon.
You know the the the there's a female soldier looking through her binoculars, like a b a Bosnian peacekeeper looking through her b uh binoculars at the sub irregulars coming to, you know, coming to take the machete to her stomach towards her.
She hasn't got a gun.
And then there's a little wizened old first world war veteran uh being helped to a remembrance day step ceremony, all bent over and stooped.
He's like an old soldier, he hasn't got a gun.
None of the soldiers on the five dollar bill honoring Canadian Armed Forces has got a weapon.
That tells you a lot about the psychology of uh of uh uh uh of the Canadian of the official Canadian attitude to its military these days.
Yeah, i and it's one of these things where I I would like to see that change, but as of this point, I mean i it's just it it's very scary that Canada has to be taking the lead on this mission when when Canada doesn't have a history of getting involved in the conflicts, it needs to.
Oh, oh Andrew, don't uh d thanks for your call, by the way.
I gotta I gotta run because we've got an EIB profit said to cover you up.
But don't worry about a thing.
The fact that Obama has now transferred operational control of the uh of the kinetic scope limited action over Libya is the surest sign that things are just gonna be going swimmingly by now.
Because uh as as he said, what what really ca what really legitimizes this war is that it's got the approval of the Arab League.
Uh if you've got the approval of the Arab League and Canada, you're pretty much covered uh on all fronts.
Mark Stein in for Rush, one eight hundred two eight two two eight eight two.
I'll be here tomorrow.
Don't forget Rush returns live, fit, fresh, and rested Monday at twelve.
Yes, one eight hundred two eight two eight eight two.
I'm devastated to report.
Devastated to report the the climate of hate that is out there.
You know, I mentioned the way uh Christ had materialized in the three cheese pizza in Brisbane, Australia.
And then I mentioned the Scottish Muslim lady who found the word Allah inscribed on the inside of her potato in Arabic.
These are all heartwarming stories.
People had been excited about them, people had been supportive about them, people had uh hailed them as miracles.
Uh but now we have a now we have a story uh out of uh Lanscove Devon in England where uh where a couple who who carved who who carved uh one of their hedges into a Buddha have received death threats and hate mail hate mail.
Uh the i the include the first letter began, it is with sorrow that we saw you cutting and shaping your bush into a Buddha uh and objecting to this, that it's one thing to have it's one thing to have Christ on a three cheese pizza.
Uh it is another thing uh to have Allah in Arabic on the inside of your potato, but when you have your bush shaped into a Buddha, then that is simply unacceptable.
Uh and these people have apparently pulled out of a a television show on which they were supposed to be uh displaying uh their their Buddha shaped bush uh and have decided that they're not uh they're not gonna be part of it uh any else.
So it's a climate of hate out there.
Pretty pretty uh pretty nasty stuff going on out there.
Let's go to Debbie in Salem, Oregon.
Debbie, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Thank you for taking my call.
My pleasure.
I think the Republicans need to have confidence that enough of the American people understand the economic trouble that we're in.
And I also think that this budget vote is an excellent opportunity to find out who's up to the job.
So in in other words, y you think that when when you say up to the job, you mean it's a way of identifying those legislators who are in fact, you know, just gonna when it c when when push comes to shove, the guys are just gonna wimp out.
Who's gonna fall like a house of cards who didn't tell the truth to get into office?
Um I think it'll be yes, given their individual votes, I think it'll say a lot.
And and are you confident, because this is a what's interesting to me is that although uh the the disapproval of Obama on this and that is widening, he he's he's he's still got this forty something percent.
And okay, it's low forties, but there there is uh there are still uh we're still a fifty-fifty nation in which half the nation does not realize the scale of the crisis that confronts us.
Uh you're you're confident that that fifty-one percent of the American people basically understand the reality of what's happening here.
I think what it what it seems like to me that I'm seeing is that we're getting cold feet.
We're Washington is an awful place.
I mean, it literally just seems to devour people for confidence or whatever else.
And it seems to me that we're getting cold feet at the eleventh hour and it's kind of spreading and we didn't get this far with cold feet, and I do believe as this thing the gas prices increase and all these various other things start taking place.
I think more and more people will be c come to realize and this is not a time to pull back.
It's not a time to get nervous.
It's not a it's just and we need to do more educating and I think the economy itself is going to do that as food prices go up, as gasoline goes up, pick something that that will affect the price of clothing.
Right.
And a myriad of other things.
Well well, you you just mentioned the gas price.
Gas has doubled on Obama's watch.
I think exactly doubled.
It's now uh it was a good play um playing the victim in all of this, but what isn't what is not getting out is how much he is literally responsible for.
Well and maybe that's our fault because we're not getting the message out clearly enough to these people who are just past cruising past the television or the radio and they're missing this.
Well, no, they they get the message because when gas goes from a buck seventy-nine, which is what it was um the national average when he took office, to three fifty-eight, which is what it is now on average.
Uh that that changes the economic if you if you, as many people do in suburban and rural America, if you commute a long way to a low paying job, uh you are um you the the whole economic viability of that job.
Your the base your basic hourly wage changes significantly when when you were paying a buck seventy nine a gallon to get there and you're now paying three fifty-eight a gallon to get there.
I mean the economic incentives change.
People understand that.
People understand that that has changed.
The question is, do they blame Obama?
Do they blame Harry Reid?
Do they blame Nancy Pelosi?
Do they blame the party that is throttling the economic life of this country?
Well, I all I know is we we did not make it this far to um start cowering and falling back into the old we have to do what we have to do for votes and they won't understand and this isn't gonna work and they're not gonna like it.
That's how this whole thing was created in the first place.
Absolutely understand or not, this thing is going to take them down and their children down and their grandchildren everybody's much.
And so I just w I can't help it if they don't understand they will at some point.
Okay.
Okay, Debbie.
You're right.
We don't want two thousand and four, two thousand and six era Republican legislators back in back in Congress again, because that's a large part of the uh the the reason we're we're in this mess.
Debbie, thank you thank you for your uh your call.
Debbie is absolutely right, uh right on this.
That the the the important part November seems a long way away to me.
November was a great night uh because i it demonstrated uh the that the popular accountability, the accountability of representatives to the people still functions.
Uh th the people sent a message in November.
Now here we are, four months later, and November seems an eternity away.
November seems an eternity away.
And we have to uh and and and it's not just about getting the votes to do this.
It's about demonstrating that you have the will to hold the conversation.
It's about demonstrating that even if Harry Reid uh uh and his cowboy poets still control the Senate.
Uh that you uh you still have the capacity to move the broader public conversation in your direction.
And Republicans have to be willing to do that.
That's absolutely critical here.
Uh because there is no there th th this idea that somehow uh simply by trimming a little bit there here, trimming a little bit there, uh we're gonna we're gonna deal with we're gonna deal with it.
You know, Obama is a fraud on this.
He's a fraud.
Uh he he's one of these people who'll make rhetorical gestures uh towards the center and the right, uh and then he will leave the actual legislating and the lawmaking and the regulating uh to to the uh to the lefties in the Democratic uh Congress.
So he set up a uh his own debt commission.
Uh entirely as a feint as as a it's a Potemkin debt commission.
Uh those guys didn't understand it.
Again, Rush made the point that, you know, all these big shots thought they were getting back in the game, they're going to be taken seriously.
It's a blue chip debt commission.
He got Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, all these grandees to go on the debt commission.
They take him seriously.
They think it's a real job.
They produce a report melodramatically entitled The Moment of Truth, the Moment of Truth.
And they proposed all these dramatic actions such as raising the age of social security eligibility to sixty-nine by the year twenty seventy-five.
You know, which is really bad news for if you're in if you're in nursery school now.
Uh oh, you might have to work a couple of years longer before you get your social security benefits by the year twenty seventy five.
There isn't going to be an America by the year twenty seventy-five if that's the rate of reform.
And yet even that was too much for Obama.
Too much for Obama.
So he mothballed and nobody remembers the debt commission now.
Nobody remembers that report.
Who knows?
That report is lining the birdcage in the Oval Office.
That's that's uh that's gone.
That's forgotten.
That's history.
The moment of truth came and went.
Nobody cared.
Nobody cared.
Let's just stick with tweaking the Great Lakes Restoration budget, or maybe give Harry Reed a a hard time on the old cowboy poetry festival in Elko Nevada before we concede uh uh or reach a compromise.
Let's have a reach across the aisle compromise where where we where we agree to fund half the number of federally funded cowboy poets in Elco Nevada.
This is not enough.
This is insufficient.
And if you don't have the votes, and I accept that.
Uh the Republicans control one house.
Uh the Democrats control the Senate and the Democrats control the White House.
Uh but you have to be moving the conversation, the way Marco Rubio, bless him, move the conversation uh yesterday and keeps moving the conversation.
This is what's necessary.
Uh you have to change the you have to reframe the way in this the the way this debate is understood.
This country is broke.
The idea that we the idea that federally funding cowboy poetry festivals is even an issue i is is basically uh a reflection that half the country still doesn't understand it's broke.
We've spent the money.
We've spent the money, and the fact that the cowboy, who used to be the the embodiment of the self-reliant frontier spirit, the fact that the cowboy is now the cowboy is is now a federally funded poet just right there and then encapsulates American decline.
Half the country still doesn't get it.
And the Republican House and Republicans in the Senate, if they're not moving the conversation in the direction of reality, they're just gonna make things worse for you and your children and your grandchildren when eventually we have to collide with reality as we surely will.
1800-282-2882.
Uh let's go to Ed in uh Brunswick uh I my eyesight's getting worse.
Is that G A or C A?
Uh Ed, uh are you in uh Georgia or California?
Georgia.
Okay, Brunswick, Georgia.
Great great uh great to have you uh with us.
Uh pleasure to talk to you, Mark.
You know, I was listening to you on my way home just a few moments ago about about Greece and about how everybody's going over the falls uh even without a barrel.
And I started to think about what what that really means to us.
I mean, most Americans couldn't find Greece on a map.
So uh much less picture what it would mean for the United States to follow Greece and the United Kingdom and Spain and Portugal over the falls.
Uh yeah, and I don't think many people uh are getting exposed to the reality of that.
Uh can can you uh dredge up a couple of examples of how that might might uh might work in in this country?
Well well uh let let's let's look at it let's look at the it uh it in basic terms, Ed.
What why i what what is the main reason why uh why Americans don't understand the scale of the crisis?
And I would say uh what's what's putting it off at the moment is that the dollar is the is the global reserve currency.
The dollar is basically the world's currency.
Uh that's that's what makes the difference between not just between America and Iceland, but between America and Zimbabwe.
Uh if you create the conditions by w that's the that's uh b before the dollar, the pound was uh w was the de facto world currency.
These things come and go.
The Chinese and the Saudis and uh and other interested parties are already actively musing and publicly musing on a world after, on on the world after the dollar.
Yes, quite right.
I I just returned I just returned from China.
I was there for four months.
Right.
And we have no concept.
United States people have no concept of what these what the Chinese are doing.
No.
And and th they're going to bury us.
Well, I'm I'm old enough to remember when Khrushchev slammed his shoe on the desk at the United Nations and said we'll bury you.
They're not gonna do that.
They're just gonna quietly do it.
Yeah, and and they've found, unlike Khrushchev, they've they've managed to come up with an economically viable form of communism, which is an extraordinary achievement.
Exactly correct.
It's a it's a mixture of of capitalism and communism.
And uh but but uh I don't know uh whether you heard this when you were in China, but this this is the way uh the the Chinese uh the Chinese big shots think.
They think that uh a a uh a half millennium period of Western domination is ending.
Oh, and that and that China is returning to natural ascendancy.
And that's the way to think of it.
Goldman Sachs says that China will be the biggest economic power on the planet by the year 2027.
They're learning English.
In fact, that's exactly what I was doing, was teaching English to kids and adults in China.
Yeah.
Yeah, but y you know, that's now.
Uh p pitch it on twenty-five years, and uh and they're gonna be over here uh teaching Mandarin uh to uh to uh English speakers.
Exactly correct.
And the other thing about about the the budget thing, Mark.
I mean, Obama's favorite trick was to blame Bush and the previous administrations for every sin that that he could he could lay on them.
Well, Congress was controlled and the and the executive branch was controlled by the Democrats.
Right.
And they couldn't pass a budget or wouldn't pass a budget.
No.
And and if anybody has any illusions about uh about the Democratic Congress uh uh acting in the uh best interests of the United States, they should sh those illusions should be shattered right now because they would not touch the budget issue before the elections in November.
No, so we're not talking Republicans, no Republicans were harmed in the making of this budget crisis.
It all came about uh when Democrats had total control of everything.
They had they controlled the White House, they controlled the House, they controlled the Senate.
It was Democrat, Democrat, Democrat.
No Republicans were involved in the conversation.
They had huge majorities, they could do exactly what they wanted, and the most basic um the most basic function of government, passing a budget to enable the the government to proceed, they weren't able to do it.
This crisis is entirely of the Democrats making.
Uh the Republicans weren't part of this con uh part of this conversation.
And why is it?
Why do you think, Ed, that they didn't go ahead and do the pass the budget?
Because they knew that they were in political trouble already with the Tea Party rising up and people saying enough is enough.
Right.
And then to add the the glaring cold hard light of day onto the under the budget situation and have it publicly debated in Congress would have been the absolute death knell to these people.
And it should have been.
And they knew it and they wouldn't do it.
Right.
So now they're kicking the ball to to the Republicans, with Chuck Schumer saying extreme, extreme, extreme like a puppet.
Yeah.
Uh that it's the Republicans' fault that the budget wasn't passed last year.
Folks both houses of Congress were controlled by the Democrats last year, and they wouldn't touch it.
Right, right.
Their political future was more important to them than the welfare of this country.
No, and what's more what's more extreme, what's more extreme than basically the democratic model of government, which is to spend four trillion dollars uh but only raise in revenue two trillion dollars.
That's extreme.
Uh that's that's beyond extreme.
That's suicidal.
And that's Chuck Schumer.
The extremists here, the extremists here who think uh are the ones who think you can go on running uh trillion dollar, trillion dollar plus deficits year in, year out, uh without consequence.
Uh basically the United States of America is now in the situation where it expects the rest of the world uh to buy the equivalent of a G seven economy in federal treasury debt every single year.
It ba the United States Treasury under the Chuck Schumer model, under the Harry Reed model, is issuing the equivalent of twice the economy of India in federal debt every year.
That's extreme.
That is that that is not extreme, but it is actually wicked.
It is evil.
Uh it is undermining the very foundations of this country.
Ed, thank you for your call.
Uh if if Republicans are stupid enough to get tagged by Chuck Schumer, the extremist, the man the extremist member of the extremist party that is that that expects to be able to govern in perpetuity by spending four trillion dollars a year and and two trillion dollars of which is buried, that's the extremist.
And if the Republicans are stupid enough to get tagged with the blame for that, then more fool them.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Michelle Obama.
Uh Michelle Obama, who is leading the campaign uh for healthy behavior, her congressional district uh ranks dead last in the United States for healthy behavior.
It's apparently the unhealthiest.
Uh the first congressional district of Illinois is the unhealthiest uh congressional district in the United States.
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