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April 29, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:59
April 29, 2011, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Oh, isn't she beautiful?
She looks so regal, so gracious.
Oh, and the dress is to die for.
And isn't that the perfect hat?
Oh, oh, no, no, wait.
That's Colonel Gaddafi riding into another town he's taken back from the rebels.
America's Anchorman is away today, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in Mark Stein.
Honored to be here.
No supporting paperwork, no long-form birth certificate on me, no, siri.
I'm a foreign exchange student at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
It's a great program.
Guys like me get to study here, and in return, Barack Obama gets put on the standby list for coach seating at Westminster Abbey.
So it all works out.
Rush is away today.
He will be back live on Monday for another full week of excellence in broadcasting.
In the meantime, empires rise and fall, debt ceilings rise and rise.
But in a turbulent world, there are some things you can rely on.
Live from New York City, it's open live Friday.
Actually, we're live from New Hampshire.
It turns out you can't even rely on.
We're not live from New York.
We are live from Ice Station EIB in the...
Yeah, no, that's true.
HR and the and the production team is all in New York.
And it goes by the piece of wet string from Ice Station EIB here in the Granite State of New Hampshire, all the way down to New York, and then I think it goes over to California and up there to the satellite and from there across to the planet wherever you are.
This is the Rush Limbaugh Show, coast to coast.
1-800-282-2882.
You know how this works.
Monday to Thursday, the show is under the control of a highly trained broadcast specialist.
But Rush is away today, so we don't have a highly trained broadcast specialist.
What do I know?
So call up and talk about anything you want to talk about.
1-800-282-2882.
We'll talk long-form birth certificates.
We'll talk long-form marriage certificates.
I don't know whether Prince Williams produced his yet.
Is he even eligible to be king if he won't produce his long-form marriage certificate?
I think we should see it.
We'll talk about whatever you want to talk about, whatever is in the news, whatever is on your mind.
If it's not in the news, stick it in the news by talking about it on this show.
1-800-282-2882.
Did you get up early to watch the wedding?
I think it's a chick thing.
But that's okay.
I'm cool with that.
I pretend when I already, I mean, it's relatively early in the day for me.
I've met a zillion women just in the course of basic social interactions this morning who have been agog all over the TV set since 4 a.m. Eastern time.
And I'm the kind of sensitive new man who can pretend to be interested in the royal wedding for the benefit of getting on with the chicks.
And so I did a pretty good job of it, I think.
But if you don't worry, we're not going to do a lot of royal wedding coverage here.
But I will say this: a couple of things I think worth noting about the royal wedding.
The snub, the ambassador from Syria, got disinvited at 24 hours' notice.
Now, that 24 hours' notice is brutal.
You're the ambassador from Syria, and they arbitrarily decide that you've crossed your boss, President Assad, the guy, the dictator in Syria, not the old dictator.
They've got a hereditary dictatorship in Syria.
I guess that's why they get invited to the royal wedding and Obama doesn't, because a hereditary dictatorship is a close enough model that Syria's got to an hereditary monarchy.
But Assad Sr. died and he passed on his toxic throne to Assad Jr., who was actually an ophthalmologist in Syria.
I don't think, did I say ophthalmologist correctly there?
I don't know.
It's like the Kyrgyzstan of professions.
But he was an ophthalmologist in London and then he went back to be dictator in Syria.
And if you think about it, it's a kind of logical career path because it's only a difference of degree between death panels of the British National Health Service and death panels of the Syrian Baathist Party.
Mere difference of degree, as they're discovering on the streets in Syria right at the moment.
So he suddenly found himself in a whole big bunch of this Arab Spring trouble, like all the other dictators over there, which when you think of it, is pretty bad because if you're an ophthalmologist and you can't read the writing on the wall, maybe you're in the wrong profession.
But anyway, he was an eye doctor and he never saw it coming.
And so Assad is up to his neck in all this trouble now.
And he fires on the starts firing on his own people and eventually kills enough people that he gets disinvited from the royal, his ambassador gets disinvited from the royal wedding at 24 hours' notice after he's booked his suit and all the rest of it.
And the ambassador did say it was, in fact, embarrassing.
And people made jokes about it.
You know, there's this guy slaughtering people throughout Syria.
And Hillary Rodham Clinton is hailing Assad as a reformer, right?
This mass murderer.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has said the position of the United States government is that this mass murdering ophthalmologist is a reformer.
And so you can mock what the royal family did in disinviting the Syrian ambassador at 24 hours' notice.
But I don't think in the imperfect world we live in that you should underestimate the power of the snub.
One of the most disgusting aspects of modern international relations is when you see the representatives of real states, states that represent free peoples, states that have responsible government, constitutionally ordered states, when you see them sitting next to the representatives of one man psycho-states, you're diminishing yourself.
When the foreign minister of Sweden is at some international gathering and he's sitting next to the foreign minister of Syria, and they're pretending that those people hold the same thing, hold the same job and represent the same thing, the Swedish foreign minister is diminished by going along with the pretense that the Syrian foreign minister is no different from him.
And we see that with the President of the United States, too.
You've seen all those pictures of him kibbetzing and backslapping with Chavez down at some, whatever it was, the summit of the Americas or whatever crazy, pointless, stupid international gab fest he happened to be attending that day.
The president of the United States is diminished by being seated at the same gathering as the president of Venezuela.
We should never overlook the power of the snub.
It's practice at royal weddings to invite the entire diplomatic or the ambassadors of every foreign country represented at the Court of St. James.
Disinviting a guy and actually saying to him, no, sorry, we can't have you in polite society because you represent a regime that's drenched in blood is a small step.
But in an imperfect world, it's all you can do to get civilized countries to take small steps.
And that's better than him seeing pictures of Obama kibbetzing and laughing with Hugo Chavez.
So I'm in favour.
I'd like to see a bit more of the snub.
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I want to talk about, instead of talking about the royal kiss, I thought it was lovely.
I thought it was lovely.
Certainly compared to, say, you know, Al and Tipper Gore.
But the Royal Kiss was lovely, but I want to talk about another kiss.
This is Alan West, Congressman Alan West, speaking in Florida.
And he gave a brilliant soundbite here.
If you support Medicare the way it is now, then kiss the United States of America goodbye.
That's the kiss that matters.
The royal kiss, Wills and Kate, very nice, very nice.
But this is the kiss that matters.
If you are wedded to Medicare the way it is now, then you can kiss the United States of America goodbye.
That's the choice.
That's the choice.
You don't like the Paul Ryan plan?
You come up with a way to reform Medicare.
Because Medicare as it is now is going to end.
The only question is whether it ends because it's replaced by something else or it ends because it winds up destroying the United States of America.
I love Alan West.
That is a perfect soundbite.
I happened to be at some event in New York last year that Alan West spoke at.
And I didn't really know much about him.
I mean, I'd read the bio and everything, but I'd never seen him in action.
He's terrific live.
If you ever get the chance to see him live, go and see him live.
He's authentic.
He can stand on his feet when some nut in the back row decides to start baying and yelling at him.
He can dish it out.
He doesn't just stand there and have a couple of lame comebacks.
He can dish it out and win.
He's not a scripted blow-dried poll.
And this improvised soundbite of his actually gets the choice in front of the United States right now.
If you support Medicare the way it is now, then kiss the United States of America goodbye.
He's right on that.
He's right on that.
Now, by comparison, here we have Donald Trump speaking yesterday, same day as Congressman West in Las Vegas, Nevada.
And this is how Donald Trump addresses the big issues.
Quote, we build a school, we build a, he's talking about Iraq here.
We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school, we build another school, we build another road, they blow them up.
We build again.
In the meantime, we can't get an effing school in Brooklyn, says Donald Trump.
He doesn't say effing.
He fills in the asterisks.
He's speaking to an audience in Vegas here.
The problem is this.
We don't actually need another effing school in Brooklyn.
We've got all the effing schools in Brooklyn we need.
The problems in Iraq are not that building schools in Iraq is sucking up the U.S. education business.
This country wastes more money on education than anything else.
So underneath the false swagger and bravado of that, the effing school in Brooklyn stuff, the point is actually false.
Okay, now then he goes on to the next thing.
He goes, we have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, you're not going to raise that effing price in oil.
He's talking about oil now.
We have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, you're not going to raise that effing price.
So again, he doesn't, he puts in the, he says the full word.
He puts in the full asterisks and everything.
No, the Saudis set the price of oil.
The reason the Saudis set the price of oil is because as a matter of policy, the United States has decided largely for aesthetic reasons that it wants to be dependent on the world to supply its energy needs.
So we have, it's not, the oil is on Saudi sovereign territory.
If you want to take it from them, then you can set the price of Saudi oil.
If you don't accept that it's, if you accept that it's Saudi sovereign territory, what you've got to do is generate oil and generate your energy needs in your own sovereign territory.
Instead, we have a guy, the president goes off to Brazil to congratulate the Brazilians for the kind of deep water offshore drilling that he would never dare to license here because it would because the Sierra Club would complain that it would destroy the planet.
Apparently, it's all right for the Brazilians to destroy the planet, but not for the Americans to destroy the planet.
So, again, that sounds like a tough soundbite of Trump's, but essentially it's false.
The Saudis would laugh.
You can use all the F words you want to the Saudis, and they'll laugh in your face.
And then he turns on to taxing Chinese goods.
Rush was talking about this a couple of days ago, and I'm correctly saying that it's protectionism and it's not conservative.
And here's Trump talking about what he's going to say to the Chinese.
Listen, you mother effers.
Okay, so he's now advanced from two-syllable naughty words to four-syllable naughty words.
Listen, you mother effers.
We're going to tax you 25%.
Interesting, interesting.
I would be fascinated to see the effect that would have on the Politburo in Beijing.
You compare the truth that Alan West distills into his single soundbite with the false braggadoccio, the hollow swagger of Donald Trump's soundbites.
If you fall for this phony guy toughness just because it's a blizzard of F-words, more fool you.
This morning, two speeches.
Alan West, absolute truth in a pithy, beautifully phrased soundbite that gets the choice facing the United States.
Donald Trump, a lot of self-aggrandizing, empty, hollow F-words at the heart of which every single position is false.
That's why this guy is not going to be the Republican nominee.
This guy is not a conservative.
And underneath all the F-word braggadocio, which we can all enjoy, is a deeply false and deluded worldview.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein in for Rush on Open Line Friday.
Mark Stein Infra Rush, Open Line Friday on the EIB network.
1-800-282-2882.
Super funky bumper music because apparently after the royal wedding, they're having a disco for the big wedding party.
The Queen was said to be not happy about it.
But I wouldn't necessarily believe that.
I remember once, a couple of years ago, she danced with Sir Elton John to rock around the clock.
And she was a game gal and gave it her best.
So I'm sure she can, I doubt if they, if Kung Fu Fighting comes up, which we discussed yesterday, the racist song Kung Fu Fighting, I would bet Her Majesty the Queen will be getting down with the best of them.
As I said, it's a chick thing in the United States, as far as I can tell.
No American red-blooded, there are even fewer American red-blooded males watching the royal wedding than watching the United States participate in the soccer match in the World Cup.
It's that low.
It's that low.
If you go into a bar and a sports bar and the royal wedding comes on, they say, oh, no, please, can't we have the can't we watch the Golden Girls rerun dubbed into Spanish on Channel 173 and said, no men, red-blooded men in the United States watching the royal wedding.
But the monarchical urge persists even in a two-and-a-third century old republic.
Don't doubt it.
Don't doubt it.
What do you think Obama's all about?
I always find this odd when I'm speaking around America.
And somebody asked me, well, who do you want to be the guy that matches Obama?
I don't want a monarchical figure.
I don't want a glorious leader.
Do you remember that little video, all the celebrities?
What's he called?
Demi Moore's boy toy.
What's that guy called?
Ashton Kutcher.
Thank you.
Ashton Kutcher.
He made a little video in which all the celebrities pledged that they're going to be servants of the president and all mankind.
Sorry, hang on a minute.
I thought I settled that question in 1776.
You were servants of George III.
What's the point of swapping being servants of George III for being servants of Obama?
Then for the first few months of his reign, we saw all this stuff where he'd fly in for these so-called town hall meetings and his subjects, his unworthy subjects, would beseech him to do something for them.
Do you remember this lady?
I have an urgent need.
This lady from Fort Myers.
I have an urgent need.
We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.
Well, you know, Good King Barack took her name, Henrietta Hughes, and ordered his staff to meet with her.
Orders his staff to meet with her.
This unworthy, like Good King Wenceslas, Good King Wenceslas looking out on the Feast of Stephen as the snow lay round about deep and crisp and even, and he and his page go off to the poor guy's hovel and bring the majesty of the state to bear on this poor, unworthy wretch's hovel.
And that's basically what Barack Obama was doing for Henrietta Hughes.
He ordered, he ordered his staff to meet with her.
I don't know who they were.
I hope he didn't insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant secretary or whatever instead of flying in one of the big-time tax-cheating cabinet members to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence for her with a swing set hanging where the drive-through ATM used to be.
But you know what was pathetic about this?
That as she stood there and she said, We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.
What's her kitchen got to do with the citizen executive at the apex of United States government?
This is humiliating.
This is embarrassing for a republic, a so-called republic.
And instead, the audience in Fort Myers roared their gratitude.
Yes, they yelped.
Amen.
Gracious God, thank you so much.
The almighty sovereign from Barackingham Palace has agreed to descend on his subjects and solve all their woes.
This is unbecoming.
When you mock what's going on in Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace, don't ever doubt Barack Obama is a product.
His accession is a product of the monarchical urge from people who think that a great leader, a benign sovereign from the clouds, can save them all.
That's exactly what George III couldn't understand why you guys were upset about things.
Because that's what he thought he was to you, the benign sovereign.
Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
You know, I don't want to press this point, by the way, but the monarchical urge and its role in the election of Barack Obama.
This idea that somehow you need the great leader, the super being, the man who bestrides the planet almost like a god, which is what was said about it.
Do you remember all this stuff about Obama?
What's his name?
The film director, Spike Lee, says that they will divide, henceforth they will divide time into the eras into before Barack and after Barack.
This is un-Republican, this stuff.
You don't need the super leader.
What you need, as I was talking yesterday, is a Calvin Coolidge figure.
You need a modest American citizen who understands that the people are not his subjects, but that he is the servant of the people in a constitutional republic.
You know, Barack Obama isn't our boss.
We employ him.
He works for us.
Now, I don't want to say that in a racist way.
So all you crazy guys with the left-wing website saying, whoa, what are you saying?
You sound like he's some kind of Pullman Porter or whatever.
No, every American president works for the American people.
And the idea of looking for the super being, if you're going to look for a super being to solve your problems, you might as well go back to a royal family.
You might as well not have bothered dumping George III in the first place.
And as I always say, if George III had been running in 2008, he would have been the small government candidate, by the way.
But I'll tell you something else, too, that struck me about this.
You know, all this, the prince marries a commoner, right?
Over in London, Kate Middleton, they meet at university up in Scotland somewhere.
And there's been all this, she's not that common, actually, by these things go, but she is what they call a commoner.
And they say that her family, among her forebears, was a coal miner.
And this is, look at this.
She's not the coal miner's daughter, but she's the coal miner's great-great-great-great-granddaughter or whatever she is.
And yet she is going to be queen.
She's going to be the queen consort of the United Kingdom, of Canada, of Australia, New Zealand, Belize, Jamaica, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea, Bahamas, a whole bunch of places.
She's going to be the queen from nowhere.
Nowhere.
Now, that's what they used.
Yeah, her dad is an entrepreneur.
Who was saying that?
Was that Diane Sawyer saying that, H.R. Really?
I don't know who was saying.
I couldn't stick watching the 20 seconds of the coverage I caught, by the way, because nobody knows anything.
They're getting, yeah, the idea that her father is an entrepreneur, so that would relate to America.
I don't even know what that means.
What?
That Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner can impose a supplementary tax on her dad or whatever.
I don't know quite what the angle is there.
We could do with more entrepreneurs.
But anyway, anyway, this idea that anyone, now they're making this, oh, look, Kate Middleton, anyone can grow up to be queen.
That's what they used to say about this country.
Anyone can grow up to be president of the United States.
And that used to be the case.
It's not quite the case anymore.
If you notice, what we have now is government by Harvard and Yale.
Obama is Harvard Law School.
Bush was Harvard and Yale Law School.
Clinton was, which one was Clinton?
Was he?
Which one was he?
Clinton was Harvard, and Bush I was Yale.
By the way, people think this is normal.
That the products of these elite institutions should be the American presidents.
And it's not actually normal at all.
There's never been a time in the history of this country when the ruling class has been drawn from as narrow a field as it is now.
Do you remember the kind of guy?
Back when it was true that anyone could grow up and be American president.
Do you remember where William McKinley?
He didn't go to Harvard or Yale.
He went to Allegheny College for one semester.
Grover Cleveland went to something called Clinton Liberal Academy.
Which sounds, is that still open?
I hope not.
What a name.
Clinton Liberal Academy.
But he left to support his family.
Truman.
Truman didn't have a degree at all.
Why?
He was entirely unschooled.
Martin Van Buren left school at 14.
Abraham Lincoln only had 18 months of formal education.
Zachary Taylor never went to school at all.
Since Ronald Reagan left office, Ronald Reagan, remember, Eureka College, Illinois?
America, for the first time in its history, has lived under continuous rule by the Ivy League.
It's not a two-party system now.
It's a two-school system.
You've got Yale for Bush 1, then Yale law for Clinton, then Harvard business for Bush 2, and Harvard law for Obama.
So it's not even true now.
When somebody comes along who's actually started at the bottom, like Sarah Palin, who's gone to schools you've never heard of, like North Idaho College or Matanuska Susitna College, whatever that is, I don't know where it is.
Because she started at the bottom and she's worked her way up and she's in the situation that a lot of people are in, where you have to pick up your credits here and pick up your credits there and pay them off as you go and work as you go.
Everybody's, oh, good grief, how frightfully vote.
Everybody recoils in horror, like Dowager Duchesses at the grief.
Manatuska Susitna, we couldn't possibly have someone like that in the White House.
It would be completely absurd.
America is, for the first time in its history, is now under the control of an elite drawn from a narrower and narrower range of society.
And again, this is un-Republican.
This is entirely un-Republican.
So don't mock what's going on at Westminster Abbey just because they've all got goofy titles like Duchess and Marquess and Prince of this and Prince of that when you're going exactly the same way.
What would Zachary Taylor's chances of getting to the White House now be?
What would William McKinley's chances of getting to the White House now be?
What would Harry S. Truman's?
What would Ronald...
Now we say, oh no.
Rule by Ivy League.
Not a two-party system, not a two-school system.
Hey, let's go to Vinny in the Bronx.
Now, there is.
There is a Ivy League name, if ever I heard one.
Let's go to Vinny in the Bronx.
Vinny, you're live on the Russian Board Show.
Great to hear you.
Hey, Mark, forget about it.
Anyway.
Oh, don't do this.
You make me sound like some silly metrosexual queen when you do it, you forget about it in that beautiful Bronx voice.
I just want to give two quick examples of media hypocrisy.
The first one would be FEMA's Disappearing Act in Alabama, where the death toll is 300 and counting.
We remember the outcry against President Bush and FEMA and Katrina, and I just want to make sure our media realizes that FEMA is nowhere to be found in Alabama either, And I'm breathlessly waiting the reports as to why and what President Obama is doing about it.
And the other one would be...
Just before you get to that, Vinny, this is right, by the way.
300 people have died in one American state, Alabama, Alabama, 300 people dead.
This is like, you remember 9-11, 3,000 people died.
This is like Alabama's 9-11.
And if this had happened on a Republican watch, the media would be demanding to know what the president was doing about it, why the delay had been in getting FEMA and getting federal aid out there and all the rest of it.
And there's a virtual news blackout on it.
You would never know that this was the biggest death toll in 40 years from a storm of this kind.
So you're right on that point, Vinney.
What's your next point?
The other one is about an incident that happened in September of 2010.
I believe they actually went by the name the Kill Team, and it was a group of rogue American soldiers in Afghanistan who murdered Afghan civilians.
They mutilated them, and I believe they took pictures of it.
Now, this story received scant coverage.
I believe it broke early this year, either February or March.
It was a one-day story.
I hearken back to Abu Gharab, where when that happened, you had art exhibits, you had novels, you had conferences, and you had everyone screaming for resignations and impeach the president and yada yada yada.
Yeah, and that's crazy.
I'm not sure if Abu Gharab, if I remember correctly.
Unfortunately, to our shame, these American soldiers committed horrid atrocities, and they just happened to be under the presidency of one Barack Hussein Obama.
I'm just wondering where the call for Mr. Obama's resignation is.
Yeah, and as you point out, with Abu Ghray, with that crazy gal, what was her name, Lindy, and opposing all the fellas in the Victoria Secrets underwear and all the rest of it, everybody was saying that goes to the top.
That goes to Rumsfeld and Bush.
They bear responsibility for this.
Rumsfeld should resign.
It's just some purely local matter happening out on the distant horizon, thousands of miles away.
Doesn't reflect on the Obama administration at all.
So as you point out, all the novels and plays and things they did about Gitmo, that whole genre seems to have died in the last couple of years, too, mysteriously.
Trying to get away from the family.
Hey, Vinnie.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I thought you'd gone for a minute there.
Carry on.
You're on there.
If I'm not mistaken, aren't they still trying to bring up Donald Rumsfeld on war crimes?
Yes, they are.
They are.
And he has to be very careful where he flies around the world because all these, as you say, it's not just the American media.
A lot of these European countries, there's like showboating magistrates in European Union countries who can't wait for Rumsfeld to change planes in their jurisdiction and they can bring him up on war crimes trials.
They haven't ruled out getting Rumsfeld and Bush and Cheney put up on war crime trials at The Hague.
Yet, as you say, GIs can kill Afghan civilians on Obama's watch, and apparently it doesn't affect the great Nobel Peace Prize winner's stature in the eyes of the media and the Europeans.
That's absolutely right there, Vinny.
Thank you.
Hey, great to talk to you.
Thank you, sir, for your time.
Thank you, Mark.
No, thank you.
Vinny from the Bronx.
1-800-282-2882.
It's Obenline Friday.
Whatever you want to talk about.
No highly trained broadcast specialist is here to restrict the range of subjects today.
Whatever you want to talk about, it's all yours.
1-800-282-2882.
The United States Congress is trying to get on up.
It wants to get that old debt ceiling up.
The debt ceiling has been raised 75 times in the last 50 years.
The debt ceiling only gets on up.
It never gets on down.
When you raise the debt ceiling, it just gets on up and then gets on way up even further.
Never, ever, ever feels the need to get on down.
But one thing is striking about the current debate, apparently, apparently, only 16% of Americans, according to the latest poll in the Washington Post, want to raise the debt ceiling without any spending reforms.
This is, on the face of it, a good result because it shows that the debate now is going the way of conservatives.
The idea that we can simply carry on increasing the debt ceiling ever and ever and ever with no plan ever to start living within our means.
I said yesterday, the government of the United States borrows $188 million every hour.
That's the official figure from the 2011 budget.
The 2011 budget presumes that the government of the United States can borrow, can spend, can spend $188 million that it doesn't have every hour of every day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Now we have to raise the debt ceiling because that's not enough.
So we've got to raise it some more so we can borrow even more than a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.
And what we see is that only 16% of people want to raise the debt ceiling without any spending reforms.
Now they're almost there.
They're almost there because you know this is the John Boehner plan.
The John Boehner plan is to is to agree to raise the debt ceiling in return for certain serious concessions on spending.
Now what's the betting that that'll work?
I mean I can see John Boehner and Harry Reid and Barack Obama having a meeting and coming out all smiles and having an agreement.
They've announcing that they've agreed to raise the debt ceiling in return for cutting back spending in this area and that area and all the rest of it.
And then as happened a couple of weeks ago, we would find out 48 hours later that these were all meaningless accounting tricks that would impact federal spending not one jot, not one whit, and yet the debt ceiling would have gone up.
So I don't even think that's a viable solution.
I think at this stage, the United States government has got a choice.
It can live within its means or regardless of what it does to the debt ceiling, it will be sending a message to our lenders around the world that we simply are in the game of business as usual and that the political institutions of the United States are impervious to cost correction.
And once that happens, it doesn't matter whether you raise the debt ceiling because the rest of the world has got the message that you're just spendaholics and you're never not going to be spendaholics and you're just going to be spending, spending, spending until you drive the country off the cliff.
What we need to do now is actually start talking seriously about ending entire government departments.
You can save straight off $100 million just by cutting out the Federal Department of Education.
You can just take that out of the equation.
If you want to have an argument about some things that it does that you think are quite good, like Pell Grants, I'm not even a big fan of Pell Grants, but if you want to take one or two little things like that, they don't need a cabinet department.
There shouldn't be a Department of Energy.
We have to get serious about saying we don't need this Cabinet Department, we don't need that Cabinet Department, we want to end those.
We want to end those.
Because right now, this guy, do you remember Paul O'Neill?
He was the Treasury Secretary, first Treasury Secretary under Bush.
He went traipsing around Africa with Bono.
They wore Colonel Gaddafi pajamas and were photographed together, like Colonel Gaddafi's mini-me's traipsing around Africa.
They were there for, you know, Bono's big thing is debt forgiveness for Africa.
Paul O'Neill has now denounced the people who are threatening not to vote for increasing the debt ceiling.
And he's saying that they're damaging the United States of America.
No, sir, your conventional wisdom is damaging and has profoundly damaged the United States of America.
And instead of wasting your time at taxpayers' expense, traipsing around Africa in the Colonel Gaddafi pajamas, arguing for debt forgiveness for Africa, you and Bono should climb back into your tribal pajamas and tour the United States arguing for debt forgiveness for the United States.
Because that's what it comes down to if we stick with your brain-dead conventional wisdom.
Mark Stein in for Rush, 1-800-282-2882, talking about the debt ceiling and lots more still to come.
The Rush Limbaugh Show Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
We're talking about the debt ceiling.
We're going to talk about the Paul Ryan plan and the real choice facing this nation, which is about between ending Medicare as we know it or ending the United States of America as we know it.
That's the way Colonel Alan West put it in Florida yesterday, and he is absolutely right.
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