All Episodes
Previous Next
July 19, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:42
July 19, 2011, Tuesday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in, the Rupert Murdoch The Rupert Murdoch hearing in the House of Commons is still going on.
This is like the Jerry Lewis marathon.
It's no end to it in the House of Commons.
Murdoch testify.
Murdoch, he's the rapacious businessman.
Wow, his journalists tapped into telephones.
You have to call them to account before the people's representatives.
What about this thing, Operation Fast and Furious, Operation Fast and Furious, about which absolutely nothing is happening fast and nobody's terribly furious?
The official explanation, as I understand it, is that the federal government, see if you can follow me on this, used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels.
That's the official explanation.
That's the official explanation.
Oh, absolutely.
Mr. Sanati wants to know what's wrong with that.
Of course it makes perfect sense because the government, the IATF, wanted to identify who were the high-up gun traffickers.
But as it turned out, the high-up gun traffickers were already known to the FBI and the DEA and the other federal acronyms.
And in fact, some of them were already on the payroll as paid informants of the other acronyms.
So what you got is one wasteful federal agency gun running to Mexico in order to find out who are the paid informants of another federal agency.
And I guess it, you know, it wouldn't matter, except a real Border Patrol agent got gunned down and killed by one of these guns that essentially stimulus funding gave to a Mexican drug cartel.
There's a wonderful way it was put in an Investors Business Daily editorial.
Quote, the evidence suggests that Border Patrol agent Brian Terry's death was financed by the President's stimulus package with the full knowledge and support of Attorney General Holder.
Unquote.
The evidence suggests that Border Patrol Agent Terry's death was financed by the President's stimulus package with the full knowledge and support of Attorney General Holder.
You think Eric Holder's going to be hauled up to account the way Rupert Murdoch's being put through the paces in the House of House?
Oh no, because he's not a big scary businessman, so he doesn't have to be accountable.
He can run guns to the Mexican drug cartels.
And if you don't care about Mexican drug cartels gunning down American Border Patrol agencies with stimulus funded weaponry, what about all the Mexican civilians, the Mexican drug cartels?
I thought the Democrat Party was all about helping the nice, sweet people from the third world.
It turns out we were talking yesterday, the guy called up to know what about all these two million jobs that Obama had supposedly created and he couldn't figure out what they were because he was in Ohio.
If you want to look at the jobs they're created, he's created a bunch of jobs in the Mexican coffin industry for burying all the people gunned down by Mexican drug cartel gang members with these thousands of guns paid for, introduced, funneled to the Mexican drug cartels through the Obama stimulus.
That's great news, but we don't have to worry.
He's not going to be hauled up in front of a committee of the people's representatives like Rupert Murdoch because he hasn't done anything as bad as employing a journalist who hacked into a phone.
No, sir, no sir.
I'm always interested to see what Liberals will defend.
Gary Jaffe, Gary Jaffe writes to me from New York and says I was dead wrong about the conversation on the Bill Maher show last week.
The reason violent sex fantasies came up comically, by the way, is because both Michelle Buckman and Rick Sam Torum have been publicly brutal and hateful about homosexuals.
So this was a comic way of getting at them.
Oh, great.
Is that really true, Gary?
Can I have a violent sex fantasy about you?
Would you enjoy that?
Would you enjoy it if I had a violent sex fantasy about you?
Would liberals be cool with that?
He says I'm not cool because I don't get the whole kind of violent sex fantasy thing.
Why can't you just have a regular sex fantasy?
That's what they, in the days when I still had sex fantasies, they weren't violent.
I had a after I saw Diamonds Are Forever with Jill St. John running around Blofeld's boat in a little bikini.
She's got an audio cassette in there that's got the secret codes that are going to blow up the world.
And she's running around on blowfellow.
It's an oil rig, actually.
She's running around in this little bikini, and you can see in her cute little bottom the outline of the audio cassette of it.
I had fantasies about Jill St. John, but they weren't rape fantasies.
What's the idea?
The liberals, it's okay now to make a comic rape fantasy.
This guy you're defending, Gary, by the way, Dan Savage, the gay advice columnist, he's part of these guys who are all trying to all claiming that Michelle Bachman's husband is secretly gay.
And they're making jokes about, oh, doesn't he have a bit of a lisp?
And doesn't he have a mincing walk?
Well, you know, I'm foreign.
I mean, don't you think my accent sounds a bit gay, Gary?
Maybe you could have like a violent rape fantasy about me.
I love this.
I love this.
Violent sex fantasies are okay, says Gary, but you didn't bother to mention the context.
Oh, okay, okay.
I'm going to have a violent rape fantasy about Michelle Obama, Gary.
Wait, wait, wait, before you criticize me.
Don't you want to hear the context?
That's all.
That's the important thing, isn't it?
Oh, and Hillary Clinton's in there, too.
I'm going to have a violent rape fantasy about Hillary Clinton.
But don't worry.
It's full of context.
It's full of content.
Mr. Mr. Snurdly's gone.
Mr. Snurdly's gone over to the wastebasket in the corner now.
I haven't even got to the violent rape fantasy, Snerdley.
Come on, you've got to be mad enough.
You can't, you're telling me you can't, you're not mad enough to hear my violent sex fantasy about Hillary Carter.
I don't.
Well, you're not cool either.
Gary in New York says everyone's cool with all the violent sex fantasies.
It's the new liberal thing.
What could be more impeccably liberal than making jokes about some guy who's got a lisp and a mincing gait?
Isn't that funny?
It's not in the least bit homophobic because I didn't mention the context.
It's okay in the context.
Good luck with that, Gary.
You're totally cool.
I think rape fantasies are really cool.
Bring it on.
Bring it on.
Let's have them.
What was the old Vaudeville joke, I think, circa 1958?
The woman saying, oh, I've just been raped.
And the guy goes, don't you mean raped?
And she goes, no, there was a bunch of them.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
That was the kind of joke they did back in Vaudeville, 1957.
Is it okay to do it if you do it about Michelle Buckman, Gary?
Is it suddenly cool?
Just because she says, as you put it, publicly brutal and hateful things about homosexuals.
You want to give an example about that, Gary?
Now, in the last hour, we were talking about Peter Ferrara.
Good luck with this, by the way.
If you're thinking this is your approach to the presidential candidacy, talking about which one you'd like to rape.
Good luck running with that.
We were talking about the impending bankruptcy of the United States.
And in connection with Peter Ferrara's book, I got a book that notches it on to the next stage because I tend to agree with Peter.
It's coming out any moment now.
I think this idea that decline, decline is sometimes attractive to liberals because they take a vacation in France and they say, oh, it all seems, you're driving through the French countryside, all seems terribly agreeable, the restaurants are nice.
Well, what's so wrong with decline?
Isn't it terrific to be able to live in a world where you don't have to worry about invading third world countries you couldn't care less about and occupying them for years?
What could be more pleasant than decline in a great power gently in a very genteel, civilized way, just kind of sliding down little by little every year?
It can be very pleasant.
But America's decline, and this is, I think, an important point, is not going to be like that.
The reason decline in Western Europe after the Second World War was so relatively civilized is because America was there to guarantee world order.
Who is going to cushion America's decline the way America cushioned Europe's decline?
There is absolutely no good answer to that.
And that is why the Obama project is an existential threat to the United States.
Basically, Obama wants to spend 25% of American GDP on big government at the Washington level.
He doesn't want to be interested in municipal government, county government, state government.
Progressives, liberals want to do it all at the national level because that way you've got nowhere to go to.
You can't move from town to town, county to county, you've got nowhere to go.
So they want to do it all at that level.
And he needs 25% of GDP to do that.
That's why he won't accept, he will not accept the principal point the Republicans and Conservatives are trying to make that spending is too high.
Because if he concedes that point, then the Democrat project whereby the workers of America pony up 25% of the GDP of this country to fund big government at the Washington level.
He cannot afford to concede that because everything about his plan rests on that.
This can't be done.
This can't be done.
There simply are not enough rich people to fund this level of government.
There's not enough people anywhere on the planet.
One of the problems of the world at the moment is that we're running up against the real debt ceiling, which is the willingness of the planet, the rest of the planet, to bankroll what's going on in Washington.
And it doesn't lead anywhere good because great convulsive changes in big power relationships and big power dominance are usually never smooth.
You know what the smoothest transfer of power in history was, and I think this is why we're complacent about it.
The smoothest transfer of power happened in the early 1940s, one month.
In the previous month, America had more, Britain had more men under arms than the United States.
The following month, the United States had more men under arms than Britain.
And in that moment, that little moment, the baton of global dominance was passed.
And it happened so smoothly, people don't even notice it because it was the smoothest transfer of global power in the history of the world, where it went from one dominant English-speaking power to its prodigal son.
Another English-speaking power spoke the same language, had the same legal tradition, and broadly speaking, the same set of ideas about liberty and democracy.
The baton was passed and life went on.
So you notice, for example, in British colony, in Bermuda, I was in Bermuda a couple of days ago.
Bermuda was a royal naval base for centuries, and then, as part of the deal for supporting Britain in the war, Roosevelt insisted on an American military base in Bermuda.
Britain's ties with its empire were replaced by ties with Washington.
So, Australia, which normally wanted the priority was to get a hearing in London, Australia and New Zealand became part of the ANZUS military alliance with Washington.
Canada, its big thing was to get a hearing in London.
You wanted to talk to the Imperial Metropolitan Superpower in London.
Then now it's part of NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain, where they're providing jointly for North America.
So, this was the smoothest transfer of global dominance in history.
Do you think it's likely to go that smoothly next time around?
Do you think it's likely to go that smoothly when China is the dominant economic power on the planet, which the IMF now predicts will happen within five years?
I mean, we are so complacent because we are coming to the end of a two-century anglophone dominance of global order.
And what is coming next, if America doesn't correct, is going to be absolutely startling, it's going to be stunning, and it's not going to be the kind of genteel decline they have in bucolic French villages where you're sitting at the sidewalk cafe, having your cafe au lait and your croissant, and watching the world go by and saying, If this is decline, bring it on, let's have more of it.
It's not going to be like that at all.
It's going to be something far more catastrophic, far more devastating, far more convulsing.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein for Rush.
Oh, things are afoot in Washington.
The bipartisan gang of six is gaining momentum in the Senate.
They have a plan, an ambitious new deficit reduction plan.
Ambitious new.
By the way, this ambitious new plan supposedly cuts $3.7 trillion over the next 10 years.
In other words, it cuts over the course of 10 years, it cuts about twice of what this year's budget deficit is a loan.
And this is what ambitious means in Washington.
This ambitious plan cuts basically takes 10 years to cut essentially two years' budget deficit by 2020.
That's if we stick to this stuff in 2020.
Now, Obama is hailing this deficit reduction plan.
He says it's broadly consistent with the approach he's advocated.
That's great news.
So, it's apparently gated.
We may have a bipartisan decay.
Bailey Hutchinson is on board with it.
It's a fair compromise, she says.
We've gone from a gang of six to a mob of 50, says West Virginia's Democrat senator.
So, we may have movement afoot, movement afoot in Washington, a bipartisan deficit reduction plan.
It may be time to head for the hills and take all the canned food and ammunition you can keep in your bag.
Let's go to Ace in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.
Ace, you're live on the Rushlinborg show.
Great to have you with us.
Thanks for waiting.
Hey, Mark, how are you doing?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Great.
I love your commentary and your sense of humor and your accent.
I wanted to comment about the government workers.
Right.
And I'm a retired civil servant, federal, and I'm also, I spent 12 years active duty in the military.
And it seems like there's a double standard between the Defense Department government and the rest of government.
Because in the Defense Department, we've had many people get either released or let go due to reductions in force or unethical behavior.
And of course, guys in the military have gone to gone to jail for things that they've done.
So I just wanted to say that in the case of the Defense Department government, it's a little different, it seems, than the rest of the federal government.
Well, you know, that might be because the defense of the nation is actually a core national responsibility.
So in a sense, those guys are doing a real job that has real measurable objectives and real goals.
But if, for example, you're at the National Institute of Health where you're just shoveling out, say, grants, they spend $150,000 asking American citizens to mail in their toenails to find out the difference between how much toenail nicotine is present versus swabbing for saliva nicotine.
And they spent basically the people at the National Institutes of Health spent $154.50 on each set of toenails.
This is just regular folks' toenails.
It's not like Elvis Presley's toenails that they go hunting for in the broad loom of the jungle room at Graceland.
This is just regular folks, not Elvis' toenails, $154.50 on each examining toenails for the nicotine content of toenails.
Now, there's nothing about that in the Constitution, Ace.
And I think it's difficult.
Some of these agencies are just so pointless.
It'd be hard to know whether you were doing the job well or badly anyway, because essentially it's just one giant kind of make-work racket.
And I think the lesson here, if what you say is correct, is that your best shot at effective government is if government sticks to its core responsibilities.
When you have small, lean government, it will do stuff better than big government will.
Big government, by definition, will be profoundly stupid.
Well, thanks for taking my call.
I really appreciate that.
This is my first time getting through, and I was really amazed I got through.
Well, I'm very glad you got through.
Ace is a great name, by the way.
Is that what your parents christened you with that name?
Actually, my first name is Horace.
Oh, oh, so it's an abbreviation of Horace.
It's the coolest abbreviation of Horace.
And no disrespect, but Horace, I don't think, is quite as cool a name as Ace.
But this is a useful tip, folks.
If you've learned nothing else from this show today, if your parents are so cruel and abusive that they christen you Horace, remember to shorten it to Ace and you will be the coolest guy in town.
Thanks a lot for your call, Horace.
Howard, does anybody still call you Horace?
Yeah, oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's.
Oh, okay, okay.
Well, thanks for your call, Horace.
That's Ace, otherwise known as Horace from Cab Hill, Pennsylvania.
That's fantastic.
That is a real contrast between the formal name and the nickname.
By the way, that is an important point here.
At a certain level, once you've got so much government, it's just going to be doing all kinds of stupid things.
I mean, for example, this $3.7 trillion deficit reduction from the Gang of Six, that does nothing for eliminating the $150,000 of taxpayer money spent on toenail clippings.
The toenail clipping expenditures are still going to be there under this plan.
Yes, Rush is back tomorrow with all-American, natural-born excellence in broadcasting.
But until then, highly ineligible, cheap foreign knockoff excellence in broadcasting.
We got money for everything in this country.
We've got money to supply Mexican drug cartels to reduce the cost of them buying their weaponry.
We've got money to pay Americans to mail their toenail clippings to federal agencies.
Did you know you can do that?
You'll get $154.50 if you mail your toenail clippings to the National Institutes of Health.
Terrific.
John in Baldwin, Missouri.
John, it's great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Thank you, Mark.
Great to be with you.
Look, my contentious debate over the debt ceiling, the Republicans are demanding an article to the Constitution requiring a balanced budget.
Now, while this sounds good in principle, the track working of Congress and abiding by limitations set forth in the Constitution, hey, it's not exemplary.
To make my point about the balanced budget amendment, you have to go back and look at how the 27th Amendment to the Constitution is interpreted.
Now, the 27th Amendment requires that Congress stand for election before they take a pay raise.
So what they did, and by the way, that was ratified in 1992.
But in 1991, to circumvent what I consider the compensation requirement of the 27th Amendment, they passed and get this the Ethics Reform Act.
Now they provided for an annual cost of living allowance of COA.
Now, the COA, so what happens now is Congress does not take a pay raise.
It's not a pay raise when they get a COA.
Even though they have more money in their paycheck, they call it a COA.
Now, I mentioned this to Justice Scale in 1996.
He said, they don't get a pay raise, they get a COLA.
And he said, oh, so that's how they did that.
Yeah, what happens is if they want a balanced budget amendment, one of the things the proviso that's supposed to be in there is they have to balance the budget in case of a national, unless there's a national emergency.
Now, who's going to define what a national emergency is?
Congress?
The president of the United States?
No, no.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And you would have...
It's not going to work, by the way.
You define what it is.
Now, where have you heard what is before?
And you would have a situation, as you say, it would not just be defining a national emergency, but also defining how you balance the budget.
The essence of Washington accounting is that it bears even less relationship to the real world than Hollywood accounting.
And you would have exactly the same thing, where stuff would be delayed to so-called out years in the same way that when you look at how they passed Obamacare, the price tag they put on that, basically they decided they wanted to hold the cost of Obamacare down below a trillion.
So they basically came up with a formula that would allow them to defer the alleged cost of parts of Obamacare so it didn't figure into the original cost calculations.
And they would be doing that if you told them they had to balance the budget every year.
They'd be doing all that kind of stuff every year too.
Yeah, well, you know, take into consideration.
Are we in a national emergency now?
If this was the case, we had a balanced budget amendment, the president might come down and say, hey, we have a national emergency, so I'm going to spend whatever the heck I want.
These are the soundballs.
Yeah, because we're in a time of national crisis because we're running huge budget deficits that are imperiling an existential threat to the Republic by this runaway government spending.
So that's why we can't have a balanced budget amendment because we're in a national emergency of runaway spending.
That's the argument they would use in the same way that the executive office of the president yesterday said that they were rejecting the House of Representatives' proposed cuts to the executive office budget because cutting the budget would impact the executive office's ability to cut the budget.
So you would be just running around in circles with all kinds of stuff.
And you know, I'll tell you, I'll add something else to this, John, because you make a good point that the whole government now is operating on accounting sleights of hand, including payments for legislators.
As you know, when you look at a guy like Barney Frank, he hardly ever has to actually reach into his pocket and write a personal check.
On paper, his salary is very low.
But by the time you load in all the perks they get, it doesn't matter actually putting up the nominal salary.
They very rarely are in.
You look at the house gym, for example.
If you wanted to belong to a private gym, if you've got a plumbing business, if you've got a computer software business, and you want to belong to a gym down on Main Street, you've got to pay your membership.
Anthony Weiner has a taxpayer-funded gym for him to take his crotch shots in.
So the whole salary cap thing is meaningless.
And I think it gets beyond this, John, because it's not about balancing the budget.
A lot of this stuff is wrong, even if it could be afforded.
And that's why the way the Republicans framed the conversation a decade ago is essentially fundamentally flawed.
It's not about finding ways to afford being able to pay American citizens to mail their toenail clippings in.
It's about actually shrinking the size of government so that we liberate more space for the citizen to exploit his economic opportunities and for the great entrepreneurial energy in this country not to be crushed by the size of government.
So it's not about making this stuff affordable.
It's about making this stuff smaller.
And that's why the balanced budget amendment is not going to solve the problems on this, John.
Right you are.
Right you are.
Don't forget off-budget out money that they have.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I know.
And absolutely absurd things.
And nobody understands it.
John Boehner, that thing, that last thing that John Boehner agreed to, where he merged triumphant, having secured supposedly all these savings, and it shrank from billions, and then it shrank to millions.
And then eventually somebody else ran the numbers and it turned out it actually increased the budget.
Nobody knows what this stuff is.
Why would you?
Why would you?
When diversity manuals in Omaha, Nebraska are being paid for out of the federal budget in Washington, why would anybody think you could actually get a real world figure on what that costs?
Big government, big government at this scale is never going to be accountable in that way.
And that's why the other thing we need, by the way, is actually to stop monkeying around with this.
We need to get a book I've mentioned before on this show called The Size of Nations.
And it basically points out that the wealthiest and most successful nations in the world are the small countries.
They're places like Singapore, places like Norway.
They're countries with either physically small places like Luxembourg or they're countries with relatively small populations.
All the big places bust up.
Soviet Union, bust up.
Yugoslavia, bust up.
And the United States has been an exception to this because it's a highly decentralized federation.
If the founding fathers had decided to emulate, say, the French revolutionaries and come up with a say the French Revolution had happened a couple of years before the American Revolution, and they'd come up with a kind of French-style level of centralization, this country would have bust up 200 years ago.
You can't have, you can't have effective centralized government in a country this big.
Obamacare includes a tanning tax, a tanning tax.
Why is that a federal responsibility?
I mean, nobody needed, I suppose if you're listening to this show in California or Florida or Hawaii, you're probably saying, why is he going on about the tanning tax?
Who needs to go to the tanning salon anyway?
Well, that's because you live in Hawaii or California.
But if you live in northern Maine or northern New Hampshire, where it's winter 10 months of the year, going to the tanning salon and so getting that pasty, sickly North Country one flesh look out of you and having a nice healthy glow so people could almost believe you're on the beach in Malibu sitting next to Barbara Streisand.
It's that, that is, if anything shouldn't be a national responsibility, it's tanning.
Obviously, tanning salons are much bigger deal in northern Maine and northern New Hampshire than they are in Hawaii and California.
Why is there now a national tanning tax?
Why is there a national tanning regime?
This is nuts.
This is nuts.
This stuff, there's no, absolutely no reason to do this stuff at the national level.
And there are many compelling, many, many compelling reasons why we shouldn't be doing it, not least the fact that once you sluice it through the great sinkhole of Washington, it's impossible to get a real estimate.
It's simply too remote.
You don't know who to call.
If there's a tanning tax in your town in Maine, you can pick up the phone and call the guy at the town hall and complain about it.
That's what people do in my town in New Hampshire.
If the school, they don't like the school district budget, they call the school board guy at home in the evening and yell at him.
But you can't do that with Washington.
Who do you yell to?
You're yelling into a void.
That's why this stuff, we need to do a lot less at the national level.
Are we going to live up to the prediction in that book, The Size of Nations?
This country is going to end up as centralized as France.
And when a big continental country gets as centralized as France, a continental power from Maine to Hawaii, you get as centralized as France, you're basically going to go the way of the Soviet Union.
You're going to bust up and it's not going to be pleasant.
Mark Stein for Rush, more ahead.
Mark Stein for Rush at the Golden EIB microphone.
Let's go to George in Springfield, Missouri, Georgia, live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Mark, thanks for taking the call.
You're doing a great job.
I just wanted to point out the explanation he gave about a half hour ago or so regarding the transfer of power from England to the United States was probably the most cogent I've heard.
I've thought that very thing for many years.
A lot of it had to do, obviously, with our industrial capability.
But once we were in Europe, we have stayed.
And that is why the socialist nations that are now failing have been able to do what they've been doing for the last 60 years because they weren't paying for their defense.
And the United States bore a heavy price in terms of man, manpower, and dollars.
So they've been able to experiment only because we were a capitalist system propping them up.
Yeah, that's a very good way of putting it, that really the only reason that Belgium can be Belgium and Sweden can be Sweden is because America's America.
America guarantees global – if you look at the Germans, for example, the Germans were one of the most militaristic nations on the planet a century ago.
And they're the opposite now.
They're as obnoxiously peacenick now as they were once obnoxiously militarist in 1911.
And when people, Americans go over to Germany and they say, oh, look, it's wonderful.
People stay in school until they're 32 and they have a great healthcare system.
The German healthcare system is paid for, essentially paid for by American taxpayers.
Because Germany, the United States Army lives in Germany.
So Germany doesn't have to pay to defend its own borders.
So it's freed up to spend that money on all the social programs.
Now, who's going to do that for America?
Who's going to play that role for the, when the United States decides to opt for a German-sized state, a Swedish-sized state, who's going to be America, play the role that America played for Germany, for the United States?
Have you got a good answer for that, George?
No, as I was listening to you discuss that, it just kind of furthers my belief, Mark, that unfortunately I just see us fragmenting as the Soviets and the Chinese do.
There are too many of us that have been producers that understand that the federal government is a mere creation, an invention by the states.
We understand that the purpose of the federal government is not to provide services, but to secure our liberty.
And we're sick and tired of watching what's been happening.
The Tea Party movement was a beginning step.
But I think what you're going to see, Mark, is a furtherance of the state sovereignty movements through the state legislatures.
There have already been 10 that have passed laws protecting commerce within their own states.
Obviously, these are being challenged by the federal government.
This movement that is coming from the grassroots will continue to grow until we either reform the federal government or we re-identify ourselves in regional governments that are more aligned with the traditional America.
And Mark, I want to leave you with one thought, if I may.
I've heard a lot of theories about how to improve things, balanced budget, flat tax, how to control the politicians.
A long time ago, I heard a guy talking about repealing the 17th Amendment and once again, having our senators be appointed by the state legislatures.
I think that would be our only hope because it is the Senate that has been the stonewall and the furtherance of either good reform or the furtherance of everything that the left has been trying to do.
If we can't get control of the high house, then we're going to march right over the cliffs.
Yeah, that's a very good point because the Senate is the club.
I spent, whatever it was, two months in the Senate covering the Bill Clinton impeachment trial.
And by the end of that trial, I wanted to do what they did in New Zealand.
New Zealand abolished the upper house.
And after spending two months in the so-called world's greatest deliberative body, listening to Robert C. Byrd, Primp and Preen, and all the rest of them, I wanted to abolish that.
And in divorcing, the 17th Amendment, moving to directly elected senators, changed the balance, changed the balance in Washington.
It turned a senator, instead of the senator being the representative of his state, to, in a sense, being the equivalent of a prince in the United Arab Emirates, the emirs of incumbestan.
In the end, you know, Teddy Kennedy flies back to Massachusetts every other weekend, but in the end, he's a national legislator representing Washington.
And that is not just a problem with your Teddy Kennedys, but that becomes a problem for Republican senators, too.
And that did change the balance in power.
And I think the bigger point there is as well that we're going to see movements towards decentralization because fiscally prudent states, my state, New Hampshire, why should we pick up the tab?
Even if we wanted to pick up the tab for California and New York, there aren't enough of us to be able to do it.
So when you have these states that have basically driven up levels of government, levels of government workforces, levels of government workforces with levels of public pensions that they can't afford, and they go to Obama or whoever it is for the national bailout, if you're in Wyoming, do you really want to get stuck with the tab for paying that?
I mean, this is the logic of this.
The question is, if you want to push this, if you want to push this, You're going to be seeding little secession movements initially just in one or two corners of the map, but eventually people will get the message that united will fall, but divided, a few of us might stand a sporting chance.
And people will get that message very quickly.
Mark Stein in for Rush, gotta go.
Hey, I hope that guy who threw the pie at Rupert Murdoch has a food preparation license for that pie.
You know, he could get into serious trouble if he doesn't.
I've had a ball these last couple of days.
Thank you to Mr. Snerdley for looking after things, holding my hand long distance from New York.
He'll be back at the Southern Command with Rush live tomorrow, 12 midday Eastern.
▲
Export Selection