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Aug. 24, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:56
August 24, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Why is it always me?
I was here during the blizzard that paralyzed New York over the winter, the one between Christmas and New Year's.
There was nobody even in the EIB offices.
Nobody was on the streets of New York.
And there was nobody on the streets of New York City.
I was here.
Yesterday I'm doing the show, and there's an earthquake in the middle of the program.
Right in the middle of the show.
Yes, I'm a self-centered egomaniac.
It's all about me.
If you were listening to the Rush program yesterday, I was here yesterday.
There's Marks all week.
Mark Davis was on on Friday.
Mark Stein was on on Monday.
I was here yesterday.
I'm Mark Belling.
I'm here today.
Mark Davis is here tomorrow and Friday.
Rush is kind of like George Foreman.
You know how George Foreman named all of his kids George so he wouldn't forget his names.
Rush now has all of his guests.
So Walter Williams isn't named Mark.
Got a couple of other guys that still do the program, but most of us are Marks.
Anyway, if you were listening to Rush's program yesterday, the earthquake hit right in the middle of the program.
It was at the end of the second hour.
In fact, we were in a commercial break.
And I'm feeling my chair move.
And I'm thinking, wow, am I cracking up?
Have I had too much coffee?
Am I getting de I got an hour to go on national radio?
You know, I just do a show in Milwaukee.
It's a big deal to be an 18 zillion affiliates.
This is EIB.
You know, my see your mind is racing.
Is there something wrong with me?
Then I'm grabbing my heart.
I what are the signs of a heart attack?
Lightheadedness.
Lightheadedness, there it is.
I'm having a heart attack right on national radio.
The chair's moving around side by side, and I'm, wow.
Then I'm thinking, earthquake?
No.
I'm in New York terrorism.
And it was right at that time that broadcast engineer Mike Mamone said, You feel your chair move?
I said, Yeah.
And he calm as could be because he's the engineer.
Said, yeah, we just had an earthquake.
And came out of the commercial break, and our TV monitor showed that indeed right away, Fox and CNN, we don't have MSNBC on the uh monitor here.
Actually, we do.
There is an MSNBC monitor.
That's the one that says, ignore this or you'll crack up in the middle of the program.
Uh right 5.8, 5.9 earthquake, and we were able to tell people about it 90 seconds to uh two minutes after it happened.
And thinking back about this, we took the commercial break at the end of the second hour a little bit earlier, in fact.
Mr. Mamone said to me, You're taking this a little bit early.
And it was during that break that I started feeling that if this had happened while I was on the air, I don't know what I would have done.
Anyway, that was yesterday, today is today.
Everybody's making fun of how the East Coast is reacting to the earthquake.
I'm from the Midwest, so I make fun of everybody.
I make fun of the Californians that make fun of the East.
Well, look, the California people, ah, yeah, you people can't handle a little earthquake.
Move out here where we get seven and eights on the Richter scale, and you know what a real earthquake is.
Still, this, you know, you're in a building and it starts to shake, it is kind of weird.
Yesterday's program, other than the earthquake, I actually had a theme for the program.
I talked about the deaths of two prominent American songwriters, Jerry Lieber and Nick Ashford, and how they created music that I felt really reflected in American culture, and that's one of the things that we're losing in our drift leftward under Obama.
Well, I don't always do the show this way, but there is another story today that I think just summarizes like every topic that I have planned for the program.
And in the third hour today, we're going to be joined briefly by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
For those of you who have been following the soap opera of Wisconsin, the national unions and the Democratic Party and President Obama have vowed to stop the fiscal reforms of Governor Walker in Wisconsin that's been going on for months.
The story's pretty much over.
The reforms have been passed, the state budget is in place, they've held recall elections for Republican members of the state legislature, and nothing's changed.
The governor is still standing, the reforms are in place, and they are working.
There's a real lesson there, I think for Republicans across the country and for conservatives, if you stick to your guns, our stuff can work.
And we're going to talk with Scott Walker about that very topic in the third hour of the program today.
But as I said, there's another story in the news that just seems to tie into that and almost everything else that I was planning to talk about today on Russia's program.
Story comes from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
Mr. Snerdley found this one for me.
More than 200 parents have told a Pennsylvania school district they don't want their children taught by a teacher who called students, quote, frightfully dim and disengaged lazy whiners on her personal blog.
Central Bucks East High School Superintendent Robert Law says he expects the district to get a lot more requests from parents who want to keep their children away from English teacher Natalie Monroe.
The Doyle Stown Intelligence reports 62 requests came from parents whose children were scheduled to be in Monroe's classes.
District officials had estimated Monroe would have 90 students in her three classes.
Monroe was suspended in February after district officials learned of her blog.
She's being reinstated, however, for the start of the new school year.
Classes begin this week.
Teacher went on her blog.
And she said that the kids that she's teaching teaching are frightfully dim.
Disengaged lazy whiners.
You'd think that she took an axe to them.
First of all, just about every kid in school does seem frightfully dim and disengaged lazy whiners.
It's part of being a kid in school.
When I was in school, we were lazy and we whined all the time, and we were usually disengaged, and that's where the teacher would slam her hand on the desk and we'd pay attention.
Parents want to take their kids out of the class of that teacher.
It's proving her point.
We are whiny and lazy.
I mean you a they're acting like this is Bobby Knight teaching grade school.
Teacher on her blog.
I don't know why anybody writes anything on a blog anymore.
All it does is get you in trouble.
Has anybody tweeted anything or blogged anything in the last three months that has come to anything good?
Anyway, she puts in her blog and she was probably frustrated.
The kids are disengaged, they're lazy, they whine, they're dim.
Every teacher thinks that.
Unless you're at some private hoity toity school where kids come from perfect backgrounds and are driven by their parents.
You know, to all go to Ivy League institutions, you've got to study studies, unless you're in that kind of an environment, that's what you're gonna get from kids.
And every teacher probably gets frustrated about it.
So what?
She comes out and says it though, and we get this ludicrous reaction from the parents who now don't want their kids in that classroom because that teacher thinks their precious little John and Jane and Jordan and Joshua are lazy.
Isn't that the whole problem with America right now?
Every issue you can think about.
We've become wimps.
We're terrified of everything.
Look at the reaction to the earthquake.
This earthquake, while fascinating, building was shaking, turned out to be a giant nothing.
They can't find any damage.
A couple of rocks fell off the Washington Monument.
And I think a window broke at the National Cathedral.
That's about it.
There's nobody dead.
There's no damage, no bridges came down.
Yet this is this incredible shared experience.
I've got the New York Post in my hand.
Five pages.
Look at this.
Day of the City Shook.
Everything that you can think of today in American politics shows people terrified, overreacting, unable to deal with any kind of reality.
The thought that we might reform entitlements, oh, people are horrified over this.
We've got senior citizens shaking in their boots.
We've got Republican politicians terrified of going anywhere near Paul Ryan's proposal, people might not like us.
When did we become so wussy?
I don't know what the line w when we cross the line.
But we've gone from a nation that could handle anything to a country filled with people who can't handle anything.
But just like my comments yesterday on the American culture, it's not everybody.
There are a lot of people who I think get this.
What's the best commercial on TV right now?
Think about it for a minute.
I don't watch a lot of TV, but there's one that just jumps right out at the screen at you.
Michael Imperioli played Christopher on the Sopranos.
He's shilling for some tequila, 1800, they'll get their plug here.
And he looks right at the screen and said, What happened to men?
And then he makes his little thing about how they're drinking poser tequila instead of real tequila.
That's the selling point for the product that he's putting.
But his point is that men have become a bunch of sissies.
He said, Whatever happened to men?
Men used to sit around and talk about sports.
What do they talk about now?
Hair tinting?
And he's right.
You know, I go out, I see a lot guys that are under thirty, the majority of them remind me of what girls used to be like.
They're sitting there with their flannel shirts on, drinking a light beer.
In the meantime, it's the women that have all the tattoos, it's the women that are drinking shots, it's the women that are acting like guys, and the guys are so passive.
Got the ranking, the seatings for the United States Open Tennis Tournament starts next Monday.
The highest seated American man is eighth.
Marty Fish.
I'm not making that up.
Andy Roddock's 21.
We don't have anybody else in the top 25.
The highest seated American woman in the US Open the US Open tennis tournament is Serena Williams 28.
Tennis is an individual sport.
It requires incredible discipline and practice and hard work.
It's very solitary.
You have to be driven to excel at tennis.
You have to push young people real, real hard to get them good at it.
It's probably like training somebody to be great at the piano when they're at a very young age.
We don't have anybody anymore that's doing if it weren't for the Williams sisters, would there be any prominent American woman tennis player at all the last ten years?
We have become soft, sissy ish, and as a society unwilling and unable to confront the notion at all of any kind of change.
When you take a look at the situation that we're in, with our screwed up fiscal situation and our massive deficit and the need to reign in government spending, you'd think right now that we were Libya coming out of a civil war.
Instead, we're told we have to cut back on the amount of money the government spends, and you've got people absolutely mortified at the idea.
We need to buck up a little bit.
I think that it's just amazing to me that World War II was only 70 years ago.
Started 70 years ago this coming December, or at least the American involvement in it.
That was tough stuff.
Few hundred thousand American men were killed.
millions went off to fight.
It was a bloody, vicious, terrible war that we didn't know if we were going to win.
How did the country that was able to do that and make that kind of sacrifice and have that kind of a commitment and took on that kind of adversity?
When did we become a country that is now so wussy that we can't handle it if a teacher criticizes their kids?
Listen, look what she called them.
Frightfully dim, disengaged, lazy whiners.
When I was in grade school, that's what the nuns called us, except they did it right to our faces.
Mark Belling, you're frightfully dim.
Yeah, no, okay.
I didn't cry and go home and tell mommy I can't be in sisters class anymore.
You're a bunch of disengaged lazy whiners.
Now pay attention.
We can't handle that.
We need to grow up.
We need to grow up as a society.
And again, I'm not referring to everyone.
I'm referring to what's taken us over.
We have become so sensitive.
Political correctness has gotten us to the point that we can't offend anyone.
Our our skins are so thin we can't handle anything.
When it's suggested that politically we have to stand up for ourselves a little bit and we can't depend on government for everything.
We panic.
I think this thread runs through many of the problems in our society.
The good news is a lot of people get it.
That tequila knows company knows what it's doing.
It knows that a lot of people agree with Michael Imperioli.
They're looking at him and say, Yeah, he's right.
What is wrong with men?
When did men become the ones that are coloring their hair at 19 different shades?
When did guys be the ones that have more earrings on than women?
When did men become so soft and so passive?
When did men become the ones that can't make a decision?
When did men become the ones that are terrified of saying anything that might offend or bother anyone?
Well, this affects our politics too.
And I'm gonna get into a lot of things on today's program.
We've got a million.
My stack of stuff rivals any stack of stuff that Russia's ever come in here with.
It just seems to me that every story kind of relates to that whole notion that we can't confront anything anymore.
Anyway, that's what I think.
The telephone number here is 1800-282-2882.
That's the EIB number.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Here's a perfect example of what I was talking about.
The ground zeroes 9-11.
The anniversary is coming up in a couple of weeks, few weeks.
There was only one church on the 9-11 site that was destroyed.
It was a Greek, I think a Greek Orthodox church, uh, Saint Nicholas, I believe.
Bloomberg doesn't want to allow it to be rebuilt there.
Because it would be offensive to put a church at that site, but we have to allow a mosque near the site because otherwise it would offend Muslims.
If you put a Christian church there, it may offend.
What do we care who it offends?
You can't handle that.
You can't handle a church being there.
This just runs through everything.
We worry about offending everyone, so we tiptoe through life, and that's why we can't solve any of the problems that we're in right now.
That's why when we have an economic downturn, we look for government to fix it all.
Well, throw stimulus around because we can't do it ourselves.
Nonsense.
Let's go to wow, American fork, wherever that is.
Sarah, you're on EIB with Mark Delling.
American fork is in Utah.
In Utah.
Well, women are women and men are tough.
Oh my gosh, I love you.
You know everything you've said in the first hour, I've always thought.
And just generally speaking, the East Coast academia are wusses.
They're babies.
They have an earthquake.
It barely even moves anything.
My sister lives in Virginia.
She was laughing at what a big deal people were making of it.
But anyway.
But that's how we react.
That's how we react to everything.
What it was was interesting.
You know, I was sitting here with Moon and I were looking at each other.
I was glad I was part of it.
I finally got to experience an earthquake.
I'm from Wisconsin and I've never even seen a funnel cloud.
We've got tornadoes all over the place in Wisconsin.
I've never even seen a funnel cloud.
I'm always left out.
I got to be part of an earthquake.
And yet it's a conversation piece, but it is not something to panic over and act like this was 9-11.
Well, I'm glad you came from work today and decided not to take an emotional sick day leave and show up and be a man.
But you know, I I'm calling because these parents that are protesting this teacher, that you know, that really bugs me.
Because listen, I've got five kids.
All of them have had different kinds of teachers.
Things happen like that all the time.
In fact, when the teacher is pretty hard-nosed opinionated, I say, oh good.
You're gonna act like those are always the good ones.
I remember the teachers that I had with the ones that always yelled at us, the ones who kind of told us that we were crumbs, they were the ones you wanted to impress.
They were the ones that motivated you.
The pr the kind of teacher that would be frustrated that her kids are lazy and disengaged are the ones that are trying to drive and raise high standards for their kids.
Those are exactly the kind of teachers we want kids to have.
This teacher ought to have more, not fewer students.
I'm throwing out the see the thesis that the cissification of America now has real consequences in terms of our public policy and the future of our future of our country.
It's pervasive in how we react to every look at the reaction that the elites have to rush.
For as long as he's been doing the program.
Twenty-two years and counting.
I can't believe he said that.
Rush Limbaugh said that.
Why that's so hateful.
That's so outrageous.
They're always reacting to that.
Once every four days he'll say something that they toss their cookies over.
But you guys listen to him.
He's not saying anything outrageous.
He's speaking his mind about political matters.
And he's telling a few jokes.
But they can't handle that.
I know why Russia's show is what it is.
I know why you're all listening.
I know why you're willing to give guest hosts like myself a chance.
It's because you don't expect that politically correct crapola from us.
You expect us to cut through it and call it the way we see it, and appeal to the best instincts of we Americans.
The good news here is that I think a lot of people agree with me on this.
And I know that the Keela Company thinks that there are a whole lot of men out there disgusted at what panty waste all men have become most men have become.
This story here.
Above all else, Eastern Quake rattles nerves.
New York Times.
They talk about there's a picture.
I got New York Post.
I've got a picture here of an actress.
Which one is it?
Uh Kirsten Dunst.
She's sh she looks shocked outside.
There's a mother consoling her crying child over this.
Why are they crying?
I was here, nothing happened.
But I guess if you're going to cry over an earthquake in which there is no damage, you'd be terrified of political candidates who say that the entitlement mentality in this country has to be changed.
We've got a president who believes that government has to be the mother protector of all of us, that we now can't cope with anything.
Let's keep extending unemployment benefits forever and ever and ever rather than allow the American economy to get back to work.
Let's protect ourselves from corporations by piling regulation upon regulation upon regulation upon regulation.
They even want to regulate here in New York where I'm doing the program, these food carts that are out there, put the ratings on them for health safety.
Well, no wonder no business is expanding.
They can't figure out how to expand.
I'm telling you this all ties in.
This wussying that's going on has an effect on public policy.
I'm going to try to pronounce this correctly.
I'm doing my best here.
Chassain in Cuba, New York.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Bellington.
Did I say your name correctly?
Oh no, it's Shasanya.
Shasanya, okay.
Hi.
Hey.
I just wanted to say I agree mostly with what you're saying, but I disagree with the teacher because I have five kids and I wouldn't want them in for class because I think it shows she's kind of dim-witted to post that on a blog for uh parents and stuff.
Yeah, she is.
She shouldn't she shouldn't have posted it on her blog.
She shouldn't have posted it on a blog.
Nobody should I I'm amazed at the stuff that people put on their Facebook page where they're talking about every stupid thing that they do.
I if nobody posted anything on a blog again and nobody tweeted anything and nobody put anything out on their Facebook page, we would all we would probably have a f a lot fewer regrets.
But she put it out there, and it's something that she thinks, so what?
Don't you like the fact that she's got that attitude that she's frustrated that the kids aren't more motivated?
Wouldn't you want your kids to go to a teacher who wants the kids to work hard?
Well, if she doesn't think her kids are working hard, then I would want a teacher who's going to find a way to get them to work hard, not rant about it on a public forum for anybody to see.
Why?
Because that doesn't really solve anything.
No, it doesn't solve anything.
So what?
You're a fr what do you think?
Let's suppose let's suppose one of your children was in her class.
What do you think would happen to that kid?
What would she do that would be inappropriate in class based on what you know about what she said on this blog?
Because that's all that the parents in this school district are reacting to is the things that you said on this blog.
What do you think that she would do to your children?
Well, if my kids were in her class, they would not be lazy.
They would not be a problem.
They would be doing their work, and if they weren't, they would be hearing about it at home.
My husband and I would not tolerate misbehavior or inequality.
Well then that solves all of the that solves all of our problems.
If you put your kids in her class, she won't be blogging anymore and she won't be upset, and the world will go along just fine.
But you know you know very well that your chids kids probably go to school with a lot of other children who aren't motivated, who are disruptive in class, that are rolling their eyes.
It's part of being a kid.
I was like that.
Kids don't pay attention all the time, and teachers do get frustrated.
The good ones though are the ones that don't take it.
Who you know, force the kids to pay attention.
I am the last person in the world to go to bat and defend public school teachers.
Just ask my listeners in Wisconsin.
Teachers in Wisconsin hate me because I've gone after them for being whiny and crying about the fact that they've got to kick in for their pensions and their health insurance.
In this case, though, all this teacher did was lay it out there, and you've got parents now terrified of letting their kids akin to class presided over by that teacher.
What do they I that's why I asked you the question what do they think this teacher's going to do to their kids?
They think that she's gonna come out with a ruler and start smacking them around.
What do they think will happen as a result of her having these attitudes?
And the answer is nothing's going to happen.
We don't have to be afraid of everything.
Thanks for the call, Shasanya.
I think I got it right that time.
Let's go to Mary and Soldier's Grove, Wisconsin.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark, how are you?
I'm great.
Well, a lot of this feminizing comes from the bad problem.
We're in a generation now where single mothers have rules.
And without a male influence, these guys have no clue what it's like being a man.
My daughter is in her twenties.
She's had three flat tires.
She's been with a guy, none of them knew a first thing about changing a tire.
She had to do it because we taught her how to change a tire, change her oil.
These guys have no clue.
They've got rid of shop classes in schools.
Being on the western side of the state of Wisconsin, a lot of our schools in the area's gotten rid of their A cup classes.
These guys have no clue what it's like being a man.
I mean, I have my own set of power tools and some of my daughter's friends have no clue what they are.
Well, and I I just think there's a passivity.
I don't know if that's a word or not, but I if it isn't, I've just made it a word.
They're so passive.
And I think that a lot of it has to do with the way that we've culturalized them.
Now you mentioned the phenomenon of single motherhood and not having a man in their lives.
That might be part of it, but I also think just this whole notion of being sensitive and not offending anyone and being politically correct and understanding how everyone feels, and then the planet, the planet, the planet.
We're destroying the planet.
We can't do this, we can't do that.
You know, the internal combustion engine is the great evil force in our society.
We're put our carbon footprint is terrible.
We just keep telling everybody that everything that they're doing is wrong, that everything that you enjoy doing is wrong.
We're sucking the fun out of life, and as a result, I think you end up with a country that's that has that sense that we can't do anything right anymore that we can't achieve, that we can't excel.
The one thing that I do know is that when you call upon Americans to rise up to be all that they can be, we still do respond.
It was the appeal of Reagan.
It was the response we had as a nation after 9-11.
We did come together.
For that brief few months before the Democrats started politicizing things, we came together as a country.
We had a commitment to defeat terrorism, and we've been pretty successful at that.
So we don't have to be afraid of everything.
And we certainly don't have to be afraid of a teacher who yells at the kids.
She only yelled here on her blog.
Imagine if the teacher had actually had an outburst in class where she started screaming at him and saying, You're frightfully dim.
You're disengaged lazy whiners.
If she actually would have said it to their faces, they probably would have marched to the school to yank the children out.
Well, maybe they are disengaged lazy whiners.
And maybe venting like that and letting them hear it as a way of motivating them.
Thank you for the call.
I don't think this is universal.
I'm not saying it's the whole country.
Because the one group of people that I don't see this from are the young people that go into the military.
They are the most well adjusted people we have.
Whether they go to Iraq and Afghanistan and come back or not, they seem far more grounded, far more balanced, have far more common sense, even though the military itself has had to adapt to the political realities of the times that we're in, they still, when you're preparing people to go off for war, you've got to toughen them up.
And I think that the people who are willing to go into the military and are willing to make that sacrifice and have been to that experience, they don't seem to be affected by any of this stuff.
That's why when a lot of them come back, they just face culture shock when they see all the wimpiness that we've got around us.
You find a political issue though out there that we're confronting right now.
I don't care which one it is.
Find one.
And I believe the root of the problem is that we keep looking to somebody else to solve things for us because we think we can't cope.
Well, what a surprise if we can't even have our kids taught by a teacher who might yell at them.
To Snerdley's asking me, do we need a man's class?
Well, I I would don't they start out, don't boys start out as boys?
Do we turn them into girls?
Or if just left to their own devices, do they become girls?
I think if we just left them alone and allowed them to be people, allowed the kids to go out on the playground and do the things that they used to stop telling you can't say this, that's offensive.
Oh, you can't pray, that's offensive.
You can't do this, it's going to offend one of your Jewish classmates or one of your Muslim classmates.
Nobody used to worry about that stuff.
The Jewish kids in school didn't offend the Christian kids when they honored their whole their holy days.
That was all fine.
We were able to tell jokes and deal with one another.
We didn't we we weren't constantly walking on eggshells, but we are now.
So Paul Ryan's telling people, part of his plan, which almost every Republican candidate for president is afraid to embrace, that within ten years you're gonna have to go off of Medicare and we're gonna give you vouchers to buy your own health insurance.
People, oh my goodness gracious!
That's politically toxic.
Come on, we can handle that.
We can handle a remaking of our benefit structure so that people take make more decisions for themselves.
We don't have to default.
We don't have to rely upon the government to give us every single thing.
We can fix these things.
Anyway, my name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for Rush Limblock.
I'm Mark Belling in for Rush.
I said, like every story I have today seems to fit this theme.
Look at what this flap over that what that idiot Biden said in China.
Can we not send him anywhere where he doesn't put his foot in his mouth?
He's in China and he says, Well, I understand why you have your one child policy.
You understand that?
I know why he said that in addition to the fact that he always says things that are Stupid.
He's there and he didn't want to offend them.
There they have forced sterilization and forced abortions in China in an attempt to control their population.
He was so afraid of creating an international incident by saying that that was wrong that he puts his foot in his mouth and acts as though he thinks that it's okay.
Well, the White House is now putting on a clarification.
I wonder how many White House staffers are assigned the job of clarifying Joe Biden's comments.
There must be eight of them that have to work on that.
Here's the clarification.
The Obama administration strongly opposes all aspects of China's coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization.
The spokesman added that Biden found the policy repugnant and was trying to point out to the Chinese that the one child policy was economically unsustainable.
Well, then why didn't he say it?
He didn't say it because he was afraid of offending someone.
Wimping out.
Prattville, Alabama, and Michael, it's your turn on EIB.
Hey, uh good morning, uh Mark.
It's a great show.
Thank you.
Your uh comments are very interesting that caused me to think that people uh not only are easily offended, uh, but I think there's a culture now that uh they want to be offended, so whether it's the subject you've mentioned, or let's go back to uh President Bush when he talked about a minuscule change to Social Security, a very small part that gets privatized.
People thought he was calling for the end of the world, so that's right.
We we have such a culture now that the political discourse has disappeared.
So the opposition and sometimes both sides, uh the vitriol comes up uh there's not a lot of listening and a lot of you're right though, what you said.
People want to be offended because then they can claim that they're victims.
And there's a ramification of that.
The fact of the matter is is that some Republicans back down over President Bush's proposal to allow some private accounts for Social Security.
You realize that if we had done that, the social security entitlement problem might be solved.
Well, you're exposing people to the risky stock market.
If it merely would have been explained that you can choose to put your money into the same kinds of things that you can put your IRA into.
For example, short-term government bonds, where you're guaranteed a rate of return, and we had done that, we would not be worrying about how we're going to service our debt because so many people would be investing their money conservatively but privately through instruments like government bonds and so on.
I don't know that everybody would have put their money into the stock market.
They would have probably looked for a guaranteed return, which is United States government bonds, which would then have solved this whole problem about how we're going to service our debt and do we have it?
Are there enough foreigners out there willing to buy American bonds as the deficit keeps expanding our national debt?
But we couldn't do that.
The Republicans were terrified of going forward because the Democrats were demagoguing on it because we couldn't trust the American people to manage their own money.
And it was one of President Bush's defeats that he was unable to get that through.
This is the point that I was making in talking about Governor Walker of Wisconsin, who actually stuck to his guns despite the histrionics that went on in my state over his very modest reforms that have fixed Wisconsin's budget problems.
You get this constant overreaction to any suggestion that the American people have a responsibility themselves to solve some of our problems rather than looking to government to provide everything.
And you're exactly right.
There are people who want to be offended.
They proclaim they're offended.
When some comedian tells a joke that has some inappropriate term on there, they say they're offended.
They aren't really offended.
They jump at the chance to proclaim that they've been offended.
That's the problem here.
If we toughen up just a little bit, we can solve a lot of these problems.
And I think there are enough Americans that will back government officials who propose decent measures if they stick to their guns and give them a chance to work.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm in for Rush.
Let's real quickly go to Fort Worth, Texas in Tonington.
Tony, you're on EIB.
Hey how are you doing today, Mark?
I'm great, thanks.
Enjoying the show, I'd just like to say right off the bat that I love my guns, I love my God, and I love my country, and uh I get choked up when I hear the national anthem sung properly before a race or a sporting event.
And I think that the uh russification of America all started when we changed the name of the war department to the Department of Defense.
Well, we've changed all of our words to avoid offending anyone.
I mean, I think that you're you're driving toward a point, I think, and that's that we we've become soft as we've you know, you know, ha as we've tried to politically c make ourselves politically correct in all things that we do, right?
Exactly.
Uh I'm I'm tired of the government trying to protect me from myself.
Well, and there's a cost, and that's that's where there's a cost to this.
The reason that we've got government spending at twenty-five percent of GDP is because government is doing everything for ourselves.
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