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Aug. 24, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:47
August 24, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #2
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There's gonna be a lot of Wisconsin in today's program because in the final hour of the program, next hour, uh, we're going to be joined by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
Probably all of you have been reading about the incredible controversy in Wisconsin over Walker's attempts to balance the Wisconsin state budget by reining in collective bargaining and requiring public employees to kick in for some of the lavish benefits that they've received.
Well, it's all been said and done, everything's been passed, the governor's gotten everything that he's wanted, he's still standing, the Republicans still control the state legislature, the changes are being implemented and they are working gloriously.
There's a point there that if you're willing to stand up and not be dissuaded by the emotional overreactions of the left, and you believe and you stand by the things that you believe in, you do get to that holy grail in conservative politics.
Your stuff gets implemented and it works.
For us, we're always climbing the mountain.
If you just do it our way as opposed to their way, if you spend less, if you trust the private sector, if you encourage Americans to be the best that they can be rather than be reliant upon government.
Things will work.
Conservative policies do work when they're implemented.
Instead, however, we're constantly knocked down by telling everyone that you can't do it that way.
You can't stand alone, you can't do this, you can't do that.
We've wimped out as a nation.
Now, I started the program by sharing with you a story that came from uh Doylestown, Pennsylvania, about a teacher who put in her blog back in February that her kids were frightfully dim and disengaged lazy whiners, and as a result, dozens of parents are yanking their kids out of the classes taught by that teacher.
They don't want their kids to be taught by a teacher who would dare say those things.
So terrified are they of a teacher who would actually criticize the kids.
Well, we ought to be able to take a little bit of criticism from our teachers.
The teachers who were tough on us were the ones that were always the good ones.
And I every story that I've got here just seems to come back to that theme.
I want to talk right now about what's happening with the Republican presidential field.
There's a piece out today in the New Republic, online on the New Republic, a big lefty website, Lefty Magazine.
Walter Shapiro.
The guy is losing his lunch off just if you think they were bothered by Bush, if you think Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman drive them crazy, where do they get a load of Rick Perry?
And it's starting.
You should read this thing that he's got here.
Here's the headline.
Rick Perry, the God-fearing no-nothing pistol packing embodiment of liberals' worst nightmares.
Here's what he writes.
What Rick Perry has achieved in his inaugural strut on the political stage is unprecedented in the annals of modern conservative history from Barry Goldwater, Sarah Palin.
It is not just that the Texas governor has dominated the news cycle, overshadowed the Iowa straw poll, vaulted over every GOP contender except Mitt Romney in the national polls, and reduced Kyle Rove to sputtering frustration.
All that is admittedly impressive for a first-time candidate whose name was familiar to only half of Republican voters just a few weeks ago.
But what sets Perry apart and earns him his niche in the far right corner of Mount Rushmore has nothing to do with the gyrations of the 2012 campaign.
Indeed, Perry is not only a presidential candidate, but also a cowboy booted sociological experiment.
It is almost as if Perry's political persona was constructed by bundling together all the fears and phantoms in the left-wing anxiety closet.
Since the hysteria of the 1950s Red Scare, no Republican figure has matched Perry in his God-given ability to give liberals the heebie jeebies.
Others can rival the governor's disdain for academic achievement, Palin, his cross on the sleeve religiosity, Michelle Bachman and Mike Huckabee, and his antipathy to Social Security and Medicare, Paul Ryan and Barry Goldwater.
But never before has a top-tier presidential candidate embodied the whole lethal package and more.
And then they rattle it off.
Anti-intellectualism.
Perry even differentiates himself from George W. Bush.
Yeah, he went to Yale.
I went to Texas AM.
The God card.
Quoting from the story.
Perry, far more than Huckabee during the 2012 2008 campaign, seems willfully oblivious to the reality that his personal theological beliefs are not universally held, even within the modern Republican Party.
In April, as Texas suffered from a deadly combination of wildfires and drought.
Perry issued a proclamation calling for three days of prayer for rain.
They then mentioned that he questions whether or not Social Security is even constitutional.
Then pistol packing president.
For Eastern liberals, myself included, nothing is more baffling than the desire to carry around a metal cylinder with a trigger attached that could easily kill someone.
This may explain why debates over gun control often seem far more cultural and theological than, say, discussions of tax policy.
What distinguishes Perry from his GOP rivals is the enthusiasm with which he embraces the lock and load ethos of the West.
The Texas governor's definition of academic freedom extends to his support of legislation that would allow college students to carry concealed weapons on campus.
They then go into his willingness to use the word treason in describing Bernanke's policies and so on.
Perry will drive liberals crazy.
Everything about Rick Perry offends the politically correct crowd.
He's overtly and openly religious.
The guy's been known to wear a gun when he jogs.
He speaks out directly about the limited power of the federal government.
That's sacrilegious to the average liberal.
He's a died in the wool, Texas cowboy.
The question is whether or not the American public has gotten to be so mortified of an actual man who lives that lifestyle and wears it openly, that he could be elected president.
The Michelle Bachmann phenomenon, the same thing.
Her willingness to be politically incorrect drives liberals crazy.
Sarah Palin.
Anyway, where do I think the Republican presidential field is?
We can talk about this, and if you want to call in and share some thoughts on what you think is happening with it and your impressions, I'm game for that.
My belief is that the field is the field.
I don't think anybody else is getting in other than maybe Sarah.
There's a story today.
George Pataki, the former New York governor, may jump in.
To fill what niche that isn't out there?
Mitt Romney's got the Eastern Governor thing taken care of.
John Huntsman has the I'm way more moderate than the other Republican thing covered.
I I don't know where George Pataki fits in, other than that he doesn't fit in, but he's talking about running.
Sarah Palin keeps going up going to Iowa.
She might jump in, she might not.
Otherwise, the field is pretty much there.
And we're going to have to decide what we want.
I know what I want.
I want somebody who can fit certain criteria.
That person has to be somebody who can beat President Obama.
If you don't fill that criteria, I'm not interested.
We can't survive a second term of Barack Obama.
An Obama untethered by worrying at all about any type of public opinion.
You've got to be able to win.
My second criteria, you have to be willing to run on a mandate of cutting government spending and the size of government.
If you don't run on that, you will never be able to govern by doing that.
If I've learned anything from the experiences that I've gone through in Wisconsin with Governor Walker, it is a lot easier politically to get away with doing conservative things if you first campaign by saying that you're going to do them.
And finally, you have to be a great leader.
You have to have the ability to lead this country.
You fit those three criteria.
I'm open to your cam candidacy for president.
And if you drive liberals crazy, that's a bonus.
I like Rick Perry.
I think he might be the one.
I think he fits all of the criteria that I'm looking for.
I'm not necessarily saying that's who I would support.
I'm saying Rick Perry has, I think what it takes to be the right Republican nominee for president.
We're going to throw up in the phone lines again.
1-800-2828-82 is the number on the Rush Limbaugh program first up in Brantford, Connecticut.
Carmen, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh Show with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark, how are you?
Uh it's a pleasure to listen to you.
You're a wonderful fill-in for Rush.
Thank you.
Um I just wanted to weigh in today about speaking about the uh feminization of young men.
And um I have to tell you, I I see that firsthand.
I teach in in all boys high school, and uh I the boys are wonderful.
I I'm not criticizing them at all, but I do think so much about the.
Why do you have to throw that in?
Uh because I I really do I care about them.
I worry about their futures.
I worry about the fact that I'm I know you had to throw in that after you because I can tell that you're gonna say something, but you felt that need to kind of correct it.
And that's what I guess I'm referring to that we have to say all that because otherwise people are going to be offended that e that even those of us who know what the problem is have to almost apologize for what it is that we're about to say.
Well, if you've seen me in front of them in the classroom, you wouldn't say that because I'm the last one to apologize, and I tell them straight up listen, guys, if you can't handle harsh words from me, okay, you're gonna have a very difficult time in the rest of your life.
You won't be able to handle the girl that rejects you, the job that you don't get, um, all the disappointments that come with living a normal life.
So I said you need to be able to hear it from me.
I care about you, and I'm telling you this because life is not fair, so just get over it.
And I mean, it's not I have to say in their defense it's not entirely their fault.
I see the way the parents treat them, and there's a term for them now that we use in education.
They're called the helicopter parents because they hover around every single thing that these boys do all the time.
And they're always there to pick up the pieces for them whenever they're disappointed.
I mean, they're texting them in school.
Um it's kind of Yeah, I've heard that that they're that the boys, not the girls, the boys are constantly being texted in school by the parents.
Now you use the term the helicopter parent.
That's one that one's been around for a while.
The parent who hovers there around and they you know they're raising their kids in a bubble.
Well, guess what, Carmen?
We now have a helicopter government.
Barack Obama's our helicopter president.
He believes that we've got to give everybody health care, that health care costs are going up so much that we can't figure out a way to make this work via the free market.
It has to become the next entitlement.
He wants to take Medicare and Social Security off the table for any kind of reform tweaks or changes at all because we can't survive if we don't have them in exactly the kind of form that we're in right now.
The whole n nature of a stimulus program.
The only way we can get through our recession is if I spend a trillion dollars and throw it out to my friends in government, that will get the economy started again.
He's the helicopter president.
And that's where I think that what you're describing here about the wimpification of boys to the point that men aren't men anymore now that they're into adulthood.
The same thing's happening with our country.
We've got to be willing to let people stand on their own and be able to fend for themselves.
Right.
And be able to deal with the disappointment that will ultimately arise from anything you do.
And I I that's what always worries me about kids today.
I just worry that they can't handle those big, big dis and I tell them you think you have to do that.
Well, they can't.
They can't tell them that.
As a nation, we can't look around us, we can't handle it.
That's why some people overreacted to the earth.
There are businesses that sent their employees home after this Eastern earthquake yesterday.
I was in it.
I was here.
I'm in a high rise in New York City.
The building shook.
We didn't cancel the third hour of the rush program.
We talked about it.
Nothing happened, but the fact that you could get that kind of overreaction to a minor earthquake is the same reason why we overreact to any kind of suggestion that we change our political structure.
It's why in Wisconsin, public employees have so overreacted to the notion that they kick in for their pension and their health insurance, they can't handle anything anymore.
So you're right in trying to toughen people up because the real world is filled with harsh realities.
But we've got a government right now trying to shelter everyone from it, and that's why it's spending so much money.
That's why we're in the mess that we're in right now, because we're trying to provide the same kind of bubble that so many of these parents provided for their kids.
You say it's not the boys' fault.
You're right, it's not their fault.
We didn't they didn't become wimps out of their own choice.
We've literally made them into wimps.
You've got par uh parents that don't want to send their kids to a teacher because the teacher said some mean, nasty little things about them.
Oh, isn't that terrible?
I'd want my kid to go to a demanding teacher like you.
May I chime in one thing?
You can.
I've had also uh heard of it's never happened to me personally, but I've had instances of parents um where children have been accused of cheating or plagiarism or anything like that, and there's proof, and um the teacher takes the son's side.
My son can't possibly be you know guilty of what you're accusing them of.
Now, mind you, you would never accuse someone unless you're absolutely sure.
These aren't random accusations.
Don't these parents remember that when they were once kids they were fully capable of doing that themselves?
I remember what I was like as a kid when they called me all of the things that this Pennsylvania teacher is calling her kids.
It was true, we were like that.
And the only thing that stopped us is that there were teachers who laid down the law and made it clear that we couldn't get away with behaving like that.
Uh thank you for the call.
The point you made about the helicopter parents is dead on.
And we now have a helicopter president and a helicopter government.
That's how you get to 25% of GDP being government spending.
When government is trying to be all things to all people and protect all of us from life, not counting on ourselves to live our own lives and our businesses to produce our own jobs and for us to be able to fend for ourselves.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm today's guest host for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
If somebody taps into this, if they essentially do what the tequila company is doing with the Michael Imperioli commercial by laying it right out there, what's happened to men, what's wrong with men?
There's something there.
Because I think that this is resonating with a lot of people.
And it's why the Republican candidates for president that I think are resonating with most conservatives right now are those that defy this Nambi Pambi way that we're approaching our society and our government and our public policy.
CNN.com, there's an analysis of a new video that Sarah Palin's campaign has put out.
It's entitled Iowa Passion.
They write in the video, the initial scenes of bright sunlight shining over Iowa cornfields leading to uplifting images of young people and young couples with children smiling and enjoying the day at the Iowa State Frair Fair.
In a phrase, it is morning in America.
Those of us of a certain age remember the Reagan campaigns, seminal commercial of that name, an advertisement that helped to secure his crushing landslide re-election in 1984.
My point is not that Palin is Reagan.
They differ in many obvious and substantial ways.
Reagan had been the governor of a large electoral important state, and so few questioned his readiness to assume the presidency.
Also Reagan had honed his political spirit skills over decades, not years, and had a well thought out ideology.
Palin, however, has risen to prominence in a different age.
Twenty-four hour news stations provide much more exposure in a shorter period.
Compared to Bachman and Perry at least, Palin is a veteran on the political scene.
More significant, however, is the fact that like Reagan, Palin has the correct media skills for the age.
They're not discounting the notion that Sarah could get into this thing and win and be a formidable candidate.
I think I'm the only person left who agrees with that.
Sarah Palin is the antithesis of this politically correct attitude that I'm talking about, as by the way, is Perry.
I was watching that reality show that Sarah did on whatever channel that was on, the Sarah Palin up in Alaska thing, and I saw her shoot and kill a caribou.
I've never seen a politician kill an animal on television before.
And she did it, and then she honored the animal and all that stuff, and she went through the spiel.
She did that.
In a real real way, people like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman are more men than most men are anymore.
There was a piece that I read about a week ago, I'm not sure where it was.
Talked about how we don't allow kids to even enjoy summer anymore where the boys can't go out and explore And go around in the woods and roughneck and play sports by themselves instead we're sending them off to this camp or that camp or the other thing and we're hovering all over them.
I think that gets back again to the kinds of points that I'm making here about what kind of country we are and how political correctness is just consuming us.
Let us be ourselves.
It worked for a long, long time.
Stop worrying about who it is that we're going to offend.
Stand up for ourselves.
Stop being such a bunch of pathetic wusses.
And I think that there are many people who buy into it.
I'm hearing from a lot of you today saying you're buying into it.
A tequila company thinks it can sell tequila by pushing that message.
Well, you know what?
The way to counter over government is by encouraging Americans to man up and stand up for themselves too.
We can't even baw anybody out anymore.
We conservatives can't criticize a liberal without being accused of engaging in hate speech.
We can't offend anyone.
Look what we have done at the airports to avoid offending Muslims.
We take off all of our clothes, we take off our belts, we take off our shoes, we go through these scanners, they look through every single thing that we've got in our briefcases.
We take our laptop computers out, they examine all of this.
The la they looked at my cough syrup the last time I the last time I flew, they tested it.
The little drop in it.
Like there was something in that.
All because we can't bring ourselves to give extra scrutiny to Middle Eastern or Arab young males who fit the total profile of the types of people who've committed terrorism or attempted to on airlines.
We can't offend everyone, so instead we engage in big government stupidity with all of these screeners at the airport and all of this staffing doing all of this useless nonsense that isn't doing anything to prevent any type of terrorism in the skies.
It's a perfect example.
Look at the fear that we have that we've just drilled into everybody under the age of twenty-five of all the things that we can't do because we're destroying the planet.
Why you can't do that, you can't do this, you can't do that.
And look what we've ended up with as a result.
Rush talks a lot about I don't know how he puts it, though we uh he speaks obviously about American exceptionalism and that pioneer spirit.
That's the thing that's made us great, and it's still there and it's still within us.
On yesterday's show I talked about how almost every interesting innovation in technology is coming from Americans.
We've got it within us, and we can survive without government carrying us.
We don't have to have the kind of spending that we have.
We don't need more stimulus to get our economy back to work.
Get the government out of the way, allow American companies to make profits, allow us to keep our income without taxing it all away, and we can still be just fine.
Knoxville, Tennessee.
Tom, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hello, Mark, a fellow uh sister Charles Bronson Diddos.
Getting earlier the point remind me of Claren Thomas in his book, My Grandfather's Son, he tells a great story of uh how he was raised by his uh grandfather relatively strict.
Clarence comes home one day and he sees his uh grandfather just spoiling his son and he says to him, Hey, you know, what's this all about?
I wasn't raised that way.
Well, the grand his grandfather says, hey, he's not my responsibility.
And the point being parents' responsibility is to raise their kids to grow up, to be proper, to be strong.
Spoil the grandkids.
Raise your children to be adults.
It just isn't happening.
Well, y you're right about that.
And the story that I, you know, have made the theme for the entire program from Pennsylvania, along with that Michael Imperioli commercial about parents that are just so afraid that their kids are going to be yelled at, protecting their children from everything.
Doesn't that just translate into all of these policy decisions that we're making about not preparing anyone for anything, not expecting us to stand up on our own?
And you can see it in society, and I think you really see it among young men.
Now I'm kind of fascinated that you don't see it as much among young women.
I The women that I need that I now see in their twenties, they're the men.
They're the ones that are making the decisions.
They're the ones that have their career paths planned out.
They're the ones that are taking charge of this stuff.
I know guys in their twenties that cannot to save their lives.
Ask a woman out on a date.
They they they can't they can't do it.
And I guarantee you they were raised by parents who protected them from a teacher who called them lazy and dim witted.
They're so protected and so sheltered that they can't do anything on their own.
I mean, when's the last time you saw a kid riding a bicycle without a helmet on?
I mean, it doesn't even happen anymore.
Why you might fall off the bike and get a concussion.
Yeah, I guess that might happen.
But we hover over everyone even with our governmental decisions.
We've got to protect they now have fast food restaurants have got to post what the fat content and what the calories are in the Big Mac in New York City where I'm doing the show.
We're doing all of these things and creating all of these regulations, all of which come at an enormous cost.
Cost of business and cost in terms of the government employees that have to oversee all of this stuff.
And for what?
Because we think we can't figure out ourselves whether or not a big Mac has more fat in it than a chicken sa sandwich?
I don't think so.
Thank you for the call.
Let's go now to uh I noticed that the people that are agreeing with me on this are all from places like he's calling from Knoxville and this one just listen to the name of the community.
Liberty Hill, Texas.
This person has to you can't be from Liberty Hill and be a lefty.
It's impossible.
Uh Kim, you're on the Rush Limbaugh, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Isn't that a great name?
Liberty Hill.
You moved do you really live there or did you just make that up?
Oh no.
I that was one of those reasons we moved here.
We love that name.
We've only lived in Texas a year and a half, but we thought what a great place to live.
It's right outside Austin and it's a rural community and it's wonderful.
Great.
Well, I am calling because I believe that all this mess traces back to radical feminism.
When all of a sudden men started kind of not knowing what what the right way was to behave.
And so now uh democratic men especially are really big bullies and call everybody names, and yet men as as a general rule and I are sissies.
They really are so worried about hurting people's feelings and all these feminine ideas.
I mean, when did men get that way?
When my husband was in Vietnam.
Well, as I asked the question, when did it h when did it happen?
I I really think the dividing line is about age thirty and under.
So if you go back to parents starting in about 1981, I that's when Reagan was elected.
We can't possibly blame this on him.
So it it's about then that you just start to see the change.
I mean, we certainly know the kids that were raised in the 70s and the eighties were raised to be totally independent.
That you didn't have anybody looking over you.
I mean, you were literally sent out to fend for your for yourselves.
The idea of challenging and demanding things of people, that was what was in vogue in the 70s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.
I mean, Kennedy said we're gonna go to the moon by the end of the decade, and we did it.
Now, admittedly, that was a government program, but it was a challenge that he laid out that we can solve this, that we can fix this, that we can move forward.
We need that in our public life.
Look at the message instead that you get from Obama.
He's always talking about how we have to reach out and help people.
And that always becomes an excuse or a rationalization for another government program.
Lord knows we can't count on automobiles and highways, so we've got to put high speed rail all over the United States at a cost of billions and billions of dollars, so we can have a bunch of empty trains that no one rides.
The stimulus program was never directed toward encouraging private sector economic growth.
Instead, it was money that was pumped into government programs that might trickle over to some private companies that get the contracts to do the temporary work.
Even the stuff that he's going to talk about when he comes back from the Martha's Vineyard vacation, build a few more roads, repair a few more schools, in other words, put everything in to government because government is the be-all and the end all.
Well, that translates into what we're talking about with men becoming whimps.
They're not allowed to stand on their own.
They can't offend anyone.
I think that there's a real correlation there.
I know, and when you s when you see men who just sit there and take it, and that's part what's bugged me about the Republicans.
The Democrats dish out all these bad words.
They they act like bullies like in the bullies in school, and yet the Democrats are the ones who are in school saying we need to get rid of bullies.
But you know, the Republicans just kind of sit there and take it.
Not that I want them to do that, but I want them to be able to articulate and talk back and take care.
And what happens when they do?
What happens when they do?
It works.
When you don't get cowed by all of this, and I like I said, I I I keep referring to the experience that I've had in Wisconsin over the last several months, and Governor Walker is going to be on the beginning of the at the beginning of the next hour.
I saw all the stuff that they hurled at him, and he didn't back down.
If you stand up for it, sell it to the public, repeat it over and over and over, and allow it to take effect, it will work.
We remember all of the stuff that they said about Reaganomics, that you can't cut taxes and you can't reduce spending, that it would destroy the social safety net.
It created a 20-year economic recovery.
It helped benefit Clinton's presidency.
Even Clinton himself, when he got into political trouble, embraced welfare reform, saying that we can't have lifelong dependency.
That stuff works.
You're right.
Way too many Republicans are terrified of the media.
They're terrified of criticism, they're terrified of getting any heat, they're terrified of the ads that are going to be run every election cycle.
This Republicans gonna take away your Medicare and your Social Security.
They're afraid of it now.
Even Michelle Bachman's afraid to embrace real reform of Medicare.
She won't endorse the Ryan proposal.
They're always afraid of it.
If you're willing to stand up and defend it, though, you can win the argument.
There's a reason Russia's show has as many listeners as it does.
There's a reason that almost all of the top talk radio programs in America are hosted by conservatives.
This message does resonate, and a lot of people agree with it.
We were not created to be a society of wussy followers.
We were created to be a society of leaders.
It's still in our DNA.
All this stuff that we're doing to our kids, pacifying them and making them so afraid of offending everyone, this is stuff that we are doing, but it's not within their nature and it's not within their spirit, and it's not who is a country we are, and you can tell that people don't like it.
It's why is it Miller High Life that does all the man up commercials?
It's why they're running that.
It's why the tequila company is saying what's happened to men.
There's a message out there that people are relating to that they don't like what this is what what what we are becoming.
And you can make this work politically too.
And whether it's Mick Perry that does it or Sarah Palin that does it, or Michelle Bachman that does it, or one of the others, you can make this message work by saying that as a nation we can solve all of our problems without having government getting bigger and bigger and bigger and taking care of us.
Thank you for the Liberty Hill, Texas.
You gotta love that.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Russia.
I don't think I'm breaking any really new ground on the program today.
Rush talk, I think the term Rush uses all the time is chicken.
I've heard him say that at least.
I that's what I'm talking about here, this womanizing of America that's now become pervasive in our public policy.
When you tell a guy that he can't be a guy, when you tell people that they can't offend anyone, when you are so protective of people that they can't handle any criticism, you lay the groundwork for Americans thinking that they can't survive without someone protecting them.
Somebody has to look out for us.
So government then expands to the point that Obama's running it, by the way, they just the Congressional Budget Office has out today, the 2011 deficit estimate, one point three trillion.
Wasn't that long ago that was the debt?
One point three trillion this year alone, and that's based on pretty optimistic guesses about what's going to happen with the economy.
One point three trillion.
And it's because we're spending so doggone much money, and the way we're coping with our economic downturn is to try to spend more and more and more.
Stimulus started it, Obamacare made it worse, and the trashing of American businesses to the point that we are regulating them to death so that they don't want to invest money in our economy, they don't want to hire and they don't want to spend is all making it worse.
I want to get to another caller real quickly, but I've I've got a comparison here.
And I want to thank a rush listener for passing it along to me.
New Orleans is still waiting for the federal government to fix it.
They kept looking to send us the federal money.
We need this.
We need we need help.
We need help.
And I know that a lot of New Orleans is bounced back.
And that many people in New Orleans are now thriving.
But there was that mantra for years after Katrina.
We need help.
In the meantime, Joplin, Missouri was flattened by that tornado.
I mean, it was wiped out.
The school is open right now in Joplin, and they don't even have a building.
They figured out how to do it on their own.
They got the school open.
I I'm pretty sure I'm right about that.
I think that it's already opened.
In fact, maybe this week or it's opening next week.
Public schools are open in Joplin, Missouri, even though the building itself was destroyed.
Roll up your sleeves, fix your problems, and don't let don't look to government to solve them for you.
Let's go to Albany, New York, and David.
David, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Mark Belling.
Good afternoon, Mark, and many dittoes to you and a rush, and thank you for having me on.
Thank you.
This past summer I taught Little League, but I'm also a military officer and I'm very involved in in the uh Civil Air Patrol program in in the area.
And I find two different two very vastly different groups.
One is in essence somewhat untouched by the mediocrity that I think it's taught from the bottom up, and the other one is almost completely saturated with it.
And that would be the Little League one.
And here's my for instance.
You'll have a bunch of little kids, anywhere from seven to twelve years old, they're playing a game with you.
By the nature that you've been discussing here on the show for a while, we all have it in our DNA to be competitive.
We want to win.
We want to know that we have succeeded at something.
So at the end of every game, what is the first thing you think they're going to ask me if they've not been following it because of their, you know, running around and being crazy and having fun?
What's the score?
What's the score?
Who won?
Did we win?
Were we the best?
And it's it's almost institutionalized now in many places around the country where even after every game, they do not tell the kids what the score is, and then at the end of the little league season, what happens?
Everyone is handed a trophy.
They all get a trophy, they're all the best.
There are there are public schools in which half the class turns out to be the valedictorian.
But you're right.
It's part of our inner being to know how we've done.
We want to be better than the other guy, and we can handle losing.
It's the motivator that makes us better.
Which is why that teacher out in Pennsylvania, she's probably so frustrated at these kids that they are lazy and they are unmotivated.
Well, what you tell the kids that and they want to show the teacher, no, I'm not lazy, I'm not unmotivated.
I can ace that test.
A little bit of criticism and accepting defeat and accepting the fact that you've had failure is what motivates you to go ahead and succeed.
And we don't have to we don't have to put everybody over that same bubble.
You're exactly right.
Now you said that there was another group, though, that's contrary to that.
And I'd like to extol the virtues of it.
I know a lot of people are going to say, well, he's he's involved with it and it's a military organization.
No, it's not.
You know what?
It's a civil organization organized under the Air Force called Civil Air Patrol.
If you guys want to find out about it, Google it.
You might want to get involved, you might not, but I'll tell you this.
It's infused with a lot of people that actually care.
And can and kids come in and they're allowed to join after a while, and then they find out very quickly whether or not they want to be there, because you know what?
The place has standards.
And then in the in the beginning, it's lax, it's somewhat easy.
It's not boot camp for crying out loud.
It's really not even a full-up military organization.
But by the time they start gaining their cadet ranks to the point where it's about to become serious.
And in the case of uh cadets, it's cadet master sergeant, senior master sergeant, and cadet chief master sergeant.
Just become before you become a cadet officer, which is equal to Eagle Scout.
Well, these kids come in and we tell them, look, game time's over.
This has got to mean something.
It's got to be a value.
If it's not a value, it affirms nothing.
So for the first time I had to, and this happened last month, a young man came before our board, and I could not have been more proud of him because he had failed the week before.
And we had taught a lesson in that group that said, you may fail in life.
You may fail multiple times.
But it does not mean you're a failure.
He came back the following week, absolutely did a flawless eye-watering board in front of three other officers to the point where you look at this and go, this affirms everything that we're talking about.
I I've got to move to my break, but I understand your point.
Now ask yourselves in 25 years, who's going to make more of a difference in our world, that person or the person who's been spoiled, pampered, and babied.
You can relate it also to where we're going as a nation.
I'm Mark Belling in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I need to correct myself on something.
I talked about the uh church that was destroyed in the nine eleven uh terrorist act, St. Nicholas, uh, the Greek church.
And I blamed uh the fact that they're not going to rebuild it because we can't have anything religious at the new Ground Zero site on uh Mayor Bloomberg.
It's actually the port authority of New York.
Coming up in the next hour of the program, in fact, right at the beginning of the hour, is the governor of my state, Wisconsin, where liberalism has thrown everything they could at him in an attempt to stop him from governing according to the way that he's wanted to.
They've lost.
He's won.
His reforms are in place, and they're working.
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