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Oct. 19, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:43
October 19, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in no supporting paperwork whatsoever.
It was good enough to be Mitt Romney's lawnboy and it's good enough for the excellence in broadcasting network.
Great to be with you.
Rush returns tomorrow.
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We've been talking about the Republican debate last night in Las Vegas.
Mixed reviews, people disagree, and that's just Wayne Newton.
He disagrees with himself.
He was there and he came out after the debate and endorsed Mitt Romney and then he also endorsed Michelle Bachman.
It was that kind of debate.
Congresswoman Backman, I love Congresswoman Backman, and I'm very grateful to her.
Years ago, she posed with a – they have this thing called Congress Reads or something.
And it's supposed to be, it's run by the National Library Association or whatever.
And they get celebrities to be photographed with books, reading books.
And the idea is that it encourages young people in our grade schools to start reading instead of dealing drugs or whatever they'd normally be doing.
And normally, the idea is that you meant to appear with, I don't know, Thomas the Tank Engine or something.
And instead of being photographed with Thomas the Tank Engine, she was photographed with my book, America Alone, the End of the World as We Know It, which is probably not ideal reading for kindergartners or first graders.
I don't want to keep them up at night or anything.
So I'll always be grateful to Michelle Buckman for doing that.
That was five years ago.
And then when my new book came out, she started quoting it on Meet the Press after she won the Iowa Straw Poll.
So I'm always grateful to Congresswoman Backman.
And I thought she did actually a pretty good job last night.
I tell you another line I liked that I thought was when I said earlier that I thought I was glad neither Newt nor Ron Paul has a snowball's chance of becoming the Republican nominee.
But they're good for these debates because they present things in primal terms.
Ron Paul is good because he uses the B word, the broke word.
America is broke.
Broke, broke, broke, broke, broke.
He's the only guy saying that.
And when he calls, I disagree with him in terms of his foreign policy, he is an isolationist.
But he's not wrong about all this stuff.
Why does the United States Army live in Germany?
Why does it live in South Korea?
These are some of the wealthiest nations on the planet.
And the insanity of the post-war world is that the wealthiest societies in human history, mainly because of the U.S. security umbrella, from Norway to New Zealand are incapable now of projecting force to their own borders, while basket case states like North Korea have gone nuclear.
I mean, just in the Korean Peninsula.
That's the problem with the world right now.
North Korea, an economic basket case that has a lower GDP than Zimbabwe, that doesn't export anything except knockoff Viagra and nuclear technology.
North Korea is a nuclear power and South Korea, one of the wealthiest societies on the planet, requires the United States essentially to fund and guarantee its defense and garrison its borders.
That's the problem with the state of the planet right there.
And well, I think defense welfare queens are as bad as any other kind of welfare queens, HR.
I mean, I think that's essentially what much of the rest of the developed world is.
Western Europe is a defense welfare queen.
Japan and South Korea in that respect to defense welfare queens.
And the point is that in 1950, America could afford this stuff.
America is now broke and can't afford this stuff.
Ron Paul pointed out that we have got forces, troops, a military presence in something like 150 out of 200 countries around the planet.
It would be easier to list the countries that we don't have troops in.
And I love the idea, by the way, on this score.
Somebody suggested that we should ask Iraq and Libya to pick up the tab for liberating them.
And good luck with that, is all I can say.
I mean, what are you going to do to Libya?
You know, come on, give us the check, or we're going to put Gaddafi back in the presidential palace.
I don't think that's going to work.
I don't think that's going to work.
And I'm not an isolationist.
I believe in the projection of American power in America's national interest.
And this is where I thought Newt had a very good line.
Newt said, I'm a hawk, but I'm a cheap hawk.
And I'm with him on that, I think.
If you look at the 10-year war in Afghanistan, which is now America's longest war, the problem in Afghanistan isn't the amount of money that we haven't spent enough money there.
It's that so much of the money we've spent there has been totally wasted.
Totally wasted.
The State Department issued a report last week on international religious freedom.
And on page 73 or something of the report, it mentions en passant that the last Christian church in Afghanistan was raised to the ground last year.
This happened on America's Watch.
I don't know why it's in a report on international religious freedom.
Afghanistan is a U.S. client state.
The Western military and aid presence in Afghanistan accounts for 97% of Afghanistan's GDP.
We're propping the thing up.
That disgusting, corrupt thug of a president, Karzai, is kept alive only by U.S. arms.
And yet, on America's watch, the last Christian church in Afghanistan got raised to the ground.
We've spent half a trillion dollars in there, helping them create some totalitarian Islamic imperialist squat.
The problem with the military budget, and I disagree respectfully with my right-wing friends at respectable publications on this, but the problem with the U.S. military objectives and achieving U.S. military objectives is not the money, it's that so much of the money is squandered, is utterly wasted.
And we have to start thinking, that line of Newt's, I'm a hawk, but I'm a cheap hawk, is critical to this.
We have to start learning to do more with less.
Because if we can't learn to do more with less, we are done for.
We are done for.
And so I'm grateful to him for actually, if you took the Ron Paul position and you took the Newt position and you figured out someplace in between, the discussion would be being held in the correct terms.
How can we project American power abroad in a more effective and less wasteful fashion?
Because when you spend half a trillion dollars and in return the natives are burning down the Christian churches, that's not an effective use of American money in America's national interest.
1-800-282-2882.
You know, it's not just government debt.
It's not just government debt.
This is from USA Today.
Students and workers seeking retraining are borrowing extraordinary amounts of money through federal loan programs, potentially putting a huge burden on the backs of young people looking for jobs and trying to start careers.
This year, for the first time, student loan debt will exceed $1 trillion.
Okay, so we now apply the T-word not just to stupid wasteful stimulus programs like Obama did, whatever it was, in 2009.
He took a trillion dollars in small bills and tossed it out the window into the Potomac and watched it float out to sea.
We know he does that because he's the government.
The government can do that.
This is American individuals taking out a trillion dollars in student debt.
For the first time ever, there's going to be more student debt than credit card debt.
And this is a trillion dollars is not trifling.
It's not trifling.
That's the equivalent of an advanced world's total economy.
That's basically the equivalent of the entire Australian economy sunk into one small boutique niche market of debt.
The USA Today makes the point, apart from anything else, that unlike most other kinds of debt, this can't be shed in bankruptcy.
It's going to create a generation of wage slavery, says Nick Pardini, a Villanova University graduate student in finance, who has warned on a blog for investors that student loans are the next credit bubble with borrowers rather than lenders as the losers.
Think about it.
$50,000 a year to do a bachelor's degree in some nothing pseudos subject like gender studies or any other kind of, or any other kind of studies.
I mean, half these things aren't worth doing in absolute terms, and they're certainly not worth doing for $50,000 a year.
People borrow money to take a half decade vacation in which they learn very little and certainly very little that would justify a quarter million dollar layout.
There's no return on investment for that.
It would be very nice.
By the way, this is the kind of education that in the 19th century you would have to be the minor son of a middle European Grand Duke to enjoy.
A middle European Grand Duke in an obscure German principality if circa 1870 could afford to take half a decade off to do race and colonialism studies at Berkeley.
But generally speaking, when everybody's doing it, when the objective of the President of the United States is that everybody in the land should be able to do this, you're looking at digging yourself into an economic pit that you can't get out of.
Yet these idiots down on the Occupy Wall Street thing, they're saying, oh, you know, oh, I think government should forgive.
I went to college and I wound up with a lot of debt and I think it's the bank's fault.
Why is it the First National Bank of Dead Skunk Junction's fault?
Why is it even Goldman Sachs's fault?
They didn't do anything to you.
Why aren't you occupying the Dean of Admissions Office at Shakedown University?
Nothing the banks have ever done to you, personally, is as stupid as the education system of the United States saddling you with a six-figure debt for an absolutely, utterly worthless so-called credential that everybody understands the worthlessness of.
And now we have a situation where, as you say, we are looking at a generation of wage slaves, reports USA Today.
For the first time ever, first time ever, student loan debt has outpaced credit card debt.
And unlike credit card debt, it can't be paid back.
Yeah, these guys down at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration.
By the way, have you ever seen any of these fellows interviewed?
They're a wonderful testament to the American education system in terms of their abilities at cognitive thinking.
There's a fascinating video at National Review.
It was posted by my pals at National Review of some guy who's saying that he wants taxpayers, in effect, to pick up the tab for his college debt.
And the interviewer asked him, he said, well, why should taxpayers pay your college debt?
And the guy just says in that soporific, brain-dead voice of someone who's had too many decaf macchiatos before the camera was switched on, it just goes, well, it's just my opinion.
It's whatever.
I'm just putting it out there.
That's terrific.
That's terrific.
As bad as I said, Rick Perry's performance was in the Republican debate.
He certainly does a lot better than any of these students interviewed at the Occupy Wall Street demo.
What cognitive skills?
I would love to know the name of the college he attended.
And I would love, people should, anytime that college is pitching for your business and wants you to pay a quarter million dollars to do whatever studies at Complacency University, they should put that guy's video up as a consequence of what it is to spend five years of your life in that environment.
You can't, you have to, we're doing it for the children, Bill Clinton said.
These are the children we did it for, and on the evidence of Occupy Wall Street, they are done for.
Mark Stein in for Rush 1-800-282-2882.
The Rush Limbaugh show, Mark Stein in for Rush.
HR just asked me where actually Complacency University was.
If you're not sure, I believe this weekend the University of North Dakota are playing Complacency University.
It's the Fighting Sioux versus the Fighting Sloths.
You may have read, by the way, that because of objections by Native Americans, the Fighting Sioux are changing the name.
Because of objections by Peter, I believe the Fighting Sloths are changing their name to the drowsy narcoleptics.
But it should be a thrilling game, that the Fighting Sioux versus the Fighting Sloths.
Look for it on ESPN this weekend.
Mark Stein in for Rush, let us go to, wow, the man with no name.
Is that Clint Eastwood in Houston, Texas?
Is that right, HR?
I've got an entirely, is the name being withheld for security reasons?
Oh, it's Michael.
It's Michael.
And somebody took Whiteout to the computer screen, so there was no name there.
Michael from Houston, Texas.
You're live on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Hey, great to have you with us.
Yes, sir.
I really enjoy your show.
I was asking the call screener, what happened to Newt?
You know, now it seemed like he was speaker and then all of a sudden he disappeared and I'm running for president.
What happened to him?
What was up with that?
Well, if you're saying what's he been doing since the mid-90s and now, he's pumped out a ton of books on winning the future, renewing the future, renewing the campaign for the American future, campaigning the renewal of the future of America.
He does one of those every couple of years, and he's got lots of plans.
He always has his thing, you know, whatever it is, the seven pillars of wisdom.
Was he forced out of the speaker, or was he forced out of politics?
What happened to him?
He quit just after.
Let me see if I get the timing on this right.
Didn't he quit just after the 90s, sometime after the 94 election?
Yeah.
And I think nobody could quite figure out why he'd.
It was something.
I can't remember whether it was something to do with not being allowed in the back door of the plane or whatever.
But basically, since then, he's been presenting himself as a public intellectual, but he hasn't held public office.
So you don't quite understand what he's been doing the last couple of decades.
No, but I love Newt.
And I kind of got the feeling that you did not.
No, I just don't think Newt can.
Look, the idea is Newt has a ton of personal baggage.
And I think there's too much personal baggage.
Well, that's the point, isn't it?
That Mitt Romney would say that he, Mitt Romney would argue that he doesn't.
There's a difference between, I think, personal baggage and policy, problematic policy positions.
And I find it very hard to see how Newt could survive a primary in primary season.
But what Newt's advantage is, is that he actually advances the debate, and he's great for that.
It's terrific to have him in there in that.
I'm not opposed to him on those grounds.
I think he had a great debate performance.
He's had great debate performances before.
The one thing I love about him, Michael, is the way he slaps down the moderator for the stupid questions.
And I think that's actually useful because these aren't the right questions.
These aren't the questions we should be talking about half the time.
And Newt understands that.
Newt understands what's at stake for America.
And when he's on his game, he puts it in terms we can all get.
And I thought that I'm a hawk, but I'm a cheap hawk is actually where true conservatives ought to be on some of these issues.
Okay, I have one other point to make, if I may.
Okay, go ahead.
I was listening to this lady economist.
She was talking to Mike Davis in Dallas.
Right.
And she was trying to explain just how much a trillion dollars represents.
And have you ever heard this before?
In terms of seconds, how much a trillion seconds represents?
Right.
Do you know how many seconds are in an hour?
60.
In an hour?
I mean, no, no, no.
Oh, the trick question.
There's 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.
So that's 3,600 seconds in an hour.
3,600 seconds in one hour.
Okay.
A million seconds is about 11 and a half days.
Right.
Okay.
A billion seconds is about 32 years.
Right.
That's big.
A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years.
Right.
That's how big that number is.
And we're dealing with a whole bunch of those.
Yeah, yeah.
And if you put it in those terms, then we have, if you if you convert it to time, by the way, this word, this word trillion is one you only used to hear in astronomy textbooks until it became a normal term in U.S. government accounting.
Before that, it was just in astronomy textbooks.
Such and such a galaxy is 43 trillion light years away from Earth or whatever.
But if you actually relate it to human history and put each dollar in terms of a second of time, as Michael was doing there, you know, 3,600 seconds to the hour and whatever, we are basically a trillion dollars, we are basically outspending human history.
In other words, you go back, these are numbers that if you were to make a second equivalent to a year, you would be going back to before the Egyptians invented papyrus for the state for the state we're in now.
And it's very difficult for people to grasp.
And that's why normalizing the word trillion, as the Democrats have sought to do since 2008, is disastrous for us.
Normalizing the word trillion means there's no way back because there's not enough money and there never will be enough money to fund multi-trillion dollar government.
That money doesn't exist and can never exist.
Yes, Rush Bag live tomorrow to take you through the end of the week.
But in the meantime, it is your undocumented anger man sitting in.
Great to be with you.
Just to go back to what Michael from Houston, Texas was saying there, talking about it trillions if you converted them to seconds.
I believe even at $1,000 per second, a reader sent this to me a few months ago: that if you were to convert $1,000 into seconds, then the total liabilities of the United States, unfunded liabilities, which is about $140 trillion now, because the great thing about the superpower is it keeps it manages to do accounting tricks that you would go to jail for if you had to do them for your company.
And so it keeps its unfunded liabilities off the book.
So, the real figure is about $140 trillion.
And if you were to spend $1,000 every second and go backwards in time, you'd wind up at about 2400 B.C. or about the time they invented the abacus.
But in 2400 B.C., they didn't have an abacus that could take $140 trillion.
So we have basically outspent human history.
That's a pretty good job.
Let's go from Michael in Houston, Texas, to Raphael in Houston, Texas, because we don't care about any other affiliates today.
We're just Houston-focused.
Raphael, you're live on the Rushlinbaugh Show.
Mark, thank you.
It's a pleasure to talk to you, sir.
Good to talk with you too.
I'll just give you three questions, and I'm going to hang up and listen to them because I don't have time to protest, so I'm out working.
Okay.
How many jobs, realistically, do we need to come up with in this country in order to get it back to the prosperity era of, say, the Reagan years?
And secondly, if or when Herman Cain is given the nomination, who else on that stage would you like to see as his VP?
And then thirdly, sir, I'd like to hear your opinion on the fair tax.
Okay.
On the jobs front, I think there's a real problem with this.
Economic growth.
You cannot grow your way out of this hole.
The hole is created by government.
The middle class, by the way, the American middle class is dying before our eyes.
Because everything that you're told when you start at the bottom, rung of the ladder, you land as a penniless immigrant from Tsarist Russia at Ellis Island, and you're in some slum in the Lower East Side of New York, and your kid moves to a kind of better neighborhood uptown.
And then your grandson moves to the suburbs and becomes the first person in your line since you trace it all the way back to being a peasant in 12th century Russia.
And you never, you were always just tenants.
You were serfs in your hovels.
Nobody's ever owned a home until your grandson, after you get off the boat at Ellis Island, buys a little home out in the suburbs of New York.
That's the American way.
Social mobility.
Social mobility is dying in this country.
Dying.
The American middle class is dying.
People with a quarter million dollars of college debt, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, live worse than their parents and grandparents who didn't go to college, had nominally blue-collar jobs, but lived longer, lived with better security, lived with better so-called health benefits, lived in more affordable accommodation relative to what they earned than we do now.
Government interfered in all those key areas of life.
So we used to talk about property ownership as a way of getting a foot in the ground, establishing yourself as a solid citizen.
Government interference has clobbered the housing market, crippled the housing market.
We haven't hit bottom yet.
We've got about twice as many three and four bedroom family-sized houses as we have families requiring three or four bedrooms.
So we've got a long way to hit bottom on those things.
And by the way, that's something that should have come up more in the Nevada debate, where something like two-thirds of mortgages are underwater in that state.
So we kicked, we've clobbered one of the big pillars of free society, property ownership.
Safe as houses.
Remember when they used to say that?
Safe as houses.
They ain't saying it anymore.
We've clobbered that.
We've interfered, and government has interfered with and distorted other areas of economic activity.
When they do it to the degree that we're doing right now, you cannot grow your way.
You cannot grow your way out of that mess.
We've got too many barnacles encrusted to the Hulk.
Basically, if you take out population growth, then economic growth growth in GDP is something like a little 1.5% or something, something a little over that.
You can't at at that level, even if we were to return to that historic level, we would still have mass unemployment in this country.
So the idea that we can grow our way, you can't grow enough to match the massive metastasization of the vast government behemoth.
There's simply too much of it now.
So before you can even grow, before you can even get the great dead albatross of government off your back, you have to do severe cutting of government to enable growth.
When you've got $4 trillion, the national government, it's not federal anymore, there's no pretense at federalism, when it's proposing half trillion dollar boondoggles to, quote, get teachers back in our classrooms, unquote, that's not a federal government, it's a national government.
The national government is spending $4 trillion, basically, and taking in $2 trillion.
You can't close that gap.
There's no economic growth that can close that gap.
So there is no correct answer to the number of jobs that would be required to grow our way out of this hole, to return us to the glory days of the Reagan economy.
We need severe cutting.
By the way, I think the other problematic thing here is that when jobs go, they don't come back.
In the recession of the early 90s, we lost a lot of jobs in manufacturing.
Now, we didn't get those manufacturing jobs back.
Instead, people moved into construction jobs.
There was a big housing boom.
And then to the professional services like lawyering and accounting that you need when you buy a home, because the government requires so much paperwork and all the rest of it now that you don't just, when you buy a home, it doesn't just stimulate excavators and carpenters and plasterers and so forth.
It also stimulates all the professional service, the cubicle guys who do all the paperwork when you buy a home.
So jobs very rarely come back.
It's unlikely under any conceivable scenario that there is going to be a boom in house construction anytime soon.
And that means there's not going to be a boom in the kind of cubicle jobs that feed off house construction.
So the question then is, what's next?
Once upon a time, two centuries ago, 97% of Americans, whatever it was, worked on the farm.
Now farms produce as much as they did two centuries ago, but they don't need field hands.
So people then move to the mills and the factories.
Then the mills and the factories automated.
Now people don't need factory workers anymore.
So then people moved into low-level service jobs.
What happens when Walmart decides to go for automated checkouts?
Then they move to the cubicle jobs, as we said.
What happens when they too go the way of the typing pool, the 1960s typing pool?
So we need a new next.
And the idea of there being a new next until we get the dead albatross of government off the back is simply incredible.
So I don't think, I think we can certainly do things that would we have the worst long-term unemployment rate basically since they started keeping the statistics.
The employment statistics are all fake because basically a lot of people have given up looking for work.
A lot of people who are nominally counted as in work are doing only part-time work.
These are terrible things.
They don't make for social tranquility either.
Youth unemployment is at its spectacularly high levels and generally speaking it's not good for social tranquility to have a lot of young people who can't find work.
I think on that front the best thing government can do is not go for job creation programs or enterprise zones or any of the other phony baloney, but just to hack away all the regulations, the crippling burden of regulation that cripples this economy.
As to Herman Keynes, as to Herman Kaine's running mate, I would be, there's people, I'm sure he's got his own ideas.
There's people there that I'd be happy to see.
As I said, I'm a big fan of Michelle Bachmann.
I don't think temperamentally Mitt Romney or Rick Perry would be content in the role of Herman Kane's running mate.
But I certainly think Michelle Buckman could be there.
And I think if Herman Kane does get the nomination, he'll want to pick somebody to balance out the ticket in some respects.
And Michelle Buckman, as a lady from a northern border state, would certainly do that.
So I'd be happy to see that.
But I think at this instance, in this election season, you've got to ask yourself, why aren't we talking the way we were talking during the Tea Party summer in 2009, 2010?
You know, why aren't we talking about it in those terms?
We've got to move the meter.
You know, Mitt Romney, I use that line right at the top of the show.
Mitt Romney was explaining how as soon as he found out that his lawn company hired illegal immigrants, he said, I'm running for office.
I can't have illegals.
Mitt actually said that on national television last night.
In other words, he thought he had a perception problem.
He didn't say, I strongly believe in the integrity of U.S. immigration laws.
I can't be having illegals.
I strongly object to people coming here and taking the jobs of hardworking American citizens.
He didn't say any of that.
He said, I'm running for office.
I can't have illegals.
But Mitt stood on national TV and lifted the curtain.
He was, for a moment, he was unspinded.
He was unfocus grouped and he said what he thought.
And I think that is a, I think that is a, I think if you think of candidates, and if you think of someone like Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, the guy who says, I can't be seen to be hiring illegals, I'm running for office.
What you have to do to move a guy like Mitt Romney in your direction is for millions of people to tug the conversation back to sanity, the way the Tea Party guys did in the first couple of years of Barack Obama.
Why does November 2010 seem so far away?
Why does it seem way longer than 11 months ago?
Because since then, we've moved into presidential season, so all the trimmers and equivocators and compromisers and centrists and move toward the mushy middle types and all their malign consultants have moved the conversation toward the middle.
And the one thing I like about Herman Kaine, by the way, is he didn't, you know, I don't care about the electrified fence.
If you're stupid enough to vote for a candidate on a line about whether he favors an electrified fence on the border, then you deserve to go off the cliff with the $15 trillion of debt.
You deserve to plunge into the abyss.
If you're stupid enough to decide the fate of the government of the United States on the basis of whether Herman Kane was joking about whether he wants an electrified fence on the border.
And I don't want a candidate who poll tests his line the way he has his hair done.
I'd like a guy who understands the existential crisis confronting the United States and is able to articulate that.
If we can't have a guy like that this electoral season, we might as well pack it up because by the time we're holding the election for 2016 on present trends, China, according to the IMF, will be the world's dominant economy.
And the guy who is running for election this time in four years' time will essentially be the second place guy.
He will be experiencing what no American president has experienced since Grover Cleveland, the feeling of being the global also round.
So if we can't get a real conservative candidate this time round, when can we?
Mark Stein in for Rush.
More to come.
Oh, gotta love the sound of that whistle.
Is that one of those high-speed rail links?
Is that the Joe Biden High-Speed Express going through?
What is that music?
What is that music, Mike?
Yeah?
Oh, it's Express by BTA.
What a lame.
That's got to be the dullest.
What happened to the Chattanooga Tutu?
What kind of name for a train song is that?
Love that steam whistle, though.
Mark's signing for us.
Just want to say one quick thing.
I joked that the Fighting Sioux nickname in the University of North Dakota, that the Sioux were suing over it.
And I've had many emails from outraged North Dakotans pointing out that the Sioux are not suing.
The university received the blessing of the Spirit Lake Sioux, who took a poll, took a vote, and 67% of the Spirit Lake Sioux backed the name, the Fighting Sioux, at the University of North Dakota.
But the other Sioux council, the Standing Rock Sioux, never placed the issue before the tribe for a vote.
So the Spirit Lake Sioux, 67% of them went for the Fighting Sioux, but the Standing Rock Sioux haven't.
So that's the Sioux news.
Sioux You Can Use are Sioux You Can Use update here on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Let's go to Brandon in, I was going to say Berwick, Pennsylvania, but that's in Scotland.
It's Berwick, Pennsylvania.
Brandon, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hey, Mark, I'm a big fan.
I just have a clarity, I think.
The thing with Ron Paul, you said you disagree with him on foreign policy, but you've got to look at the big picture.
Four years ago, there wasn't one candidate talking about smaller government.
Ron Paul's been saying it for 35 years.
And when you look at, you just got them saying we need a real conservative.
When you look at the other people up there, I mean, Michelle Bachman worked on Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976.
You know, everybody knows that Rick Perry worked on Al Gore's campaign.
Romney passed RomneyCare.
Herman Cain was a Federal Reserve Director.
You know, these people are just saying what everyone wants to hear because the tone of the country is that we want smaller government.
No, Ron Paul.
Anyone else is a true conservative.
No, Ron Paul, you're right, Brandon.
Ron Paul is the voice of principal on that stage.
And to go back to four years ago, by the way, and I'm proud, incidentally, I happen to be doing this particular broadcast from a building that four years ago housed, I'm not sure whether it was his state chair, but it was certainly his county chair in the state of New Hampshire.
So the building I'm doing this show from has an impeccable record when it comes to Ron Paul.
And Ron Paul, if you go back four years, people thought he was a nut.
He was going on about the Federal Reserve and the gold standard and everything.
Now, four years later, in an age of quantitative easing, in an age when 70% of the debt issued by the United States Treasury is being bought by the Federal Reserve, and if you're wondering how that works, the short answer is it doesn't.
What Ron Paul was saying four years ago isn't nuts anymore.
It's actually part of the legitimate public discourse of the United States of America.
And that's why Ron Paul is the principled voice of liberty on that stage.
And one of his best answers, I thought, by the way, one of the most heartening aspects of that debate, Brandon, was when somebody stood up and asked, what do the candidates have to, what's their message to Latinos?
And it was heartening to me that they had no message to Latinos.
So they said they didn't want to get into that identity group pandering.
And Ron Paul put it best when he said that the individual, it's the individual that matters.
The ultimate minority group is the individual.
And Ron Paul is right that when you start having competing identity groups trying to catch the eye of the federal sugar daddy, that you count for less.
One consequence of that is you count for less and less as an individual.
You count for less and less as a citizen of the United States.
And what matters is what particular combination of identity groups you belong to.
And I thought it was great that nobody did any identity group pandering.
Nobody bothered with it.
Nobody wasted time with it.
They all addressed the electorate at large and the electorate as individuals.
And Ron Paul gave the best answer on that, as he often does.
He's a principled speaker for small government and liberty.
I disagree with him in the sense that it is entirely impractical in the 21st century for America to be a 19th-century isolationist republic.
The United States borders two relatively benign nations, and one consequence of that is that 40% of Mexicans are living north of the border, and every bad Canadian idea has moved south of the border.
More to come.
It's like a heat wave.
What is it?
47 degrees and cloudy?
That's a heat wave in New Hampshire.
Mark Stein in Farush, 1-800-282-2882.
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