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Dec. 29, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:51
December 29, 2011, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, America's Anchorman is away today.
And this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in, no supporting paperwork whatsoever.
If you can't tell one Mark guest host from another, I'm the one without the accent.
The Rush Limbaugh Show has more guest hosts called Mark than Iowa has second-tier single-digit candidates.
But the good news is that the great Walter Williams will be here tomorrow for Mark Free Friday on the EIB network.
Walter Williams, don't miss it.
12 midday Eastern tomorrow.
Best of Rush on Monday.
And then Rush returns live Tuesday for the big day, Iowa Caucus Day.
And I hear, I hear just a rumor, but you never know.
I hear that he'll be introducing two If-By T in a special limited edition ethanol flavor just for Iowa Caucus Day.
We'll be following all the latest developments from Iowa and beyond.
Newt is still falling.
He has yet to bottom out in the polls.
He's been under a barrage of attack ads from all directions in Iowa.
So Newt's still falling.
Rick Santorum is now surging.
Everyone else on the Iowa ballot has had a surge now, except for John Huntsman.
He remains a surge-free zone in Iowa.
He's the candidate for people who don't like surges.
There's different demographics that you can appeal to in Iowa.
Romney has appealed to moderate.
Ron Paul has appealed to Ron Pauliaks.
Rick Santorum has appealed to evangelicals.
But John Huntsman is the only candidate in Iowa who's running on a principled non-surging ticket.
When I was here a couple of days ago, we spoke to a caller in Virginia whom I identified as the John Huntsman supporter in the state of Virginia.
But in fact, you can't vote for him for Huntsman in Virginia.
He's not on the ballot.
The only two candidates who made it on to the ballot in Virginia are Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.
So I would love to know who our caller a couple of days ago is going to wind up voting for in Virginia.
Now he's got a choice between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.
And I would love to know this too.
Newt Gingrich lives in Virginia.
And Newt didn't make it onto the ballot in Virginia, which he compared in his usual way to an unexpected setback such as Pearl Harbor.
I think that's a bit of a stretch even for Newt.
But what I want to know is this: who will Newt vote for in the Virginia primary?
Newt Snoot lives in Virginia.
He's a Virginia voter.
Who is Newt Gingrich going to vote for?
He's got a choice between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, and he's already said he won't vote for Ron Paul.
And you can't write in a candidate in Virginia.
So will Newt vote for Mitt in the Republican primary in Virginia.
All the latest developments from Iowa, 1-800-282-2882.
If you want to talk about what's at stake in the Iowa caucuses before we move on to New Hampshire, and all the rest of the news, too, we will be following.
Surprise developments in North Korea.
Kim Jong-un has been declared the supreme leader and the great successor at his father's funeral.
Basically, Kim Jong-un won the Pyongyang Caucus.
I think he got 98.7% of the vote, and I think John Huntsman got the remaining 1.3%.
But anyway, Kim Jong-un has triumphed in the Pyongyang caucus.
Do you know who's the president of North Korea?
It's still Kim Il-song, who was Kim Jong-un's grandfather.
Kim Il-sung died, whatever it was, 20 years ago now, but he's still president of North Korea because he was proclaimed eternal president.
So he's not like your Rinky Dink, average nickel and dime dictator who's just president for life.
Kim Il-sung is president for death in North Korea.
He's the eternal president.
And, you know, I like to think outside the box here.
And I really think that would be terrific.
If we could have that system here, I would love it if, like, Calvin Coolidge could be proclaimed eternal president.
I mean, is it too late to get that on the ballot in Iowa, the North Korea?
Well, no, in Chicago.
No, in Chicago, the voters are dead, not the candidates.
But I would like to move to the North Korean system where the candidates are dead.
Live voters, live voters, but dead candidates.
It's a better system.
If you have dead voters but live candidates, you wind up with Barack Obama and the whole Cook County machine.
If you have dead candidates but live voters, you end up like in North Korea where Kim Il-sung is eternal president.
So why couldn't we just proclaim Calvin Coolidge eternal president?
And we wouldn't have to worry in case John Huntsman has a last-minute surge in our...
I'm just trying to think about the...
Well, well...
Mr. Snerdly.
Mr. Snerdly is now thinking logically here.
He can't understand why North Korea, which is a people's republic, but the only people who get to run it have to have Kim in the name, don't they?
That's the way it is.
But wait a minute.
You know, there's all kinds.
Snerdley is no one who has any right to complain about this because all over this country, there are people who would love to guest host this show.
And they say, why do the only people who get to be on the Rush Limbaugh show are Mark?
There's like Mark Davis, Mark Belling, and what's the other guy called?
I can't remember the third guy.
Mark Davis, Mark Belling, Mark Stein.
We are basically the equivalent of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un.
It's like, it's basically Mark, the guest hosts for the Rush Limbaugh show are Mark Il-sung, Mark Jong-il, and Mark Jong-un.
If you're having track, if you're having difficulty keeping track, I'm Mark Jong-un.
Mark Jong-il was here yesterday.
So, yeah, but it is an interesting point.
Most of these, it's the same thing in Syria.
The so-called people's republics devolve into hereditary bodaky.
But who's to say, given what is happening out in Iowa, who is to say that that's necessarily a worse system?
We will talk about what is happening in the Iowa caucus today.
They say there are really only four tickets out of Iowa.
I would say there's five.
There's going to be basically Mitt will still be in the race.
Ron Paul will still be there.
Newt Gingrich will still be there.
Huntsman, who isn't really competing in Iowa, is still going to be there because he's betting everything on New Hampshire.
And that means the real winnering will be the Perry Bachman-Santorum vote.
They're all jostling for the same constituency.
Which one of those is likely to come out on top?
Right now, it is Santorum who is surging.
But we will see.
I mean, basically, no one knows anything about Iowa.
The fascinating thing about Iowa is it's basically 100,000 people out of a state of 3 million.
If you're lucky, if it's a spectacular turnout, it'll be 100,000 people.
If there's a snowstorm, it'll just be 20,000 people, 18,000 of whom will vote for Ron Ball.
Nobody knows how well organized people are.
Newt, as we saw, Newt has had a spectacular.
Newt did this kind of iconoclastic outside-the-box campaign.
He just ran on debates.
He lost a lot of his staffers and his consultants.
They all quit.
He didn't have fancy ads.
He didn't have focus groups.
He was just basically running on newt in the debates.
And when you get to Iowa, you've got to have people who've got to come and stand in school gyms and move to the corners and stand in the corner of the school gym and everything.
And at that point, just having terrific answers in the debates isn't enough.
So who is going to the interesting question is who of these three second-tier candidates, Santorum, Bachman, and Rick Perry is best organized?
Because it's the best organized one who's going to emerge from that.
And there are only, I would say, five tickets out of Iowa.
So we're going to have Romney, we're going to have Gingrich, we're going to have Ron Paul, we're going to have Huntsman, and we're going to have one of the Perry Bachman-Santorum trio.
Which one will it be?
1-800-282-2882.
And all the candidates are unsatisfactory to one degree or another.
That's just the nature of politics.
Because unless you get the perfect guy like Kim Il-sung was for North Korea, as everybody starving in those North Korean camps with no light, no electric light, freezing, shivering, starving in the dark.
All those people still think, wow, Kim Il-sung, he was a great guy.
What a guy.
You very rarely, except in Pyongyang, you very rarely get the perfect candidate.
You have to accept you're going to get a 70% guy, basically.
If you're lucky, you'll get a 70% guy.
So the question is, what 70% is it important to go for?
And the critical, the single most important issue here is driving a stake through Obamacare beginning in January 2013.
Because if that sucker is not killed dead in the next presidential term, it will never be killed.
And if it's never killed, you'll never get conservative government again.
You will never get conservative government again.
It changes the relationship between the citizen and the state to one that's closer to junkie and push.
And right now, all the bad things about Obamacare are kicking in.
And none of the lollipops, none of the things that people are going to like.
And once they start, which will be roughly toward the end of this decade, in other words, in the presidential term starting in 2017, once those things kick in, you will be in the, it will not just be like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security.
It'll be something closer to the situation that prevails in Western Europe and most other parts of the Western world, whereby the relationship between the citizen and the state has been transformed to such a significant degree, you will never get a truly conservative government ever again.
So the way to think about this thing, if you're trying to figure out who's the guy you want to agree with on the 70% and let him go off and do a lot of cookie stuff on the 30%, I would place that right at the top of the list.
Obamacare will not only bankrupt the state, but it will make him possible.
For example, if you object to Ron Paul on foreign policy grounds, it ain't going to matter if Obamacare kicks in because this country won't be able to afford a foreign policy by the end of this decade.
That's a very basic arithmetic there.
You can have a massive government, sclerotic, bloated government healthcare system, or you can have armed forces that can project themselves to anywhere on the planet, but you can't have both.
So it's not going to be an issue because if you have Obamacare by the end of this decade, you're not going to be able to have the U.S. armed forces as they're known.
So the important thing is which candidate is going to drive a stake through Obamacare and kill that sucker starting in January 2013 as fast and effectively as possible.
Because if we don't kill it in this term, it's over.
This is a consequential election and you might have strong views about, I don't know, legalizing, who's the guy, Mr. Snerdley, who's the fellow who's running from New Mexico?
The governor from New Mexico who's running is a Gary Johnson, Gary, who says that he's for legalization of drugs and all the rest of it.
This is not a time to worry about the legalization of drugs, whatever you're viewing it.
This is a time to be able to prioritize.
And if you're a candidate who can't prioritize, you shouldn't be in the race anywhere.
And the single most important issue facing this country is whether a state can be driven through the heart of Obamacare before it fundamentally redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Mark Stein in for Rush 1-800-282-2882.
We will follow all the exciting developments, whether from Cedar Rabbits or Pyongyang in the hours ahead.
Mark Stein, InfoRush on the EIB Network, 1-800-282-2882.
Yes, the excitement is at fever pitch at the EIB Network as we count down to the big Iowa caucus day, January the 3rd.
That's Tuesday.
Rush will be here live following events in Iowa.
Today is Mongolian, I think it's the 100th anniversary of Mongolian independence.
Mongolia became an independent nation in 1911.
So I want to give a special shout out to listeners in, if you're a Liberal in Oregon or Vermont and you're listening to the show in your Mongolian yurt, a big shout out to you because Mongolia is celebrating 100 years of independence today.
So if you're enjoying the show in your yurt, you have Mongolia to thank for it.
It's 100 years old today.
Also from overseas, Mr. Snerdley thinks this could be an omen.
It has been the worst year for elephants in a quarter of a century.
At least a record number of seizures of elephant tusks reveal that there is a massive pile of corpses, 2,500 dead elephants.
And that may be a bad omen for how things are going to go for Republicans in the year ahead.
But it's also a bad year for rhinos.
A record 443 rhinos, I'm not talking about your rhino squish types, like your Massachusetts moderates and whatever, but a record 443 rhinos have been killed this year in South Africa.
Mr. Snerdley worries that this could be an omen, a bad year, both for elephants and for rhinos, according to this report out of Johannesburg.
Now, I was talking about the ability to prioritize.
What are going to be, what are the issues you should be voting on?
Basically, if Obamacare survives, there's nothing else.
There's nothing else.
If you look at health spending in many jurisdictions in the Western world, the minute you have the governmentalization of healthcare, it becomes the dominant issue.
It's the one thing that people, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how long the wait list gets, people will not let it go.
And so you have situations where it already consumes like 46% of revenues in many Canadian provinces.
For example, in Ontario, which is the biggest province in Canada, healthcare spending is set to consume 80% of revenues by the year 2030.
Now, just to put that in comparison, if it were to be a comparable figure here today, that would mean that by the time you took government revenues for healthcare and you threw in the interest payments on the debt, which are going to be 20% of revenue within a few years, that would leave no money for nothing else.
In other words, if you covered the cost of Obamacare, plus you paid the interest to the Chinese on the debt, there's no money left for anything else.
No armed services, no nothing, just that.
Just healthcare and interest payments on the debt.
And by the way, Obamacare, I think, is going to be even worse, even more chaotic, and even more expensive than the Canadian and British and European systems at their most dysfunctional, because it has corruption built into it, as we saw with the retirement of Ben Nelson, the cornhusker kickback guy from Nebraska, as that reminded us.
It doesn't even have the same basic, you can't even make the same basic argument for it that you can make about the Canadian system, which is that at least there's an equality of awfulness about the whole system.
Here, there were payoffs to this state and that state and all the rest of it, and there are special deals and special favours and special opt-outs and all the rest of it that will require an even huger bureaucracy to administer it.
Nobody has ever attempted this on any scale before.
The British National Health Service is the third largest employer on the planet after the People's Liberation Army of China and the Indian Railways Network.
That's for one tiny little miserable, grubby little island in the North Atlantic.
For 50 million people, it's the third biggest employer on the planet, the British National Health Service.
The United States equivalent to administer health, a bureaucracy to administer healthcare for over 300 million people from Maine to Hawaii is going to be way more expensive than that.
You look at the way Medicare costs have exploded, and once you put Obamacare in place, that is going to explode on a scale nobody has ever attempted this in a first world society before.
So if we don't drive a stake through this in the next presidential term, it's going to be over.
Ann Coulter, in her column today, makes the point that if Obamacare, if Obama's re-elected or if some presidential successor comes along who is unable to actually kill Obamacare, then by 2017, all the goodies will be kicking in and people will be running, as they do in Western Europe and Canada, on a promise to manage Obamacare more efficiently, to make it work more efficiently,
to make Obamacare run on time, as Mussolini would have said.
So the point here is that if we don't actually have a candidate committed to killing this thing dead, rolling it back, ending it before the end of the next presidential term, then the nature of the United States will be changed forever.
Great to be with you!
I'm here today.
Walter Williams in tomorrow.
Rush Back Tuesday.
If you go to RushLimbor.com, you need not be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts because if you're a Rush 24-7 subscriber, you can have Rush 24-7 and it's like he's never gone away.
Let's go to Brent in Manassas, Virginia.
Brent, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, how are you doing, Mark?
I'm doing good.
How you?
All right.
I do agree with you on the Obamacare.
Got to go.
And hopefully the next president will do that.
But the reason I called was I'm just wondering why everybody is always bad-mouthing Ron Paul.
And I know that the military thing is a big thing, and the legalizing drugs is a big thing.
But drugs were legal a long time ago.
Anybody who wants drugs can get drugs.
So I don't see why that is such a big deal.
And the military thing, it's not that he wants to, you know, be an isolationist and not do anything in other parts of the world when people need help.
He just doesn't want to go to war for no reason and kill a bunch of innocent people.
And so I just don't understand why those two things would be a reason not to vote for the man when all of his other, you know, the economy and a lot of other things, he's good on.
And so I was just wondering if you could kind of give me a reason why those two things should kill him as a possible president.
Well, you've actually put it in a more rational way, Brent, because if you were to leave it, let's put the drugs thing aside.
And I'm not averse, by the way, to the decriminalization of drugs, because I think the so-called war on drugs has totally corrupted large parts of US law enforcement.
I have no love for the DEA, and I strongly object to the idea that people, these paramilitarized police forces kicking the doors down and opening fire and then explaining afterwards that no, they should have been at the apartment next door and they're sorry they shot grandpa in the chest.
I think this stuff is disgusting.
And I think the corrupting effect of the war on drugs is as the problem, the root cause of the problem is American appetites for drugs.
And you're not going to and the war on drugs doesn't actually address that.
But let's put that aside and turn to the foreign policy stuff.
If you put it the way you did, which is that we shouldn't just be launching wars willy-nilly around the planet, I'd agree with you.
I think the United States has become very good at launching wars, less good at winning them.
We haven't decisively won a war for two-thirds of a century now.
That's an issue.
That's an issue, and it's one that ought to be taken seriously.
They haven't legally declared war either.
That's a constitutional point, and it's not an unimportant one.
But the point is that we go into wars and we have nothing to show for them.
All the stuff we talk about, by the way, most of the stuff we talk about is the legacy of unwon wars.
Why are we excited about this Kim Jong-un guy over in Pyongyang?
Because that was the Kim dynasty is one of the consequences of an unwon American war from the 1950s.
Why are we getting exercised about Iranian nukes?
That's one of the consequences of an act of war, 1979, when the Iranian embassy was seized, and we sent the Carter sent the helicopters into the desert and the Mullahs were poking American corpses on TV and they got away with it.
They've been in a state of war with us for a third century and we're still talking about them.
A lot of the stuff we talk about, why are we back in Iraq?
Because we didn't bother winning the war first time around when we went in when Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait.
The consequences of unwon wars are not frivolous.
And America has not decisively won a war since 1945.
And it won those that war, by the way, by dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And anyone who thinks that the United States of America was is going to nuke anyone today is living in cloud cuckoo land because that America is gone.
You try to imagine any circumstances in which a U.S. president would order civilian death on that scale.
And it's out of the realm of possibility.
So we spend a huge fortune on a nuclear arsenal.
The most of our enemies, the guys with string and fertilizer in obscure parts of Waziristan, do you think they're worried about America's nuclear arsenal?
No, they're not.
They know that string and fertilizer can beat a nuclear power if the guys with string and fertilizer want to win and the guys with the nukes don't want to win.
So if you put the argument in the terms you're putting, Brent, you're right.
A lot of money is wasted on starting wars for which there is no strategic clarity, no provision for victory, and no sense even of what victory would look like in those wars.
What would victory look like in Afghanistan?
Nobody, President Obama, nobody has any idea what that would look like.
That's kind of why I was saying that a President Paul would be good because we wouldn't go to war for no reason.
And if we did go to war, we'd go there, we'd kick their butts, and we'd come home.
No, no, no, but dragging things out.
No, no, because he's because Ron Paul goes beyond that.
Ron Paul goes beyond that.
He goes, what's he go for a start?
There is a tonal problem with Ron Paul in that he's very, he goes too far to my taste, for my taste.
And it ought to be for most American tastes too.
And it ought to be not to the taste of primary voters in Iowa.
He goes too far in arguing that 9-11, for example, was something that America brought on itself because America bombed people.
That's his argument.
He's got endless concern for, he has minimal concern for the victims of 9-11 and a profound and actually, I would argue, diseased sympathy for the so-called root causes that led al-Qaeda to fly those planes into those buildings.
Mohamed Atta was a wealthy middle-class Egyptian engineering student from Hamburg University.
The United States did nothing to him to justify him flying a plane into a skyscraper in Manhattan.
And if Ron Paul doesn't get that, he really is not a man who should be running for president of the United States.
So he goes beyond that.
And then I would make this other point that he says, well, Iran, he then uses that argument to justify Iran going nuclear.
Say, well, you know, we've done stuff to Iran.
Nobody did anything to Iran.
Iran has been in a state of war with the United States since 1979.
Seizing an embassy is an act of war.
It's the most basic core relationship between states.
Nobody has to worry at the height of the Cold War that Stalin or Khrushchev or Brezhnev would seize the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
That's the minimum courtesy between states, is that they respect each other's embassy.
It's sovereign territory.
The U.S. embassy in Moscow is the sovereign territory of the United States.
When Iran did that, it was an act of war.
When Iran blows up community centers in Argentina, that's an act of war.
The Speaker of the Iranian parliament organized a plot to blow up a community center in Argentina.
The leaders of Iran put out a mob hit on a British novelist and killed his translators and publishers around the world.
The idea that they are not going to be acting extraterritorially when they go nuclear is completely absurd.
So when Ron Paul says, what will be the big deal of Iran going nuclear?
He has no idea.
It changes everything.
It would turn every Sunni Arab state in the Middle East into an Iranian client state.
So if you look at where the US Fifth Fleet is based, that in Bahrain, that wouldn't be a bet.
In 20 years' time, the Chinese fleet would be there.
And there would be no US fleet there.
So in other words, it transforms the entire global scene.
And Ron Paul's supporters say, well, I don't care.
Who cares about the world?
Screw the world.
We can live as a 19th century republic and let the world go its merry way, nuking each other, organizing its affairs in its own way, giving resources, oil resources to the Chinese, and none of it's going to make any difference to us.
And that is stark staring nuts, Brent.
And you tell me why you don't think it is.
Oh, I'm not saying that I don't, that I 100% agree with his views.
I'm just saying that, you know, when he talks about the lesser of two evils and have to vote for somebody, I just can't see where he would be the end of the world.
He's the opposite in a lot of ways of other people.
Just hopefully he wouldn't take it too far.
And you have to think I'd be willing to give him a chance.
Well, if you're willing to give him a chance, here's what I'd like.
I'm not like fellas on the right who think the defense budget shouldn't be cut.
Because as I said earlier, if you've got Obamacare, you're not going to have a defense budget.
You're going to have – you can't have – right now, the United States is responsible for 43 percent of global military spending.
And that's too much.
And the interesting thing about that is when you put it like that, people think, well, we must have the biggest powerful army in the world if we're responsible for 43% of military spending.
But in fact, you don't.
Because when you're spending on that scale, it's pretty clear you don't have an army in the conventional sense of the word, which of the word, which is one that goes abroad soldiering in the national interest of your country.
You wind up with an army that serves as the kind of enforcer of global order.
So spends 10 years building schoolhouses in Afghanistan on behalf of some panty-waste UNFID NATO EU type mission that has nothing to do with the national interests of the United States.
So I would be, I think that the problem with the United States military is not that it is not the amount of money it spends, but that so much of the money it spends is wasted.
So if you want to have a discussion about that, that's fine.
But when you stand up there in public and you say that Iran going nuclear has no consequences, you're making a fool of yourself in front of the world.
And if the voters of Iowa don't know that, I can assure you that the guys in Moscow and the guys in Beijing and the guys in Tehran get it.
So Iowans should think carefully.
If some of these polls are correct and 25% of Iowans want Ron Paul to be their president, that is sending a message that is not healthy for the United States.
And Ron Paul talks a good game on a trillion-dollar cut.
He's good on all the stuff that the United States government shouldn't be doing, that it is unconstitutional for it to do.
And furthermore, it's unaffordable and unsustainable for it to do.
He talks a good game on that.
But when he says that Iran going nuclear makes no difference, he's making himself look an idiot.
You can't be a great power, by the way, and just hold up in Fortress America.
There is no Fortress America.
He knows that too.
There's like a bazillion, 30 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, the majority of whom, by the way, have come here since September 11th, 2001.
That's to say they broke into a country on so-called orange alert.
That's Fortress America for you.
Mark Stein, InfoRush, 1-800-282-2882.
Hey, Mark Stein, InfoRush, 1-800-282-2882.
We've had the Why Are You So Anti-Ron call.
Let's line him up and see if we get through the Why Are You So Anti-Huntsman call before the end of the show.
Let's go to Vinny in New York City.
Great to have you on the show, Vinny.
Hey, Mark, thanks for having me.
My pleasure.
Listen, you can't say that Newt ran a campaign just on debate performances and rose in the polls and then turn around and say because he didn't stump in Iowa as effectively as, say, Ron Paul or maybe Rick Santorum that he went down in the polls.
He went down in the polls because you and Ramosh Panuru and other writers in National Review and probably every writer at the Weekly Standard and on and on and on trashed the daylights out of him.
Now, I admit there's a lot to go after Newt for, but Newt also does have a solid record of conservative achievement when he was in government.
Okay?
And, you know, I hear a lot of guys like you trashing everybody.
So I'm going to say that.
Sure.
Let's work through this, Vinny.
Why do you think I like listening to Rush?
Let's put it in those terms.
Why do you like listening to Rush?
Yeah, I'm just going to start with that.
Rush represents the conservative truth, and I listened to him for the same time.
And you know why he does?
Because Rush, the great thing about Rush, and the reason he's still here after two decades, is because Rush argues from first principles.
Rush thinks through first principles.
That's what I liked about Rush the first time I heard him.
You don't know what's going to come along.
You know, one minute there'll be an oil spill in the Gulf, and the next minute there'll be a bank failure, and the next minute Gaddafi will be toppled in Libya.
Those are the news items.
But your approach to the news items is guided by first principles, which Rush talks about, articulates very well.
Now, Newt Gingrich came out in favor of an individual mandate in healthcare.
And he argued it, he argued in favor of it as recently as, I believe, four years ago when he said that he thought the RomneyCare thing was the most exciting development in healthcare in ages and that his only problem with it was that he thought the individual mandate should only be applied to citizens who earn over $55,000 a year.
Nobody who thinks through first principles of conservatism or first principles in political philosophy would do that.
Because an individual mandate on healthcare, that's telling you not just that the government, let's say the tax rate is 20%.
So you make $10,000 a year, you give $2,000 of it to the government, and the government decides how it's going to spend that $2,000.
What the individual mandate does is it says that the $8,000 you keep, you get to keep, you have to spend in ways that meet government approval.
Once the government can do that, it can tell you to do anything.
Why can't it tell you then?
You have to take your vacation in certain places.
You can only spend by so much gasoline a year.
A government that can do that can do anything, Vinny.
And Newt came out for that.
I don't disagree with that.
And that's going to come up in the next debate.
And by the way, Gingrich's people denied that.
This is recent news.
This only came out in the last week.
No, I read it.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Okay.
Wait a minute.
I'm interested to hear his answer on this because it's news to me that he came out for Romney's health care plan.
Okay, it's news to me.
That's all I'm saying.
Okay, but we're so busy beating the hell out of Newt Gingrich that we're not even talking about what his accomplishments are while he was in government.
And he did have some real major milestones.
And like you said, we all have Ronald Reagan running.
Sorry, we don't.
And as much as I like Rick Santorum, he's branded himself as a one-issue candidate.
That's why he's going to do a huckabee.
We got to go, Vinny.
I'm sorry to do this to you, but we've got to go to an EIB commercial profit center.
But I'll pick up on the points you made when we return.
It is unusual.
A Hawaii man was charged with four counts of assault after allegedly attacking a group of men with what is believed to be a cow's thigh bone.
Nothing to do with Nancy Pelosi's $10,000 a night vacation in Hawaii.
But of course, there are serious calls now for cow's thigh bone control.
I believe, as the NRA say, if you outlaw cow's thigh bones, then only cows will have thigh bones or something like that.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
We will pick up some of Vinnie's points about Newt and talk to Congressman Louie Gomeut.
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