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Dec. 29, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:51
December 29, 2011, Thursday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's anchor man is away, and this is your undocumented anchor man sitting in, no supporting paperwork whatsoever.
It's not quite an all-mark week on the EIB network.
The great Walter Williams will be here tomorrow to take you through a mark free Friday on the Rush Limbaugh Show with a best of rush on Monday, and then Rush returns live Tuesday for the big Iowa Caucus Day.
Huntsman has been uh retailing an old line.
He uh John Huntsman uh was asked uh why he wasn't actively campaigning in Iowa, and he said uh in Iowa they pick corn.
In New Hampshire they pick president.
So he's gambling it all on one big roll of the dice for a good showing in the granite state in New Hampshire.
That's not his line, by the way.
I think uh pretty much every New Hampshire uh politician says I think uh I think the last time I heard anyone deliver that line, I think it was uh John H. Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire, said uh in Iowa they pick corn in New Hampshire, they pick presidents.
Just to go back to what we were talking about.
We'll be talking to uh Congressman Louis Gaumut from Texas uh in uh uh in a few minutes.
Uh last time he was on the show with me, uh I think he did a Lou Rawls impression.
What was he saying?
He was singing that big uh bass line from some Lou Roll song or other.
I forget what it was now.
But he he'll be we'll be talking to him in a uh in a few minutes.
I want to just go back to something Vinny was saying about uh about Newt.
I said I had like first principles objections to that's what I like about Rush.
Rush frames things according to first principles.
And if you think about first principles, a conservative does not support an individual mandate on health care.
In other words, he does not support because for the government to order you to spend your money uh in a form that uh complies with government fiat is not a conservative uh position.
Uh uh and by the b that's aside, by the way, from the sort of utilitarian objections, that what is killing uh what's left of private health care in the United States is the third party element.
The fact that whether the government pays for it or the third party pays for it, uh your private insurer, it's a classic third party transaction, which means you don't care what it costs, you just care whether it you you gr you're get you're granted access to it.
I uh I was taken ill.
I'm in New York at the moment, I was taken ill and had to go to the doctor and get a little prescription.
And it used to be that if you uh it was an easy business uh to get a prescription and uh and take ten minutes to pick up some uh to pick up some pills.
Uh I was in the Dwayne Reed pharmacy in the middle of Manhattan, uh as usual, standing behind a bunch of people.
Uh uh the delay is caused the delay in service was caused not by uh the time it takes to make up the prescription, but by the fact that everybody was told, oh no, uh your insurer says you can't have a refill of the prescription until the thirty-first day of the month.
Uh oh no a a uh the one poor lady uh I blush to say what it was she was suffering from because I certainly wouldn't want to mention it on the radio, uh not least if you uh if you happen to be having a dinner date with her that evening.
But she was uh she was denied uh the particular treatment by her insurer for this thing.
So if you have a third-party transaction, you don't care about you don't care about the cost of it.
You don't care about whether the pills cost fifteen dollars or whether they cost a hundred and fifty dollars.
You care about your in your third party, whether it's the government or the insurer giving access to it.
You can you can I you can look at how it would be if we had that system for you know going to McDonald's.
You wouldn't care whether the hamburger costs two dollars or two hundred dollars or two thousand dollars.
You'd only care about whether the Obamacare hamburger program or Blue Cross Blue Shield hamburger insurance granted you access to the hamburger.
So that's classically inflationary.
But before you even get to that, uh you should object to it on first principles, which is that it is simply wrong in a free society uh for the state to tell you you have to you have to spend private money in a way that meets the state's approval.
And once it can do that on, you know, when it comes to your bladder or your kidneys, it can do that uh with virtually anything.
It uh as you uh as you see in other European countries, they're proposing uh a maximum carbon allowance Per citizen.
In other words, you m you'd be able to take one long haul flight a year.
You'd be so you'd be able to uh you know take a vacation in the summer and fly off to a beach somewhere, but if you decided in the winter you wanted to have a skiing vacation and you could afford a skiing vacation, the government would say, no, you're not allowed to do that uh because it would be in excess of your carbon footprint allowance.
The minute the minute you go down that road, you're no longer in a free society.
So conservatives who think about uh first principles wouldn't do that.
Now, having said that, just to go back to Vinny's point, here's what I like about Newt.
Newt gets the big picture.
Newt understands that the problem with the deficit, for example, isn't that we isn't an accounting problem, isn't a bookkeeping problem, uh the the the i it's not a fiscal problem, but that it has underlying causes.
Newt is is very good on that, sometimes in a kind of slightly wacky way.
I mean, he he's the only candidate in this election cycle to give a speech on brain science.
Why did he do that?
Because the entire Western world's demographic model uh is is decaying into a uh i into a society where people live till 97 and spend the last 20 years of their life with uh dementia, and that's incredibly expensive.
Keeping people uh alive for decades in advanced stages of uh dementia is hugely expensive.
So Newt, in his i in the side of him that's attractive, the thinking outside the box way, goes and gives a talk on brain science, so how we can come up with a cure for Alzheimer's disease so we can peek keep people being productive till ninety till the age of ninety-seven, and that will improve the bottom line uh for the very unhealthy demographics of the Western world.
He's great like that.
Uh a lot of candidates don't think like that.
If you asked uh if you asked Obama about that subject, he wouldn't have a clue.
And he's supposed to be a genius.
So that's that's fine.
Newt's great on that kind of stuff.
But there's too much.
There's too many of these situations where Newt is on TV explaining that what he said, not in the 1990s, but what he said in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 is no longer operative.
Uh and and just to go back to Vinny's point, by the way, on what this uh so-called thing is, in which uh he expressed his approval for the individual mandate in Romney care, uh, it was something called Newt's notes.
Sorry, when it appears in a publication called Newt's Notes, it doesn't matter whether your intern wrote it, it doesn't matter whether you uh some minimum wage illegal immigrant uh wrote it for you, it doesn't matter whether you uh outsourced it to Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore to write it for you, and it appears under the heading Newt's notes, you own it.
And Newt owns this.
As much as Ron Paul owns his stuff about uh from his newsletter about Martin Luther King having sex with underage boys.
Uh the difference is Martin Luther King isn't around to have sex with underage boys uh anymore.
So uh so Ron Paul's point, whatever it was he was making, is moot.
But Newt's point in that about uh the health care uh individual mandate is relevant to the crisis facing America in the United States today.
And it's odd to me that those of us who are concerned about that are dismissed as kind of rhino squishes.
We're rhino squishes uh because we we haven't flirted with individual mandates.
We're rhino squishes because we haven't flirted with cap and trade and big punitive liberalism solutions to climate change.
Newt is susceptible to that in a very worrying way, in a very worrying way.
And he has many admirable qualities, but when he's staggering around the big issues, he's like Yosemite Sam.
The dynamite is as likely to blow up in his own pants as it is uh to do damage to his opponents.
And that's that's my problem uh that's my problem there.
Now we were talking about Obamacare as the uh the big issue.
Uh the other big issue, of course, facing the United States today is that it's broke.
Well, it's actually beyond broke.
We've got to pay back 15 trillion dollars just to get back to being broke.
Uh the Republicans are uh now faced with a choice of whether they're going to uh raise any objections to another increase in the debt ceiling.
Uh President Obama has asked for a one point two a mere one point two trillion dollar increase in the debt ceiling to take it to sixteen point whatever trillion.
At this stage, uh, you know, why not?
Why not raise it to nineteen trillion?
Why not raise it to twenty-eight point seven trillion?
Why not raise it to forty-nine point six trillion dollars the debt ceiling.
The the the problem here is that every time we do this, you get the stronger and stronger impression that there is no realistic intention on the part of anybody spending this money, and they're spending it in our name, so we're in the on the hook for it, uh ever paying it back.
And once the world gets that message, the dollar is going to collapse and then, you know, we're basically looking at Mad Max on I-95 as uh as as the big scenario.
So that's that's the second issue.
Who is going to be serious uh about raining in, dramatically raining in, which means killing government departments, uh which means closing agencies, which means rolling back millions of federal regulations and ending programs.
Because when you're uh spending four trillion dollars but you're only raising two trillion dollars, there's no way you can close that gap.
You can't close that there's not enough money anywhere on the planet to close that gap.
Nobody is even talking about these sums.
And when one point two trillion dollars you know you look at all the money they're talking about in Europe for the bailout for Greece, for the bailout for Spain, for the bailout for Portugal, for the bailout for Ireland, and it's a few rinky dink billions.
It would be lost in the line items of the federal budget under miscellaneous.
No one would even bother discussing it.
The only people spending on this scale uh are are us.
Obama in 2008 complained that Bush had raised uh the debt by four trillion dollars and as a result, every man, woman and child in America now had thirty thousand dollars of debt on his shoulders.
Now every child man, woman and child in America has $50,000 of debt in on his shoulders.
Bush uh increased it by four trillion dollars in in eight years and Obama thought that was outrageous and unpatriotic as he saw it.
Obama has increased it by six trillion dollars in three years and has no plans to stop.
And and so now we've got another one point two trillion dollars uh 50 grand for every man, woman and child in America.
And people run these sophisticated analyses when you talk to economists and they say, well uh okay our debt is about 100 is just over 100 percent of GDP, whereas in Greece it's about 150 percent of GDP.
But by the way, think about this for a moment.
The United States of America is now saying we don't have to worry because we still compare favorably to Greece.
Anyone who who's ever spent any time in Greece, even the European Union doesn't think Greece uh doesn't have any respect for Greece.
They think Greece snuck into the European Union as some kind of clerical error and shouldn't even be there.
That in fact it's some kind of basically it's a a a a North African kind of Middle Eastern country in terms of corruption and inefficiency and incompetence and general inertia that somehow wound up on the wrong side of the Mediterranean.
Even the Europeans don't pay any uh heed to Greece but we're now saying oh well the good news is we're not as bad as Greece.
Uh yeah Greece's uh debt to GDP ratio is 150 percent so what?
They're talking about a few billions.
We're the only people f 16 trillion dollars is more money than anybody on the planet ever has owed in all the human history.
And and again I put the question to you are we seriously gonna pay that back?
Because if we don't pay it back, if we don't pay it down, if we don't have a plan for somehow getting from sixteen trillion dollars of debt to twelve trillion dollars of debt to four trillion dollars of debt to $173.87 of debt, then the world is going to yank the rug out from under the dollar and as I said once that happens it's Mad Max on I-95 and good luck with that.
We're going to talk to one of the few voices in Congress who takes these issues seriously, and he will be up next on The Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein on The Rush Limbaugh Show.
Let's go to Congressman Louis Gomert from the 1st Congressional District in Texas, which is on the Louisiana border.
I think that's what the congressman told me last time.
Last time he was on, I think we'd had some Lou Rawls bumper music or something, and he sang this whatever song it was, three octaves below Paul Robeson.
you'll never find Mark, you've got to laugh time to time or you go nuts.
I mean, Russia's good about that, and so are you, but uh the the craziness going on uh it would be pretty comical if it weren't so serious.
No, well uh this time last year we'd just come to the end of that uh pr pretty disastrous lame duck session, which kind of sucked.
Actually now it depends on your point of view.
From the standpoint of the Democrats, it was the most uh productive giveaway lame duck session in the history of the country.
So uh yeah, it just depends on your perspective.
From their perspective, it was fantastic.
They gave away more money than any lame duck in history.
Yeah, and it and it and it was spectacular from and uh what it did, I think psychologically was it kind of sucked all the life out of the the the November victory in the midterms.
And I wondered how you felt just looking back on the uh a year later, obviously we had the uh the payroll tax thing uh just a few days ago.
How do you feel a year on?
November twenty ten kind of feels a lot longer than just a year ago to me.
It it well, it really does, Mark.
Well, uh I have been extremely discouraged through the year.
You know, we had the big debate over potential shutdown last spring.
It's hard to believe that was uh like nine months or so ago, eight or nine months.
Uh and uh so many of the freshmen were convinced uh that gee, if we allow a shutdown, the military won't get paid and they'll blame Republicans, so we gotta vote for it.
Never mind the fact that I had a bill that would have if we could have brought it to the floor, it would have ensured the military got paid in the event of a shutdown, just as Social Security recipients get paid in the event of a shutdown.
And then we s we were told the debt ceiling, you know, that's where we'll have the leverage and we get to the debt ceiling and we're told, gee, we can't afford to let the country default.
Well, it was not gonna default.
Uh if it was, then it there would be no better evidence that Geitner really is the worst Treasury Secretary in the history, even surpassing uh his predecessor, who up until Geithner I thought was the worst.
I agreed with Newt on that.
But but uh anyway, so we didn't really accomplish anything there.
We get to the end of the year, and the encouragement I have, Mark, is that I'm seeing so many of the uh uh massive number of freshmen that came in are going, you know what?
We we've gone a whole year and we've really not cut anything.
Now, in the uh the bill that passed right before Christmas, right before we left, uh not the payroll tax extenders or what might better be called the Social Security bankruptcy bill.
Um the bill that actually uh would would fund government for the year.
Uh we were told rightfully that it was actually making six billion in cuts.
Uh that's a far cry from the hundred billion we promised in the pledge, but it was making six billion in cuts.
And then as soon as that passed, we immediately passed uh eight and a half billion dollar bill that we didn't want to include in that one.
Right because then we wouldn't have been able to say that we cut six billion.
No.
And so then that passed.
But listen, we we're now to the end of the year and people are looking back going, wow, you know, we we promised we were gonna make cuts.
We promised we'd get back to pre-bail out pre-stimulus years like oh seven and oh eight.
Right.
And we really have made no progress.
So the encouragement I have, Mark, is seeing so many people that say, We have got to be serious about this.
And even though we put uh put this thing off for two months, and I'm sure the Democrats would like to keep doing that every two months.
Uh I think you're gonna see a lot of people saying enough is enough.
We made some promises.
It's time to start keeping them.
And it being election year, I think we'll have a good chance to do that.
And and the bill that we were demanding that the Senate uh take up or at least send people a conference on had a bunch of good stuff in it.
Uh, you know, Obamacare wiped out most of the good welfare reform from the nineties.
But uh we had welfare reform put back in.
You had to get a G D if you were gonna get welfare.
States were gonna be allowed to drug test to get welfare.
It had eighty nine billion in legitimate cuts.
There was a bunch of good stuff.
Uh, when if you have a million dollars in property, you can't draw welfare food stamps.
Uh just just hold that actually look for a job.
Hold that thought for uh a minute there, Congressman, because I w I want to come back to you uh uh after the break and pick up on that.
Uh if you got a million dollars worth of property, you can't food steps.
Uh just to put that six billion dollars of cuts in perspective, though, even if there had been six billion dollars of cuts, that's basically just the equivalent of a day's borrowing by the right now.
The United States government spends about a fifth of a billion dollars every hour that it doesn't have.
So that's like uh spending uh weeks and months negotiating a day's saving uh uh and that is one of the problems here.
We'll pick that up with the congressman when we return.
We'll pick that up with the congressman.
Yes, Rushback Tuesday for the big Iowa caucus day.
He'll be here live running on ethanol.
We were talking to uh Congressman Louis Gomot from Texas uh just before the break and uh he's uh he's agreed to uh stay with us.
Very grateful uh for that.
I uh and the th th the point at which we held the conversation was he was talking about they want to uh make it uh and end food stamps for people who own more than a million dollars worth of property.
This is the kind of radical reform.
Um people who own a million dollars worth of property, they're gonna be forced out into back alleys now.
They're gonna be begging.
You'll be you'll be walking down Park Avenue and bespoke beggars will be standing there with with their hands out in their in their hand tailored suits, uh, begging begging for food.
This is what this this is what you know co Congressman, the problem the problem here is when you say things like that, uh a lot of people listening will think we've got a two party system in which one party uh explicitly wants to floor it over the cliff, and the other party is kind of content to go over the cliff in third gear.
And if you're in the car and you land at the bottom of the ravine, it's not gonna be making that much of a difference in the end.
Uh well metaphorically speaking, you're exactly right.
That uh that's uh that's really where we are, and some of us are wanting to uh put on the brakes and go back to the fork in the road where we took the wrong fork and get back on the on track to f fiscal responsibility.
Uh and and I'm telling you, I uh I am encouraged going into this new year.
You you go down the roster of the Republicans in Congress uh in the House, you got a great bunch of people there.
And uh y you know, at the end of the year, apparently uh it shocked uh however the message got mis portrayed to the s the Republicans in the Senate that House Republicans would go along with a two-month extension.
However that happened, when the speaker came to our conference, people were going, uh-uh, now is the time to take a stand.
We have gone a full year.
And that was just a huge consensus.
Well, Mark, that's very con uh very encouraging to me.
We have come so far from my uh freshman term when we didn't used to say, look, we're the ones that can make a difference back in 05 and 06.
Uh our last uh term in the majority, uh I heard somebody stand up at conference and say, Well, nobody's to blame.
This is simply an unfortuitous confluence of circumstances.
Well, I love that expression.
I'd never heard that before.
But if what we have here is not only a failure to communicate, it's more than an unfortuitous confluence of circumstances.
You got a bunch of people in the Senate that are holding up the good good uh legislation, and we'll they've realized in the House we can make a difference.
We can take a stand and people were ready to do that uh before before the caving occurred for two months.
I don't think you're gonna see that kind of caving again because it's been made very clear to Republican leadership, we're not gonna do this too much.
We're gonna stand up and make some changes, and uh I d you know, you talk about the millionaires.
It just gets me to have the president keep talking about fat cats on Wall Street.
That man knows.
They gave to him four to one over McCain and uh Mike Frank and Heritage Foundation did the research.
He said, actually that's pretty typical.
Wall Street execs give four to one to uh them and their family, four to one to Democrats over Republican every election.
Yeah, because you've got you've got to be that wealthy to afford big government liberalism on on that scale.
Basically you've got to be to want to take other people's money to give to the charities that that they may not be giving to.
That just sounds better when you got a lot of money.
Yeah, that that that that's right.
Just to just to go back to that business with the payroll tax extension, though.
Basically, uh th it was thought that the Republicans could call uh the President's bluff on the Canadian pipeline, and in the end he wound up calling the Republicans bluff uh on on on the on the payroll tax thing.
Uh and is there not a is there not a real concern that given the media environment and all the rest of it, uh that the House leadership will simply be lining itself up to get suckered for that again.
I mean, I notice uh with with the with the one point two trillion dollar debt ceiling increase uh that there's not a lot of commentary from uh the Republican leadership on that.
They've no they don't they're not in they're not anxious to pick a fight uh this side of the uh of Iowa and New Hampshire on some of this stuff.
Well, that's what's so shocking for the Republicans that did vote for the debt ceiling in fr increase uh this summer, they were assured this that it would not require another debt ceiling vote before the election.
Uh so look, let's just get it behind us and we won't have to have another.
Well, some of us could see this this president and Harry Reid are addicted to spending like nothing we've ever seen before.
And it's also why I uh and Paul Ryan and I both talked about and agreed, we had separately told groups that uh if you gave us a choice between a balanced budget amendment or a spending cap, we would vote for the spending cap because what we've seen we we hadn't been able to cut anything after the biggest wave election in history.
That spending cap is incredibly important to force us to quit spending.
And so the way this president went, spent over a trillion dollars more than we had coming in, nobody'd ever run that up.
In 06, we got beat up for it for uh overspending 160 billion dollars.
Who knew that that the president would take over and go ten times that much?
But he wants to raise the taxation up to the level of that extra trillion to trillion and a half in spending rather than bringing the spending down.
It's and that's also the from his standpoint the beauty of taking down lowering the Social Security payroll tax.
This year, for the first time in history, Social Security tax money coming in did not pay for a full year of Social Security payments.
Yeah, he is uh we had to dip in five percent into the general revenue, and you know we're borrowing forty, forty-two cents of every dollar there.
And next year it's predicted to be fourteen percent or more of general revenue that that we won't make up because this president cut social security.
It was brilliant politically on his point, uh, from his standpoint, but uh the trouble is he is pitting working people against our seniors.
This guy is a divider, not a uniter like anything we've ever seen before.
It's just incredible.
Ankala Merkel in Germany uh laid it out pretty bluntly for for a European leader.
Uh she said, uh, you know, we are gonna have to take some pain.
There's no other way.
There seem to be tens of millions of Americans who don't seem to grasp this point.
So there's no money for any of this stuff.
All the money's been spent.
Uh so that uh no matter how caring or compassionate uh it might be to give food stamps to people who own a million dollars worth of property, there isn't any money for it.
The money has gone.
It's it's spent, it's blown, it's done.
Uh we've got a big sixteen trillion dollar hole that we have to pay back just before we get.
Mark Mark, you are heartless.
Just heartless.
How could you say that?
You wouldn't want to help millionaires.
But you mentioned uh well ago going off the cliff and you mentioned Europe.
You know, really what we're doing is we're following the tail lights of the European countries that have already gone off the cliff and we're just beating right along behind them following their taillights.
Well I think I think it's actually worse than that, Congressman, because some of those European countries are heading back this way.
They're saying, no, no, no, don't go down that road.
The road is the bridge is washed out and there's a huge drop.
We've seen it.
There ain't nothing back there.
And and uh and Washington is uh at the wheel saying, hey, uh that's just a rumor, full speed ahead.
And and what uh what uh just as a f just as a final thought, Congressman.
The the excuse made for the Republican House leadership is well, it's a Democrat Senate, it's a Democrat White House.
Let's suppose that things the stars align perfectly in November.
Uh the Senate flips and there's a Republican president.
Are we gonna get serious course correction or are we just gonna get more of this like trimming at the margins with the uh with the old uh millionaires and food stamp stuff?
I don't think uh we can afford to do anything but get serious.
We either get serious or on our watch, we've lost the greatest gift God ever gave a people, and that's this country, more freedoms, more liberty, more opportunities than anywhere in history, greater than Solomon's Israel in the way of freedom and opportunity.
And uh we've got to get serious or we're gonna squander it.
And and some of us are just too serious about not letting that happen on our watch.
We don't want that wrapped around our neck as we leave this world.
Amen to that, Congressman.
Keep fighting the good fight.
Always good uh always good to talk uh with you, and let's hope uh we get more of your ilk elected uh this November.
Elections do make a difference.
That would scare a lot of people.
I told the speaker, hey, why don't you put me on the conference committee?
You always talking about Alam a pain in the rear.
Let the Senate see the kind of pains in the rear you're having to deal with down here.
But I didn't I didn't make the conference.
I think that would that might be next time.
That might frighten those ladies from Maine if they found you sitting across from them.
Thanks, uh thanks a lot, Congressman.
Great to talk with you.
Mark Snyder from Rush on the EIB Network.
More straight ahead.
The EIB Network.
Mark Stein for Ush on the EIB network.
Let's go to Carl in Fort Myers, Texas, uh Louis Gommott's uh home state.
Carl, thank you.
Thank you for waiting.
Uh and uh I'm glad you hung in there and you're alive on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Good to have you with us.
Well, thank you very much, Mark Stein.
Uh I'm actually from Nashville, Tennessee, but we're down here visiting uh our uh wonderful son Rex Moontower and the grandkids, and uh I'm just here and enjoying this beautiful weather in Florida, and you earlier mentioned Mongolia.
And it just I mean, I always think about America as the greatest country in the history of the world.
And I was just thinking about what had we'd come to had we didn't had we not had I'm a little nervous, I'm sorry.
That's okay.
What would we do if there weren't if there wasn't the Roman Empire, if there wasn't the Greek Empire, if there weren't all these great civilizations for good or bad that it has led to the United States of America, and then all of a sudden we're doing everything wrong.
Although I want to say I know that uh the Indians, the slave trade.
I know that that was part of our history, but I want to say I believe we've done it the gentlest way.
Well, you you you gotta look at the overall balance sheet.
Just before we get into that, what what what was the connection with Mongolia?
I think I mentioned that today's the it was way back uh doing your great show.
Yeah, that's right.
And I it just struck me, and I just wanted to call to celebrate America with you, the rest of the country, and I want to remind everybody how great our country is because of freedom, not because of government, right?
But because of freedom.
Uh and and Carl, that's uh that's a great point.
I mentioned Mongolia because it's uh the centenary of Mongolian.
It's Mongolian independence day.
And if you're uh a member of the Mongolian American community, you'll be having your big parade down Main Street in in Fort Myers or and everywhere else.
But the point the point to remember, Carl, is that uh we laugh about Mongolia now because it's like a backwater, it's not on the UN Security Council or the G seven or anything.
But the Mongol Empire uh was the biggest uh the the the biggest butt kickers on the planet at one point.
And uh Genghis Khan, or as uh John Kerry would say, Jean Zhish Khan.
He's got a more effect accent than me than gag that guy.
But uh uh uh Genghis Khan uh led the Mongol hordes uh swept across uh Europe uh now uh uh uh uh Mongolia's a backwater uh it it went it was Mongolian people's republic under the uh under a communist system for a long time uh and has crawled out from under that and I gather is actually doing quite well now uh uh they're now they're now like a parliamentary uh republic of limited government uh of some kind I don't Mr. Slurdley well
w well I think it's I think it's fair to say Mr. Snerdly that the system Mongolia has isn't as expensive as us.
But but to go back to Carl's point, you know, it's a very good example of how mighty forces uh can suddenly can suddenly collapse, wither away to nothing, leave no trace.
The Mongol Empire didn't make a huge difference to the world uh the Romans did, uh the Greeks did, uh the Spanish did, the br the British did uh you uh great tides in the affairs of men you hope to arrange affairs so that if even things are going sticky for you, your legacy survives.
That's what the British did after World War II when they could no longer retain global dominance uh around the planet they did deals with the United States to ensure that the trade routes built up by the British, uh the uh rule of law, the global order built up by the British survived.
That's why in Bermuda there was a U.S. naval base.
That's why in Australia there was the ANZUS alliance, Australia, New Zealand, the United States.
That's why there were Canadian, Royal Canadian Air Force officers at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.
All that is the legacy when the British discovered they couldn't retain global dominance and they transferred it to the kind of best available partner.
And there's no one on the scene now.
And so it is much closer to something like the Mongol moment where...
if you're gonna collapse there isn't going to be a successor power to take your place uh Kim Jong un old pal Kim Jong un who's just been uh crowned in uh in uh Pyongyang has been given the title the Great Successor that yes he's the great successor is a number one hit for the platters in 1957.
There's a Mitt Romney cultural reference there.
Around the time that Lucille Ball was getting into the chocolate factory business, the pretenders, the platters were number one with, yes, I'm the great successor.
And Kim Jong-un, the great successor.
Who is going to be America's great successor if America goes down this path?
Congressman Gomer made a very good point just now, that the idea that somehow it was inconceivable when the Republicans agreed to the debt ceiling deal last summer, after all that phony baloney theatre of all, you know, the clock is ticking down to American default, that the idea that it wouldn't be coming back for more.
Barack Obama would not be coming back for another trillion here and another trillion there before the election.
This was a good way to get it out of the way.
When you're spending on this scale, we're not talking about decline.
We're not talking about genteel European decline.
We are talking something closer to Mongolian collapse.
And Carl is right that when he says the difference...
in in those civilizations that left a trace uh whether we're talking about Rome or Greece or Britain is that they were civilizations predicated on an expansion uh of liberty and the motto my great state live free or die what is great about that is it's not a battle cry it's a simple statement of the obvious that you can live as free men but if you choose not to do so your civilization is uh surely doomed.
We'll pick that up straight ahead.
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The NASCAR driver Casey Kane has apologized uh for saying on Twitter tweeting that he was disgusted at the sight of a woman breastfeeding in public on Wednesday night.
He said it had it had put it it put him off his food in the supermarket he didn't feel like shopping or eating anymore and he's now uh apologize for that Casey Kane uh I wonder you know I I d I can live with that as long.
Once once it gets kind of they get too old, once you see these like six and seven-year-olds breastfeeding, that's when it kind of gets slightly creepy to me.
Um but uh, you know, in a way, this is the perfect uh the perfect emblem of the Republic at Twilight.
We're we're big overgrown babies uh suckling on the government teat.
And it is time, as Casey Kane said before he apologized for his offensive remark uh uh when he told the woman it was time for her to put it away.
It is time for big government to put it away and uh for us to stop being overground babies and get off the big government teat.
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