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July 6, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:34
July 6, 2012, Friday, Hour #2
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I'm running Open Line Friday today and we've got a lot of stuff we're firing away at, including the miserable economic news.
I've got coming up in the next hour, the hour after this one, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, he and I are going to talk a little bit about how he was able to survive governing as a conservative and taking every shot the liberals fired at him and survived to tell the tale.
Right now, however, we're going to talk about a story that I think got lost a little bit in the 4th of July shuffle.
On Tuesday, July the 3rd, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized to the Pakistani government for an American airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last year.
The bombing came at a couple of border posts where American soldiers had been fired upon repeatedly.
They had been ambushed at least twice.
The soldiers, after taking sustained fire from Pakistan's army, remember Pakistan's supposed to be our friends, decided to retaliate in the area where the attacks on them were coming from.
It was a planned attack.
The Pakistani government has been outraged ever since.
Pakistan's been playing us like a fiddle.
Pakistan gets aid from the United States.
Pakistan winks at the terrorists in Pakistan.
Pakistan allows al-Qaeda to hide out in Pakistan, takes our money, says it's our ally, and then their troops fire at us.
When we respond, they object, and we apologize again.
President Obama has become the apologizer-in-chief.
He's always apologizing.
And every time he does it, I think we become weaker.
The world, especially the despots in the world, laugh at us.
What do you think Vladimir Putin thinks of Barack Obama?
We know what the Iranians think and we see how the Pakistanis are playing us.
Well, I'm joined right now by the Honorable Congressman from the 1st District of the State of Texas, Louis Gomert.
Congressman, good afternoon.
Good afternoon, Mark.
And you're exactly right.
I mean, he's the apologizer-in-chief.
He can't find enough people to apologize to.
Here, Pakistan has not only been allowing bin Laden to hide out there, not only allowing attacks to emanate from there, but I've been in Afghanistan a couple of times this year, and each time our officers are telling me that most of the Taliban supplies, directions, money is coming from Pakistan.
And so it doesn't really seem to me we owe them an apology.
Well, in this case, the attacks were the firing was approved by American commanders and it occurred after our soldiers were attacked repeatedly in that area.
If we're going to be there, are we supposed to simply sit back and be cannon fodder for the Pakistanis who are double-crossing us every chance they get?
No, and that's exactly right.
I mean, one of the problems for our troops is the rules of engagement.
And unfortunately, it didn't just start with this administration, but this administration has just doubled down on the inability of our troops to truly defend themselves.
But we should, you know, people talk about the lesson from Vietnam.
The lesson from Vietnam was not that we couldn't win.
We could have.
After two weeks of carpet bombing, Sam Johnson at Hanoi Hilton says, you know, of course, they ran and begged us to surrender, and we did.
But This is the lesson that we should learn from that is you don't send our troops unless you're going to let them do everything it takes to defeat the enemy.
And if the enemy is across the line in Pakistan, take them out.
And if they get supplied from Pakistan, then that's why in an op-ed I'd said maybe it's time to start pushing for an independent Balochistan.
These supplies are coming through the Baloch area.
The Balooch are terrorized by the main Pakistani government.
And in talking to some of our Northern Alliance before this administration threw them under the bus, the same people that routed the Taliban on our behalf in late 2001, 2002, they say, you know, man, if you were to start pushing for an independent Balochistan, it would change the dynamics completely.
Well, you're suggesting that we should be trying to apply leverage to the Pakistanis.
But President Obama's policy has been with any country like this that we have to have some relationship with, but is playing us, Russia with Putin in particular.
He does this constant kissing up, kissing up, kissing up.
And I just think that this puts us in a position of weakness where we can't get anything out of Pakistan.
I think that they're just playing us for saps.
Well, yeah, and when you find out exactly what we're telling the Taliban, you know, these are terrorists.
These are the guys that helped train the 9-11 bombers.
I mean, these are people that should not be allowed to be anywhere and call themselves a group.
We should have completely taken them out.
And the Northern Alliance pretty much did until we lost focus and went to Iraq.
But the whole thing with the Taliban is we are begging them to come to the table.
And the thing that Obama's got going for him is that the economy is so terrible and he's done so much damage to the economy, people are not noticing that he's losing this war over there for us.
And he's begging the Taliban to come to the table and telling them, look, look, we will buy you an office in Qatar or Qatar, depending on where you are.
We'll buy you an office.
You don't even have to agree to anything.
Heck, we'll start releasing all your murdering thugs from detention if you'll just simply come to the table.
We're not even asking you to agree to anything.
And so one of the Northern Alliance guys was telling me in April, he said, you know, the Taliban have already been on national television saying, you know, obviously everybody sees the U.S. begging the Taliban to come negotiate with them.
So it's clear to the whole world, and especially Afghanistan, that the U.S. has lost.
That's why they're begging the Taliban.
And so you better understand that we're going to be back in charge as soon as the U.S. pulls out.
And under Sharia law, if you have not been supportive of us, then you need to come beg our forgiveness and beg our protection, and maybe that'll save your life.
So the world sees that we're dealing from a position of weakness, which is all this pressure.
And don't you think the Iranians see that too, and Putin sees that, and the Chinese see that?
Yeah, absolutely.
My point is, is by acting so weak in this region, they all see that.
Mark, according to some of these guys who have talked to the top Pakistani leaders, they say privately the Pakistani leaders are furious because here we're begging the Taliban to negotiate.
We'll buy them an office.
We'll do all this stuff for them.
The leaders are privately saying that the U.S. doesn't get it, that they're the ones with nukes.
Need to start begging Pakistan and buying them offices and letting any of their prisoners go instead of the Taliban because they're the ones that keep the Taliban going.
And this president does not see that.
Final question for you.
Why do you think they don't see it?
My belief from day one is that in all areas, the president and his team are in over their head.
He at least started by keeping President Bush's defense secretary.
But right now, you have Hillary Clinton, who really had very little foreign policy experience.
You've got Leon Panetta, who, you know, been around for a while.
But other than that, you don't really have a foreign policy team that has a feel for this and a president who has no feel at all.
I just think they're in over their heads and are incompetent.
Is that your theory?
Or do you think they're making these mistakes for another reason?
No, no, Mark, there's a reason you're such a popular talk show host, and that's because you're dead on right.
That's exactly.
They're in over their heads.
He doesn't know what to do about the economy.
And the last thing he's got time to figure out how to deal with is people that want to destroy our way of life.
He just cannot imagine.
He's always seen his whole life that if he gives a real pretty speech and says something nice and especially adds an apology, everybody's going to love him and just flock.
And what can we do for you?
We love you so much.
And I'm sure it's a mystery to him why these foreign governments don't love him more.
He's apologized to him plenty.
He just doesn't get it.
I think he's always felt he could deal with them.
He looks at Putin.
That's who he wants to be.
He thought he could deal with Ahmadinejad.
He thinks that by looking at them, he can work with them.
And I think that they're just playing him for sucker.
I want to thank you for joining.
I'm joining for sucker.
And the scariest thing you know is that if he gets another term, he will have a lot more flexibility.
There's no doubt about that.
Congressman Billy Goldmart, 1st District of Texas, thanks for joining us on the Rush Show.
He made some really good points, and that's why we wanted to have him on the program.
I want to go back to something that Congressman Gomeard said, though, a few minutes ago.
He mentioned that because the economy is so bad, there has been very little attention being played to what's going on in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
One of the reasons why the problems that President Bush experienced before the surge in Iraq, the period after the takeover, the ouster of Saddab, but before the surge occurred, one of the reasons why that was so controversial is our economy was pretty good during that period.
It became the biggest issue.
Right now, we run the risk of losing Afghanistan.
That was the war that Bush won right after it started.
The Taliban was immediately thrown out of power there.
We run the risk of losing Afghanistan.
The American body count is high.
The Pakistanis are playing us for suckers.
But almost no one's been paying attention to that because so much else is wrong.
Even from the perspective of a guy like me doing a show like this, you've got Obamacare.
You've got a terrible unemployment rate.
You have the assault on the private sector.
You have the guy just ignoring congressional law and declaring amnesty where he feels like it.
There's so many things out there that he's doing that are wrong that some of them like this get lost in the shuffle.
On that note, however, this president has been for the last six months using the American military to prop himself up.
The taking out of bin Laden in a bold operation by SEAL Team 6 has been used as one giant campaign ploy by the president, taking credit for what they did.
Yet here in this instance, where our soldiers were retaliating after having been attacked repeatedly, he throws them under the bus and apologizes to Pakistan for their actions.
They didn't do anything wrong.
And there's nothing for which we need to apologize to Pakistan for.
He wants to apologize.
Hey, I know who needs an apology.
How about the people who voted for him?
We thought he turned the country around.
How about the people who were suckered in when he gave us all of this stuff about how he was going to unite the country and he was going to be beyond ideology?
How about apologizing to the people who've been out of work for three years?
How about apologizing to the future generations who are going to be digging out of the debt that he's piled on?
$4 trillion added onto the national debt by him in this presidency alone and counting.
How about apologizing to all the people who will lose their doctor if Obamacare kicks in?
There are about 300 million people who deserve an apology.
They're here.
He doesn't have to run around the world with the apology.
Start here in the United States.
I don't know if I'll accept it, but Pakistan is the last place in the world he needs to be apologizing.
Instead of apologizing in Pakistan, try Missouri.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
This is Friday.
And on the Rush Limbaugh program, that means one thing.
Live from New York City.
It's Open Lines Friday.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number.
Rush may not be here, but I am here.
It is Open Line Friday.
Congressman Goldman's stuff was really good.
That whole thing about apologizing to Pakistan is a story that's just underneath the rug.
And the reason it's underneath the rug is with Obama, there's so much junk on top of the rug.
Let's go back to the phones.
Open Line Friday.
Scottsdale, Arizona, and Paul, Paul, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yeah, Mike, simply.
People aren't looking at.
You know, these politicians play with their unemployment numbers.
I've been out here 25 years, and in the last two to three years, there's a rapidly increasing number of vacant retail storefronts with businesses that were there and thriving are disappearing, and the commercial property is remaining vacant.
And there's more and more of it.
I think that's more of an indicator of the direction of the economy than any kind of games that can play with numbers.
There is very little activity going on in the private sector in businesses, the deal with the consumer.
Obama keeps saying the manufacturing numbers are better.
They're not better.
He's merely comparing it to every other sector of the economy.
You know, one of the reasons why what you're describing is going on is that consumers are sitting on their money.
We still have an incredibly high unemployment rate.
8.2% isn't the real number.
Everybody knows that it's higher than that.
Well, people who aren't working aren't spending much.
Then you have all these people that are on the bubble.
One of the things that happens during a recovery, and we're not in a recovery, is that the people who were worried that, oh my goodness, is the axe going to fall on me next, they stop worrying because they see the company starting to hire again.
They see more people coming back to work.
So there's people that were on the verge of being fired or on the verge of being laid off or on the verge of their businesses going under, they then became more confident and they would then start spending money again.
None of those people have any peace of mind.
There's still a lot of downsizing that's going on, and nobody thinks that this thing is turning around.
The pace of recovery that we are at is slower than last year.
That tells me that we're headed south rather than north in terms of the economic numbers.
So, consumers just aren't going to take that many chances, and you're going to see the things that you describe: the empty storefronts, the people, the businesses that have either closed or others who aren't going to go in and step up and try to take any risks.
That's the real economy that's going on.
He can run around and talk all he wants about a recovery, but nobody who's sitting in the United States sees it.
You're in Scottsdale, I'm in Milwaukee.
We've got a listener in Joplin, we've got somebody else in Newark.
Nobody sees this recovery being anywhere.
The stimulus has been pretty much spent.
You know, we built a few roads, built a few bridges, gave a bunch of money to school districts so they didn't lay off teachers for a year.
It's gone.
All we have to show for it is that.
And we don't have a single answer from him.
What's his plan for 2013 for the economy to turn around?
He doesn't have one.
And if you don't believe me on that, ask one of his supporters.
Describe his plan.
As much as Romney can overdo the I am a manager and I know how to build jobs and I can do this, he does talk like a technocrat.
If you go to his website, he does have a 59-point economic plan.
He does lay it out.
There is a notion that we're going to try to get businesses to invest in themselves.
His plan is to make permanent several of the Bush tax cuts so that businesses don't have taxageddon hanging over their heads.
His plan is to encourage investment in the private sector.
His plan is to have government stop spending as much money as it's doing and to go out there and give businesses a reason to try to invest in the United States.
He talks about lowering the foreign corporate tax rate so that we can compete with foreign countries.
He does have a plan.
He may not explain it all that well, but there is a plan.
The point that I'm making here is that Obama doesn't have one.
They thought stimulus would work.
And when I say work, they thought that we would paper over the ugliness in the economy, that we'd see some job growth.
I think that their plan was going to be that it was going to be primarily government job growth, but they thought this would kick in.
All you have to do is read Krugman, Paul Krugman, the Keynesian columnist for the New York Times, who is half nuts, but he's committed.
The guy won the Nobel Prize on this stuff.
He thought it would work.
Go back and read it.
It was going to work.
Now, the explanation for the fact that it didn't work.
Well, we didn't do enough of it.
Well, Lord knows we can't do more.
We're running a deficit of $1.3 trillion.
What do you want it to be?
$2 trillion?
$3 trillion?
We're already spending money that we don't have.
The only way to change the economy is to change the leadership of the country because this president's plan has failed.
Things aren't getting better.
I'm Mark Bellingen for Rush.
Speaking of returning, Rush is back behind the microphone on Monday's show, taking his 4th of July vacation, the 4th of July.
It's my birthday, you know.
I just celebrated my birthday.
4th of July.
Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Louis Armstrong, a few of us, born on the 4th of July.
People think I make that up.
I'm 35.
Now, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on my birthday the exact same date.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died July 4th of 1826, 50 years to the day after they signed the Declaration of Independence.
I still think they looked at each other that day.
John Hancock put his name on it and all that.
And Adams and Jefferson looked at each other and said, Think the thing of the last 50 years both died the same day.
4th of July trivia for you.
I want to get into something here.
It's Open Line Friday.
That means the host can do open lines too.
Serena Williams has advanced to the women's, you know what they call the women's final at Wimbledon?
They call it the ladies final.
Everything about the British is just like too put on for me.
Anyway, she's playing in the Wimbledon ladies final tomorrow against Victoria Azarenka.
No, that's who she beat.
She'll fleece Agnieszka Radwanska.
Nobody knows who those other two are.
I mean, if you're into tennis, I suppose you know who they are.
They're not household words.
They're not anything.
And the reason they're not anything is because they're not from America.
I know a lot of people don't like the Williams sisters.
They think that they're too arrogant.
They don't like their attitudes.
Whatever.
I think we need to step back and give them some props because they've done something that nobody else has been able to do in the last 15 years.
They've proven that you can be American and be good in tennis.
What's happened to tennis in the United States?
Other than the Williams Sisters, and Venus is probably about done.
So other than really Serena, can anybody name an American tennis player?
This used to be our sport, especially with the women.
Billie Jean King, Chris Everett, Tracy Austin, Jennifer Capriotti.
We've got the Williams sisters, and that's it.
And on the men's side, John Eisner, I think is his name is out there, one or two others.
I think we have maybe two guys rated in the top 30 or 40 in the world.
Otherwise, it's been the same bunch.
Andy Murray, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Federer.
Americans used to be the country that dominated tennis, and I'm trying to figure out what happened.
Is it just that the rest of the world started taking up the sport more seriously?
I doubt it.
They've always played tennis.
Something else has happened.
American tennis was dominant with the greatest generation, the World War II generation, and the baby boomers dominated the sport.
But ever since the baby boomers started producing kids, we haven't done anything in tennis.
Is it because we don't push kids hard enough?
And tennis is a game that you have to be driven, especially when you're young.
And maybe post-parents don't want to do that to their kids.
And maybe we have some people who overreact.
You know, the father of the Williams sisters is hardly a role model.
He said, I'm going to take these two girls and make them the two best tennis players in the world.
Well, it worked.
He did it.
And I'm not suggesting that you take a kid who only has marginal talent and drive him into the ground trying to turn him into something that he can't be.
But there has got to be a reason why this sport, an individual sport that requires competitive fire and just constant non-stop practicing, is one that we aren't any good at anymore.
I hope Serena wins tomorrow.
I applaud what she's been able to do.
She's lasted longer than any contemporary woman's tennis play.
Most of them now fry out at 25.
She's been able to change her game.
Yeah, it's true.
She's got that incredible body and this monster serve and she can do things that others can't do.
Well, nobody else in America is able to pull it off.
She's still around and she's still standing and I think she's a pretty good representative of the United States.
I think she takes too much heat.
She's got her own individual style.
She's got her own individual flair and everybody knows she's an American.
In a sport where the Americans are just nowhere, the men people in this country still follow because you've got the three great superstars, Federer, Jokovic, and Nadal.
On the women's side, Maria Sharapova, Serena, and a bunch of people whose names most people don't know.
So if anybody wants to call in with a theory on that on Open Line Friday, if you're a tennis instructor or somebody who's close to the game, or if you've got some theory as to why, really since about 1995, we haven't produced a decent tennis player out of the United States at all.
It's got to be a generational thing.
It's got to be something has changed either in our culture or the way we train the kids or parents not willing to push their kids or the kids going into other sports or something.
Because it's just striking how long the Williams sisters have stayed there as the only tennis players that anybody in America can name.
Few people will throw out Andy Roddick, who I think is probably past his prime.
But it's really something.
This used to be our sport, and it's clearly not anymore.
And after Venus and Serena are finally gone, this sport's going to be like one of those sports in the Olympics where a bunch of people from other countries that we've never heard of always win, and we just assume that we're not any good.
What's another sport that we're terrible in?
Like Nordic skiing or something, cross-country skiing?
I don't think we're any good at that.
We haven't been very good in bobsledding.
We occasionally do well in bob sledding.
And tennis is a sport that like we play.
There's tennis courts everywhere.
I honestly don't know what the answer is as to why we're as bad in tennis now as we were.
Anyway, let's go to the phones.
Palm Close, Palm Coast, Florida.
Paul, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, I just had a question for you.
I noticed in today's news reports that there were 80,000 jobs created in the month of June and 85,000 people went on disability.
And I'm just wondering if you know if that's ever happened before, if more people have gone on disability in a month than have found jobs.
Well, probably in some of the months where we actually lost employment, that would be the case, but probably never in a month where we were supposedly having a recovery.
Remember, these are the months that summer is generally a good hiring season.
These are the months where things were supposed to be turning around.
You've got a country in which we, and one of the problems with this is when people aren't working, that means that the rest of us have to subsidize them, not only through unemployment benefits, they're eligible for food stamps.
The whole country is now eligible for food stamps.
They're eligible for all sorts of government assistance.
So we have a smaller pool of people that are paying to support a larger pool of people who, either because they've chosen not to work or because they're victims of this miserable economy, simply can't find jobs.
That drags everything down as well.
We're paying more and more.
Those of us who are fortunate enough to have jobs are paying more and more to support a social welfare system that's just expanding because of the failure of the administration to do anything to produce any employment.
This isn't rocket science.
Every time we've ever had an economic downturn in the history of the United States, we've had a recovery.
We even recovered from the Great Depression.
The economy goes up and it goes down.
What we haven't had here is any kind of a bounce at all.
The strategy of the Obama supporters is to keep blaming Bush.
Even if that were correct, that this is all a Bush economy.
And I'm not granting them that because I think it's gotten worse because of the monstrous deficits that this administration produced.
But even if we granted that this is all Bush's fault, he's been the president for three and a half years.
Does that mean it will never recover?
If he's re-elected four years from now, will it still be all Bush's fault?
What's the timeline in which he's supposed to produce something?
When do we get some positive result out of the Obama presidency?
Try to pin that date down.
When do we get the unemployment rate under seven and a half?
They don't even answer the question because right now they don't have any answers at all.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882 is the phone number.
Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania.
Bob, it's your turn on the Rush Show with Mark Belling.
Hello, Mark.
You're on fire today.
Thank you.
Immediate reaction about the tennis.
My son played Division I NCAA on scholarship.
He was a late addition to tennis.
So we had to learn a lot fast.
He's now a tennis pro in Texas.
And the main thing that we saw while he was trying to learn the sport is that people equate high-quality instruction with lots of money.
So somebody charging $150 an hour is supposedly much better than someone who charges $60 an hour.
And they have no way to know how to determine that.
And we see this over and over and again.
So are you saying that the quality of the instruction is going down or that people are spending money on bad instructors or that the cost is deterring some younger kids from getting into it?
Nobody prevents anyone from getting into it.
The problem is that so many people tried to get into it.
Instructors who are supposedly great instructors because they charge $150 an hour really don't know what they're doing.
Because, you know, when you see the players who get to Wimbledon or they get to the United States Open, they'll always have the coach that will be sitting there in the stands.
I'm just trying to figure out why, here in the United States, a sport that we pretty much owned.
I mean, golf was another one that was an international sport, but really dominated by the United States, and tennis was the other.
Individual sports, non-team sports, in which our level of dominance has dropped.
The same thing is happening in golf, but nowhere near to this extent.
The United States still has a number of outstanding golfers, but in tennis, the Williams sisters are in.
And on the men's side, we really don't have anything.
If you could pinpoint it and nail it down to one reason as to what's happened to youth tennis in the United States over the last 15 to 20 years, what would you come up with?
Well, no, Mark, the reason, as I said, is you don't have that instruction.
But the second thing is, is the really high-quality athletes are going into sports that have a lot of money, basketball, baseball, and football.
And that amount of money has increased in the last 15 years.
That's true.
But that doesn't explain really the women because other than soccer or maybe softball.
No, the women's business.
To some extent, basketball.
I think that there's got to be a cultural component to it.
Thank you for the call.
Let's try Elko, Nevada.
And, Mike, Mike, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark.
It's competitiveness.
Look how they've drummed competitiveness out.
Everybody wins.
There's no such thing as that.
You can put that to the economy.
You can put that to anything.
Nobody wants to work for it.
We've made.
I think you're on to something.
The individual sports in particular, you have to, it's motto a motto.
It's competitiveness.
You have to want to win.
The few people that I've met that are really outstanding in sports all had this same trait.
They not only liked to win, they liked beating other people.
I know a guy who's very close to Michael Jordan, and he told me that in practice, Michael Jordan really got off on taking another player, his own teammate, to the hoop and beating him.
He always wanted to win.
It's why he took up golf.
It's why he liked to gamble on the golf course.
He was a guy who wanted to win.
He was driven to win.
And we in our country have just given that a bad name with youth sports.
The focus is on everybody getting their playing time.
A lot of the little leagues, they don't want to keep score.
This notion that winning is everything has just been thrown out.
You've got so many Americans, liberals, who think that the notion of America being number one or that we're better than everyone else is wrong.
Look at how many people just cringe when they hear conservatives talk about the notion of American exceptionalism.
They don't like that.
So maybe what we're doing with these kids is that we are, you know, we're encouraging them to be so cooperative and to get along and such good citizens of the earth that we are not pushing them to be better than the other guy, which is what individual sports really is all about.
Well, and that's why I'm, you know, I was really big into wrestling when I grew up.
My boys asked to wrestle.
I thought it was great.
Wrestling is a team sport, and points only is all individual sports.
That's correct.
You're beating someone else, right?
I do drive, and I drive my boys.
I drive them.
I help coach them.
I drive them.
I'm on the side of the mat with them.
And can win or lose, they show whether they lose, whether they win, anything else, you show good sportsmanship at the end of it.
You win, you show good sportsmanship, but you won, irregardless.
You get to celebrate.
You get to be the one.
You get to show yourself off.
I'm so sick and tired of listening to these coaches that, well, you know, we can't do this, we can't do that.
And it turns out that a lot of the rules are being dictated by the NIA for throwing these half the moves that I used to do when I was in the middle of the day.
But the point that you were making is that you specifically are pushing your kids hard.
And the time to be cooperative sportsman with the opponent is after the match is over.
Now, we all know that that can be taken too far.
We've seen the little league parent who can be the nut, who's screaming and yelling and berating the eight-year-old kid over nothing.
Nobody wants it to go to that point.
But when you have someone who is talented in something, every one of us who was ever a kid knows that kids are basically satisfied with giving 75% effort.
They're willing to push themselves to a certain point.
And if they're going to get better, it's because somebody shoved them to be better than that.
Now, that can be overdone.
On the other hand, if we're not doing it to anybody, we're not letting these kids get to their full potential.
And I suspect that's why in a lot of these individual sports, we're losing our edge, that we don't want to push and shove and demand and say you've got to beat the other guy.
I cite tennis, but I think it's probably going on in a lot of other places.
And the individual sports is really where the one-on-one really does show up and where you see people competing directly against one another.
Thanks for the call.
I appreciate the comments.
My name is Mark Belling.
I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm going to be joined by the governor of my state of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, at the beginning of the next hour of the program.
We've got a story to tell.
He's taken more fire than any Republican politician, I'd say, in the last 50 years in America and survived it.
And I had the privilege of doing a talk show that was on the front lines of all of that.
And I think you'll be interested in some of the things that we can share with the rest of the country about how you can govern conservatively and survive even when the media is against you and all of the establishment is against you.
You know, I mentioned Serena Williams is going to play for the women's championship at Wimbledon tomorrow.
You know, if she wins, Barack Obama is probably going to make her apologize.
We've got a president who's been spending his entire presidency apologizing to everybody for any success that we ever have.
It's become part of our culture to frown on the notion of being the best and being successful.
You're rich.
You don't deserve it.
You're one of the one percenters.
It's your fault that you got there.
Instead of being proud of being a one percenter, you're a bad person.
You somehow must have done it by shafting everybody else.
You couldn't legitimately be there.
The notion that we can fix all of our economic problems by supposedly taxing the rich.
It plays to the class envy of a lot of people who think that the rich are the rich somehow illegitimately.
and that their money belongs to the rest of us, that they don't get to keep it, that there are no rewards for doing whatever it was that made them rich.
There's a thought process that a lot of Americans have, the liberals, that somehow being better than everybody else isn't good, and that's because none of them are any good at anything.
They're all of the people who need to have socialism, who need to have a level playing field, who need to have everything brought down to their level because they can't win at anything.
Unfortunately, they control so many of our institutions, so much of the popular culture, and a lot of the schools that I think their philosophy of mediocrity is coming home to roost.
And that's one of the reasons why in individual sports, we're not that good anymore.
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