RUSH: I’m noticing more and more in advertising the phrase ‘you deserve.’ You deserve brighter eyes. Have you seen that commercial? It’s all over cable, the female doctor who uses the product, ‘You deserve brighter eyes.’ Now, this is not a selling job. I don’t care whether you use the product or not. That’s not my point here. There’s a phrase that’s recurring more and more in the age of Obama: ‘you deserve.’ In the last few days I’ve heard four different ads telling you what you deserve. And, by the way, it’s not new, but it’s now becoming intensified. You deserve a break today. Quick, Snerdley, what company used that slogan? That’s right, Mickey D’s. That’s before people started calling 911 when they ran out of McNuggets. You deserve a better night’s sleep. You deserve a bigger income. You deserve happiness. You deserve brighter eyes.
Now, if the truth be told, no one deserves any of the above. So why, you ask, are more advertisers playing the ‘you deserve’ game, and why now? Friends, it’s not that complicated. Advertising does not establish consumer trends, contrary to people like John Kenneth Galbraith and all these libs who thought advertising is rotten, creating a demand for products people otherwise wouldn’t want. It’s not that at all. Successful advertising recognizes consumer trends. Now, if liberals are out there telling everybody they deserve everything, why won’t advertisers get in the game? Barack’s saying you deserve health care and you deserve a job and you deserve — he’s not getting you any, but you deserve it. You know, people tell me all the time, ‘Rush, you deserve X.’ I don’t deserve anything. I’ve earned it. I don’t deserve it. ‘Yeah, you deserve it. You’ve been through hell and a lot of –‘ that doesn’t qualify me to deserve anything.
My definition of deserve is very narrow, but it has broadened in our society now to mean basically as an American you are owed, you deserve whatever you want, and the added benefit is you don’t have to provide it for yourself. You can now vote for some schlub who says, you deserve it, and he’s going to get it to you, at some point before he dies or you die. Barney Frank, he’s another guy, ‘You deserve affordable housing, Americans deserve affordable housing.’ So he devises a system where you can get a house without paying for it and creates the scandal and the problem that we are in the midst of. There was an editorial yesterday in Investor’s Business Daily and it laid it all out again. I don’t know how many times I’ve read this. How many times have I read Barney Frank and Chris Dodd created the problem with Bill Clinton, and still it isn’t mainstream. It’s been out there all over the place for years and years and years. I’ll tell you if you deserve anything, folks, right now it is reality. And the reality is, we are in heap big trouble, a little Indian lingo there.
The more you think you deserve, the less you actually deserve is the reality. The more you’re running around thinking you deserve something, the more you’re probably also hoping. And I’m not talking about the biblical context here of hope. But people sitting around hoping — hope and change. ‘I hope’ is an excuse for not doing anything while at the same time you think you deserve something. So in the era of Obama, where the government is going to be your salvation and solution to everything, it makes total sense that advertisers would get in on the game. You deserve brighter eyes. You deserve a break today. You deserve whatever it is. I predict you’re going to see this more and more often.