RUSH: Jonathan in Silver City, New Mexico. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Well, hello. This is a huge honor, Rush. I’m a 25-plus-year listener.

RUSH: I appreciate that, sir. You’re a lifer, then.

CALLER: Yep. This Rubio thing, from the first time I heard his name and where he was from, I was skeptical of him and thought he was a plant, and it turned out I was right.

RUSH: Wait a minute, now. Where you heard he was from? What you mean, Florida or Cuba?

CALLER: Florida.

RUSH: A plant. Why is he a plant just ’cause he’s from Florida?

CALLER: Well, there’s a lot of Hispanic influence out there, and you’ve got Jeb Bush and others who are attempting to cultivate that political mark, but beyond that he’s cooperative with the higher-ups in the establishment. He knows he has to to get anywhere in the political arena. He’s gonna have to cooperate with the leadership, as is the case with most of them, not all of them, but most of them. And it’s possible to be a plant without knowing you’re one. You can cooperate, call it compromise, you know, oh, we gotta give a little to get a little.

RUSH: Wait a minute, now. Who planted him?

CALLER: Well, political forces in Florida which are —

RUSH: So he had no idea. Somebody told him he was gonna run for the Senate, and then somebody told him he was gonna win, and then after he won somebody told him what he was gonna do when he got to the Senate?

CALLER: Oh, it’s not that simple.

RUSH: You mean it’s more complicated than that?

CALLER: There’s people in the political sphere that look decades out. They see somebody with a name like that, a background like that, and a glib, excellent speaker with integrity, and they say to themselves, “You know, this is a vehicle here that we could really use. He’s got everything.”

RUSH: If he were a Democrat, I could almost, I could almost say that you might have, on a day I was really bored, a good point. But I’m not really bored today. There’s no way Rubio is a plant, long-term, short-term, or otherwise. Now, it’s fine if you don’t want to vote for him ’cause you think he betrayed his integrity and honesty by sidling up with the leadership on immigration and making a mistake on it, now trying to walk it back. If you want to say you don’t believe he’s serious, that he just realizes he made a mistake and he’s just pandering to you, think that. But he’s not anybody’s plant. I mean, he’s not anybody’s puppet doing this, and it’s not designed to fool anybody. And even if it is, they haven’t fooled you.

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RUSH: Hollywood, Florida, Mike, great to have you on the program. Hello.

CALLER: Hola, Rushbo, (speaking Spanish) How are you, sir?

RUSH: Very well, sir.

CALLER: Longtime listener, first-time caller. It’s a privilege to call you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Thank you for taking my call. The reason I was calling is I listened to the Marco Rubio speech last night, and the one thing that stuck out for me was the fact that he spoke about the fact that all the education that our young people are getting and getting in debt for, is not even landing them jobs. And he talked about getting kids educated enough in high school so that when the come out of high school they can get a job.

I’m a Cuban-American and this country doesn’t owe me anything. It gave me everything that I have today, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart, because it educated me free of charge. My parents gave everything up in Cuba, came to this country, and were able to make do and have five of my sisters go through college, and I have also been educated in higher learning. I’m a little nervous talking about this, but it’s very emotional. I related completely to everything that Mr. Rubio said yesterday.

RUSH: Well, I understand. I know exactly what you mean with your comments. You relish, you appreciate the freedom that you had as an American to go be what you wanted to be, to go do what you wanted to do, to try to do what you wanted to do, be what you wanted to be, based on your family history, where they came from and so forth.

Now, Rubio’s point about education is a good one. I saw the other day that two years of college barely equals what a high school diploma used to be, not very long ago, 20, 30 years ago. There are kids, young people getting into college who can’t read, cannot demonstrate they can read. There are people being admitted to college that do not have basic English composition, mathematical, sentence structure skills whatsoever, no business being there.

But the pressure, societal and otherwise, is to get everybody to college, you don’t have a future if you don’t go to college. It used to be people came out of college after four years, you were prepared to enter the career world. That’s what it was for. A four-year undergraduate degree was to prepare you and you were to be qualified to get in the door for job interviews. It does not prepare people anymore.

Vocational schools is what Rubio referenced last night, that not everybody is intended to go to college, and there’s no shame in not going to college. There’s all kinds of job opportunities out there, but the point that he was making is that high school graduates are not prepared to work today. Why do we need job counseling sessions or centers if we’ve got high schools? It’s redundant. It’s because the high schools aren’t working, and he’s right about that.