Give Libs a Week to Freak Over Gas Prices

RUSH: John in Tampa, Florida. Thank you for waiting, sir, and welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Well, Rush Limbaugh, God bless you, and it’s good to talk for you for the first time. Hey, something that has been on my mind for a while — and I think it kind of falls on the laps of both the puppet Congress of the liberal party that’s in there and our own conservatives — is that the oil prices… We keep hearing a lot of excuses for the gas prices being a result of oil prices going up or refineries, you know, just producing and converting the oil. However, when I’m reading the Wall Street Journal and I’m watching Exxon, quarter after quarter, ever since Katrina, is reporting record profits. I just don’t understand. Is there anybody out there that you see, whether it’s Congress or any of our presidential candidates, that is actually going to come from the puppet strings of the oil company and maybe actually do something about, you know, this group of people?

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you upset that the gasoline price is rising?

CALLER: Not at all. As a matter of fact, I love supporting Exxon. I mean —

RUSH: I don’t understand the question. Why do you want the government to do something about it?

CALLER: Well, I think that, you know, what’s bothering me is that they’re using the excuse that it’s the war and everybody else that’s causing that, when they’re reporting record profits.

RUSH: I think this is a case of the Democrats not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. The gasoline price is up 31 cents in the last month. Under normal circumstances, they would be bellyaching and whining and moaning and they would be demanding the heads of the Big Oil company executives. They’d be doing story after story after story on the human toll and the terrible suffering that is taking place all across America because the gas price is now back over three dollars. The only thing I’ve seen on it was yesterday. I was watching PMSNBC here on one of my many monitors. They had a little crawl at the bottom of the screen which said, ‘Gas price back over three bucks!!’ with a couple exclamation points. They were excited about it, because they thought it was going to be another avenue to attack Bush. Then today all I’ve seen is, “Uh, there’s a reason, and that is that refineries are not operating at capacity, and that’s normal for this time of year.”

We haven’t build a refinery since 1976, and the refineries that we have are doing other things with the oil other than making most of it into gasoline and jet fuel and so forth. That switchover, by the way, will change pretty soon because they will have to start refining more and more for the so-called summer driving season. Yeah, it’s boutique fuel time. It’s ethanol and all these other little happy-go-lucky, phony baloney, plastic banana, good time alternative fuel deals — and Bush is down there in Brazil. Well, they do produce some pretty good looking models, but beyond that, they’re using ethanol down there. They make it from sugar. (interruption) Well, it is their number one export, is models: underweight, Size Zero models. That’s about it. Argentina has a pretty good Social Security reform program, but they’re just messing around down there with ethanol and runway models.

At any rate, I just don’t think Democrats have it on their agenda. They’re so flummoxed trying to appease their stupid kooks about Fox covering the debate about the Iraq war. (Laughing.) You have ‘the elite strike force’ of the Democrats in the Senate led by Kerry threatening Pakistan that if they don’t get up to speed quick and start preemptively taking out terrorists. While at the same time we’re abandoning the war on terrorists in Iraq, they’re telling Pakistan, “You’re not going to get these F-16s that you’ve bought and you’re not going to get any repairs on the others that you’ve got. You guys gotta start fighting terrorism.” Democrats are telling them this while they want us to pull out of Iraq! I just don’t think they can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think they’re sitting there saying, ‘Okay, we’ve got the gas price up. How do we use this?’ But it’ll happen. Give ’em a week or so. If the price stays up, they’ll be back there. There are always market reasons for this. But there’s an interesting thing here, folks — and I don’t want you to forget this, and I don’t want you to overlook this. The gasoline price is up 31 cents in the last month, right? Have you seen anywhere any signs of outrage on the part of the American people over it? I haven’t.

I, frankly, didn’t even know the price was up 31 cents in the past month. I’m sure you did, but there is no outrage over it. So it takes the media for there to be the perception of outrage. Since the media is not caterwauling and bellyaching about this, there doesn’t appear to be any crisis, does there? Nobody is really upset about this. I mean, nobody is breaking down the walls in Washington. There aren’t protests. It’s a great illustration of how the media creates a bubble and leads you along with it. If they were doing stories on this, and doing in-depth explanations on how Big Oil is profiteering and so forth and so on, I guarantee you the perception would be that there was public outrage. But there isn’t any. It’s a crucial point to remember.

Now, some of you individually may be upset about it, but I’m telling you it has not made national news because of the people being upset. Even if they are, the media hasn’t picked up on this. By the way, the Democrats in Pelosi’s first hundred hours, they were going to have this windfall profits tax — and then of course Jeff Bingaman, the senator from New Mexico in the Senate sort of shut that down. So it was on their agenda to do something about this, along with the minimum wage. Where’s that? The minimum wage, they’re still arguing about it in conference committee. Democrats made all these promises and were going to get all these things done. They aren’t accomplishing anything.