RUSH: Charles in Pittsburgh, nice to have you, sir, on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Mr. Limbaugh, let me tell you what an honor this is to speak to you, bud. I’ve been listening to you since 1992, and I was a junior in high school.
RUSH: Really? So you’re a Rush Baby.
CALLER: Absolutely, and I want to thank my dad Clark and my mother Sharon. They both turned me on to you back when I was a mind full of mush.
RUSH: It’s great to have you here. Thanks much for calling.
CALLER: All right. Hey, I got two points I want to get to you.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: I want to tell you about the YouTube debate. What is the point in that silver headed fox, Anderson Cooper, whenever the question about taxes came up, he immediately throws it to Dennis Kucinich. Why would that be? You know, obviously he stands no chance of getting in the White House, so why wouldn’t he ask one of the front-runners the question on raising taxes?
RUSH: Who knows? That thing was so produced.
CALLER: Of course.
RUSH: It was produced. They knew every second of that show, what was going to happen. They had built this time for the candidates to answer, and if you watched you could hear Cooper occasionally say, ‘Time. Time.’ They put that whole thing together. I know how TV shows work. They put every video together; they put it in the order they wanted; and they chose which candidates they’re going to go to first. In fact, one of the things that kind of surprised me was the Breck Girl didn’t get a question for the first seven or eight, maybe nine minutes, or six or seven questions. He was last on the list. He sat there patiently. He stood there patiently, but…
CALLER: (Laughing.) Coiffing his hair.
RUSH: I don’t know how they decided who would get which question. I’m sure you’re relating this to the fact that they might have some bias on it. I don’t know. They’re at CNN. They produce TV shows, and the YouTube show was exactly a produced show under the guise of being a debate.
CALLER: Well, one of the reasons why I was able to observe that is for the fact that you’re able to observe it and, you know, you being the professor of conservatism, that’s how I know. But I also want to tell you that I do not think we should drill for our own oil right now.
RUSH: Why not?
CALLER: Well, use up the rest of the world’s. If we’re making long term ‘strategery,’ as Mr. Bush would say — President Bush would say — I think we should just hold off on drilling for our oil for a while.
RUSH: (Laughing.) It’s an interesting strategy.
CALLER: Am I going to get somebody in trouble for saying this?
RUSH: No, you’re not going to get anybody in trouble for saying it. The problems with that are that we’re almost being held hostage to price and supply and all the other ramifications of becoming dependent on other sources of oil. There’s more oil than you think. We can’t sit around and wait ’em out ’til they run out. There’s more oil down there than you think. The thing to do here… This is really simple. It’s really, really simple. We are the United States of America. We are a growing economy. We cannot continue economic growth without oil. If you want your kids to have a better life than you did, you can’t get there by conserving energy alone. We have to have more! We have to produce more. Growth, productivity, opportunity, are all related, and if we’re going to sit here and hamstring ourselves and put ourselves in handcuffs under the guise of protecting the environment and so forth, we’re going to lose the status that we have, and it may become a reality someday that your kids won’t do as well as you do.
The only way that we are going to be able to sustain this kind of growth — that we, by the way, demand; we are a very high expectation society of our own country. We expect that when we go to the grocery store whatever we want is there. We expect when we go to the gas station that the gasoline is going to be there. We expect when we stop at a hotel, that there’s going to be a room there and that there’s going to be a hotel. We have these expectations. We expect when we go to the restaurant that they’re going to have what they have on the menu and that we’re going to get it served at the proper time. We have all these expectations. We go to the automobile dealership and they’re going to have the car that we want or we’re going to order it. We’re going to get it at some point. We’re going to be able to negotiate the price. All of these things are interrelated, but they lead to high expectations that the American people have, and these high expectations are not going to be met if all we try to do is ‘conservative energy,’ with these lightbulbs and these hybrids and so forth. It isn’t the answer. More supply is. Drilling it, refining it, and hopefully our own supply — and it’s there. We just don’t have the will to go get it, either.