Conservatism and the Future

RUSH: Here’s Mike in Boca Raton, Florida, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Hey.

CALLER: How you doing?

RUSH: Fine.

CALLER: Couple things for you.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Michael, caller in I think the last hour?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: It touched on my subject. First off, though, I want more Snerdley bits. I think he’d be perfect for the Obama wardrobe thing.

RUSH: The Obama what? Obama wardrobe thing?

CALLER: Wardrobe, yeah.

RUSH: You mean the Official Obama Criticizer?

CALLER: Correct.

RUSH: Yes. Well, the Official Obama Criticizer will be used on the program. We can’t overdo this, but when warranted — look, I’m not going to shirk from criticizing Obama, either.

CALLER: Of course not.

RUSH: But our Official Criticizer will be Bo Snerdley.

CALLER: Right. And I told him I really liked his bits, but before you accuse him of favoritism, I’ve been on hold for two hours so he didn’t put me right through.

RUSH: That’s true, he plays by the rules. Snerdley’s an ethical guy, that’s why he is qualified, he’s certified black enough, by the way, to be the official Obama criticizer.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: And for those of you that haven’t gone to the website, if you want to see what Snerdley looks like, we even gave him a badge, there’s an Official Obama Criticizer badge, you can see it all at www.RushLimbaugh.com. Have you seen it there?

CALLER: I have not.

RUSH: It’s a good picture of Snerdley. I took it when I got the new camera. It’s here in the studio. You won’t know that because we’ve cropped it just for the head-and-shoulder shot. But, no, got the official beret, the Official Obama Criticizer. It’s a uniform. It’s a very serious position.

CALLER: I’ll check that out when I get home. I didn’t know that.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Back to Michael’s call, I do have a gay cousin I’m going to call, I’m going to find out for you how she’s going to vote: Is it for Hillary or Obama?

RUSH: So she’s a Democrat, you’re saying, she’s a liberal?

CALLER: She is, yeah, oh, definitely, definitely. I don’t know which way she’s going to vote —

RUSH: Where does she live, you’re in Springfield, Ohio, where does she live?

CALLER: No, I’m actually in Boca.

RUSH: Oh, I’m sorry, you’re in Boca, where does she live?

CALLER: She’s in Kansas City.

RUSH: Kansas City. Missouri or Kansas?

CALLER: Missouri.

RUSH: Good.

CALLER: But she’s from a long line of Irish Democrats. My family is not, though.

RUSH: I see.

CALLER: Same family, though —

RUSH: We’ll look forward to the answer there. Because there’s a rift, a split, all factions are warring with each other on the Democrat side. We have not heard from the gay, lesbian, or transgender community.

CALLER: I can’t help you — the transgender, I can’t help you.

RUSH: We’ll find a way. We’ve got tentacles out there everywhere.

CALLER: And the original topic of the call, I’ve got Irish twins. They’re both one years old. My son will be two at the end of the March. They’re ten months apart. I’m worried about what they’re future’s going to be like and if they’re going to be left a better country or better way to make a, you know, a good living and life —

RUSH: Serious concern.

CALLER: — than I was.

RUSH: Your concern is one that most responsible parents throughout life have had.

CALLER: I don’t think that the Boomers, no offense, are leaving things better than they found them from their parents. My grandparents had a great life and left a great country for them.

RUSH: Well, in some cases, you’re right. I mean the Boomers, some Boomers, not all, I mean I’m a Boomer, I’m from the good branch of Boomers, but some Boomers are so narcissistic, so self-focused you’re right, they didn’t care how they left things because it was all about me, me, me, me, me.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Other Boomers are not quite that way. The Boomers are a wide and diverse lot but you basically split ’em down the middle, there’s two kinds. You’ve got the big anti-war sixties Boomers, the anarchists who want to blow everything up, want to make everything about themselves, and have succeeded in having so much free time on their hands that they’re free to do stupid, destructive things, including invent their own neuroses and disorders and psychosomatic problems. The good Boomers, people like me, make the country work. And they’re out there working hard and some of them are anonymous, you don’t even know who they are. But your concern is something every parent has, and you have a greater influence in what happens with your kids than you might even know, because we all worry what the future of the country is going to be, a serious question with this presidential race coming up. If a George McGovern-type liberal, if an Obama or Hillary win, with Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, then, you know, it’s going to be problematic. The hope would be it would be so bad that it would be a Jimmy Carter four years and we get rid of them after that, because things would go to hell in a handbasket so fast. But you don’t want to base the future on that kind of hope because you never know. The last time, when Barry Goldwater lost, we were in the wilderness for 20 years.

CALLER: Well, you look what happened, happening to everything today, they don’t call it a new tax, but my phone bill doubling, property taxes going up, you know, every little user fee that they’re putting on. You live in Palm Beach County, they’re talking about charging people to spay their dogs more, every single thing that they can think of. They don’t call it a tax, but —

RUSH: Okay, look —

CALLER: — it costs more to live now.

RUSH: All right, since you bring this up, I have a little story here. You know, Bush meeting with the governors today. The National Governors Association Conference is in Washington, had lunch there in the state dining room today, or a meeting, and big dinner and so forth. But on the eve of the National Governors Association meeting, some interesting statistics were released. Twenty states face a total budget shortfall of at least $35 billion in 2009, and eight others expect budget problems. Now, I have a list of the states that are expecting budget shortfalls, and the blue dots are in Democrat states; the red dots for some reason, they’ve assigned red dots to the Republican — well, that makes sense. Red and blue. See, I keep thinking the Democrats ought to be red. I never understood this red and blue. The Democrats are red. Official color, communist flag, all that, Soviet Union flag, the Cuban flag. At any rate, when you count — let me just count these blue dots here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Why, can that possibly be? Yeah. Got to 20 here, we don’t have all 25 on the chart. So out of 20 of these states with projected gaps, 16 of them are Democrat run.

Folks, this is determined by who is the governor, by the way. The idea that these states are out of money is just absurd. They’re spending it left and right. The amount of money that we are taxed, like user fees or what have you, that go to government, state, local, we got a budget now with $3 trillion, $3.1 trillion. The idea that our governments are out of money is just crazy, and that’s why your state taxes and other things in these states are going to continue to go up. It all comes back to smaller government, less intrusive government. It all comes back to conservatism versus liberalism. I know people think that’s awfully simplistic. It’s not. I was reading somebody the other day, wanted to get caught up in the definition of what a conservative is and even we conservatives have let liberals define what that is, in part, in that conservative equals racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, and his point was, I think this was in the American Thinker, his point was forget the label, let’s explain the principles, let’s just keep articulating the principles. If we want to call it Rushism, call it whatever we want to call it, the label is not important, it’s what the principles are, and they are too infrequently articulated. And certainly there’s no conservative leadership right now that has the guts to articulate these principles.

Bobby Jindal, I gotta continue to give him credit, Mark Sanford in South Carolina, there are some people, but none of them yet have arrived on the national scene. Anyway, I know it’s going to be a challenge to all of you with young churrin today. Every parent is worried about whether their kid’s going to have as bright a future. It’s worth being optimistic about, but you have to make it happen; it’s not going to happen sitting around hoping it happens; it’s not going to happen sitting around wishing it happens. It takes the work of the American people to continue to produce an ever-growing US economy. This is what frosts me about having all these obstacles and restrictions placed in the way by bureaucrats particularly in the area of energy, the ability to move around, get where you need to go to conduct business, to engage in leisure time, vacations or what have you. It was said here earlier today, and it’s right on the money, energy is the key, affordable energy is the key to growth of the US economy. Everything else will fall from that, affordable health care, affordable health care, affordable housing and so forth. Affordable energy is the key, and that means new supply — supply and demand.

Conserving what we have is all fine and dandy, hunky-dory, makes you feel really good about yourself. It doesn’t contribute to growth an iota. Getting rid of your stupid lightbulbs and replacing with those little spaghetti things is not gonna make a bit of difference in your prosperity or in the country’s growth. Driving your little Prius around and your hybrid, fine if it makes you feel good. It ain’t going to matter. It’s not going to contribute to the growth of this country whatsoever. What’s going to contribute to the lack of growth is not finding more resources of energy that are ours, and they are there, and we are letting others in the world go dig it and find it and then sell it to us, and then we become dependent. We are letting a bunch of long-haired, maggot-infested, dope-smoking, Birkenstock-wearing, linguine-spined liberals determine how this country grows or not, environmentalist numskulls who place a higher value on a kangaroo rat or a snail darter than your kids!