RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I gotta tell you I’m a Rush Baby, and I’m doing my best to make sure that my kids are Rush Babies as well.
RUSH: Amen, bro. I appreciate that.
CALLER: No problem. My question, Rush, is basically I want to know why such a small minority of people, like the environmentalist wackos, can stop drilling in ANWR and they can stop us from making new refineries, but issues like tax cuts and border security are clearly supported by the majority and are ignored by people in Washington. What’s the deal?
RUSH: I’m going to answer the question for you. It’s a good question, and the answer is: it’s not such a small minority. The environmentalist wackos — if you just take them and the Sierra Club and all these groups — that would be a minority, but that’s not the problem. The problem is politicians. Politicians generally poll and focus group and find out what people want, and give it to them. That’s how you stay elected. That’s what’s so frustrating to people like us. We want leadership. We don’t want people bending and shaping with the wind. We want leadership. We want somebody challenging Democrat liberal premises. It’s the cover commentary of the latest Limbaugh Letter just off the presses today: ‘Stop Accepting Liberal Premises.’ But that’s what we do. Look, you couldn’t get the ANWR vote defeated to drill in ANWR without some Republican votes. Because Republicans are in districts where there are a lot of people who think oil is destroying the planet and that we’re using too much of it. This is the result of a 20- to 25-year campaign, and it has infected the minds of the American people. Let me give you a little story as an example here from the San Francisco Chronicle today.
They went out and they took a poll of people. ‘Californians support the idea of charging ‘green’ vehicle fees that would make drivers of gas guzzlers pay higher taxes and offer discounts for those driving less-polluting vehicles, according to a survey by a transportation researcher at San Jose State University. The state [of California] now charges drivers registration and licensing fees and gasoline taxes at rates that do not take into account vehicles’ pollution levels. But the survey, conducted by Asha Weinstein Agrawal, a research associate with the university’s Mineta Transportation Institute [named after Leon Mineta], found that Californians would support a variety of taxes and fees to raise money for transportation improvements as well as combat global warming, including: Raising vehicle registration fees, which now average $31, to an average of $62,’ doubling them, ‘and having higher-polluting vehicles pay higher rates and cleaner cars lower rates. …’ They also believe in ‘Levying a mileage-based tax that would replace the 18-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax. The per-mile amount would vary depending on how much a vehicle polluted the air. ‘The public is very supportive of these green taxes and fees,” said the researcher at San Jose State.
This is how it’s worked. They have created all this guilt, and you’ve got people in San Francisco who think this has to be done, or has to be done, and when you have linguine-spined politicians who simply care about being reelected and doing what polls well. ‘But, Rush! But, Rush! That’s what democracy is: the people, the will of the peoples.’ No, we are a representative republic. We are not a full-fledged democracy. We’re not mob rule. We’re not simply majority rule. We are a representative republic, and the idea used to be we would elect leaders — leaders who might believe in their hearts that all of this is a giant hoax and a scam and would have the guts to stand up and say so and fight it. We have precious few of those people around. They might think it, but they don’t have the guts to stand up and say it. So we go along and we get this notion that all these things have to… This is San Francisco. This is California in general. Don’t forget the news out of LA yesterday, which was going to bump up similar registration fees and the gasoline tax to nine cents a gallon and so forth, in addition to whatever price hikes are down the road just from the market forces.
It’s not a minority of people that are getting things done. It’s not even a small minority of people that are getting things done. Washington Post today: ‘Washington Inaction on Polar Bears Criticized — Democrats Blame Interior for Delay in Addressing Climate Change.’ Now we got food prices skyrocketing out there; we got energy prices skyrocketing out there. We got any number of problems that people are facing, and ‘Senate Democrats yesterday’ spent a lot of time beating up George Bush for ‘failure to meet a legal deadline for determining whether global warming is pushing polar bears toward extinction and lashed their scheduled star witness — Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne — for declining to appear in his own defense.’ James Inhofe is one of these that will stand up, the Senator from Oklahoma, and tell people that the whole thing is a hoax and it’s a rip-off and it is nothing more than an attempt to expand government by virtue of raising taxes and limiting people’s liberty. James Inhofe said that the environmentalist wackos ‘are trying to use the act [the polar bear business] ‘to achieve global warming policy that special interest groups cannot otherwise achieve through the legislative process.”
So you’ve got little kids watching Algore’s movie, they go home, and say (doing little kid impression), ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! The polar bears! The polar bears, they’re dying! I saw a picture in the Gore movie! Polar bears, two polar bears on piece of ice, and it’s buried six feet. They’re gonna drown, Mommy! They’re gonna drown.’ Parents don’t want their kids frightened like that, so they join the cause, and this is not small minority. That’s why this is something that’s going to have to be fought, day in and day out. But I think there’s progress on this. Algore announces on 60 Minutes a $300 million initiative to really get people to believe what’s going on. What, the movie didn’t work, Al? I guess the movie didn’t have the impact everybody thought it was going to have. So there is hope here, and there a lot of scientists who are doing their best, but they get squelched and they get impugned in the Drive-By Media when they speak up. But, I’m telling you, this is the thing about democracies and representative republics: People generally get what they want. The environmentalist… This is the thing. Liberals get hold of something, and they don’t stop. No matter how much of it they get, it’s never enough. They want to keep going. This is traceable to 1980 to 1982, ’83. This is when the modern global warming movement began, and it’s been steady, and they just keep plodding away, and here we are now 28 years later, 25 years later, and it’s taken hold. So we’re accepting the premise and trying to refute it a little bit. We shoulda stomped on it way back when.
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Steve in Guntersville, Alabama, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, you’re doing a great job.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Listen, I just wanted to go over something very similar to what you just stated. I’m amazed at how dumb the American public has become. We tend to want to blame the White House on everything, but actually the Congress is killing us. They have $17.2 billion in earmarks and Social Security is going bankrupt. I mean, we’ve got to vote these people out —
RUSH: Wait a minute, wait a minute, you misunderstand.
CALLER: Oh.
RUSH: Congress issued a report late last week that there is no Social Security crisis. It’s been really overstated, no problem.
CALLER: Oh, really?
RUSH: I’m not kidding. They did. It was a particular Democrat, and I think it was from the Senate, ‘There’s not a problem. It’s no big deal, everybody in a crisis mode about Social Security. We don’t have a problem.’
CALLER: Of course they’re on a different retirement system.
RUSH: Of course they do, different retirement — but you know, here’s the point. I don’t care whether we got a Social Security problem or not. The one thing American people don’t want is earmarks, and both parties are doing nothing. They have no desire to stop ’em. That’s why I have to laugh when I hear these guys constantly talking about budget cuts and deficit spending, all these other things. By the way, Steve, it’s not the American people are dumb, it’s not that. It’s where Senator McCain was wrong yesterday. The American people aren’t dumb. What is happening here is, and has been for much longer than this radio show has been around, a constant daily bombardment from the government and from the media of pure, unadulterated liberalism. A lot of people sit around and over 20 years of a bombardment, watching television every day, you’re going to soak some of it up. You’re going to start to believe it. And then if your friends believe it, nobody wants to argue with their friends, and then you couple it with the fact that a lot of people want their lives to have meaning and all these liberal causes, supporting them, can make people think their lives are going to mean something. Liberals are very smart about this, and they’re patient. Because they’re content to dominate news cycles, set the agenda, and as long as it takes, they’re still controlling everything because there’s not a political party around that’s refuting the agenda or the premise.
I wish there were somebody besides Ronald Reagan that I could return to and cite as an example of how you fight and beat these people. And since it’s such a great example, why our party has no desire of replicating it has been something that confounds me. I understand it, but still it confounds me. I don’t agree with it, don’t misunderstand, but it confounds me. Lee Atwater was one, too. Lee Atwater refused to accept the agenda and the premise — just went out there, it was a political war, and he was out to destroy ’em politically, and he did, and they hated him, they despised him. We got too many people on our side that want to be liked by these people, appeasers and so forth. But if nobody’s going to reject the premise on any issue that liberals put forth, then all we’re going to be doing, it’s like Mr. Buckley said way back early in his career, he had this phrase: ‘Standing athwart history and saying, ‘stop.” Meaning, we put the brakes on it for a while but we never get control of the agenda ourselves and start advancing it. That’s what everybody wants, and for that, you need leadership. And it just isn’t there.
Now, we have to do what we have to do, and right now stopping them is what we have to do. Stopping global warming, stopping the premise of manmade global warming, establishing that as a hoax. But then what do we do after we stop it, if we succeed in stopping it, what do we do? Well, then we generally, okay, we declare victory and we move on to the next liberal premise and try to stop it. They don’t give up. They’ll try an end around, illegal immigration, amnesty, a great example. We stop that cold, the whole thing, meaningful, comprehensive immigration reform, stopped it, and so Congress wised up and they start doing little incremental things like the S-CHIP program, sneak a little immigration amnesty in there, other little pieces of legislation. They just keep going, folks, they’re Energizer bunnies, and right now we’re in a mode where we just have to stop them, stand athwart history and shout, ‘Stop.’ It would be so wonderful to be in control of the agenda and bombard the American people every day with our beliefs. Look, I’m not trying to depress you. As you know, I’m optimistic. If we don’t give up the fight we’re going to eventually prevail, and it’s going to go on long after we’re gone but your kids and grandkids are going to be around as either beneficiaries or as victims of whatever happens today as we battle these issues ourselves, so it’s always going to be an ongoing thing.
Who’s next, Hayne in Mount Shasta, California. This is where the giant harmonic convergence was back in the eighties. Hello, Hayne. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Hello, Rush.
RUSH: Wayne. I’m sorry. I didn’t have my glasses on. The ‘W’ here in our 1970s computer looks like an H.
CALLER: No problem. Speaking of California politicians and fees, I got blindsided last Thursday when I received my registration fee for my ATV. The fee had gone up 100%.
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait just a second. For those of you in the Northeast, ATV is all-terrain vehicle.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Okay, continue there, Wayne.
CALLER: So I was a little perturbed, I called DMV and said, ‘Hey what’s this, I got a 100% increase in my fee.’ And he said, ‘Yes, the California legislature approved the rate hike.’ So I called my state senator, who said that —
RUSH: Hey, Wayne, Wayne. Speak right into the phone. Sounds like you’ve got your hand over the microphone on your phone.
CALLER: Okay. Is this better?
RUSH: Much better, yeah.
CALLER: Okay. I called the state senator, and I was told that DMV raises the fees, and that the legislature has nothing to do with it, which I know is not right. And she did not know how my state senator voted on it. I called my state assemblyman and was told that the person told me that she did not know how the assemblyman voted on it but he probably voted against the rate hike. So I called the governor’s office and the governor’s spokesman told me that he did not know how the governor voted on it, but blamed the Democrats because they control the legislature out here. So, in any event, California fees keep going up, and the buck keeps getting passed, and they won’t even tell you how they voted on it or what their stance on these tax hikes are out here.
RUSH: And you’re surprised by this?
CALLER: Not anymore.
RUSH: Good.
CALLER: Not anymore.
RUSH: Remember, you are a supposed to bend over and grab the ankles. You people that drive these ATVs, I mean you know how dangerous they are, those things could roll over, kill you and your kids and so forth, they pollute. You gotta pay the price for global warming, Wayne. You gotta pay it.
CALLER: I was told that it was all off-road vehicles. Now, it encompasses, you know, I think motorcycles and those boats, I forget what they call ’em —
RUSH: Same thing.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Big-time polluters, not necessary for people to get to work and to the grocery store and back. You don’t need that ATV; you don’t need an off-road vehicle; you don’t need a motorcycle. If you want one and have one, by God, you’re going to pay for it because that extra vehicle is making a bigger carbon footprint. I know how these people think. And of course you’re not going to find any accountability.
CALLER: And probably they figure that if you own one, you’re rich and you should pay the extra fees anyway.
RUSH: There’s all of that. But I tell you what’s going to happen, especially with this new proposal that I see that this researcher I just mentioned that’s in the Chronicle today, San Francisco Chronicle, raising registration fees, and then getting into a sort of a two-tiered or three-tiered tax plan based on the kind of car you drive. They’re going to raise taxes on the gas guzzlers. They’re going to reduce gas taxes on what are called environmentally safe, nonpolluting cars. This is going to affect their tax rate income. If it doesn’t go up, it’s like when the gas price went up and the state was urging people to drive less, save the planet, drive less, be more economical, people, like sheep, did what the state said. It didn’t take long for the state to realize, ‘Hey, our gas tax revenue’s plummeting here.’ And so they raised gas taxes to make up for people following orders to drive less and go by more economical cars.
So the bottom line is, when you have a state government like yours in California, Wayne, which is run by liberal Democrats, you can make book on the fact that your government expenses, taxes, are going to go up every year regardless what you do to reduce them. If you follow your orders to drive less, if you got rid of your off-road vehicle, a lot of other people did, too, they would lose the tax revenue associated with it; they would raise taxes on the remaining vehicles. You live in a state totally run right now by liberals, including the governor, and I don’t know what you can do. It’s a fact of life for everybody that lives in states and cities totally run by liberals. Now, you look at the cities in this country that have been run by liberals for decades, you wouldn’t want to live there. They are an absolute mess, the schools are a mess, jobs are being lost at a rapid rate. It’s just frustrating. The evidence of not just the failure, but the damage that liberalism does to people is just all over the place. They ought not even exist is the point; they ought to be to discredited.
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RUSH: Who’s next? This is Harry in Anderson, South Carolina. Hi, Harry, nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Rush, I’m an initial subscriber to The Limbaugh Letter.
RUSH: That would be a charter subscriber, yeah.
CALLER: Yes, I am. I want to compliment you on its increasing content and volume. I remember when it was a four-page thing. But, Rush, I also subscribe to the military magazine. I’m a World War II vet. In February’s issue, there was an article about how we spent 50 billion — that’s a ‘B,’ billion dollars — since 1990 and found no human cause to change. The Taleo, I don’t know, T-a-e-e-o climate scientist stating this is Bob Barker. So, that’s a lot of money we spent, and yet its finding is being suppressed, and I just heard what you’re saying on this last attempt.
RUSH: Yeah, but, see, you could have that finding publicized. You could have that finding put on the Associated Press. It could be the lead story of the nightly news cast tonight: ‘$50 billion dollars spent since 1990, no manmade cause for global warming has been found!’ They’d run to Algore or some other global warming proponent, you know what they would say? ‘We’ve never said that there is direct evidence, and we can’t afford to be wrong. We can’t afford it! We have to take steps now. If we don’t, 30 to 40 years from now, we’re all going to be turned into cannibals!’ There’s ways around it. That’s why nobody will come out and say definitely. Some of the wackos do, but that’s why the 30-or-40-year variant.