RUSH: Let’s talk about energy, tires, inflation, gasoline, oil. We have… I don’t know. The oil business is relatively young, just over a hundred years old. We have therefore a century of experience, market-based experience, with the concept of oil being the foundational building block of all energy, which has led to the most prosperous and the most free collection of human beings in one country ever in the history of the world. I’m not saying oil replaced the Constitution, don’t misunderstand here; but the invention of the internal combustion engine and the discovery that oil, refined, would fuel it, has led to more than we can comprehend. Market forces have worked extremely well in doling out this resource as it’s needed.
Now along comes One Guy who says he knows more than God (’cause he is God) and he knows more than the market, and he knows more than everybody else about our energy needs, and what he knows is that if you had a tire gauge, we wouldn’t need oil! One guy comes along and says this, and an entire pack of butt-wiping journalists comes along and helps promote-amplify the message — and we end up debating this absurdity! Health care. For centuries, the human population of this country has advanced and made great progress in health care. The life expectancy in Western democracies continues to increase. We have drug companies that work hard in R&D to come up with drugs that cure disease, help us live with disease, increase our lifespan, and one guy (or one woman) comes along and says she or he (Hillary or Obama) knows far more about this than anybody in the health care business.
We end up debating it. Next time Obama — and he’ll get back to this because it’s in their platform. Next time Obama starts talking about, ‘We need health care, health care for every American. It’s not enough!’ Now, he starts talking about it, the correct retort will be: ‘We don’t need government health care, Senator. All we need is to ban junk food. If we did not permit our children to eat junk food, the money we would save on health care later in their lives would obviate any need for national health care.’ I mean, throw this stupid, insane argument right back at ’em. They come to education. For decades, centuries, adults have been educating their young. Until the federal government got involved in it, it worked pretty well. Then the federal government got involved in it, and a bunch of unions got involved in it, and all of a sudden in some school districts we’re paying $14,000 $15,000 per student, and half of them drop out and can’t read!
And once again comes along, or a political party comes along, ‘We need more money spent on education.’ No. If the students who are in school now would just be forced to read the textbooks they have, we wouldn’t have to buy new textbooks. But of course we have to buy the new textbooks because the old ones are not up to date with the leftist agenda that is taught in the public schools. That’s why we need new textbooks, and we end up debating people on this. The weather. The weather is what it is. It’s been there long before any of us were here. It’s going to be here long after we are all done. One guy comes along, and says he knows more about it than God, and he gets a Nobel Peace Prize! And the media — the butt-kissing, butt-wiping media — amplify his message, and we end up discussing this! I’m tired of discussing it, frankly.
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RUSH: Here’s Christian in New York City. Nice to have you on the program. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. It’s a pleasure to speak to you. How are you?
RUSH: Fine, thank you.
CALLER: Good. Rush, I’ve got considerable experience in veteran, vintage, and high-performance automobiles and tires, and funny enough, it was the Dunlop Motorcar Company in England that were the first people to discover, and they did it with the Jaguar aquaplaning on a very, very good tire but driven at high speed on water, on a water surface, you know, maybe half an inch of water with aquaplane causing a lot of problems. They also demonstrated that a completely bald tire has the exact adhesion as a brand-new tire on an absolutely dry road, of course not on a wet one, then it becomes another thing. But getting back to this big argument — I’m a little surprised that we’ve all spent so much time on it — if you have perfectly inflated tires, and you’re driving your car at 75 miles an hour all day, you’re not saving anything at all. No consideration also is being taken into the fact that especially we in the metropolitan area of New York, you’re coming let’s say from New Jersey and everything and spend one hour in the Lincoln Tunnel on perfectly inflated tires getting there, you’ve wasted all the savings in any case.
RUSH: Precisely. This is even more exactly my point. We gotta start talking about not just road resistance, but wind resistance, and how much idle time in big cities are you sitting there not even moving your tires.
CALLER: Exactly. Rush, one important thing I think —
RUSH: This is why I say, Christian, we cannot inflate our way out of this.
CALLER: I agree. Rush, there’s one very important thing you should tell your listeners that, to overinflate the tires, especially in hot weather, what you do is that when the hot tire gets really hot that tire is subject to bursting because the tire pressure increases because of the heat generated —
RUSH: I did. I warned them of that last hour, Christian. I’m very much concerned —
CALLER: Yeah, yeah.
RUSH: — that some of the morons in this country who listen to Obama and think he’s The Messiah are going to go out there and overinflate their tires thinking they’re going to reduce how much gasoline costs per gallon, and they’re going to start having accidents out there, and they’re going to start hydroplaning, as you pointed out through the Dunlop tests.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: We’ve got major disasters on this on the cusp here if people follow this insane advice.
CALLER: This is an amazing red herring, believe me, and it has no validity whatsoever.
RUSH: None. None. The Drive-By Media is circling the wagons and telling everybody that it is miraculous. I’m back to losing it again, folks. Thanks, Christian, for the phone call.
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RUSH: This is Dan in Lakeland, Florida. Dan, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, hey, it’s an honor to speak to you. I’ve been listening to you since I was 18 years old when my father, who’s a conservative political cartoonist, got me hooked on you and we’ve really enjoyed laughing around the dinner table talking about your program. But one thing I wanted to mention was, and Christian just mentioned it and you mentioned it in the last hour, is the overinflating. You know, a few months ago, I hate to even admit this, I was taking my family to North Carolina with an older Suburban and trying to do due diligence, I inflated the tires up to what it said on the side of the tire, 44 psi. Well, that’s when it’s hot, that’s the max when it’s hot, and, unfortunately, I had a rear tire blowout when we were on the highway —
RUSH: Because you misread the number?
CALLER: No, it said 44 psi, but what they told me is that’s the max when it gets hot —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — you’re supposed to inflate it to lower than that —
RUSH: Nobody inflates a tire to 44 psi, not even on a Hummer. That’s the max — that’s the tolerance of the tire.
CALLER: Yes. Yes.
RUSH: Yeah, so you inflated it to the max while the tire is cool, then you hit the highway, and you had a blowout.
CALLER: — it was a rear tire, not a front tire —
RUSH: That isn’t the point. How much gasoline did you save?
CALLER: Yeah. Well, 13 miles to the gallon in a Suburban, I think I probably got to maybe 13.1, so — (laughing)
RUSH: No, you saved more than that because you weren’t driving after the tire blew out.
CALLER: Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, what the lowercase ‘m’ messiah is trying to say is ignorant and it’s preposterous and it’s irresponsible because someone is going to have to deal with all the accidents and possibly deaths that occur from overinflating our tires.
RUSH: And then we’ll start, you know, really investigating insurance companies for not paying off, so forth. Yeah. All right, Dan, thanks for the call.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: I appreciate it.
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RUSH: Bill in Sacramento, my adopted hometown. Nice to have you here, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: Hey, I’ve been in the tire business for 35 years, and I think we’re all missing something Obama’s doing to us.
RUSH: What can we possibly have missed today, Bill, in talking about this?
CALLER: Well, overinflating your tires, if they think that you can put a lot of air in it, people will be putting too much air in it, and the tires wear out in the center more because of the overinflation. Now, a tire averages about eight quarts of oil per tire, and if you’re wearing your tires out faster, you will be putting tires on sooner. So I figure that he’s spending a lot more oil down the road, you know, replacing tires than the gas you’re saving that day in your tank.
RUSH: Wait a minute. Let me see if I follow this. You overinflate the tires, you’re going to increase the use of —
CALLER: The centers of the tire, when you overinflate, the center bulges out.
RUSH: Yeah, I got that, I got that, the center of the tire, you overinflate, that bulges out.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: But leads to the increased use of motor oil?
CALLER: It takes eight quarts of oil for a tire to be made. Now, if you’re wearing your tires out faster —
RUSH: Oh! Oh! Eight quarts of oil to make a tire.
CALLER: Yeah, average. Now, if you’re wearing out your tire from overinflation in the center, you have a lot more tread on the side, it’s the same as underinflating where the sides wear out faster. So overinflation will make ’em wear out faster, which you will be replacing that eight-quart average of tire oil faster.
RUSH: Exactly right. And, by the way, it’s interesting, we did talk about this aspect of this penetrating, crucially important issue of tire pressure, earlier in the program and did make mention of the fact that tires are made from oil, and if we don’t drill for oil, we’re not going to have tires to inflate in the first place. And if we do overinflate, as you point out, we’re going to change tires more frequently, which require more oil to make more tires. But don’t worry. Obama has a plan. Don’t know what, but I’m sure he’s got a plan. And he’s going to continue making fun of the concept of drilling for oil while making an absolute fool of himself on this tire pressure gauge inflation business, ’cause, my friends, let this be shouted from the mountaintops: We cannot inflate our way out of this.
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RUSH: Overinflated tires could lead to even more use of oil. There’s a greater problem out there, ladies and gentlemen, and that is Obama’s overinflated ego. This guy’s overinflated ego could cost this country trillions of dollars. We don’t need tire gauges, ladies and gentlemen. We need an ego gauge. We need a way to measure The Messiah’s ego, ’cause that’s what’s overinflated, and that’s what’s going to cost us trillions of dollars. The closest thing I know of to an ego gauge is a rectal thermometer.