RUSH: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, we’ll start with Dave. It’s great to have you here, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s a pleasure and an honor to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: Rush, ever since this debacle in Detroit has shown up, it seems as though Ford Motor Company has kind of dumped all the bullets and dodged all the bullets and whatever you want to call it, and Chrysler and General Motors seem to be taking all the brunt. Is Ford doing something differently, or are they laying back and watching what’s transpiring?
RUSH: They didn’t take any bailout money.
CALLER: Yeah, exactly. But initially whenever this all transpired a couple months ago, Ford was included in on the possible bailout.
RUSH: Yeah, but they decided not to take it. After the CEOs got trashed for flying to Washington in their private jets, and all the abuse, Alan Mulally decided, ‘We don’t want any part of this. We’re not in that bad a shape. We’re in bad shape, but,’ he thinks he can make it to 2009 without any bailout money, so he didn’t want it. He didn’t take any.
CALLER: Well, I guess he’s a smart man, then.
RUSH: Well, yeah. But the larger lesson here, the larger lesson is that we can still save all of this if… Well, it’s easy for me to say. I’m not in Rick Wagoner’s shoes. But I would have refused to quit. I would have taken a stand, but I’m sure he’s got a nice going-away package and so forth. It’s like some of the banks are saying, ‘We don’t want this TARP money.’ Some of the CEOs of the banks say, ‘Screw this! Take your money back. We don’t want any part of these regulations.’ A bank CEO in St. Louis just quit because he makes too much. TARP doesn’t allow him to make as much as he makes. So he quit. He doesn’t want the abuse. I think Ford — and I really don’t know anything about why Ford did what they did, other than to say that they thought they could make it through 2009. But as we stand here now, Obama doesn’t have a way into the Ford Motor Company that he has with the others ’cause they didn’t take any bailout money.
So if I’m Ford, if I’m Mr. Mulally, what I do is I look at what Obama has done. You can find it in his book. You can find what he thinks of the auto industry in his book. You can find his hatred for the SUV. You can find in his book of 2006, I think, you can find exactly what kind of cars he thinks Detroit ought to build. They’re the cars that are going to have to be forced on people, the cars that people are not buying en masse of their own volition. So if I run Ford, I see what General Motors and Chrysler are going to be forced to manufacture, and I go the other way — as far as I can, anyway, within the bounds of these stupid CAFE standards.
You know, I don’t start competing with the other two of the Big Three by making the same cars, the same stuff. So I go the other way. ‘But, Rush! But, Rush! Isn’t the future green cars, and isn’t the future electric cars?’ No. I’m not convinced that it is. We’re going to have to be forced into these pieces of junk. Nobody wants to buy them, not enough to keep an industry alive. You let the gas price fall from four bucks to two bucks as it did and check out what people go buy. We Americans — and we are Americans — have always wanted trucks, SUVs, large cars. They’re safe. They have big families, and they carry ’em around, drag people around in them. We just have this preference. There’s no shortage of oil! We are not destroying the planet with auto emissions.
We’re not destroying the planet with CO2 emissions. We are all living under a giant hoax. We have all been brainwashed. Well, some of us haven’t. Way too many people are unable to resist the tug of popular sentiment. They get on board with all this garbage. Oil is not the death of Planet Earth! Gasoline is not the death of Planet Earth. I will guarantee you that not one vehicle in Barack Obama’s fleet will be electric. He may have some hybrid SUVs in there at some point, but his limousine is not going to be electric. The thing that gets him around won’t be. He’s not getting rid of his jets. He’s not getting rid of his internal combustion engines, and no president will. ‘They’re the president, Rush. They’re the president.’ That’s right! Well, there’s no reason for us to, either — and people have bought into this hoax and this myth that we face shortages and that we’re destroying the planet. Neither are correct.