RUSH: Maylene, Alabama, and Ron. Great to have you on the program, EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Congratulations on your wedding. Wish you and Kathryn the best. And thanks again for being a voice for us for things that we don’t get a chance to say.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much, I appreciate that.
CALLER: I’m the uncle of the young man who died on the rig that called earlier.
RUSH: Oh, yeah.
CALLER: It upsets us very much when we have a memorial service in Jackson, and the president was invited to that, but he chose to go to Barbara Boxer and raise money for her campaign. But we were at a very moving memorial service, one of the best I’ve ever been. I’ve been to quite a few police ones, helped in some of them for police officers that died, and this was probably the best one I’ve ever been to. The CEO of Transocean went to the individual houses of each person, got to know each person’s family individually, and he got up and gave a eulogy of each person as he had their picture on a big screen behind him. And the man actually choked up and you could see tears coming down his face. More emotion than I’ve ever seen from Barack Obama since he’s been in office.
RUSH: Well, he’s a cool dude.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, another thing they wouldn’t want is they wouldn’t want any of these families don’t want the other members to lose their jobs out there. They know that this job, I’ve done it myself, is a hard, dirty, long job —
RUSH: You mean due to the moratorium?
CALLER: Right. They don’t want this to happen. These people counted on these jobs to provide for their families. It’s tough work, it’s hard, it’s dirty, but you can make a good living, and you can provide for your family. And they wouldn’t want to take this away from other family members. That would be the last thing that any of these people who died —
RUSH: Well, now, let me ask you a question here, Ron, maybe you’ve heard this. Part of the BP shakedown of $20 billion was a $100 million fund from BP to pay workers of these rigs shut down during the moratorium.
CALLER: Right, for six months.
RUSH: For six months.
CALLER: What do they do after that? Where do they go to get a job?
RUSH: Ostensibly the moratorium is going to be lifted after six months. That’s the theory.
CALLER: Ah.
RUSH: The problem is the moratorium goes on for six months, the employers are going to move.
CALLER: Right. That’s what I’m saying, where do they go for a job after the six months is over. They go on welfare? They go on unemployment, make about a quarter of what they were making in the oil field? That’s not going to help their families any.
RUSH: Well, Obama might throw in health care.
CALLER: (laughing) Yeah, well, none of them want that. These people are independent people who work for a living and work hard for a living. They’re used to that. They don’t like that attitude. I never wanted it. I worked out there for a long time. It’s hard, dirty work but —
RUSH: Let me tell you something, Ron. This whole thing is just unacceptable. In the first place the moratorium is senseless and it was based on lies. They backed up the moratorium with statements from experts who were lied about. Experts’ signatures were attached to a statement that they did not make. Ken Salazar was behind it. The second thing is there’s no reason for the moratorium in the first place. ‘Until we find out what caused the leak here in the Deepwater Horizon, for safety reasons we’re shut down all offshore drilling, including up in Alaska.’ Now, there’s no common sense behind this. Somebody tell me, safety concerns overrides things here? I mean, anybody with half a brain knows the damage they’re doing to the Gulf economy by having this moratorium, and by extension, the Alaskan economy. This is why people like me think these people are not stupid. They are committed ideologues and this is part of it. All you have to do is remember all of your lives how many times have they dumped on Big Oil and portrayed them as evil and demonic. So this is just a natural extension of it. And it’s another bit of evidence these Democrats run around and make you think they’re for the little guy, the downtrodden. It’s just the opposite. They create the downtrodden. They create little guys. And they prevent little guys from growing. That’s who they are.