RUSH: The Obama family is going to pack it all up and head to the Gulf tomorrow anyway, ‘Obama and his family travel to the Gulf Coast this weekend to support businesses that rely on tourists but have been devastated by the oil disaster. The family will leave tomorrow morning for Panama City Beach, Florida. ‘Even as the president talks about what our next steps are in response, obviously part of this will be highlighting the tremendous economic toll that has taken place,’ [said] White House spokesman Robert Gibbs’, who has yet to respond, by the way, to the challenge from Cindy Sheehan for the pee-off.
Now, if Obama really wanted to help the people in the Gulf, what could he do? The administration itself has put out news that there’s no oil. The administration, even! They can’t find any oil, it’s all gone. The administration somehow wanting credit here after labeling this the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history. The Obamas are only going down to the Redneck Riviera because they were pressured to do so. Twenty-seven hours on the ground, then next week they go on the real vacation: ten days in Martha’s Vineyard.
But I read the statement like this, the opening line in this CNN story: ‘Obama and his family will travel to the [Gulf Coast] this weekend to support businesses that rely on tourists but have been devastated by the oil disaster.’ Do you realize that, coming up in the next segment, what a total batch of lies were told by science, the administration, and the media about this disaster? There should not be a reason for Obama to go down and talk to businesses that have been hurt. There should not have been any businesses hurt. Businesses were harmed purely because of the average, predictable hysteria that attaches itself to virtually every story. There’s a story out, started yesterday, it’s getting amplified today — chicken, poultry products, the biggest source of food poisoning in America. Oh, no! Who knew? Are there reports of recent food poisoning? No. We have a bunch of dunderheads sitting around with too much time on their hands doing study after study after study, studying human behavior here, human behavior there, creating crisis after crisis after crisis. Same thing happened in the Gulf. There was no reason for a panic, there was no reason to shut down tourism, there was no reason for any of it, except it sold newspapers and got ratings — or a crisis is too great a thing to waste. Let’s manufacture one. It was never warranted.
And the real truth is, if Obama really, really cared, and if he really wanted to support businesses that were hurt, he’d go talk to some oil workers. Because they’re the ones he has put out of business. The real crisis is the drilling moratorium that has been totally unnecessary, it has not been lifted. And I might point out that our esteemed president, after having his Iftar dinner tonight, will not meet with anybody in the oil business at all, while on the ground for 27 hours in the Gulf.
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RUSH: ‘The Gulf Recovery Obama Does Not Want to See.’ This is from the Morning Bell at the Heritage Foundation. ‘Next week, for the fifth time since July, the first family will board Air Force One for yet another luxury vacation, this time to an exclusive Martha’s Vineyard estate that rents for up to $50,000 a week. But before they head north, the Obamas will first grace Panama City, Fla., with their presence this weekend for what is being billed as a ‘solidarity vacation to the Gulf Coast.” And they talk about what’s on the agenda, what the Obamas are going to do, and they point out as I just did: ‘Not on the agenda? Any meetings with oil workers in other Gulf states who are now unemployed thanks to President Obama’s Gulf oil drilling ban.
‘If the President really wanted to see the economic damage his policies are causing in the Gulf, he could first stop in Pascagoula, Miss., where idle oil rigs in the Signal International shipyard have formed an eerie floating ghost city that locals have dubbed ‘Rig Row.’ Instead of being deployed at sea where they could be creating wealth for this country and jobs for Gulf residents, these rigs are wasting away idly in port as a direct result of President Obama’s oil drilling moratorium — a moratorium that when first issued on just deep sea rigs, a federal judge ruled was ‘arbitrary and capricious.’ Undaunted, the Obama administration doubled down, issuing a broader oil drilling injunction that is killing even more jobs than the first ban.’
Lou Dolinar, in National Review Online today: ‘Our Real Gulf Disaster.’ And this is what I was in the previous half hour. If I may get personal here for just a moment, one of the areas in which I find myself in the most controversy is simply when I state things that are not part of the formula or not part of the conventional wisdom. This is an example. We hear news of the oil spill. We hear and see pictures of all the oil escaping from the leak. What ensues everywhere is an utter panic, followed by stories of total destruction, the end of life as we’ve known it in the Gulf of Mexico and in the coastal areas, a sheer, unadulterated panic. I didn’t get on board. I said, ‘Wait a minute. Nature’s going to fix this. Even if this spill keeps up ’til August until they get the relief wells drilled, this is a minimal amount of oil. You couldn’t find this amount of oil in the entire Gulf if you didn’t know it was there.’ And then later, we had people doing studies that found out that if the Superdome or the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Texas was the Gulf, the amount of oil in it is the equivalent of a 24-ounce can of beer. You couldn’t find the oil if you didn’t know it was there. It’s how insignificant it was.
I kept telling you about how the Mexican spill Ixtoc 1979 was far, far worse and that we had totally recovered from it nevertheless and that it had devastated the Texas Gulf Coast. But never mind, I was called stupid, irresponsible, a hack, following through on my global warming denier position when in fact all I was doing was engaging in critical thinking rather than following the crowd. I was simply using common sense. One of the worst things about our culture today is that common sense is considered controversial. Better stated, a commonsensical reaction to any event is considered controversial. What is not controversial is the planned and orchestrated and easy path reaction. Oil spill, Gulf of Mexico, Big Oil, bad, Obama, liberal Democrat good. Wow, we have a disaster.We have a crisis. This is horrible, and, see, we’ve been warning you about all this. Big Oil doesn’t care. They hate people. They’re trying to kill their customers. Here’s a great example of it. They don’t care about the price of their product, all of the 50 years of rotgut rhetoric. Ed Markey, some member of Congress demanding the leak be shown 24/7 so that BP could be shaken down for another $20 billion.
I’ve prided myself in never being a conformist. I take pride in being a nonconformist. And it’s not all that hard to be a nonconformist, aside from the guts it takes. You just have to have a little intelligence, guided by experience and common sense, and a willingness to proclaim it. And yet I am considered controversial, I am considered dangerous, I’m the one said to be knee-jerk reactionary, when we know now that the wizards of smart from all levels, from academia down to the media, the administration, they’re the idiots, they’re the non-thinkers, they’re the people who simply take any event and attach it to their political agenda and lie and frighten and scare whatever they have to do to get people believing it. Then, after it’s all over and we find out that all of those people were wrong, every damn one of them, every crisis-monger was wrong, is there any price to pay by those people? No, because they’re the ruling class elites and their intentions were honorable. We have to reward them for caring.
Folks, I’m not patting myself on the back here. I’m nothing special. It’s not that I’m so omniscient. Socrates once supposedly said — I’m paraphrasing — ‘It’s not Socrates that’s irrefutable; it’s the facts.’ In this case the BP oil leak, it wasn’t even a spill, the BP oil leak is another example of why arrogance and incompetence is a dangerous combination. Look at what’s happened. Folks, it’s an outrage! An entire industry has been shut down on the basis of an unwarranted panic, based on an unwarranted reaction to an event that itself was amplified way out of proportion to its reality. And to add insult to injury, the president of the United States is making a face-saving move, what he really doesn’t want to make in the first place, going down there because he’s been told you better get down there because your wife just got pictured in a lot of bad optics over in Spain, and you’re going to Martha’s Vineyard for ten days next week. You better get down there. So he’s gonna go down there and he’s gonna talk to people who have been hurt by himself and his administration, his experts and his media.
Tourism, people were scared, remember we had the story from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the eighth graders or tenth graders, whatever it was, took a field trip to go find the oil and the reason was to see the devastation and the damage being wrought by capitalism and Big Oil. And I got ripped for that. I got ripped for making fun of that. But I, using common sense and critical thinking, knew that the kids were being used by activist oriented teachers who saw an opportunity to move forward their own anti-capitalist global warming agenda. It was I and I alone, El Rushbo with respect for God, respect for creation, respect for truth, and a healthy awareness of our own insignificance when it comes to the massive scope and complexity of our planet and our climate and systems, eco and otherwise.
So here’s where we are. The smart people all ganged up, got together and tried to be the first to cross the finish line shouting disaster, disaster, disaster. You want a phrase? Obama lied; Gulf tourism died. Bush lied; people died, fine. Obama lied; Gulf tourism died. Here’s Mr. Dolinar: ‘Four months after the Deepwater Horizon spill — which President Obama called the ‘worst environmental disaster America has ever faced’ — the oil is disappearing, and fisheries are returning to normal. It turns out that this incident exposed some things that are seriously wrong in the world of oil — and I don’t mean exploding wells. There was a broad-based failure on the part of the media, the science establishment, and the federal bureaucracy. With the nation and its leaders looking for facts, we got instead a massive plume of apocalyptic mythology and threats of Armageddon. In the Gulf, this misinformation has cost jobs, lowered property values, and devastated tourism, and its effects on national policy could be deep and far-reaching. To get an idea of the scale of misinformation involved, consider how many of the most widely reported narratives about the spill — ones that have woven their way into the national consciousness — have turned out to be dubious.’
I’ll get you those after the break, but I want to repeat here, look at what’s happened here because of a lie, a series of lies, a bunch of liars, a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals, a bunch of noncritical thinkers in the media and everywhere, reactionaries, people who would not know common sense if it slapped them upside the head. Look at what’s happened. Jobs have been lost. Property values plummeted. Tourism devastated. At this moment, the oil industry is shut down in the Gulf of Mexico for no reason whatsoever. These are the some people that you’ve put in charge of health care. These are the same people you’ve put in charge of running Obama Motors; the same people you’ve put in charge of running our financial system; the same people that are responsible for the global warming hoax; the same people responsible for every other panic-oriented hoax. They get away with near criminality, irresponsibility for certain, and they are never, ever held accountable. If a terrorist had done to the oil industry in the Gulf what Obama has done, even Eric Holder would bring him up on charges.
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RUSH: The BP oil spill hysteria about a lie, ladies and gentlemen, was child play compared to the hoax that’s global warming, child play. This hoax was nothing. It only lasted a couple of months. The global warming hoax has been ongoing for 25 years. It has determined the curricula at every level of education in the country. It’s a lie, it is a hoax. And the people who are the deniers are said to be the 
nutcases, the fruit loops, and the idiots. Here are some of the examples. ‘The scale of misinformation involved, the most widely reported narratives about the spill have turned out to be dubious,’ and in some cases a lie. ‘East Coast beaches are threatened.’ Do you remember the folly? We had people in the Keys, we had people in Miami, we had people on our side of the state of Florida actually going out to beaches and looking for oil from the Gulf of Mexico. They would find tar balls and they would stop everything and do investigations. ‘Is this from the Deepwater Horizon?’ And it never was. There was never a chance that oil was gonna get to the East Coast of Florida. It was going to get to the Gulf Stream; it was going to get to Great Britain; it was going to change the climate forever; it was an out-and-out panic.
And a lone voice said, ‘This is silly.’ We had a bunch of stupid experts talking about things they have no clue about, and all they’re doing is alarming people. ‘East Coast beaches threatened. Everyone got the wrong idea about the magnitude of the spill from the very beginning. Simply put, while terrible, it was never going to be as big as most thought it would be. The spreading of this East Coast-beach meme was a joint operation of NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the media. In June, NCAR produced a slick computer-modeled animated video that showed a gigantic part of the spill making its way around the southern tip of Florida and up the East Coast. Oil covered everything from the Gulf to the Grand Banks. ‘BP oil slick could hit East Coast in weeks: government scientists,’ dutifully reported the New York Daily News. CBS News, MSNBC, and many other media outlets chimed in in the same vein. The video was wildly popular on YouTube.
‘In fact, according to Chuck Watson of Watson Technical Consulting — a Savannah, Ga., firm specializing in computer modeling of the effects of hurricanes, seismic events, geophysical hazards, and weapons of mass destruction — the simulation was bogus from the very beginning, because it ignored important conditions in the Gulf. Furthermore, says Watson, the media never took account of how diluted the oil would be once it hit the Atlantic.’ But who was it? It was I, El Rushbo, who told you on day two this is light crude, it will evaporate, it will be eaten alive by the ocean. And once again I, El Rushbo, portrayed as a Neanderthal, knee-jerk reactionary. ‘The bulk of the theoretically massive spill the video shows amounts to roughly a quart of oil per square mile.’ That’s how much was gonna end up on the East Coast, a quart of oil per square mile. ‘Watson claims flat-out that NOAA was ‘gold digging; for grants; there’s probably more federal research money floating around the Gulf than there is oil. ‘There is a feeding frenzy with people trying to get funding for their specialty,” and I can confirm this. Maybe I ought not.
If you get a satellite picture, take a look at the number of ships, take a look at the boat traffic on the Gulf of Mexico. You will be stunned at all the boat traffic. There is no slick. There is no oil. There is no oil drilling going on. So what’s going on? There’s a feeding frenzy. People are trying to get funding. They’re looking for damage. They’re looking for the slightest evidence of any damage that will get them funding to continue research when there isn’t any. It’s what happens when the government starts giving away money.
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RUSH: Maybe, ladies and gentlemen, maybe Obama is being more considerate than we’re giving him credit for. Maybe his trip down there to Panama City Beach to the Gulf Coast, maybe he’s just trying to show the unemployed what vacations are like. He’s the great leader, people live through him vicariously, so while they’re unemployed, they get to see what a vacation looks like, ’cause Obama cares, along with his wife, Moochelle (My Belle).
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RUSH: I’m really riled up about this, folks. I just cannot stand what these people get away with, what they cost this country, what they cost you, this lying, this reactionary crisis-mongering. Look, ‘Poultry Fingered as No. 1 Food Poisoning Culprit.’ Oh, no, oh, no, we’re gonna die. ‘Cooking chicken on the grill this summer? Be careful. Health officials say that poultry continues –‘ What the hell. Has anybody died of salmonella out there the last week? What’s the point of this story? It’s August, for crying out loud. People started using their grills in late May. Why are we getting this story now? ‘Chicken, turkey and other poultry accounted for 17 percent of the food-borne illness outbreaks reported to the government. Beef and leafy vegetables were close behind, at 16 percent and 14 percent. Experts say it represents only a fraction of US –‘ What the hell. Who cares? Nothing new here. You don’t cook the food, you get sick. Big whoop. Something new about this?
‘A rare U.S. outbreak of typhoid fever has been linked to a frozen tropical fruit product used to make smoothies, health officials reported Thursday. Seven cases have been confirmed — three in California and four in Nevada. Two more California cases are being investigated. Five people were hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The CDC said five of the victims drank milkshakes or smoothies made with frozen mamey fruit pulp. Four of them used pulp sold by Goya Foods Inc. of Secaucus, N.J. Mamey is a sweet, reddish tropical fruit grown mainly in Central and South America. It is also known as zapote or sapote. It is peeled and mashed to make pulp, the CDC said. The company has recalled packages of the pulp, sold in mostly Western states. A sample from one package found in Las Vegas tested positive for the bacteria that causes typhoid.’ Here we are the happy Summer of Recovery in Barack Hoover Obama’s America. Fruit smoothies linked to outbreak of typhoid fever. Four people, an outbreak of typhoid fever, four people!
This is from TheHill.com: ‘Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said ‘clean energy’ advocates are getting their ‘asses kicked’ inside the Beltway and is calling on environmental groups to rethink their strategies following the collapse of climate change legislation. The comments, in a blunt interview with the online magazine Yale Environment 360,’ not to be confused with Anderson Cooper 24, ‘come as the environmental movement is plotting its next steps now that long-sought legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions appears dead in Congress. ‘The first thing we need to do is a good assessment of what went wrong.” Try telling the truth about the environment for once, Sierra Club. Stop lying and maybe you’ll get some people on your side. ‘We should not try to do the same thing and expect a different result. We need to rethink what the best way is to build momentum to fight climate change.’ You can’t do anything about it, you dingleberries! There’s not one damn thing you can do about it. We’re not causing it, we can’t fix it, it happens despite us. Go out of business. You people are a menace! You’re frauds. You’re scaring people to death, and you’re taking money from them in the form of donations, and you’re doing nothing with it except enriching yourselves and creating panic.
Back to this Gulf story. Another dubious claim: ‘The giant plumes of oil. By mid-May, oil was still comparatively scarce in the Gulf. Disappointed, the media began trying to figure out where it had gone. Marine researchers were drafted to provide the answer. Diluted oil was being found beneath the surface; but how diluted, no one was sure, and there was nothing vaguely resembling peer-reviewed literature. Still, news reports implied or asserted that ‘enormous oil plumes’ were waiting, like submerged monsters, to rise and attack unsuspecting beaches and wetlands. The New York Times summed up the media consensus on May 15: ‘Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide, and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.”
Oh yeah, remember all those estimates. ‘It’s a hundred thousand gallons a second. No, it’s 500 gazillion gallons a minute! The government’s lying; BP is lying. Pretty soon the Gulf is going to be nothing but oil.’ All of this panic, and it was all untrue. It was all a crock. There were no undersea plumes. It was light crude. The stuff gets eaten alive by the ocean. It’s called mother freaking nature. ‘As with the bogus doomsday model, industry experts say the giant-plume threat was greatly overstated by scientists and further blown out of proportion by the media. … It also ignores the Gulf’s well-known ability to break down oil.’ Well-known ability. Arthur Berman, a respected petroleum expert in Sugar Land, Texas, ‘points out that the Gulf has for millennia been a warm, rich ecological gumbo of natural oil seeps, oil-eating bacteria, and marine life that subsists on the bacteria.’ Yes, marine life that subsist on oil-eating bacteria. ‘His research, he says, suggests that the spill represents at most four times as much oil as seeps into the Gulf naturally in a year — in other words, it is eminently digestible by the native ecosystem.
And then there was the Corexit threat, the dispersants. ‘No aspect of the spill response has been more controversial than the widespread use of Corexit, a family of detergent-like compounds that break up oil, hence the name ‘dispersant.’ Once broken up, oil evaporates, and is also easily eaten by bacteria. Dispersion turns thick, ugly slicks into widely distributed droplets, minimizing damage to beaches and sensitive wetlands. Massive application of dispersants is the reason the spill disappeared so quickly; but it’s important not to spray the dispersants directly on living things, like marshlands or coral.’ Remember the panic about this? When they couldn’t find the oil then they tried to zero in on the dispersants, ‘Oh, my God the dispersants are going to kill the beaches, the fishies and the shrimps and everything!’ Nah, ah, ah. ‘The reality is that enough of anything will kill you, but that the amount of Corexit in the Gulf is highly diluted. As for the British ban on Corexit, it was based not on toxicity, but on the product’s slipperiness: Because the island nation is surrounded by a rocky, ecologically sensitive coastal environment, its version of the EPA makes sure all the small creatures that live there can cling safely to their rocks.’ So they ban Corexit there because it makes the rocks slick and the poor little creatures slip off the rocks where they’re supposed to live, plain and simple.
And then there’s this. So far, because of all this misinformation, even if the regime ‘quickly rescinds its ban on offshore drilling, the economic impact of the spill and the paranoia surrounding it will be huge. Potential visitors and customers are scared.’ So far, the cost has been about 75,000 jobs and more than two and a half billion dollars in wages. Two and a half billion dollars in wages, over 50,000 jobs, all based on total BS, total hysteria, total made-up desired hysteria. (interruption) Yeah, send ’em an unemployment check. That was Obama’s answer, send ’em an unemployment check. Make ’em wards of the state.
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RUSH: St. Augustine, Florida. John, glad you called and welcome. Nice to have you here.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s an honor. Congratulations on your marriage.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: You know, as a lifelong Floridian, someone who works in the tourism industry with some Gulf Coast areas I heard the story that referenced that the Gulf Coast was devastated by the oil spill, but I think the true story is the Gulf Coast areas were devastated by the media and the media coverage.
RUSH: Exactly right, aided by the administration.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Is that it?
CALLER: Well, I guess that’s it.
RUSH: Well, brevity is the soul of wit. No, I applaud you. Brevity is the soul of wit. Florida tourism, Gulf tourism devastated by the media, no question about it. Groupthink, conventional wisdom, ruling class, the elites, smarter than everybody else, the best and the brightest, and they’re idiots. They’re not even curious. There is zero critical thinking whatsoever at the highest levels of our institutions of higher learning even.
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RUSH: Lee, Richmond, Virginia. You’re next, EIB Network, Open Line Friday. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. Kudos.
RUSH: Yes. Thank you.
CALLER: Say, I just wanted to tell you you should warn the Gulf commercial fishing industry to brace itself. Next year, a year after, they’ll probably have a record take. I taught high school science for 20 years, I was in the classroom during the Exxon Valdez spill.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: And of course experts and the pundits predicted dire circumstances for fishermen for unforeseeable future.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Well, two years later they had a follow-up video that I showed in class that showed everything had returned to normal —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — in fact a year after the disaster they had a record take of fish.
RUSH: Right. And it was worse than what happened in the Gulf.
CALLER: It was heavier oil, I believe.
RUSH: In a smaller volume of water to boot.
CALLER: And they actually added some of these oil-consuming bacteria, which of course provides a super food source. And I was on the same page with you with this one. I showed this video to my class and I said not to get too distraught about these dire predictions, and so we both have been proven right.
RUSH: Way to go.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: He is, by the way, absolutely right. That is a great prediction. Record fish season next year in the Gulf Coast.