RUSH: Open Line Friday. You can talk about whatever you want to talk about on the Friday edition. Here is Diane in Greenville, Tennessee. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine. Thank you.
CALLER: We need to talk about Republican guts. I am a truck driver, non-union.
RUSH: Hm-hm.
CALLER: Unions have priced themselves out of the job market. I’m pretty tired of them griping and moaning about jobs, fair wages, right to work. Who gave them the ability to have a job for life? Now, on top of that, they are thrusting a pension bubble on top of this country that we can’t afford. I hate the word unsustainability, but this fits.
RUSH: Well, you’re talking about public sector unions —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — you’re talking about —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — NEA, the teachers, municipal workers, and you’re right about the unfunded liabilities that we face on their pensions, there’s no question.
CALLER: And in the meantime the Obama administration has rescinded executive orders that were signed by President Bush for the Labor Department as far as transparency and accountability with their books, their right to hire, where their money goes, and they’re not accountable anymore.
RUSH: This should not have surprised you.
CALLER: No, it didn’t.
RUSH: Obama and the unions, there’s an umbilical cord there.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Has not yet been severed.
CALLER: I think this strikes at the heart of the human working condition. If you are preferred as a worker over me, who are you to be preferred over me when I work just as hard as you do?
RUSH: Well, that’s exactly — you know, if I had a question for President Obama today in his press conference, I coulda said this. ‘Mr. President, the average federal bureaucrat makes $120,000 with salary and benefits. The average private sector employee earns half that much. So who’s defending the rich and who’s attacking the middle class, Mr. President? Mr. President, you are defending the rich.’ I don’t think Obama — and we can talk about whether he understands it or not — I don’t think he understands how a private sector job is created. He’s never had one, and when he did work at a private sector he thought he was behind enemy lines. I think he believes a government job is the same thing as a private sector job. I don’t really think he understands. He’s a theoretician. I don’t think he understands the difference in a private sector job and a public sector job. I think he thinks they’re one and the same, and I think he thinks spending federal money to create jobs is the same thing as growing the private sector. I think he does. And if he doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t matter, because the outcome is the same. He’s still doing as much damage whether he knows it or not to the genuine engine of production of this country which is the private sector. And, Diane, your voice is one of a chorus of millions who call here and I can hear the angst, the anger, dissatisfaction. And look, do you hear what she’s saying, ‘What is it about you,’ she’s saying of other unions, federal union people, public union people, ‘what is it about you that guarantees your job forever? Who are you?’ So Obama’s gotten everybody at each other’s throats here. Mr. Unifier has come to divide, and he has succeeded.