RUSH: Mary in Glenburn, Maine. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Greetings from the great state of Maine.

RUSH: Thank you. Great to have you here.

CALLER: I promised to say hi to my husband Phillip who is hopefully still listening on his lunch break. I have two points to talk about today, which back up what you said earlier about the difference between America and Europe.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: The first is during my time working for Lufthansa German airlines as a stewardess. I was stationed in Frankfurt but I had been visiting a friend of mine, Heidi, in Austria. As I got ready to leave for a flight one day she looked at me and said, “You’re such a risk taker.” Now, I don’t consider myself a risk taker, but before I could say anything, she continued and said, “It’s in your nature as an American. Part of the American spirit is to be risk-takers. Your ancestors got on the boat and left Europe to face the unknown in America. My ancestors stayed here. They weren’t willing to give up what they had here.” So I thought that is —

RUSH: Now, Mary, what were you doing that Heidi at Lufthansa thought constituted a risk?

CALLER: Just getting on the plane each day to go to work. That, for her, was risk-taking.

RUSH: What did she do?

CALLER: Oh, she was a nurse at the time.

RUSH: So she thought it was a risk getting on an airplane every day?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: And that was something distinctly American that she wouldn’t have done?

CALLER: Yes, in the American spirit.

RUSH: Right, and she equated that to ancient Europeans. Interesting.

CALLER: Now, the second point goes along with unnecessary regulations and laws. It happened some years later when I was a young mom living over there. My three-year-old daughter got injured on the playground. Her grandmother, Oma, had been pushing her on the swung. She got down and actually got hit in the mouth by the wooden swing. Her tooth —

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. Who got hit in the mouth, the grandmother?

CALLER: My daughter.

RUSH: Your daughter.

CALLER: My three-year-old daughter. But Oma was so adamant that I not take her to the emergency room to seek medical help because the law at the time over there was such that the grown-up watching the child would have been held accountable and prosecuted under the law, even if it was an accident, which it clearly was.

RUSH: You gotta be kidding?

CALLER: No, I’m not kidding.

RUSH: So a three-year-old gets hit in the mouth by a swing on the playground and your grandmother says don’t take her to —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: — the ER because I’m gonna get in trouble as negligent.

CALLER: Yes. So I had to get her calmed down and send her home, and of course I sought medical attention under the crappy medical care that they have over there. But my daughter’s tooth was saved and she had braces for a while and she got the care she needed.

RUSH: And did you indeed have to face questioning from the authorities and produce your papers and all that kind of stuff?

CALLER: No, I did not. I knew the doctor quite well. He knew our family.

RUSH: Oh. Okay.

CALLER: But can you imagine the kind of fear that’s instilled by unnecessary laws?

RUSH: Absolutely. I don’t mean to make light of that. Absolutely, totally, and the total unwillingness to challenge it, just to acquiesce to it, just —

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: — take the path of least resonance, no matter what it is? Yeah, there’s a movie that I saw called “The Lives of Others.” It was about the Stasi in East Germany during the Cold War and about the surveillance and all of the other tactics that the state used to spy on people and to keep them in line. It was about how people were basically afraid to leave their apartments every day. The only place they felt comfortable speaking to each other was to go to the bathroom. They thought somehow the bathroom was safe, wasn’t bugged or something. It was just a profound experience. The Lives of Others.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Don in Portage, Michigan. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet, sir.

CALLER: The subject I want to talk about was the preamble of the Constitution is we’ve got a situation where it starts right out, it says that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they’re endowed by their creator, and everything’s based on that, the value of the person, what are those rules, the foundation for the rules of law. And the public schools have taught, in my time, which was 50 years ago in school, and even our daughter’s and our grandchildren’s time, that they would teach that there’s an overwhelming tendency in the universe for things to come into order by themselves and therefore there’s no value to life. Some people may be more evolved than others. That would give them their value. And there’s just no basis for this.

RUSH: Well, it’s actually the preamble to the declaration, rather than the Constitution, but you’re right, it’s a powerful statement.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: I mean, this is one of the fundamental reasons why the United States became what it became. This acknowledgement that we are all endowed by our Creator — that would be God-d — with certain inalienable rights, among them, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. That is how we are born, that is where our freedom and liberty and humanity come from. It comes from God, not from government. It comes from God, not from law. It was huge! It was profound!

And that alone — I mean, you’ll hear Democrats cite that with supposed reverence, but that’s a big threat to them and a lot of other people who want as many people to believe as possible that, A, there isn’t a God. And, B, if there is, he doesn’t care about us; the job’s too big. And, really, our freedoms come from government and elected officials who care about us. That’s who’s really looking out for us. You can’t count on God for anything.

And then this whole notion that we’re all born with certain inalienable rights, that we’re all equated equal. Well, they’ll tell you right away that’s flawed because we’re not equal, and it’s their job to make us equal. So God screwed up, or the Founders screwed up, or somebody screwed up, and that’s what Obama’s whole take now is, his whole pitch is, this level of inequality and unfairness out there, and it’s his job to change that. And it isn’t his job. It’s not his right. It’s not his business. And precisely because we’re all different.

I mean, any explanation of American exceptionalism has to include the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. And again, American exceptionalism does not mean superior or better. It means why we are the exception to the way most human beings have lived and have been governed.