Rush Limbaugh: A Colossal Failure of Liberalism

CALLER: You were talking about the political fallout for the governor and the mayor, but I'm talking about an immediate reaction like a recall. They're going to have a tremendous amount of money pouring into the state, and they've shown at the very least a gross mismanagement and at the worst, huge graft.

RUSH: You know, that's an interesting question because let me go back to something I mentioned at the top of the program to tell you where that battle is being fought. I mentioned earlier today a story in the New York Times by Robin Toner which says that this episode says the conservatives have a lot to answer for in the sense that conservatives have been hammering away at large government and they've been whittling away at large government, and they've taken the government down and they've limited it, and they've made it more efficient, they've made it smaller, and then this disaster comes along and look, why the conservative version of government doesn't succeed. Well, of course that's pure folly. The government is not smaller in any measurable away. It has been the desire of some conservatives, but it has not been the desire of this president. He may be conservative, but he has not tried to make the government smaller. This government has built more bureaucracy and layered it on top of other bureaucracies. Created homeland security, moved FEMA into it, and just made it all the more difficult here for the big bureaucracy to handle itself and to function efficiently as a small one would more likely do. So you've got that and that's a media reality once again that's totally untrue. There is no smaller government.

On the other hand, Jeannie, you have the literal fact that more money has gone to New Orleans for levees and the Corps of Engineers in five years of the Bush administration than any time during the Clinton administration. As you pointed out, the local officials have not spent it wisely, who knows where it's gone. It hasn't gone to poverty relief because the poverty rate down there is bad. The reality is that you have a massive socialist type entitlement state in New Orleans and through a lot of Louisiana, and you look at when a disaster hits, the people are out there saying, "This is just really displaying the depths of American poverty." No, it's not. It's displaying the depths of poverty in a liberal Democrat-run community, not the depths of poverty in America. You're not seeing this, as I say, from Mississippi. You don't see stuff like this when hurricanes go through Florida. You just do not see it. So what Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin are saying is that it's not their fault, that the government didn't succeed, government didn't work, and government needs to be bigger. The left is saying this proves that government is not yet big enough.

The lesson here is something that I and other conservatives have been saying for decades, and that is that self-reliance and self-responsibility are the best things to be able to fall back on. You hear that a disaster is coming, make sure that you have the ability to get out of the way. Make sure you have the ability to move. We're talking about saving lives here. Everybody is going to suffer economic and financial losses in a disaster this size, so we're talking about saving lives. Why is it that the people who were able to get themselves out have become enemies? Why is it that, "Well, easy for them to do, but what about the poor?" What about the poor? We still haven't had the proper argument in this country about why they're poor, and the reason that we haven't is because the left believes they're poor because of the construction of this country. They think that the system of capitalism dictates that there will be haves and have-nots and therefore there is no attempt even made to help the have-nots, that capitalism is comfortable with haves and have-nots. But socialism, even though it's never worked, even though it is something that requires revolution, dictators, and walls to keep people in, even though it's never worked, the self-loathers constantly rely on the promise of socialism and the promise of equality, the good intentions of equality. "We'll make sure that there are no haves and have-nots, there are just haves." Well, when you take away entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets, and that's why socialism does, you don't have achievers. You've got people that become more and more and then totally dependent. So the argument here really is, "Is the government not big enough, or is it too big?"

The media, which is creating a reality for everybody, is out there saying, "This proves small government doesn't work and we need to have government get even bigger." And mark my words, when the inevitable hearings begin, that will be the theme of the left. That government wasn't big enough and it wasn't ready enough and it needs a new department of disaster relief, we need a new cabinet level, homeland hurricane security, or whatever, something along these lines. And then we'll have a whole new bureaucracy that's supposed to sit around and do nothing but get ready for these. On the other hand, you'll have people saying that, "No, the government is too big and if you're going to make it even bigger it's only going to get worse." The bottom line, if you want the real truth, the bottom line is that the local and state governments failed miserably, there's no question about it, I don't care who wants to try to rewrite history here. The dirty little secret is that the feds got there pretty quick and they got there pretty quick with a lot of stuff that could help people. They got there faster than they got there in five other hurricanes. In some cases, the lag was five or six days. They were there in three days. This was big. We now know that the Salvation Army was ready with pallets of food and water to go to the convention center and the Superdome, but the state Department of Homeland Security said "No, if you take that stuff in there it's only going to attract more people and we want to get them out." As time goes on -- this is why you're going to see Democrats less and less eager for hearings. As time goes on, we're going to learn that the federal government did pretty much what it is supposed to do in these circumstances, and that the one element of the federal government that the left literally despises, the US military, deserves the gold medal, and General Russell Honore, because once he got off the plane and started doing his John Wayne routine, things started happening, one guy in charge. He didn't care about which bureaucrat he had to answer to, he didn't care about the leaflet of forms that he had to go through, and check off that box, check off that box, call this bureaucrat, call that bureaucrat, fill out Form 345(b,) Section 2, subparagraph 4, he threw all that to the shreds, and simply started barking orders.

He said, "Damn it! Go out there and take care of that." People started marching. So you can't even really call the military a bureaucracy. It is a streamlined organization with a definite chain of command and when an order is given, it's carried out. Most of the time, otherwise the person is shot. (Only kidding, members of the left.) But the fear of not carrying out an order is huge in the military. So as to your question, will there be political fallout? The governor and the mayor who may face a recall, I don't know that it will get there, once it is finally learned how much money was spent down there, and once it is learned who actually prevented all that money from being spent -- hello wacko environmentalists. Hello militant environmentalists wackos. If the truth, if the reality ever hits mass distribution, then there will be hell to pay. If the media reality of focusing all this on an inept big government, because of who's running this big government, and that of course is George W. Bush, if it stays there, then Nagin and these local people will survive. But Jeannie, what's happening now, you've got a record amount of federal aid coupled with private donations heading down to that region, and right now, while you could go down there and you could look and you wouldn't see it, because it's all happening behind closed doors, but right now the jockeying is on for who's going to be in position to receive those dollars and distribute them. It is another scandal waiting to happen. You think the looting so far has been bad, ha. Wait 'til the looting of the $100 billion starts. You just wait. That's what's being set up now, who is going to be in positions of power to accept that money and distribute it, and I think that a large factor in this is the positioning that the mayor and the governor are taking here to try to be in position to have access to those dollars. When you're in politics, it's all about money. It's all about raising it and spending it because that is where you derive your power, particularly in liberal and socialist-run communities. When you've got the money to pass out, and hand out, you've got the money to buy power. And put two and two together here.

I was in a grocery store buying a loaf of bread a while back and the woman in front of me had four kids and was paying for her groceries (mostly junk food) with food stamps. I paid for my bread and walked out into the parking lot and saw this same woman getting into a brand new $60K Lexus. It made me sick.

I remember when I was in college, I got a lot of offers for credit cards and sent away for all of them. Soon I was in way over my head and had no idea what to do (I owed about $20K). I went to my parent and told them what was going on. We worked out a deal, they paid them all off and cancelled the accounts. My father then took away my car, put me on a very tight allowance and I had to hand him my check every week when I worked over the summer. I remember being pissed and complaining that I wouldn't have any money to have fun, he said, "you had about $20000 worth of fun in the past few month, that should last you a while." I learned a very valuable lesson, IF YOU CAN'T AFFORD SOMETHING, YOU SHOULDN'T BUY IT!

I've never had these problems since, now I have money in the bank, perfect credit, a new car and everything I need; a few months ago I was about to buy a 60 inch plasma TV and my wife looked at me and said, "all you watch is Fox News, why the hell do you need a big screen TV?" Bottom line, it's not intelligence or ability which makes most people poor, it's their attitude.

I received this via e-mail today and literally went postal. If anyone ever asks why Attorneys and the Far left are so despised, then read this (I'd post it as an article but I don't know how)

"The Two Americas

By Marjorie Cohn

09/03/05 "t r u t h o u t" -- --- Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."

"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."

"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin."

They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff," Valdes observed.

After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does."

Our federal and local governments had more than ample warning that hurricanes, which are growing in intensity thanks to global warming, could destroy New Orleans. Yet, instead of heeding those warnings, Bush set about to prevent states from controlling global warming, weaken FEMA, and cut the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for levee construction in New Orleans by $71.2 million, a 44 percent reduction.

Bush sent nearly half our National Guard troops and high-water Humvees to fight in an unnecessary war in Iraq. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Paris in New Orleans, noted a year ago, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq."

An Editor and Publisher article Wednesday said the Army Corps of Engineers "never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security - coming at the same time as federal tax cuts - was the reason for the strain," which caused a slowdown of work on flood control and sinking levees.

"This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide," said Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager in the New Orleans district of the corps.

Unlike in Cuba, where homeland security means keeping the country secure from deadly natural disasters as well as foreign invasions, Bush has failed to keep our people safe. "On a fundamental level," Paul Krugman wrote in yesterday's New York Times, "our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on prevention measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice."

During the 2004 election campaign, vice presidential candidate John Edwards spoke of "the two Americas." It seems unfathomable how people can shoot at rescue workers. Yet, after the beating of Rodney King aired on televisions across the country, poor, desperate, hungry people in Watts took over their neighborhoods, burning and looting. Their anger, which had seethed below the surface for so long, erupted. That's what's happening now in New Orleans. And we, mostly white, people of privilege, rarely catch a glimpse of this other America.

"I think a lot of it has to do with race and class," said Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reached a breaking point Thursday night. "You mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources we need? Come on, man!"

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had boasted earlier in the day that FEMA and other federal agencies have done a "magnificent job" under the circumstances.

But, said, Nagin, "They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying. Get off your asses and let's do something!"

When asked about the looting, the mayor said that except for a few "knuckleheads," it is the result of desperate people trying to find food and water to survive.

Nagin blamed the outbreak of violence and crime on drug addicts who have been cut off from their drug supplies, wandering the city, "looking to take the edge off their jones."

When Hurricane Ivan hit Cuba, no curfew was imposed; yet, no looting or violence took place. Everyone was in the same boat.

Fidel Castro, who has compared his government's preparations for Hurricane Ivan to the island's long-standing preparations for an invasion by the United States, said, "We've been preparing for this for 45 years."

On Thursday, Cuba's National Assembly sent a message of solidarity to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It says the Cuban people have followed closely the news of the hurricane damage in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and the news has caused pain and sadness. The message notes that the hardest hit are African-Americans, Latino workers, and the poor, who still wait to be rescued and taken to secure places, and who have suffered the most fatalities and homelessness. The message concludes by saying that the entire world must feel this tragedy as its own.

Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to t r u t h o u t, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists."

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