This hour of the Limbaugh Wire brought to you by the Magical Wingnut Jargon GeneratorTM
By Simon Maloy
Well, we're back for day two of the Mark Steyn Experience despite our suggestion yesterday that slamming a car door on our head might be a preferable alternative. Now, make no mistake -- we're not here out of any desire to actually listen to more Mark Steyn, or because we think a self-inflicted grievous injury might have been the wrong choice. We just don't have a car...
Steyn got things rolling by reminding us that yesterday was “Uighur Wednesday,” so he didn't want any calls today about Uighurs -- save them for “Open Uighur Friday!” tomorrow, he counseled. Steyn then observed that not a lot has been going on at the G8 because none of the leaders from Europe or India are on board with his cap-and-trade agenda. Steyn said he last went to a G8 in 2002 in Canada, and the anti-globalization people showed up like they always do. Steyn said the thing he doesn't understand about the anti-globalization movement is that it's a globalized movement. It's the same people protesting at all these summits all over the world. Anyway, the moral Steyn imparted to us from his story of the 2002 G8 was “don't urinate in the same place twice.” We're not going to bother with the back story he offered -- that's pretty much all you need to know.
From there, Steyn segued to the Daily Mail, which reported that an “anti-ageing pill was created from a chemical found in the soil of Easter Island -- one of the most remote and mysterious places on the planet.” This means, said Steyn, that under the new socialized health care system, you won't have to wait three years for your hip replacement; you'll wait two decades.
The other good news of the day, Steyn said, is that we have final confirmation that men are entirely redundant. Pointing to reports that “Researchers at Newcastle University in England report they have coaxed the first human sperm cells from embryonic stem cells,” Steyn said we no longer are hunter gatherers (because the government takes care of that), we no longer hold the door at the restaurant, and now we're no longer needed for reproduction. So they can manufacture human sperm industrially, said Steyn -- will celebrities have their own sperm line? It's easy to get worried about cap and trade and the stimulus, but this has far greater implications.
And you wonder why we wanted to bludgeon ourselves with a car door...
After the break, Steyn said that Obama's personal ratings are beginning to reflect the unpopularity of his policies. Rasmussen's tracking poll is showing that more people strongly disapprove of Obama than strongly approve, and if you break it down into the battleground states, 48 percent of respondents in Ohio disapprove of Obama's handling of the economy. His numbers are down below 50 percent, said Steyn (no, they aren't), but the media are ignoring it and still treating him as a god, even though he's very much an ordinary politician with serious problems. We have to say it's very amusing to us to see conservatives, who dismissed George W. Bush's abysmal poll numbers as irrelevant, gleefully pronounce Obama's still-strong approval ratings a “problem.”
What people are realizing, said Steyn, is that Obama isn't the moderate that he sold himself as. Temperamentally, he's a moderate, and for a while that worked -- there was opposition to his policies, but it didn't show up in his approval ratings. But now they are showing up. He's not going to be able to get away with fudging this for much longer, Steyn said, because he has his 60 votes in the Senate. This is an all-Democrat government. When a president is promoting unpopular policies, Steyn said, he becomes unpopular, too. Obama is not governing as a centrist, said Steyn, and those people who told us that Obama was a moderate centrist -- like Christopher Buckley and David Brooks -- got “suckered.” At least the people who voted for him because they thought he would be a transformative figure got it right.
After another break, Steyn took his first caller of the day, a gentleman who works in construction in Chicago, who said that the market is a disaster and central planning is not the answer. Steyn said we're going to get more central planning with cap and trade, because it's going to mandate California housing standards for the entire nation. Steyn said what the government doesn't get is that, in the end, it's the small businesses that get things done, and when you try to artificially preserve the value of houses, you're continuing the problems with the market, which would otherwise correct itself. They just want increased regulation and control, said Steyn. The caller said we can't forget that Obama is from Chicago, and he's schooled in corruption. Steyn said you also have in Chicago an alliance between the government class and the dependent class, and in the middle of that there's a dynamic, productive middle class that is being squeezed from both sides. That's the statist model all over the world.
Steyn's next caller was a liberal from Virginia who voted for Obama and agreed with Bill Maher that Obama is being too moderate, and not liberal enough. Steyn wanted to know in what areas Obama's being too moderate, and the caller said Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell, the bailouts, raising troop levels in Afghanistan, not closing Gitmo immediately, and single-payer health care. Steyn said the caller mentioned mainly foreign policy issues, and “the reason that is of no interest to him is because it doesn't offer the opportunity for control, for government control at home.” The caller said that on health care, Obama's not proposing single-payer, and that's really important. Steyn said Obama can't use the words “single-payer,” but he can take steps that will destroy the private health insurers, leaving us with de facto single-payer government health care. He's going to get you there, Steyn told the caller, he just knows there are certain trigger words he can't use. Caller said he thinks Steyn is better than Rush, and he hopes Rush stays on vacation forever. Steyn said he loves these liberal callers, and he wants to hear from liberals who are still happy with Obama, and from the ones who wanted a cool, black guy as president, but didn't want their 401Ks wiped out.
Another break and Steyn came back with his Magical Wingnut Jargon GeneratorTM, which creates -- seemingly out of thin air -- intelligent-sounding words that conservatives can employ to seem informed when regurgitating their attacks on Obama and the Democrats. We've bolded these words, in order to assist you in identifying them. There's a point, said Steyn, when you get to double-digit unemployment that you've essentially "European-ized" the American workforce. Ten percent unemployment in France is normal, said Steyn, and it's the same with Germany. It's not surprising -- one reason they have that is when you over-regulate business, you depress incentives for people to hire new workers. The level of unemployment we have now will be permanent, said Steyn, if Obama's policies are made permanent. Cap and trade, national health care, and more stimulus will make 10 percent unemployment normal. The way to make 10 percent unemployment go away, said Steyn, is to make the "overgovernmentalization" of the economy go away.
Speaking of wingnut jargon, Steyn rounded out the hour with a call from a woman who was at one of the July 4 tea parties, and she said she believed that none of what's going on now with the economy is accidental, but she couldn't really figure out what the motivation was. But then she was turned on to the Cloward-Piven Strategy, which seeks to overturn capitalism by overloading the system. Steyn said this is the right idea -- you make people more dependent on government. This is right out of Saul Alinsky.
Greg Lewis and Zachary Pleat contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire.
Highlights from Hour 1
Outrageous comments
STEYN: No, but let's go through the stuff you don't like, because, essentially, all that is foreign policy and war on terror stuff. And the reason that is of no interest to him is because it doesn't offer the opportunity for control, for government control at home. In the end, he doesn't care whether he backpedals on his policy regarding detainees in Gitmo, because that's peripheral to the overall scheme of things. He doesn't care about troop levels in Afghanistan or Iraq -- that's peripheral to the scheme of things.
He doesn't care about foreign policy much at all. His whole approach to the rest of the world is he doesn't want it getting in the way while he's busy transforming America. The last thing you need if you're like -- if you want to transform American into a statist, socialist basket case, the last thing you want is a bunch of terrorists blowing up Cleveland, or whatever, in the middle of it, before -- you don't want Cleveland blown up before you've turned it into a socialist basket case. That's basically the extent of his interest in these things.