RUSH: Now, we had a caller talking about media reaction to Ted Cruz’s speech or filibuster and how it angered her. Let’s listen to some of that because we have our share of it just as an illustration. This is yesterday, the Atlantic magazine had a Women of Washington forum series. Snerdley, don’t you wish you’d been able to go to that? Women of Washington. I mean, how many testicle lockboxes do you think were at this forum? Washington women? Ha!

Anyway, The Atlantic put this thing on, and they got Karen Finney, who’s a Democrat strategist and an MSNBC infobabe, interviewing Democrat Senator Patty Murray. Now, this is the Brit Hume talking point, which is the Republican Party’s run completely on fear of me. And here’s how this sound bite goes.

FINNEY: Their like, “Oh, we can’t do that. We can’t speak out against Rush.” Right? “But he’s not a leader in our party. But donÂ’t think that. ItÂ’s not that. ItÂ’s just we canÂ’t say anything.” And similarly, you know, you hear that kind of conversation about the Tea Party people.

MURRAY: That’s leading from a point of fear. And people don’t support fear. They want, whether youÂ’re a CEO of a company or a whether you are a legislator, or you know, whatever role you have, they want to be confident in their leader. If youÂ’re confident in yourself people will be confident in you. And they need to take him on.

FINNEY: They do.

RUSH: Who are they talking about, me or Cruz? I don’t know who they’re talking about here, because my name, “Well, they can’t do that. We can’t speak out against Rush, right? He’s not a leader, but don’t think that, it’s not that. We just can’t say anything.” They’re talking about me! They need to take me on. This is the Brit Hume talking point. The Republican Party — this is what they’re saying — Republican Party is run completely on fear of Rush Limbaugh.

I asked Cruz yesterday, you mighta heard, I said, “Senator, are you afraid of me?” Snerdley and everybody thought that’s gonna be the pull quote of the interview. No, no, no, because Cruz laughed at it and swatted it away, so of course nobody in the Drive-Bys is mentioning that I asked Cruz that question. But this is what got me. This is a Democrat talking point, and here it is on Fox News, that all these Republicans are afraid of me, and that their fear of me is what’s standing in the way of them doing the right thing. Brit Hume was on O’Reilly’s show.

Okay, here’s another one. This is The Situation Room on CNN with Jessica Yellin reporting about Ted Cruz’s filibuster. Now, get this one.

YELLIN: Karl Rove called it an ill-conceived and self-defeating strategy. Guess what? Cruz loves the hate. He told Rush Limbaugh —

CRUZ: The single biggest surprise in arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude here.

YELLIN: You know who else does? Conservatives in a crucial primary state, Iowa.

RUSH: I read the transcript here and I just listen to this, and I don’t know what she’s talking about, and she is an infobabe at CNN. Can I run this by you? Okay, I don’t know the question, just her report. Karl Rove called what Cruz did, his filibuster, Karl Rove called it an ill-conceived and self-defeating strategy. And guess what? Cruz loves the hate. What? So Karl Rove hates Cruz is what this means and Cruz loves the fact that he’s hated by the Republican Party. That’s what she’s saying here.

Cruz loves the hate? Did Cruz say anything about hate? These people have to use the word “hate” and associate it with conservatives every chance they get. The truth is they’re the ones that hate us. It’s the media that’s afraid of me, not Ted Cruz. It’s the Democrats who are afraid of me, not Ted Cruz. There may be some Republicans, but that’s silly. And then, they quote Cruz, “the single biggest surprise on arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude here.” I thought that was huge news yesterday. Ted Cruz said at every luncheon of the Republican senators they never talk about how to win. He said they never talk about winning anything. He said, “Rush, if you had to attend one of these lunches, you’d be in therapy for a year.”

Okay, so Cruz is quoted in this piece as saying, “The single biggest surprise in arriving at the Senate is the defeatist attitude here,” and Jessica Yellin reacts to that by saying, “You know who else does? Conservatives in a crucial primary state, Iowa.” What is that about? Cruz’s single biggest surprise in arriving to the Senate is the “defeatist attitude.” “You know who else does? Conservatives in a crucial primary state.” I guess she’s saying that conservatives in Iowa have a defeatist attitude?

Is that what she’s saying?

No. “The single biggest surprise in arriving to the Senate is the defeatist attitude here.” That’s Cruz. Then she says, “You know who else does?” Who else “does” what? (interruption) Maybe it’s they enjoy hate? Oh. Maybe she’s saying that the conservatives in Iowa also enjoy the hate. It’s impossible to decipher. I have no idea. This is a reporter for CNN, and we have no idea what she’s saying. No idea. Well, I know the words. I don’t know what the point she’s making is.

Let’s see. We have a Democrat hate montage here, calling Republicans arsonists, terrorists, rapists, hostage takers. You talk about who hates? Listen to this.

CHUCK SCHUMER: You can’t have someone put a gun to your head.

MARK ZANDI: You can only put the gun to your head so many times.

HARRY REID: (whispering) We’re not going to bow to Tea Party anarchists, Republican fanatics.

NANCY PELOSI: I call them “legislative arsonists.”

KIRSTEN POWERS: The fringe of their party.

TAMARA HOLDER: They are raping the American people.

STENY HOYER: It is a blatant act of hostage taking.

PETER KING: Holding the entire Congress hostage.

MIKE VIQUEIRA: (background noise) Republicans hold the Affordable Care Act hostage!

BARBARA LEE: The Affordable Care Act would be held hostage.

ROBERT GIBBS: …hold the running of government hostage

BILL PASCRELL: (rotunda noise) We are not going to be held hostage by Mr. Cruz.

BILL MAHER: The House Republicans are holding hostage…

CYNTHIA TUCKER: A bunch of terrorists, who will have taken the country hostage.

BARACK OBAMA: (godlike echo) TheyÂ’re holding the whole country hostage.

RUSH: That is a standard Democrat line on every issue that comes down the pike. The Republicans are holding Congress or whoever, whatever, whenever, hostage. But they’re not “haters,” folks. People who talk like this accuse us of being anarchists and bomb throwers and hostage takers and terrorists? But they are never described as haters. Here’s Peter King, congressman from New York. I thought he was a Fox News commentator. I didn’t know he was a congressman from New York. When does he have time to be at Congress? He’s always on Fox. Every time I turn around and look at Fox, there’s Peter King there. Anyway, I’ve never heard him attack Harry Reid or Pelosi or any of them, but listen to what he said about Ted Cruz.

KING: No, to me this is like the Charge of the Light Brigade or like Gallipoli or like, uh, a kamikaze pilot and he’s not standing on principle. First of all, I don’t know what he’s standing on but he’s standing for a strategy that can’t work. It’s gonna personally help him as far as his political status but it’s going to be bad for the country, bad for the Republican Party. If I asked my constituents — and those I’ve spoken to think he’s crazy. They know what’s real and what’s not, and they know a guy who’s being basically a, uh, almost like a medicine man here selling goods that he knows are phony goods.

RUSH: Peter — seriously, now — do you really mean that? Have you ever described Obama as “a medicine man selling goods that he knows are phony goods”? Have you ever once thought about describing your real political opponents that way? So here you’ve got this dreadful, awful thing called Obamacare, and you’ve got one guy trying to stop it, and the Republican Party goes after that guy — not the awful thing, Obamacare, and not the people who are responsible for it at the Democrats.

If the Republicans want to know why four million of ’em sat home on Election Day, and why their campaign donations are down, it’s this kind of thing. Where is this kind of combativeness against the real political opponents of the Republicans, the Democrats? Ted Cruz is a medicine man? This guy says, “I talk to my constituents and everybody out there thinks he’s crazy”? So I guess it’s Anderson Cooper was interviewing… (interruption) Oh, King wasn’t on Fox, he was on CNN? Oh. He gets around.

Anderson Cooper then said to Peter King, “It is unusual for a member of Congress to be so tough on a member of his own party, Peter. I mean, saying that he’s a fraud? Why are you speaking out like this.”

KING: I don’t think we owe any loyalty to Ted Cruz. He spent, you know, the last months of the summer trying to put Republicans on the spot, trying, uh, to force — eh, basically intimidate Republican members of Congress to vote his way with the implicit threats of primaries. Eh, he had no — no regard or respect for, uh, eh, us. So why should we be concerned about him at all? I mean, I’ve never seen anyone as unpopular in Republican circles as Ted Cruz, but he continues to do, and it’s just creating real — again, real problems for the Republican Party.

RUSH: These people, they don’t see it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Queens. This is Lee. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking the call. I want to talk about the process of lumping all of government spending into one big, giant, miscellaneous spending bill and how grandma is not gonna get her Social Security check unless we fund all these other programs. Every year, grandma’s check is gonna be held unless we fund whatever else they want. I think this process is an iron grip over the entire economy, and it’s completely government manufactured.

RUSH: Yeah, because you know why? Even when there’s a government shutdown, grandma gets her check.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Even when that happens, grandma gets paid. But what you’re saying is… If I understood what you’re saying — and I might not have, which would not be your fault, it would be mine. What you’re saying is that what the government does is essentially hold hostage every bit of spending to the concerns of the elderly and whether or not they’re gonna get their Social Security.

CALLER: Right. I mean, I just use that as an example. It could be the military, it could be whatever program, and if Boehner was actually serious… I mean, I have my doubts about that vote because he coulda sent something over that he knew was just gonna get shot down, but if he was truly serious, he can send over separate bills to fund the military, separate bills to fund Social Security, whatever it is, and just don’t send the bill over to fund Obamacare. You know? And then what is Obama gonna say about a government shutdown if he’s sitting there looking at a pure, clean bill to fund each of these programs?

RUSH: Well, the problem is… Look, you’re exactly right. The problem from, like, Boehner’s perspective is that no matter what he does, the media is going to say he and the Republicans are denying grandma her check. No matter what he does, no matter what trick, no matter what smart thing he does. This is what they’re afraid of.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, we’re up to audio sound bite number six. The unbridled hate for Ted Cruz is striking. I think back to the Watergate days, the Nixon days. Those of you who were not alive then or were too young in the seventies and eighties to care or pay any attention to this kind of thing, I can’t describe for you how utterly despised Richard Nixon was by the Democrats of the day and the media.

You think that they hated George W. Bush or name anybody today that you think they hate, and you’re not even getting close to the almost rabid hatred for Richard Nixon. Now, you might be asking, “Well, what was it about?” There is an answer to this that engenders almost as much hate, but it is about a man by the name of Alger Hiss. Two things here. Alger Hiss was proven to be a communist spy back during forties and fifties.

The Democrat Party and the left of the day loved Alger Hiss, and they hated Nixon for exposing him. To this day, Nixon is hated for having exposed — successfully exposed — Alger Hiss as a communist spy working in the State Department. He was at the high levels, and Nixon got him, and they hated Nixon for it. Nixon also had the audacity to defeat a woman for public office by the name of Helen Douglas, Helen Gahagan Douglas.

For some reason, they just hated Nixon for the campaign he ran against this angelic, peaceful little librarian woman. She was not that, but it’s how she was portrayed. Nixon didn’t like being hated, so Nixon attempted to curry favor with his enemies. So he grew government like no Republican ever has, and it bought him nothing. I don’t know why that lesson is not learned today.

Nixon gave them OSHA.

Nixon gave them the Environmental Protection Agency.

Nixon gave them wage and price controls.

Nixon gave them I don’t know how many bureaucracies.

Nixon gave ’em affirmative action.

He gave ’em everything! He was did everything he could to not be hated. Nixon was a guy… You know what? Richard Nixon’s wife was named Pat. He loved that woman from teenage days. He would drive her on her dates with other guys just so he could be with her. I don’t know how that was arranged. Maybe he was the only one who had a car and he offered to drive her and her dates around. He was considered socially awkward.

He was a brilliant politician, but they hated him. I mean, they literally despised him. But my point is, even in those days of Watergate, the Republicans then went to the White House (led by Howard Baker) and privately and behind closed doors, they let Nixon have it. They told him they don’t support him and that he was destroying the party, but they didn’t do it publicly, for the longest time. At the end, I mean everybody joined in.

But what they’re doing to Ted Cruz is public. My point is, what the Republican Party and its associates are doing to Ted Cruz wasn’t even done to Nixon, and Nixon was despised. I cannot emphasize enough how despised he was and is, to this day. They thought they had sent Nixon away forever, and he comes back and he wins the presidency in ’68 in the midst of the Vietnam War; then he brought Kissinger in, and they opened the doors to China.

They hated everything about him. But the Republicans, during the Watergate era, very privately went up to the White House and told Nixon that they couldn’t support him. They didn’t go in public until the last days of it all, like is happening with Ted Cruz. There was no Peter King of the Nixon era going on television, trashing Nixon in the midst of it. Now, Ted Cruz spoke for 21 hours, and everybody talks about all the hate and this and all the craziness.

But nobody’s quoted anything. For twenty-one hours, Ted Cruz spoke, and nobody’s quoted craziness. Nobody’s pointed to what he said as nuts, mean-spirited, extremist mean, hateful or what have you. Twenty-one hours straight. For his part, Ted Cruz didn’t personally attack anybody in his 21 hours. But yet the long knives are out, and this is not just the Republicans.

This is the Washington establishment circling the wagons and making sure that any outsider is head off, cut off at the pass. “No outsider is gonna come in here and upset the applecart and destroy what they have going.” So we go back to the sound bites in this context, and CBS This Morning today, Charlie Rose speaking with the political director of CBS News, John Dickerson, about Cruz’s filibuster. Charlie Rose says: So, John, old buddy, old pal, “What did Ted Cruz achieve?”

DICKERSON: Talking to senators, Republican senators, they have very dark feelings about Senator Cruz. They think he wasted time. They think he gave the party a black eye, infighting among Republicans instead of keeping them together so they could fight the president. So he’s got some enemies now. They thought this was so foolish. Yes, be against Obamacare, but don’t do it in this dumb way. That was what other Republican senators were saying.

RUSH: Oh, are they against it, too? I didn’t know. Are there other Republican senators against Obamacare other than Ted Cruz and Mike Lee? I didn’t know there were. Be against it how? What is the smart way to be against Obamacare, hmm? What is that? Yeah, “don’t do it in this dumb way”? Well, what’s the smart way? They think he wasted time? He gave the party a black eye? Infighting among the Republicans? This is all because he didn’t tell ’em in advance what he was gonna do, and I asked him about that. Here’s David “Rodham” Gergen, who’s the architect of conventional wisdom in Washington, last night on CNN. These are his comments on Cruz and the filibuster.

GERGEN: For vast majority of Americans looking at this, they’re shaking their heads again saying, “What is going wrong in the Republican Party? Why are we being treated like this? Is this guy really ready for prime time?” From my point of view, yes, the Republican Party has to fight. But if it strikes people that the base has moved so far as to become extreme, the growing opportunity for Republicans to take back the Senate next year and to take back the White House in 2016 is going to be blown if people think the party has been taken hostage by extremists.

RUSH: And the Republican Party has been winning the Senate lately by doing what? Oh. Excuse me. They’re not. They haven’t won in the Senate in a long time. Never mind.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, so the throat. That’s what I call David “Rodham” Gergen. It sounds like he’s speaking right from the throat, Adam’s apple. David “Rodham” Gergen says that the Republican Party, it’s coming off as just way too extreme. What’s wrong with the Republican Party, people are asking. Wait a minute. Last I looked, 80% of the country opposes Obamacare, in one poll. In one poll, 12% support it. In another poll, 40% support it. Most of the country, vast, clear majority must be extremists because they don’t want Obamacare. Poll after poll, I don’t care which one. So really, with whom is Ted Cruz aligned here?

The vast majority of Americans are vehemently opposed to Obamacare, so what is extreme about that? The extremists, by this definition, are the minority that support it. I mean, it really is a new day when being for smaller government, more limited government, being for the Constitution is now called extremism, terrorism. Defending the Constitution, standing for the things the Founders stood for is called extremism and terrorism, according to the Washington establishment now. God knows what would have David Gergen called the Founders if he’da been around doing commentary? What would he have called the Founders?

These guys woulda all been defending King George III. These guys would have been on the sides of the Redcoats. And Jefferson and Washington and the boys would have been the malcontents and the extremists and they’d be upsetting the applecart. The Founders who actually took up arms for liberty and for a smaller, less intrusive government, in the eyes of our current pundit class, would have been nuts and bitter clingers, hanging onto their guns and so forth.