RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, there’s so much out there that seems on the surface to be inexplicable. The problem in this country, as a majority of people recognize, I mean, look at this poll here. Look at this. It is a poll from the Pew Research Center. The bottom line: 81% of the people in this country are dissatisfied. Eighty-one percent are dissatisfied. Do you think they’re dissatisfied with Ted Cruz? Do you think they’re dissatisfied with the Tea Party? Do you think they’re dissatisfied with the opposition to Barack Obama? The Republican Party obviously thinks so, but that is tantamount insanity.

“A new poll shows more frustration with Washington over the government shutdown and risk of default, with the number of people satisfied with the state of the country plummeting to the lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis. Only 14 percent of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the US. … The survey also picked up a strong ‘throw the bums out’ sentiment.”

Now, of course, what this poll attempts to convince people of is that everything in Washington was fine and that everybody was happy with Washington until the shutdown. We were just robustly happy, and then the shutdown came, and whoever is responsible for that, why, everybody’s really ticked off at them. That would be Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and the Tea Party. And, of course, the Republican and Democrat establishments are lined up that way, and that’s what the polling data is attempting to establish.

The fact of the matter is, a majority of people in this country have been dissatisfied for a number of years about the way the country is going, and you know and I know that the people in this country who are dissatisfied with the way it’s going are not dissatisfied with the Tea Party. They are not dissatisfied with Ted Cruz or Mike Lee. They are the only opposition to what’s been going on.

I was trying to think earlier today, if ever in my life I could remember any major political party being so irrelevant. I have never seen it. I have never seen a major political party simply occupy placeholders, as the Republican Party is doing. There hasn’t been any opposition, not any serious opposition. There may have been votes against this or that, votes against Obamacare. There may have been votes against the stimulus, but in terms of a package of policies, a package of principled beliefs, of opposition expressed daily by party leaders against what’s happening in this country, there hasn’t been. And I know why. And you do, too.

The Republicans have been hoodwinked. There are two things that have happened. A, they are literally paralyzed because Obama is African-American. They are literally paralyzed. Before that happened, the Democrats and the media ran one of the most brilliant political tricks I have ever seen pulled off. That political trick convinced Republicans, and, more importantly, their brilliant moderate consultants, that criticizing any Democrat president would anger the independents. Remember that? Because the independents, God bless the independents, oh, my God, folks, the princes and the princesses of our culture. The moderate independents, the only reasonable people out there. The only open-minded, nonbigoted, nonclosed-minded human beings in America.

Twenty percent of the voting population are independents, if you win them, you win everything. Ask Mitt Romney about that. He won big with independents. But his base stayed home. That’s why we’re here. Anyway. So the Republicans got hooked into this belief that any criticism would send the independents running to the mild-mannered, never critical, never extreme, never loud, never arguing, never bickering Democrats. So the Republicans agreed to tie one hand behind their back because of Obama’s race. They had the other hand tied behind their back by this trick that got them to shut up, and really doubled down on that any criticism of Obama, ’cause now you’re criticizing the first black president, that makes you a racist.

So they’re not gonna go there, not gonna be critical. It doesn’t matter if he’s president. It doesn’t matter if he’s transforming this country in ways it was never founded to be, doesn’t matter. We can’t criticize him ’cause they’re gonna call us racists. And then you add to it the silly notion that any criticism would send precious independents running to the Democrats. Note that there was no behavior the Democrats could engage in that would send the independents running to Republicans.

The Democrats can call Republicans hostage takers. They can accuse them of taking ransom. They can accuse them of being terrorists, and that doesn’t bother the independents. But when the Republicans question Obama’s Obamacare plan, “You racist pigs, how dare you!” And so the Republicans have been talked into halfway, and they agreed on the other half, to shut up. They have bought hook, line, and sinker that what the American people want is kumbaya. Everybody living together in a circle and loving each other and no acrimony, nothing but love everywhere. That’s what everybody wants. And if anybody interrupts that, they’re gonna pay.

So the Republicans have done everything they can to try to make everybody like them, and what they’ve ended up doing is creating one of the greatest political disasters I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, simply because they failed to show up. Then when they finally did make a play of showing up, they didn’t have the guts to stick with it. Undertake a partial government shutdown. Let’s call it a slowdown. Undertake 87% shutdown the federal government for two weeks, and the endgame is that Dingy Harry gets to write the continuing resolution and the debt limit expansion and extension. And then after that two and a half weeks, all of it, the Democrat side, the Republican side blamed on Ted Cruz.

One guy did all this. One guy created all this havoc, one guy. If this one guy woulda shut up and never said anything, why, we’d be what? In fat city? So the Republican establishment, the Democrat establishment, there is a full-out now — I want to warn you about this because, folks, we’re gonna have to hang tough. You may think I’m crazy here. We’re gonna have to remain as best we can detached from that mess and stay bucked up, optimistic, of good cheer as best we can because there is an all-out assault now, not just on Cruz and Lee, and not just on the Tea Party, but on the conservative wing of the party. It isn’t new. We’ve spoken of it on many previous occasions. But now they’re being fortified because now they all think they’ve got all the ammo they need, and that is this last two and a half weeks was brought about strictly by the Tea Party.

So now you’ve got moderate Republicans who call themselves conservatives, like David Frum, suggesting that the greatest thing that could happen to Republican Party now is if the Tea Party just branched off and formed its own Conservative Party. You got moderate Republicans and some who call themselves conservatives suggesting, “You know what? You Tea Party people, why don’t you just take a hike,” and even in the New Republic today there’s a column.

The New Republic, a liberal journal of opinion, is telling David Frum that if the Tea Party really does that, you moderate Republicans are forever going to lose. You don’t have a prayer of winning if you succeed in driving your base out. This is not the time to abandon Ted Cruz or Mike Lee, folks. I’m not talking about sending the money, and I’m not talking about anything traditional. I’m just talking about in your hearts and in your minds, ’cause you know they’re right.

You know that what they attempted to do here was, I think, valiant. It’s been an illustration of just how terribly wrong things are. There are plenty of opportunities for lessons to be learned here. Now, look, I’m not living in a false reality here. I was thinking about this last night, too, while I was pondering if I can ever remember a greater political disaster in my lifetime, if I could ever remember a time when a political party just made a decision not to exist for all intents and purposes.

Do you know the Republican Party now can’t wait to move on amnesty? Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, they can’t wait. Obama can’t wait. After this cave on the shutdown or whatever you want to call it, the next move at light speed is gonna be for amnesty. The Republican Party is leading the way. It doesn’t make any sense to me, not in the traditional political sense. Now, if you throw money into it — the demands of donors, advice of consultants — it makes total sense.

But those are the people that have been securing defeat for this party, and those are the people who have set the table that has resulted in where the party is right now. They’ve been running it. The conservatives have not been running the Republican Party, and nobody can say they have. The conservatives have been trying to, but they don’t and they’ve not. The conservatives do not run the Republican establishment.

Whatever the Republican Party is today is because the Wizards of Smart that run it are not the conservatives. They’re the ones who have authored this. It’s their signature on all of this, and they are — like a lot of other children, lot of like other victims — blaming everybody else. That’s where we are. But the opportunity here, I still like it, as I finish my thought. I was thinking, you know, yesterday I said — and this is picked up a couple places, and I knew it would be. (interruption)

No, I’ve not forgotten the Phil Mushnick thing. Don’t worry. In fact, there’s a new addition to that Adrian Peterson story. This guy’s got more kids than he knows out there. A couple more have just been discovered. But we’ll get to that in a moment. I said yesterday on this very program, there are times I feel like we have just lost a war to the communists. I use the term “communists” generically, but I can remember back in the ’50s. I’m a child of the Cold War.

As a child, the threat that the Soviet Union was gonna succeed was a daily thing you lived with. If you were one who was engaged in all that, that was a frightening concept, and I almost feel like that’s happened here — and then in addition to that, it seems like it happened overnight! I mean, all through the Bush years, I guess the signs were there, but I missed them. I didn’t see the utter, total transformation and what I will call the deterioration of the pop culture.

I knew it was going on, I thought it was more gradual. With the election of Barack Obama and then the next day after that, it is like the country that was founded didn’t exist at all, and the transforming that Obama talked about wanting to make really had already almost been completed. Yet we’d had eight years of Bush. I’m not commenting on the specifics of Bushian policy, neo-conservative, all the things and the Iraq War. How do you go from Bush winning two elections to where we are now in the spate of a week?

That is like what it seems to have to have happened, and because of that I don’t — this is where I’m not living in a false reality — I don’t really think that’s happened. We are being asked to believe it has. Everybody says, “Oh, yeah, Rush, these are changing times! The country’s changing. It’s passed you by. You know, you’re 62, Rush. You may as well be 82! You’re not relevant, you don’t know anymore, you don’t have anything in common with anybody in this country.”

I have people tell me this.

“You gotta get with it Rush! You’re not anywhere near hip. No, no, no.”

And this happened overnight?

They want us to believe this. They want us to accept it, and want you to, but things don’t happen that way. Now, I know they’ve been trying this 50 years and they’ve been succeeding, chipping away, education, Hollywood. But all of this stuff happening here, coupled with this inexplicable political cave-in, I mean, no opposition to this at all, not serious opposition, no serious push-back. Nobody standing up, until Cruz and Lee came along, to explain what’s wrong with what’s going on, to explain what’s wrong with Obamacare.

By the way in the Obamacare Stack today, I have one of the funniest things. Have you heard about this, the poor like diarist at Daily Kos. This little guy, I guess he posts there regularly and that’s why they call him a diarist. He went to his Obamacare exchange, and he find out he’s gonna go bankrupt, practically, with what the prices are. So he wrote about that. He had a headline, “What the Hell Kind of Reform is This?” Well, all the Daily Kos commentator just jumped on this guy, made him feel like three feet tall.

So he went and changed his headline, tried to soften it. I’ve got the story and ome of these comments. “Why don’t you go shop the market if you don’t like what you find in the exchange?” I’m saying, “Who are those fools? Do they not know there isn’t a market anymore? There’s no market to go shop,” and these are the true believers. I think the fact of the matter is, the true believers don’t even know what’s happened here!

The true believers haven’t even really figured out what’s going on, who Obama is and what he’s really doing. All that is yet to happen, ’cause it will happen, and they will figure it out. How about this headline. It’s a Clinton story. Yeah. This dovetails so perfectly with the trick, “Don’t criticize Democrats! The independents won’t like that. They’ll go running right back to Democrats. Doooooon’t criticize Obama. Don’t! Don’t be mean-spirited. Don’t be partisan.” The Republicans buy it.