RUSH: Wow. I look as orange on this Dittocam as Obama did last night during the State of the Union. I may need to white balance this thing at some point. No big deal now. Did you notice the orange makeup that Obama had on last night? Did you watch…? Some birthday. Some birthday to sit there and watch this. It was a replay, a combination of previous Obama speeches mixed with lines that were stolen from the West Wing TV show, which Obama has done before in these speeches. But Obama is not the big news last night.
There was nothing unexpected from Obama. It was more of the same. Everything I told you was gonna happen, happened. The Limbaugh Theorem was on full display. It’s like he hasn’t been president for seven years. He just totally lied and made up this utopian vision of America that he’s created that currently exists, and it’s threatened only by elections of Republicans and redistricting. It’s not threatened by ISIS. They’re just a bunch of guys in pickups. You know, that ISIS is no big deal. They’re just a bunch of guys running around in pickups.
And it’s interesting that Trump goes after Cruz and Cruz goes after Trump, and so did Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley is actually the story today, in a whole bunch of different ways. There’s so much here to say about the Nikki Haley response. It’s the first time in my life I can remember the response to the State of the Union not going after the president but rather going off the front-runner of, in this case, her own party. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. And it is quite telling to note where in the Drive-By Media and in the conservative media today she’s being hailed.
It’s quite instructive, very informative, and illustrative to find out where it is, particularly on our side of the aisle here. She is being universally praised for giving one of the best responses to the State of the Union ever. I’ll tell you what it was. You know, this is hard for me, because I like Nikki Haley. I’ve never met her. I’ve never met her, but I’ve always admired her from afar. I thought she’s done good jobs when she’s spoken at Republican conventions. I mean, she’s done questionable things. In the aftermath of that shooting in the church South Carolina, the participating in the burning of whatever it was, Confederate flag.
A little bit questionable, but on balance I haven’t had a whole lot of problems with her. But, boy, last night her response? I think it’s proof and it’s an example of so much. For one thing, it’s almost absolute proof of what I have been saying for last couple years now, that the Republican Party’s trying to drive conservatives out of the party. But I think it’s more than that. It’s certainly that, but her speech last night sort of expanded the theme of who is and who isn’t qualified to be a Republican, and the Republican Party is still anti-conservative.
While that isn’t anything new, what we learned last night is that they are very comfortable identifying themselves as elites and members of a club and that you can’t get in just by being who you are and doing what you want to do as a Republican and pursuing what you believe in. Going after Trump last night the way she did… She wasn’t going after Trump the same way the party goes after the conservative base, or as Jeb Bush said, famously, that his objective was to win the Republican nomination without the support of the Republican Party base.
That’s never been done before, and he was very proud saying so. And he said it a number of times, and it became an objective of the party’s: To have a nominee that got the nomination specifically without the support of the base. Now, the way Jeb was gonna do it was by raising more money and spending more money than anybody else, and freezing the opposition out by virtue of all the other conservatives in the race canceling each other out and dividing the support, dividing the money. Jeb was gonna be the last man standing because of the money and the only option Republican voters had when it comes time to vote for president.
And it hasn’t worked, obviously.
Although, did you see the latest Reuters poll that out of nowhere, Jeb’s in third place?
Now, he’s nowhere near the lead, but he’s up from 2.5% or 3% to 10.5% or 10.6% in the latest Reuters poll. You know, I got a note last night from somebody informing me of this before it hit the news and I wrote ’em back. You know, I should have mentioned this to you people because something about Jeb particularly hit me over the Christmas break. When I got back, there’s something in the back of my mind that was gnawing at me that these numbers on Jeb are not actually correct and that he’s gonna end up being — or be reported as having more support than he does.
Something about this has just never seemed right to me, and I’m not charging anybody with anything or alleging conspiracies. It just hasn’t seemed right. But nevertheless, my point is I was not surprised that Jeb all of a sudden is at 10.5%. I’ve been expecting it. The thing is, I didn’t say anything to you about it, ’cause, frankly, it wasn’t at the top of my mind and there were other things every day that nudged that thought out of the way. But back to Nikki Haley here before we go to the sound bites. She goes after the loud voices, the angry voices, and that could be anybody.
She admits today that she was talking about Trump — and to a lesser extent, Cruz. She also means talk radio. She also means the conservative base, and don’t believe anything other than that. But here’s the thing, folks. This is, to me, one of the greatest bits of evidence that the Republican Party is not just anti-conservative, but it is very much pro-elite. It is a club that they don’t want a whole lot of people joining. And it’s this. Donald Trump has put together a coalition of supporters that, on paper, is exactly what the Republican Party claims that it wants to do when they say they can’t win with only Republican votes, that they’ve gotta branch out.
“Gotta the bet women votes! Gotta get Hispanic votes!”
This is why they’re pro-comprehensive immigration reform. Well, Trump… There was a story from TheHill.com yesterday that 20% of Democrats would defect and vote for Trump. Trump’s support comes from all over the spectrum, is the point, which is what I always thought the Republican Party said was their objective. And this is why they do various things in Washington because they very openly say, “We can’t win the presidency with just Republican votes alone. There aren’t enough of ’em. We gotta go out and we gotta peel off some Democrats. We gotta peel off some independents.”
Well, there’s a guy that’s done it, and they don’t want it. They don’t want it! Nikki Haley made it clear last night they don’t want whatever Trump has done. They don’t want Trump, they don’t want the people supporting Trump, they don’t want the way Trump has done it. But nobody can make the argument that Trump is a conservative in the same way the Republican base is conservative. So the rejection of Trump is not specifically because he’s part of the base and the GOP resents or is embarrassed by or doesn’t want its base to be dominant.
Trump brings something entirely different to this, and they’re not interested. Which is, in a sense, them saying, “You’re not one of us. You’re not in our club. You are not the type of elitist we want, no matter what you bring to the party.” I thought it was fascinating to watch all of this. I mean, they’re worried, I think — or they want us to think that they are worried that Trump has tainted the party’s image. How can that be? How can Trump have tainted the party’s image any more than it already is?
See, this is the thing that I don’t think people — we call it “the establishment,” “the elites,” whatever. I don’t think they understand, and if they do, they don’t want to admit it. They’ve already tainted the image of the Republican Party with its base, and the base is what matters. The base is the strength of the party. It’s why it’s called “the base.” Well, the GOP has already tarnished itself. The GOP has already signaled that it is not interested in its base and what its base wants. Now, it knows what to say to the base when it comes time to campaign.
In 2010, 2014, these midterms were veritable landslide victories. Republican base voters thought for sure they are electing Republicans who were gonna go back to Washington and stop Obama and stop Obamacare and stop all of this mindless spending and stop all of this destruction and transforming of America — and there hasn’t been any stopping. And in the process, they’ve done a better job than anybody ever could of tarnishing what they are, their own image of what they believe in and even their honesty.
Because their campaigns have been bordering on fraudulent in several respects given that they’ve promised and they’ve let it be known, “Vote for me! We’re gonna go to in Washington, we’re gonna stand up to this stuff, we’re gonna stop it.” There hasn’t been one serious effort to stop anything. And to the contrary, it appears that there has been more cooperation. I hear people talk about gridlock. Frank Luntz’s focus group last night was about as worthless as any focus group I’ve ever seen. You see it on… I watched Megyn Kelly. Normally Luntz’s focus groups have just some clown standing up stating, “Yeah, well, you know, I’m really upset all the gridlock won’t…”
There ain’t any gridlock in Washington. They agree with each other there. What gridlock? That’s the point. We’re dying for some gridlock. We’re dying for an opposition party. We’re dying for somebody to stand up and say, “No, we’re not helping. We’re not going along with this. Stop it.” And we get that deal like we got and we’re told, “Well, that cake was baked before we got here. There’s nothing much we can do,” and it’s always the story. “Well, that was already pre-done. There was nothing we could do. But you wait! Next time we’re gonna really take it to ’em.” And it never happens.
So this tainted-image business that they want us to think they’re worried about regarding Trump? Really what they’re trying to say is that what Trump is doing and the people that he is assembling his coalition, “Hey, hey, hey! That’s not us! That’s not us!” But it is. It’s exactly what they claim they want. What they don’t like is the guy putting it together, ’cause he’s not in the club. He hasn’t been in the club. He’s been a businessman. He’s a TV star. He not a lifelong politician. He hasn’t paid his dues. He hasn’t been elected to anything before.
“Who is this guy intruding on our turf?”
It’s as much about that as it is the Republican Party having a problem with their base. Both things are true. But opposition to Trump is not because he represents the base. That’s Cruz. That’s why they hate Cruz. That’s why they’re universally opposed to Cruz. But their opposition to Trump is not that he has stolen the base or has become the champion of the base. Now, they might think there’s some of that going on. I’ve remarked on this a number of times. It really is curious. I mean, here you have a party which claims and tells us they can’t win with Republican votes alone; we have to broaden the base.
“Sorry, folks. Don’t be personally offended,” they tell us, “but we’ve gotta go out, and we’ve gotta fight this War on Women business because we need some women supporters and we need some Hispanics. We can’t win the White House without Hispanics.” Who says that? Democrats say that! You think the Democrats really want you guys to win White House? Democrats are telling, “You better be nicer to the Hispanics! You better stop all this immigration stuff. You better stop talking about the wall. You better stop doing all that and you better reach out, otherwise you’ll never win the White House.”
Like they’re interested in us winning the White House?
Well, all that aside, Trump has a coalition of supporters that is much broader based than the Republican Party has, and they’re rejecting it — and I’m telling you, they’re not rejecting it because they’re embarrassed of their base. They’re rejecting this ’cause they don’t like Trump. It’s personal, it’s clubby, it’s cliquish. There’s a whole bunch of reasons for it. And they’ve set up a firewall in South Carolina to stop Trump. And that’s what Nikki Haley was doing last night. Nikki Haley is the establishment of the firewall in South Carolina where the establishment’s gonna put the brakes on and bring all this Trump stuff to a screeching halt.
The next thing is their universal praise here, and you’ll hear from where it’s coming as the program unfolds before your very eyes. What’s next is for Nikki Haley to endorse somebody. Rubio, whatever’s going on here with Jeb (it could be Jeb), but she’s gonna endorse somebody that comes from the establishment wing. It’s part of erecting the firewall and putting it into place in South Carolina to take over whatever happens and mitigate whatever happens in Iowa and New Hampshire, and I don’t think she realizes that she’s actually damaged her VP chances to an extent. I’ll explain all this as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears.
But it’s just weird. Here you have a president who’s… It was almost indescribable last night. It was a heck of a birthday present, to have to sit there and endure this. It was not the State of the Union; it was the state of Obama. And one lie after another. They did a bunch of fact checks on this speech. It just… This roaring economy, job creation? I mean, this stuff is just off-the-charts untrue. But here’s the thing, folks. Again, being objective. If you just landed on this planet yesterday from Mars, and you watched Obama’s speech last night, I guarantee you you would have thought it was reasonable and nice tone, nice guy.
You would not have known who he’s criticizing. These “loud voices” could be anybody. You’d have to be a student of these things to know he’s going after Trump and Cruz — and the low-information voters, by definition, don’t know that. But it was weird. Here’s Obama going after the two front-runners in the GOP, and here’s the Republican response going after the two front-runners. So the establishment’s circling the wagons, and they’re sending a message. “You want in our club? Well, you can’t get in the club unless we invite you — and we don’t want you.” That’s the message.
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RUSH: Nikki Haley audio sound bites coming up. But more telling is the quarters and the places from where she’s being praised. It makes the point that I just made to you. But this is also quite telling as well. Nikki Haley was on the Today show today with Matt Lauer. (Well, she was everywhere. She was on CBS today, too.) With Matt Lauer on NBC, she said, “Mr. Trump has definitely contributed to what I think is just irresponsible talk.” Now, folks, I know why the GOP is upset. It’s amnesty.
Trump’s talking about building a wall and putting a limit on immigration, and the Republican Party doesn’t want to hear any of that and they think he’s hurt them. The fact of the matter is Trump represents majority thinking on this. The GOP is in the minority on amnesty and immigration reform. It’s what they don’t get, but it doesn’t matter. They’re gonna go down for amnesty rather than win without it. She said, “Trump is definitely contributed to irresponsible talk, but going after Obama, that’s just not my style.” Well, how can you do it one and not the other?
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RUSH: Now, there’s a puff piece from NPR typical of the Drive-By Media reports on Nikki Haley and her speech. Now, here’s how it starts. “South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has a lot of qualities her party needs.” So here we go again with the left telling us what we need to win. The problem with this is, the Republican Party believes it.
The Democrats get to define what the Republican Party is and isn’t, and the Democrat and their allies in media get to tell the Republican Party what they need to do to fix their problems, and the Republican Party buys into it 100%. And they don’t understand why a perceived outsider is wiping the floor with every other Republican! They don’t understand it. It’s right in front of their face. So here’s how NPR starts their story. “South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has a lot of qualities her party needs: She’s a rising star who is young, female and the daughter of Indian immigrants.”
So that… According to the people who define what is qualified and what isn’t for Republican, those are the things that make her qualified. She’s a woman? She young and the daughter of immigrants? Why? These are the three things that will dispel whatever the left has succeeded in doing in destroying the Republican brand? How are any of those things “qualities”? How are any of those things qualifications? Being young, being female, the daughter of immigrants? And I guarantee you, the Republican establishment is running around when they hear things like that, and they’re saying, “See? See? See? We made the right decision!”
It goes back to the same old thing. Our party is so beaten down, our leaders are so beat down and on the defensive that they are seeking the approval of political opponents — and when they get it, they’re happy. They’re happier when they get the approval of political opponents than they are when they win elections! It’s uncanny. It’s genuinely psychological. Some might say pathological. I guarantee you all these people on our side running around praising Nikki Haley are using the same kind of “qualified” characteristics ’cause they know that’s what the left wants to see in a Republican.
What is this, “She’s young, she’s female…” I thought that’s ageism and sexism! And the daughter of immigrants. Why? Why is that so important? Because the Republican are seen as anti-immigrant? No. That’s what the Democrats tell people the Republicans are, but that’s not what the Republicans are. But the Republicans are too afraid to stand up and tell everybody the Democrats are wrong about the way they talk about ’em. Republicans are — I don’t know — too afraid to actually stand up and tell people what they’re for.
Well, ah, the answer to that? That would require them to articulate conservatism. And they just can’t bring themselves to do it. So essentially what NPR, as a representative of the Drive-By Media, is saying is that the Republican Party is going to have to pander. Here we have the Democrat Party, which is out of ideas. Everything it stands for is on full parade. They’ve begun the process of destroying this country when their president is in the forties in approval ratings and the sixties in disapproval. The number of people who think this country’s on the wrong track’s at all-time high, or close to it. He’s close to Jimmy Carter’s numbers.
The number of people who have been let down by this president and this party is massive, and they still think they’re running the show, still think they’re defining the terms because the Republican Party lets ’em get away with it. Why does the Republican Party have to pander to the young? Why does the Republican Party have to pander to females? And why is choosing Nikki Haley and having her do a good speech a sign of what the Republican Party needs? It isn’t a sign of what the Republican Party needs.
It’s a sign of what the Democrat Party has succeeded in doing in defining the Republicans and putting them on the defensive 100% of the time. So the Republicans think the first order of business every day is to tell people, “We are not what you see about us in the media,” rather than dealing with that by going out proudly and happily declaring what they’re for issue by issue by issue, position by position by position. They fall into this trap of accepting the allegations and accusations by the left and the media, and then embark on a course to disprove it. So they choose Nikki Haley; then Nikki Haley goes out and does a speech criticizing her own party’s front-runner.
It’s quite understandable she’s gonna be hailed as having given a great speech by people in the Drive-By Media, is it not? What a godsend! The Democrats are looking at this and saying, “We’ve been so successful!” They chose somebody to do the response to Obama, which was a pathetic speech. She goes out there and starts attacking the two front-runners in her own party? Why wouldn’t the Democrats be happy today? Why wouldn’t the media want to praise that to the hilt so the Republicans would do more of it? It’s mind-boggling to see how easy this is for the Democrats.
So the Republicans are now pandering to the young. They’re pandering to females, to women, pandering to illegal immigrants. “Yeah, she’s a daughter of immigrants. Oh, that means she’s qualified!” No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It means the Republicans have bought hook, line, and sinker the belief that they’re hated. I guarantee you if they were, if all of these things the Republican Party thinks about itself were true, Donald Trump wouldn’t be over 5% in the polls, folks. Look at it that way. But they even refuse to see that.
The people in the Republican Party that identify with the establishment, the elites, whatever you want to call ’em? Look at where they are in the primary. Look at where they stand. Single digits. But this pandering, this acknowledging that the Democrats’ allegations are accurate; then this defensive behavior in response to it? It’s breathtaking to watch it. The Republicans are never gonna outbid the Democrats from Democrat voters. The Republicans are never gonna be able to out-immigration the Democrats or out-feminazi the women.
The Democrats are always gonna have a response to any of that. It’s gonna be, “Free this, free that, free this, free condoms, free birth control pills, free tuition, free equal pay, free welfare, free right to vote…” It’ll be “free” in front of everything. According to that same NPR article that I just quoted the beginning of, it says Haley went into politics — Nikki Haley — after hearing Hillary Clinton speak at a local college.
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RUSH: Now to the Nikki Haley sound bites to get started on those. Here’s the first. Well, we have three, maybe four to start with. Here’s the first one…
HALEY: We need to be honest with each other and with ourselves. While Democrats in Washington bear much responsibility for the problems facing America today, they do not bear it alone. There is more than enough blame to go around. We, as Republicans, need to own that truth. We need to recognize our contributions to the erosion of the public trust in America’s leadership. We need to accept that we’ve played a role in how and why our government is broken — and then, we need to fix it.
RUSH: Now, she has a point, but not in the way she means. Now, this was hailed. The Drive-By Media loved this. They always do. When they can get Republicans to agree with them that Republicans are the problem, why, that’s a red letter day. You can pack it up and go home. You’ve had a successful day when you’ve been able to pull that off. And they pulled it off. And the Republicans and the conservatives in the media, oh, this was wonderful, ’cause this is bipartisanship. This is owning up. This is honesty.
This is showing that we can work with the Democrats! All of this stuff that’s guaranteed to lose them elections, they are having uncontrollable excitement over. But let’s go back. “We need to recognize our contributions to the erosion of the public trust in America’s leadership. We need to accept that we Republicans have played a role in how and why our government is broken.” She doesn’t mean it in the way most people will agree with her, and I’m sure you know where I am going with this.
The Republican Party’s “contributions to the erosion of the public trust in America’s leadership” is exactly the Republican Party failing to come through on campaign pledges and promises after they’re elected. Republicans have indeed lost faith in their party, and they have, as such, lost faith in the government as an agent of change or as an agent of stoppage. So, yeah, the Republicans do own a lot of the lack of trust, but it’s not because of the reasons she thinks. It’s because the Republican Party has ignored the people who have elected them to office for the most part. Not in all cases, of course.
But the vast majority of Republican voters are frustrated to no end and think that it makes no difference for the Republican Party to win, because they see no evidence of the Republican Party behaving like winners. They see no evidence in the Republican Party engaging Obama or the Democrats and making serious efforts to stop them — which leads, understandably, to a major, huge erosion in public trust of government with the Republicans involved. It makes perfect sense, but she understandably doesn’t mean it that way.
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RUSH: Isn’t it amazing how the Drive-Bys just go nuts when a Republican criticizes the Republicans? And now we’ve even got some in the conservative media who get as excited when a Republican criticizes a Republican. It’s amazing.