I don’t even know if he’s still at the think tank.  And Thomas Mann? Remember Thomas Mann?  He’s a think tanker too.  I remember these guys from 30 years ago.  I mean, that’s how long they’ve been around.  They’ve been around as long as I have been doing this.  I want to say that Ornstein is AEI, but that doesn’t makes sense.  American Enterprise Institute.  And Thomas Mann, Brookings.

Maybe they’re both at Brookings, which is far left. Anyway, they wrote a book, and they released a summary and premise of the book, and it’s the most… It’s an alternate universe.  They think… They have written that the only reason to explain the state of the United States today is the descent into pure extremism of the Republican Party.  But wait ’til you hear the actual words that they use.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  You know I’m right even when I think I’m wrong.  I’m right even when I have doubts about what I think.  Norman Ornstein is at the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann at the Brookings Institution. And they have an article in Vox, which, as you know, is a Millennial, slash, leftist offshoot of writers from the Washington Post.  It’s a favored spot, it’s a favored publication of leftist Millennial journalists.

Vox is where the cool nerds hang out, just to tell you where this is.  And here’s a brief excerpt from Ornstein and Thomas Mann.  Ornstein is a political scientist.  Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings.

“In April 2012, we created a major stir in the political world with a long piece in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section called, ‘Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem.’ It was adapted from our book published days later, ‘It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,’ and this was our money quote: ‘The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American –‘” this is four years old now, all this stuff.

“‘The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.’

“As scholars who had worked for more than four decades with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, we faced a ton of scorn from sitting Republican lawmakers and outside observers for making this argument — and denial from most of the mainstream media. For reporters, professional norms and concerns about accusations of partisan bias dictated that the parties be treated equally, whatever the underlying reality.”

Which is a faux premise anyway.  It’s never been the case.  “The safe haven –” here we go.  “The safe haven of false equivalence led the press to ignore one of the most consequential developments in contemporary American politics: the radicalization of the Republican Party.”

So these guys thing that it is the Republican Party and its radicalization which has resulted in this America mired in malaise.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Okay.  Let’s take this money quote here, that Ornstein and Thomas Mann acknowledge as their money quote.  To you and me, this is an alternative universe.  These are educated, learned people. Yeah, they’re leftists.  But they’re educated.  These are not crackpot commenters on Twitter or Facebook.  These are ostensible intellectuals.  Today’s Republican Party…is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme…” Where is the Republican Party ideological, period?

Name for me an elected Republican who is ideological in terms of the way he or she leads?  They’re not conservatives.  Is that not the primary problem that they face within their own party?  The Republican Party’s not ideologically extreme.  They agree with the Democrats on amnesty.  They have not done serious things to roll back Obamacare.  They have given Obama every dime he has asked for spending-wise! They even got rid of some of the sequester dollars, some of the real (albeit small) budget cuts.  Those have been allowed to fritter away.

Where is this Republican ideology these guys write about?  Where is this extreme ideology in the Republican Party?  The Democrat Party, in our view… You want to talk about ideologically extreme or just plain extreme? The Democrat Party owns it lock, stock, and barrel! For us, the most amazing thing as we look at the political spectrum is to see how radicalized the entire Democrat Party has become.  They are all left-wing, extreme radicals.

There isn’t a John F. Kennedy Democrat among them anymore.  Well, maybe Joe Manchin. But, I mean, you can count them on one hand, the so-called moderate Democrats.  They’ve all gone over.  They’re all extreme leftists.  It’s not just ideologues; they are extreme radicals.  They are hell-bent on overturning as much of the foundational building blocks of this country as they can.  And what? They’re mainstream in these guys’ views?  They’re mainstream?

They are just the natural evolution of our culture?  These guys have taken everything that we hold dear to the gutter.  And yet, in their view, the Republican Party has become the “insurgent outlier… ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime.” What is that?  I can only guess what they’re talking about. Remember, they write this in 2012.  “In April 2012, we created a major stir.”  Now, this piece that actually ran in Vox was just last week. Recently.

But “contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime.  Scornful of compromise.” Scornful of compromise?  Isn’t the number one identifying factor of Republicans, “I’m the guy that can cross the aisle! I’m the guy that can work with Democrats! I’m the guy that can show we can get along! I’m the guy that can show Washington can work! I’m the guy that can show the parties can come together and govern”?

Where is this “scornful of compromise”?  I’m not saying conservatives aren’t scornful, but the Republican Party?  “[U]npersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science…”   That’s clearly a reference to climate change.  There isn’t any science in climate change!  This is as astounding to me. I have to put this in perspective.  You know how the “hands up, don’t shoot” meme coming out of Ferguson is an outright lie?  It did not happen.

There is literally no evidence anywhere that Michael Brown was murdered after being hunted down by a racist white cop and shot in the back with his hands up saying, “Don’t shoot!”  It didn’t happen.  Quite the opposite.  He was being arrested or stopped for walking in the street instead of the sidewalk and he lunged into the cop car, trying to get the cop’s gun.  Many people said that they would have fired sooner than the cop did.

The grand jury conducted investigation after investigation.  There were five witnesses, African-American witnesses who said that Michael Brown was aggressive and tried to get the gun away from the cop.  And yet everybody on the left runs around thinking that and that’s why Black Lives Matter’s doing what they’re doing. All of this unrest and a lot of this cop killing is rooted in that lie that is still being told, still being promulgated, and it didn’t happen.

And global warming is the exact same thing.

There is no science that establishes climate change.  The climate is always changing.  But they don’t have any evidence.  All they’ve got is computer models.  I’m blue in the face trying to explain this to people.  There isn’t any evidence.  In fact, what evidence there is shows no warming in the last 18 years.  That’s why global warming became “climate change.”  There isn’t any.  There hasn’t been any warming. There isn’t any evidence.  All they’ve got is computer models which are predicting all these hurricanes that are not happening.

And they dare to tell us that we are “contemptuous of science”?  What we are contemptuous of is the politicizing of every damn thing on this planet to the point of it being corrupted.  Everything they touch ends up being corrupted.  Do you know the Journal of the American Medical Association…? That is a highly respected scientific magazine. The Journal of the American Medical Association published an article that was rooted in the science of Obamacare and the way the satellite exchanges work and the website and all, and you know who wrote it?

Barack Obama, who is not a scientist.  He’s a politician.

The Journal of the American Medical Association, a once-respected publication of peer reviewed science, has allowed itself to be corrupted by the Democrat Party’s political agenda of the advancement of single-payer health care.  Look at the courts.  The courts? Corrupted.  I can’t… You can’t look around this country and find an institution… The churches are becoming corrupt by leftists.  Our culture’s corrupted. Marriage has been corrupted. Bathrooms are being corrupted. Everything in the world is being corrupted!

Everything they touch ends up being corrupted.  When they run it, they politicize it, and their politics is corruption.  There is no way that Barack Obama is a health care expert; he’s not a medical expert. He’s not a scientist.  They turned over their pages to him, just like they Nobel Committee gave him a Peace Prize.  Can you imagine a Nobel Peace Prize was given to Obama on the come?  You think they’d like to take that back?  If they had any self-respect, they would have taken it back long ago.

There have been more wars involving this country under Obama’s administration than Bush.  We’ve had multiple domestic terror attacks in this country and around the world, all traceable to the foreign policy of the Obama administration with Hillary Clinton at the Department of State.  They gave him a peace prize!  It’s incredible.  Everything they’ve touched is corrupted, and yet we — conservatives and Republicans — are the “outliers.” We are responsible for all of this because we are the “new politics of extremism.”

We are “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts.”

What? Facts are not determined by convention.  Facts are facts.  You don’t get to make up your own facts.  It’s just like consensus of science.  There can be no science if there’s consensus.  Science is isn’t up to a vote!  So what the hell is “conventional understanding of facts”?  Why do facts need understanding?  Why do we need conventional…?  I know what they mean by “conventional” here, but what they’re trying to say here is: We, on the left, represent the majority of thinking, the majority opinion — and this is what we think of the facts.

And the Republicans come along and say: You guys are crazy!  That’s not what those facts mean.

We are “contemptuous.”  Therefore, we are contemptuous of the conventional understanding, defined as we don’t agree with liberals.  So when we don’t agree with liberals, we are “contemptuous of conventional,” because they are what “is.” They are what is natural. They are right all the time. There is no such thing as them being wrong, and anyone that disagrees with them is an extremist loco.  “[D]ismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition…”

Everything these guys have written is actually more accurately said about the Democrat Party today.  This just illustrates the massively wide divide we have, and it illustrates that there’s only one way to deal with this. We’re never gonna reach compromise with these people because there is no common understanding, because there is no common sense on any of these positions that they hold because they politicized everything.

So all that’s left is to defeat them.

By the way, in order to write what these guys have written, you have to totally abandon the whole concept of moral authority and morality as it is.  So I wanted to put this at the beginning of the program because the left… This is news outside the convention, and this is big news on the left today.  They’re all out there chortling over this. They’re celebrating. (chortling) “Yeah, yeah! You go, Ornstein! You tell ’em, Thomas Mann!”  They’re all excited about this.  This is the kind of stuff that’s informing news producers and directors and so forth at various newspapers, magazines, TV networks, that you would never hear about unless I told you — or unless you read Vox.