RUSH: Well, now the White House has fought back. Will the congressional Republicans get their acts in gear? It looks like they’re falling part. This gang of moderates under the tutelage of George Soros that killed the ANWR drilling project– (interruption) You are unaware that the Republican mainstream partnership is funded by George Soros? I kid you not. It’s on Michelle Malkin’s website. I pulled it down last night. Here we go. She writes, “Many of you were asking for the list of the anti-drilling Republicans. The group who succeeded in pressuring the Republicans to cave in calls itself the ‘Republican Mainstream Partnership.’ They’re holding a press conference at 1:30 in Washington yesterday to bray about their victory… Guess who is funding the mainstream moderates? George Soros and friends.” This is on Michelle Malkin’s website. I have the names of the Republicans who voted against ANWR, the Republicans against ANWR. You want to hear some of the names?
Charles Bass of New Hampshire; Sherwood Boehlert, New York; Jeb Bradley, New Hampshire; Mike Castle, Delaware; Vernon Ehlers, Michigan; Mike Ferguson, New Jersey; Mike Fitzpatrick, Pennsylvania; Rod Frelinghuysen, New Jersey; Jim Gerlach, Pennsylvania; Wayne Gilcrest, Montana; Bob Inglis, South Carolina; Nancy Johnson, Connecticut; Tim Johnson, Illinois; Sue Kelly, New York; Mark Kennedy, Minnesota; Mark Kirk, Illinois; Jim Leach, Iowa; Frank LoBiondo, New Jersey; Jim Ramstad, Minnesota; Dave Reichert, Washington; Jim Saxton, New Jersey; James Sensenbrenner, Wisconsin; Christopher Shays, Connecticut; Robert Simmons, Connecticut; James Walsh, New York.
These are basically a bunch of New York McCain Republicans. They used to be called “Rockefeller Republicans.” It may be better to start calling them “McCain Republicans,” the McCain wing of the party, because there are some exceptions, but you heard a lot of New Jerseys, Connecticuts, and Pennsylvanias in there, and some New Yorks. Northeastern, “moderate” Republicans basically threw it out. In the Senate Olympia Snowe from Maine helped to scuttle even a single year extension of the current 15% tax rate on dividends and capital gains. That’s due to expire in 2008. So the finance committee chairman Chuck Grassley was forced to postpone a committee vote on extending a tax cut that has been crucial to an economic rebound that since mid-2003 has been marked by ten straight quarters of nearly 4% average growth. Tell us why, again, Republicans need 55 senators? Why do we need 55 senators when we have so many malcontents and traitors in the bunch? And they all happen to be from the northeast and they all happen to be moderates, they all happen to be liberals — well, not all, there are some exceptions — but the great percentage of them are.
So the White House has responded now to all of these history revisions and these mindless personal attacks, these lies on lying about prewar intelligence. Let’s see if the congressional Republicans, including the Senate, will get in gear, because I’ll tell you what’s going on here, folks. This has been an amazing thing to watch this week, and I’ve been sitting back and I’ve been eyeing it, and it almost looks to me like there is a sort of a civil war right now in Congress between conservative Republicans, which represent about 90 to 95% of the Republicans in Congress, and the RINO Republicans, these Republicans in name only, who are using what they perceive to be the president’s weakness to gut the conservative agenda, and this is what I have been worried about when I’ve discussed the fact the president is not leading a movement. When he’s not out making the case for conservatism with every address and speech he makes, it only empowers these moderates. The moderates basically have been tamed. They had been cowering over there in the corner. They hadn’t been able to stop anything. So now along with the Democrats, these RINO Republicans, Republicans in name only, surface in an atmosphere of what they think is presidential weakness. Their rear their heads and show us who they really are. They’re anti-tax cut. They are anti-drilling for oil in ANWR. They are anti the conservative agenda.
Let me paint this with a broad brush, and say the Republicans are advancing our agenda is to be simplistic. We have a relative handful of Republicans who are cutting and running in hopes of advancing themselves. I mean, to say the Republicans are advancing our agenda is not true because all of them aren’t. Conservative Republicans are trying to advance the agenda, which is why there has been a desperate cry for conservative leadership, politically, not just in the media. Conservatism has plenty of voices in the media. But it needs these voices and leaders elsewhere, where other votes can be shepherded, where weak minded can be strengthened and be taught to follow or motivated to follow, and people look to the president for that, and people look to congressional leaders in the House and Senate to do that. It’s been very frustrating, all the silence that we’ve gotten, and some of you have been upset by the silence in the White House. So have I, but I’m just as upset, if not more so, than the silence from the House and Senate where we hold distinct margins. And I know that not all of the members of the Republican Senate or the House are conservative, as we are now learning, but they are a smaller minority than the Democrats are.
It’s one thing to have a sizable minority like the Democrats stand in your way, but it is just unacceptable when a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of Republicans in Congress also rear up in opposition and join the liberal Democrats to derail an agenda. At some point that has to be faced. It has to be faced because these RINOs, these moderates, are undermining our agenda on taxes; they are undermining our agenda on spending; they are undermining our agenda on oil drilling, and they are undermining the war on terror — and I’ll give you some names. You want some names? Here they are: Olympia Snowe, John McCain, George Voinovich, Mike Castle, Christopher Shays, and about 30 to 35 others. Now the Democrats don’t do this. They are disciplined. They punish those who dare to cross them, not so on our side. We don’t have any party discipline. “Well, Rush, we’re the party of ideas! You always say we’re the party of ideas. We have free and open debate.” Yes, we do, but when it comes to… Your family is your family, and when you go to battle with other families, folks, you want your family on your side, not joining the family across the street firing back at you — and that’s what’s happening here, and it’s because liberals hate conservatives and liberals fear conservatives.
I don’t care if they’re Republican liberals or Democrat liberals, they’re still liberals. They’re not “moderates.” Don’t hit me with that. There’s no such thing as a moderate. A moderate is just a liberal disguise, and they are doing everything they can to derail the conservative agenda, and they’ve been frustrated, they haven’t been able to do anything about it because conservatism has been so strong. This propaganda attack on the president has weakened him. They’re looking at the polls. “All right, the president’s finished, he’s weak, we can stand up now and defeat the rest of these conservatives,” and so forth. Nancy Pelosi has a — I forget what this is called, a “loyalty oath” that she’s sworn all of her members to. They cannot vote against the leadership position. The Democrats in the House of Representatives have been forced to sign a loyalty oath.
Now, you can say what you want about that, but the point is they end up unified on these battles that are crucial. These ideological battles are the battles of the future of the country, and members of our side have no desire to be unified. In fact, they want to join the other side in derailing conservatism, and the reason conservatism is so feared is because it works. Conservatism is so feared because it cannot be defeated with ideas. So it has to be defeated with other tactics. We’re told to invite liberals and moderates into our party. We’re told to extend our arms in welcome, extend our hands in friendship. We’re told to be nice and try to make them like us, and every time that happens we only see them stab the president or stab the majority in Congress in the back. It’s really not a civil war; it’s almost part of a civil war, but this is the Rockefeller wing of the party which has been down and out since the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s ascendance. The Rockefeller wing, now the McCain wing, of the party rearing — actually, he thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, by the way, not Nelson Rockefeller, but we’ll call it the McCain-Rockefeller wing, what have you, rearing its head.
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