RUSH: Here’s a good question. This is Matt in Williston, Vermont, the home state of Howard Dean. Hello, Matt. Nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: Good.
CALLER: It’s been a couple of years of going to school with you, and I deeply appreciate it. I was raised a liberal. My father was a union president, so you can imagine what the kitchen table was like.
RUSH: Ooh.
CALLER: But I have been attempting to deal with some liberals. Like crying in the wilderness here in Vermont, but I have been attempting to try to understand how so many of my very intelligent friends have difficulty grasping what I attempt to convey, and I have come to this graphic way of looking at it to try to help me mentally to structure things, and what I’ve arrived at is that liberals tend to only think vertically. They’re only in the now. Now, in the now is nice in therapy, but they’re only in the now, and they live in sound bites as a result. And the future is to be avoided or feared. And the uninformed can be swayed by that and can be driven to an excitement on that end of the curve, whereas what I’m finding with–
RUSH: You know what, let me interrupt you here. You’re half, well, you’re 75 —
CALLER: The horizontal thing that I see is that it’s over the horizon. It’s thinking about the future. It’s what freedom around world is all about.
RUSH: They’re doing that, too. No, they’re doing both. That’s why you’re 75% right. Let’s go at the first thing you said, “They live in the here and now.” They are living in the here and now, and you’re right, they’re afraid of the future. The reason they’re afraid of the future is because the future, if it keeps going like the past has, means they continue to lose power. Means they continue to lose influence.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: So they’re using the fear of the future that they have to live in the now to try to transfer the same fear, and they’re basing that on the fact they still think most people agree with them. You know, if you look at what their claims of the future are, they don’t think they have to teach anybody anything, they just think they have to warn them, and that everybody is going to agree with them. But no, they’re very, very attuned to the future and what it holds for them. Now, they’re not attuned — in fact, Social Security, they’re not interested in fixing Social Security.
CALLER: Absolutely not.
RUSH: Not at all. But they are very much interested in stopping Bush from doing it so that they can get their power back. They didn’t care about the war on terror when you get right down to it. They only supported it because they had to politically, but with the first chance they got to come out against it, they did, and they’ll do anything they can to get their power back, including try to upset the power balance and upset the American people’s opinion on this. So, no, I think you’re largely right, but they do have a great fear, a genuine fear of the future, based on the fact they’re not in charge of it.
CALLER: Well, and I also think that this business of, you know, of the Middle East and Iraq and all of the obvious things you can talk about with regard to that that are tragic and difficult and all that sort of thing, is what I would call part of the horizontal thinking. It’s the long-ball mentality of, starting now as tough as it is to begin it, try to have other parts of the world be free, not because it’s a warm and fuzzy thing to do, and yes, that’s valid on human terms, but it makes very smart economic terms down the road.
RUSH: Well, not only that, it’s morally the right thing to do and it makes good national security sense. But, the reason — well, there are many reasons, and I’m running short on time here, but as you well know, Matt, they’re basically pessimists. They’re doom-and-gloomers. This can’t possibly work. The Soviet Union was never going to be free, the wall was never going to come down, there will never be a solution to the Middle East there, won’t be a free Iraq, there will not be Democratic regimes in the Middle East, they don’t believe these things are possible. That’s why they’re getting fewer and fewer followers.
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