RUSH: Kyle in Daytona, Florida. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, thanks for taking my call. I got to watch the whole ceremony, and when he took that oath and he gave that speech and he delivered the 21-minute speech, it reminded me of everything that I voted for, without so much as a doubt. It reminded me of September 11th; it reminded me of his 2002 State of the Union and everything in that period.
RUSH: How about the domestic agenda stuff that he mentioned? Because, see, I think that the left continues to miss a point. They’re acting surprised that he’s going to pursue these big-ticket items, and yet he campaigned on them. He campaigned on Social Security reform.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Immigration was a huge thing. Tax cuts always, making them permanent and so forth — and he addressed them again today. This was not just a speech about Iraq and the war on terrorism and protecting ourselves in the event of another 9/11-type attack. He within the on the domestic side, too. Did you feel validated on that?
CALLER: Oh, yeah, I voted for him for that, too, because I do believe we need to peel back the layers that are keeping people from being more productive, and that goes into what he said about freedom, and it goes back to something that I read earlier,about a week or so ago, about the Natan Sharansky he read on the case for freedom.
RUSH: Yeah, we interviewed Natan Sharansky on the book in the Limbaugh Letter. The president’s read that book. The president recommended that book to people and turned a lot of people on to it. In fact, let me tell you a little story about Natan Sharansky. It dovetails, and I mentioned this once before, that if you didn’t read the interview in the Limbaugh Letter, shame, shame, I’ll pass on to you what it said in one example here.
I asked him. He was a dissident. He was in a Soviet gulag for nine years, Natan Sharansky. He’s now in the Sharon government in Israel. I said what was your first day like, how did you feel when you got out of there? He said (paraphrased), ‘A lot of people, having been incarcerated for nine years, on their first day of freedom would always be looking over their shoulder thinking, ‘This isn’t real. Somebody is going to come back for me. Somebody is going to take me, put me back here.” Did you have any trouble adapting? He said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, because I was always free while I was in prison.’ I said, ‘You were always free?’
‘Yes, freedom is a state of mind. Freedom is who I am. Freedom is how I was born. Freedom is how I was created. Freedom. I’m a free man,’ and he gave me an example. He said while he was in jail, he could tell all kinds of jokes about Soviet leaders — Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yuri Andropov — and he could laugh after the jokes. What could they do to him? He was already in jail. But his guards couldn’t laugh, guards didn’t dare laugh at these funny jokes, they weren’t free, they were members of the Soviet military, the Soviet system, but he was in prison. He had more freedom than his guards. That was his metal attitude, and I think that’s an excellent story and an excellent example to portray exactly what the president was talking about today. But this isn’t the first time the president’s talked about freedom. This has been a central theme of the president’s campaign starting back in 1998, or ’99, whenever it got started in earnest. But that’s been something that has been a hallmark. That’s why I just chuckle when I hear the left talk about how surprising all this is and how Bush is actually going to do what he says and so forth.
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