So we have a State of the Union speech last night, big focus on domestic issues, primarily Social Security — and the president said last week in his press conference, he was asked: What are you going to do? “Well, after I do the State of the Union speech, I’m going to go out. I’m gonna take this to the American people. I’m going to visit five states. I’m going to take it to the American people.” He was asked specifically, I think: How are you going to overcome the opposition? “I’m just going to go to the people,” and he is. He’s out there today. He went to Fargo, North Dakota. He’s going to be going today and tomorrow to five states. These are red states, by the way, that have Democrat senators up for reelection. They were all invited to go with him. Most of them refused the invitation. What did the Democrats do today? The Democrats sent five or six of the Senate leaders, Dingy Harry and Corzine and Patty Murray, Chuck Schumer, Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords, who’s an independent, and they went to the FDR Memorial and they surrounded a statue of FDR, sculpture of FDR in his wheelchair, and their audience was who? The media! The Democrats continue to play to the media, and the media, of course, willing accomplices wherever the Democrats go. The media will be in tow and they’ll be amplifying and supporting.
Here’s the president, on stage are people who are interested in the program, and in the audience are people the president is trying to convince to support the program and make the case, and where do the Democrats go? The Democrats go to a statue; the president goes to the people. The president is appearing and appealing to the people. The Democrats’ audience is the media. What they don’t understand is the media doesn’t carry the weight that it used to carry in terms of persuasion with the American people. Going to the American people is the thing to do. The Democrats don’t dare do this, I guess. I mean, Dingy Harry, none of these other guys are scheduling a road show. They’re gathering around a statue of FDR. Now, I ask you which of these two approaches is the more genuine? Which of these two approaches makes the most sense, and which of these two approaches has the best chance of succeeding? Obviously if you go talk to real people and sell your plan you’ve got a much better chance of succeeding when the other guys are going and talking to a statue and being photographed and then they want that photograph or the video circulated around the country of them gathered around a statue of the father of Social Security, FDR, which isn’t going to persuade anybody of anything.
The contrast is just striking here, and by going to the people, I always tell you: What are we doing here? We are engaged in the arena of ideas, all of us, and the whole point here has always been to increase the level of knowledge of the people via this program and the arena of ideas, because the people of this country get what they want. I know there are exceptions. Please understand when I say this I know there are exceptions to everything, but going to the people is the best chance the president has for this. It would be a waste of his time to try to persuade the media, be a waste of his time to stay in Washington, try to persuade the Democrats there. It’s the people that are going to persuade the Democrats. It’s the Democrats’ constituents who are going to bring pressure to bear on all the people in Washington and the House and the Senate, on whatever the program is. When I look at the various battle plans here and strategeries, basically I see a sound one on the president’s side, and something that’s just a laughable joke on the Democrats side. Speaking of laughable jokes let’s go to the Democrats response last night. Dingy Harry looking more like a small town mortician than anything else and Nancy Pelosi delivered the response to the State of the Union — and what timing! Here we are yesterday, three days out from the successful elections in Iraq, one of the most spellbinding, optimistic, visionary, reach-for-the-stars State of the Union speeches I have ever heard. Here is a man who in pitching Social Security looked the American people in the eye and said to American federal workers, including the Democrats in that house last night, hey, all I’m doing is talking about bringing the same plan you’ve got to the American people. The point was crystal clear. So here come Dingy Harry and Nancy Pelosi, and they’ve got to somehow respond to this in a way that takes attention away from the president and distracts some of the good vibes, and with that in mind, I want you to listen. It’s pathetic. It is embarrassingly pathetic. Here up first is Dingy Harry.
REID: I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada, in a tiny town called <a target=new href=”http://www.2steppin.com/srchlt.htm”>Searchlight</a>.
RUSH: Nobody cares.
REID: My dad was a hard rock miner.
RUSH: Nobody cares.
REID: My mom took in wash.
RUSH: Nobody cares.
REID: I grew up around people with strong values, even if they rarely talked about them —
RUSH: Stop the tape, Alttmont. Now, here we go. This is all part of the plan. The Democrats are all worried that people think they hate God. Democrats all concerned that people think that they hate morality. Democrats all concerned they have no values in people’s minds. So Dingy Harry has got to talk about the great values that his parents had but nobody talked about. We didn’t brag about them; we didn’t make them public, but we had them, big faith in God, blah, blah. Here comes the litany. These things that are designed to convince you that the Democrats also believe in God, the Democrats also believe in faith and values and so forth, and this is their mortician-like salesman out there Dingy Harry selling the concept.
REID: — country, worship God, never shunned hard work and never asked for special favors. What I imagine growing up, no matter how far I’ve traveled, Searchlight is still the place I go back to, and still the place I call home. A few weeks ago I joined some friends of mine for a bite to eat at the Nugget, Searchlight’s only restaurant. We were sitting down at a booth when a young boy about ten years old named Devon walked up to us carrying his skateboard under his arm. He said, “Senator Reid, when I grow up, I want to be just like you.”
RUSH: Now, this is some response. Dingy Harry is giving a response to the president that’s all about him. There’s one restaurant in this town, Searchlight. I wonder if that’s because there’s so many regulations that they can’t have more than one restaurant. So they’ve got a one-restaurant town he’s from; it’s probably a monopoly. He’s used to monopolies — and he went in this one restaurant. Some kid comes up with a skateboard and says, “Dingy Harry, I want to be just like you”? Jeez! Now, Dingy Harry to his credit did say, “Son, I hope you do even better than that,” when it was all over, but (interruption). No, I don’t know the kids name. Devon Gephardt? I don’t know. He never mentioned the kid’s last name. I’m surprised the kid wasn’t, you know, sitting in a seat off to the side where the camera could pan to him with his skateboard with an autographed picture of Dingy Harry sitting there. Yeah, “I want to be just like Dingy Harry,” and this is how Dingy Harry closed it. Here’s something that is just… I’m sorry, I’m running out of words. I know I’m a wordsmith here, but I’m running out of words to describe what I think is the utter lack of coherence and seriousness on the part of these people and their utter lack of understanding of reality. Listen to this:
REID: You know, today is Groundhog Day.
RUSH: So what?
REID: What we saw and heard tonight was a little like the movie Groundhog Day.
RUSH: Oh, come on.
REID: The same old ideology that we’ve heard before, over and over and over again.
RUSH: Stop the tape. We didn’t hear ideology. That’s what was so remarkable about the speech last night. There wasn’t any ideology in this. This was not a primarily conservative and not liberal speech. This was a lofty, visionary speech that was as ambitious as it could be. To say that we’ve heard this over and over and over again is to miss the point. We haven’t heard this in a long time. We haven’t had big ideas come out of the White House in a long, long time. For the eight years of Clinton we got no big ideas, we got nothing but little things that could said to be done so that an approval number would be raised so that a legacy could be established. We didn’t have any big ideas coming. We had the avoidance of big things. We had the avoidance of hard things. To say that this is the same old same old? I’ll tell you what, folks, if they really believe this they’re in worse trouble than I thought. But this with reference to Groundhog Day, he goes on with this.
REID: We can do better. I want you to know that when we believe the president is on the right track we won’t let partisan interests get in the way of what’s good for our country. We will be the first in line to work with him. But when he gets off track, we will be there to hold him accountable.
RUSH: Now, this is a classic example of the arrogant condescension. They are going to be the judge of when the president’s on the right track and when he’s off the track. The fact is they haven’t supported the president on much of anything. Certainly not since he was reelected, and they don’t intend to. But this reference to the movie Groundhog Day the same old thing over and over again? Did you see the Groundhog Day movie? He doesn’t even understand what happened in that movie. That movie was not the same thing happening over and over and over again. That movie was all about how you make decisions in life to improve your life, and end up doing the right things. He’s just working off the clich?.
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RUSH: Why in the world are Dingy Harry and Pelosi doing the response here? I’ll tell you why they’re doing the response. They’re doing it because they’re the leaders of the Senate and the House respectively, especially in Dingy Harry’s case he’s the new leader and so they elected him and so he’s out there as the leader. The question is: Aren’t there better people to do this than Dingy Harry? I mean, clearly even in the Democratic Party you’ve got people that don’t look like morticians from small towns that only have casinos in them as Searchlight, Nevada, does. The Nugget is actually a casino, folks. There’s a restaurant in there. We’ve done a little search. There’s no “restaurant” in Searchlight, Nevada. It’s a casino, and we just had a drive-by caller said there aren’t any sidewalks there so we don’t know what this kid Devon Gephardt is skateboarding on unless it’s I-15. But nevertheless, clearly you’ve got Bill Richardson who could go out there and make a better impression. You could put out this new guy, “Osama Obama” from Illinois to go out there, anybody. Many people are better. So is it Dingy Harry’s ego that said, “I’m going to go out and do this to establish my credentials as leader,” I think partly.
You know, he’s going to be the #1 spokesman. Just like the media always gathered around Daschle all those press conferences, they’re going to be gathering around Dingy Harry and he’s going to be the #1 spokesman anti-Bush. So I think he wanted to cement that, too, but I think there’s another reason. They can’t trust it to Bill Richardson. Bill Richardson lowered taxes in New Mexico as governor, and I think they’ve got some people in the Democratic Party — contrary to what we’re hearing from Linda Douglas and all — they’ve got some people out there who are not as rock-ribbed opposed to all this as Dingy Harry wants everybody to believe and they can’t trust some other Democrat to go out there and not take this totally violently opposed-to-Bush stance right now. So I think it’s partly ego. It’s partly to establish his credentials as the number one anti-Bush spokesman in the Senate, and for the Democrats, and it’s also insurance to make sure that some of these people who may be drifting off the reservation, and I don’t know how many there are. It isn’t many, but there are some.
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RUSH: All right, we got time to squeeze in a little Nancy Pelosi here. Here is a portion of her response to the president’s State of the Union last night.
PELOSI: We all know that the United States cannot stay in Iraq indefinitely and continue to be viewed as an occupying force [sic].
RUSH: All right, stop the tape! Stop the tape! That is going to sink them. This insistence on describing our presence in Iraq as “an occupying force,” not only is it intellectually dishonest, it is in no way accurate, particularly when you look at the timing here, the Iraqi elections on Sunday. This is the kind of thing that should make everybody question how serious they are. This is not even serious. This is incoherent, and it is utterly paranoid, and not to mention wrong, just blatantly wrong. To call the U.S. an occupying force after what happened in that chamber last night involving the couple from Pflugerville, Texas, Mr. and Mrs. Norwood. Again, these people claim to be the most sensitive and the most compassionate among us, and this is just heartless.
PELOSI: –neither should we slip out the back door falsely declaring victory, but leaving chaos. Despite the best efforts of our troops and their Iraqi counterparts, Iraq still faces a violent and persistent insurgency, and the chairman of the National Intelligence Council said in January that Iraq has become a magnet for international terrorists. We have never heard a clear plan from this administration for ending our presence in Iraq, and we did not hear one tonight.
RUSH: I beg to disagree. There has always been a clear plan for exiting from Iraq, and that plan is called victory. And there will be an exit in Iraq because there will be victory, and the victory is on the march. Once again, we don’t get a word of support from these people. We don’t hear anything from them that might inspire any of us to trust them with the defense of this country or this country’s national security. All we hear, as the president said, “a litany of complaints,” and nothing but pessimism — and Ted Koppel said last night on Nightline, he said he saw an interesting sign, “Pessimism is a waste of the imagination,” and that is precisely what is happening to the Democratic Party. They are wasting away. They are wasting they are imaginations. They are simply looking to the future, telling themselves negative stories, everything is doom and gloom, and it’s almost as though they want that to be the case. That’s the only way they benefit apparently.
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RUSH: All right, here’s what we’re going to do next. I’ve got one more response sound bite from Nancy Pelosi, and I’m going to back it up with a bite from President Bush’s State of the Union address. So, here’s Nancy, and she’s talking about our national security, how Bush hasn’t done anything to improve our national security and protect us against terrorists and all the rest.
PELOSI: For three years the president has failed to put together a comprehensive plan to protect America from terrorism [sic], and we did not hear one tonight. As we strive to close the gaps in our security here at home, we must do more to show — more to show our great strength as well as our greatness. We must extend the hand of friendship to our neighbors in Latin America. We must work to stop the genocide in Sudan. We must reinvigorate the Middle East piece process, and we must bring health and hope to people suffering from disease, devastation —
RUSH: This is unbelievable. I can’t sit here and be quiet during this.
PELOSI: — by our faith and our common humanity.
RUSH: I’m sorry, folks.
PELOSI: — and also because these actions will enhance our national security.
RUSH: You do not know what you’re talking about. You couldn’t tell the truth if your life depended on it, Ms. Pelosi. We didn’t hear one thing tonight about our plan to protect us from terrorism. We need to extend the hand of friendship to our neighbors in Latin America? Where the hell have you been? We bailed out Mexico. We’ve cleaned up Nicaragua. We’ve cleaned up El Salvador. What in the world is this woman talking about? We got rid of pineapple face Noriega down in Panama. And then she says, “We must work to stop the genocide in Sudan.” The UN just said the other day this is not a genocide! What’s the UN for? I thought we were supposed to go to the UN to solve these things as far as you people are concerned. Have you not talked to John Kerry lately? All right, now, you just heard what she said: “We haven’t done anything anywhere to help the security of the American people.” Here’s the president. She must not have read the speech or she didn’t hear this.
BUSH: If all regions of the world remain in despair and growing hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America and other free nations for decades. The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror and replace hatred with hope is the force of human freedom —
RUSH: Stop the tape. Ms. Pelosi, what do you not understand about that? You say the president has failed to put together a comprehensive plan to protect America from terrorism. We didn’t hear one word about that tonight. What did you just hear? This is the only way to do it. We can’t kill everybody that’s a potential terrorist. The president continued.
BUSH: — know this, and that is why the terrorist Zarqawi recently declared war on what he called the evil principle of democracy — and we declare our own intention. America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else. That is one of the main differences between us and our enemies. They seek to impose and expand an empire of oppression in which a tiny group of brutal, self-appointed rulers control every aspect of every life. Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations with governments that answer to their citizens and reflect their own cultures. And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.
RUSH: There can be only one reason Ms. Pelosi does not understand this. When the president says, “Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations with governments that answer to their citizens and reflect their own cultures and because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace,” what is it about that that you think Democrats don’t understand? I’ll tell you exactly what it is, folks. It’s this bit about democracies respecting their own people. The Democrats in this country don’t trust you. They don’t trust the American people. They do not respect you because they don’t think you have the smarts to do the right thing. They know that if left to their own devices, they are going to be out of power. If you are left to your own devices, they’re not going to win elections. That’s why they need to filibuster judges, to get activist judges on the courts, because they can’t win their agenda legislatively. They can’t go to the American people and persuade the American people to support them. It’s been demonstrated in two elections now. It’s been demonstrated in House elections. It’s being demonstrated in Senate elections.
If they haven’t noticed, they’re losing election after election by ever wider margins. Of course they don’t trust the people! This is why they don’t trust democracies. They don’t even believe freedom is for everybody. If it doesn’t involve government, if the U.S. government is not involved in actually doing something they don’t think anything can be done. So no wonder this disdain, no wonder Nancy Pelosi can listen to this and not hear it. No wonder she can hear it but not understand it. She rejects it. She rejects the whole notion of preserving a community of free and independent nations with governments that answer to their citizens. That scares them, too. Government that answers to the citizens. Citizens can vote members of government out of office. Democrats don’t like that. So no wonder they don’t trust it, and no wonder they don’t understand how it will bring freedom to other people in other nations, and you’ve heard the old saw: Democracies rarely go to war? They’re attacked, but democracies rarely go to war because there’s no need to. They will mount defenses of themselves but they don’t run around and start conquering and oppressing other countries. Dictatorships do this, and they do it to rid themselves of nearby opposition. Democracies are not worried about that except in terms of defending themselves against such oppressors.
So the idea is to build as many quote, unquote, democracies. All this means is, the people of these countries, wherever and whenever, exercising their own self-determination — and that’s another concept the Democrats don’t trust, because that involves elections, and the Democrats might lose elections and the Democrats’ precious little candidates might lose elections if you trust it to the people. I guess that’s the only thing I can think of to explain all this, that plus the fact that no matter what the president said last night was going to get panned, no matter what he said was going to be criticized. No matter what he said he was going to be ignored. But, see, the problem that these people keep encountering is that they are dealing with a more informed and more educated public than they’ve ever dealt with before, and more informed and more educated public, you, has a greater understanding of the left and who they are and what they represent, what they want to do, than the public has ever understood before, and that works against the liberals and the Democrats as well. They’re used to operating under camouflage or wearing masks, pretending to be one thing while being another, but those masks are gone, the camouflage is gone, and they are basically naked before the American people. We know who they are. We gaze upon them. We don’t like what we see, and they understand this — and so what’s their solution? To go hang around a sculpture of FDR to try to persuade the media to hold onto the current vestiges of Social Security.
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