A Lesson on Partisanship

RUSH: Crystal in Miami, nice to have you on the program. Welcome.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. You often comment that politics have become more partisan over the last decade or two, and I’m only 29 so I really have to take your word for that, but I wonder what you think may have motivated that development and is there anything we can do to effect some kind of change towards less partisan politics.
RUSH: Hmm. The second part of that I find a fascinating question, “Is there anything we can do?” Partisanship is not a problem that we can all get together and solve. Partisanship is a battle. There’s a myth here, Crystal, and hang around here just a second. Yes, it’s true that things are more partisan, but it’s not really by much. See, I happen to love partisanship. I think partisanship is natural and a perfect outflow from people who are committed to their core beliefs. That’s why I don’t like moderates. Moderates by definition will not tell you what they believe. They’re wishy-washy and they sit around and they wait to choose sides based on which side makes them feel better about themselves. But partisanship has been around ever since the founding of the country. Partisanship was worse in the days of the founding of this country than it is today. Partisanship, it has been vicious, it has been mean, the things that the tabloid press wrote about Abraham Lincoln in his day and others, it would make today’s occurrences look like Romper Room. You say you’re 29 and you haven’t followed this. That’s my point, people’s historical perspective begins with the day they were born, but if you, in school, had been properly taught American history, you’d be able to a little bit better, maybe, put all this in perspective.
Now, having said that, let me acknowledge that for those alive today that have been alive for at least 50 years, it does seem worse than it has been in the previous 50 years, or 30, if you’ve been alive 29 or 30 years. And there is a reason for that. But if you go back to the 1970s you will find that the Democrats in the media hated Richard Nixon every bit as much as they hated George Bush. The parallels are amazing. Nixon, in an attempt to make the liberals less combative, gave them a bunch of things that they wanted. He created the EEOC. Nixon created the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon gave them a whole bunch of new government bureaucracies in an attempt to tell them, “Hey, I’m not such a bad guy.” Didn’t matter, they were out to destroy him, and they were out to destroy him because of two things, a man named Alger Hiss. A well-known communist spy was uncovered and nailed by Richard Nixon, along with the help of a man named Whitaker Chambers. The left never forgave Richard Nixon for that, and he compounded it by beating Helen Gahagan Douglas in an election in California. From that point he was a marked man. You don’t expose communists, and you don’t beat Democrats. Then Reagan came along and they hated Reagan like they hate Bush today. Reagan was just as hated, just as reviled, just as impugned, just as maligned. The reason in those days that it didn’t appear to be partisan, is because in those days the Democrats ran the House of Representatives, the Democrats controlled the Senate for most of those years, and the Republican power was centered and focused on the White House. The conservative emergence had not yet occurred, and in all of those days — listen to me on this, Crystal — there was a media monopoly. There were the three networks, there were two major newspapers, and three major news magazines, and that was the US media. And whatever they said was. Whatever they reported as news, was the news. There was nothing else. If they didn’t report it, it didn’t happen. They told us what the news was and they told us what to think about it with their commentary and commentators.

Things began to change when Reagan took office, a number of things were spawned including the creation of a new media. But the primary reason, and there are many, but the primary reason for the increased sense of partisanship today as opposed to in the last 40 years or 50, is the Republicans winning the House of Representatives in 1994. The House of Representatives is the seat of real power in this country. It’s where all the spending bills originate. It’s where much of the legislation that affects social policy via taxation originates and the Democrats controlled it for 40 years. So they were able to stop Republican presidents, they were able to stop a Republican controlled Senate now and then when they had to deal with it. When they lost the House of Representatives, that began the era. Well, actually one thing happened before that, 1988, 1989 they began to lose the media, although they didn’t know it then. But their media monopoly broke up. We had the creation of this program and then that spawned more talk radio. Then the Internet came along, and now the blogosphere. And the left-wing media no longer has their monopoly; they can’t package the news as easily as they used to — well, they can package it as easily, but they can’t persuade many Americans of their version of events on a daily basis. What you’re seeing in the short version here is a dominant American left in Democratic Party which has been rendered basically a bunch of eunuchs. They have lost their power, they have lost their media monopoly, and that’s a huge thing. When you lose the House and a media monopoly, that’s an amazingly powerful apparatus, and they relied on it for so many years that they got intellectually lazy and they did not know how to fight intellectual battles with the conservatives that were working hard behind the scenes to triumph and that triumph began with Reagan and cemented itself with the House takeover in 1994. And since then, this partisanship, this shrill partisanship is due to the fact that a bunch of Democrats and a bunch of liberals have lost their power, they see it evaporating everyday, and they don’t know what to do to get it back.
They cannot believe that Al Gore did not win in 2000 so they’ve convinced themselves the election was the stolen. They can’t believe John Kerry didn’t win in 2004, so they’ve convinced themselves that Ohio’s voting machines were screwed with. They can’t believe that somebody is as stupid and idiotic as they believe George Bush is could win in a landslide reelection in 2004. They just can’t believe it. Since they cannot win at the ballot box anymore and since they cannot control via a media monopoly the flow of news in this country, the only thing they have left is to take out their opponents via the criminal justice system or the ethics system or what have you. That’s what they’ve been reduced to. The partisanship is simply the result of a bunch of people who have lost their power who think it’s been stolen from them and they’re doing everything they can to get it back because their purpose in life is to have power, their purpose in life is to own Washington, to have this political power, to be able to exercise it. And that’s why the partisanship today. It’s always been around, the disdain that liberals have for conservatives has always been around. It’s just reached this fever pitch. For those of you that have not been alive that long to know all this historical background to this, it’s really about nothing more than the fact that the Democrats think that by virtue of their birth, they are entitled to power. By virtue of their being liberals, they are superior to everybody else, they are elites, they can’t understand being rejected by American people. They can’t understand being rejected at the ballot box; they can’t understand the media being rejected by consumers. They can’t understand why this new media is triumphing over them. And rather than blame themselves and rather than examine themselves, see what they might be doing wrong, what they are instead doing is simply going to whatever lengths they can to take out their enemies elsewhere, because they can’t do it at the ballot box. And they have no sense of humor, they don’t like being made fun of.
You never used to here jokes about liberals anywhere. Just didn’t happen. You didn’t hear jokes about liberals from comedians or Democrats. You didn’t hear jokes about liberals or anything in movies or so forth. You didn’t hear jokes about them, period. Now they are a walking laughingstock. And they become more so each and every day. And I firmly believe this, folks. I know a lot of you people are just scared to death of them, and I guess that’s somewhat healthy. They’re never going to go away and they’re never going to be totally vanquished but this is a bunch of people that ought to be more scared of themselves than we need a to be afraid of them. You corner a lion, what’s it going to do? You take a king of the jungle, king of whatever, corner it, a rat, whatever, it’s got one chance to get away and that’s kill you. That’s destroy you. That’s where they are. They are a bunch of cornered vermin, cornered rats, and their only way out of this is to destroy their enemies. That really, Crystal, is the best I can sum it up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Crystal in Miami, I know you’re still out there. Two others things I want to mention to you in this regard. The Democrats used to have a lot of conservative members in the south. A lot of Democrats used to be conservatives, and that kept the Democratic Party from going Trotskyite left. It kept the party from becoming Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and all that. Those conservative Democrats have become Republicans. The Democratic Party moved so far left that they had no home. They called the Reagan Democrats; they finally have become Republicans. The Democrats don’t have one state that they — Louisiana may be the closest thing that they can say they still run and control, and we see what it gets us. The second thing that you need to understand here about partisanship, I don’t want to mislead you, I say I love it. The Democrats’ partisanship is not a partisanship born of honestly telling us what they believe. If they did they would be finished. You haven’t heard an agenda from a Democrat in six years. You haven’t heard one thing from a Democrat running for office, what he’s going to do. All he’s done is criticize what the Republicans or conservatives do. But you don’t hear any agenda from these people. They don’t have the guts to be honest about it so they wear masks and they camouflage themselves and so the partisanship that we’re getting is now really personal. It’s not the partisanship born of issues. I mean, I love the partisanship where you get in the arena of ideas and you debate them, but that’s not what’s happening. We are presenting our ideas, we conservatives are, to the American people, and they are buying it, they are learning it, they are accepting it, they are discovering it, and they know that it’s all true.

The liberals don’t dare debate liberalism, so what they do is try to destroy the credibility of conservatives. ?Well, this guy is a crook, or that guy has got ethics problems, now we’ve indicted Tom DeLay,? because they don’t have the guts nor the wherewithal nor the ability to win a partisan debate of ideas. So the partisanship is really, really, really gotten vicious because the Democrats have made it personal. Not about issues. But about personal. And it’s about criminalizing conservatism. It’s mean-spirited, it’s cruel, ?Tax cuts, why, why, that causes people to starve!? It’s all a bunch of bogus charges and accusations, but it’s the best that they can come up with. The reason the media continues to create these phony realities, these false realities, like they did with Cindy Sheehan, like they did with Bill Burkett, like they’re doing now with DeLay, like they’ve done ever since 2001, and they did it many times before. Like Iraq. They’re trying to portray a picture of Iraq that’s totally untrue, and they know it. Just like they gave us a picture of the New Orleans aftermath that was totally untrue, and they knew it. They didn’t care, they wanted it to be true. Here’s why. They’re nothing but cornered rats, too, and they’ve only got one way out and that’s to destroy their enemy, their opposition, the threat. At the same time, the media, the big, what we used to call the mainstream media, the elite media, whatever, they still trying to prove to themselves that they have that old power to shape opinion in America.
It’s like the 44-year-old quarterback who still thinks he can take his team to the Super Bowl, still thinks that he can throw 30 touchdown passes in a season, still thinks he can throw the deep out, still thinks he can zip that ball into tight coverage. It’s like the athlete who will not admit he’s over the hill. The media will not admit that the day is different, the day is new, it’s a new era, and that they aren’t a monopoly anymore. And so what you see every day in the media is nothing more than their attempt to prove to themselves that they still have it, that they still matter. And that’s why they’re aligned. That’s why you can watch NBC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, sometimes even Fox, depending on who the reporter is. You can read the New York Times and it’s all the same. It’s literally all the same. DeLay, money laundering, DeLay this, DeLay this. It’s all the same, and it’s not going to change until they realize that they’re the ones that are going to have to do the adapting. Let me go to Vancouver, Washington. Rick, we’ll take you next. We’ll get on with things in a second here, folks, but I want to grab this. Rick, hi, and welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you very much. There’s another factor on the partisanship that I think your modesty isn’t going to allow you to cover. Back in the eighties when you hit the national scene, typically I would talk to friends of mine and things like that, “Have you heard this Rush Limbaugh guy and stuff.” Maybe I’ve heard of him, maybe I haven’t, I like him, I don’t like him. But for the most part, people were going along about their life, didn’t know anything; all they knew is the Democrats wanted to help the little guy, the Republicans only wanted to help the rich guy. And you educated the electorate, the populous, whatever you want to call it, and the chips started falling where they may as far as how people believed, but you did cause people to become more educated in the world of politics, and I think the left had to respond. They started stepping up their attacks more as your popularity grew.

RUSH: So what you are saying is that I am the reason it’s more partisan out there?
CALLER: It’s your fault, yes. (Laughing.)
RUSH: I caused it?
CALLER: We are able to express ourselves in ways that we weren’t able to before. We can come out and say, “Look, tax cuts cause the treasury to get more money.” You kind of broke — or I should say shattered the template that was always existing prior to that.
RUSH: Well, I’ll be glad to take some credit for this. I know that they’ve got me in their crosshairs as well, and they have been, for I can’t tell you how long, trying to discredit me every year I have been doing this program. “Don’t listen to Limbaugh, he makes it up. No, he lies about it, he shapes things to be whatever he wants his world to be,” blah, blah — accuse me of doing what they actually do, which is another thing, transference. Listen to the liberals criticize Republicans, folks, and when you hear these accusations, even on this DeLay business, “It’s corrupt, this is just ethically corrupt.” They’re talking about themselves, whether they know it or not, they are. I have no question that this program and what it’s spawned is a participant — and why things are, quote, unquote, more partisan. But all that really means is this program and the things it has spawned is the reason Democrats have been losing. And of course if you corner a rat they only have one choice. If you’re a rat you cannot dig a new rat hole in the corner and duck into it. You don’t have the tools. All you can do is try to fight your way out of it and you can only do that by wounding whoever it is that has you cornered. That’s why nobody likes to corner a lion or a sick animal, it’s risky, it’s risky, because there is only one way out. And that’s where we are, and that is today’s lesson on partisanship.
END TRANSCRIPT