RUSH: I just saw a story here on Breitbart.com, which is disturbing. Glencoe, Georgia, is the Dateline. ‘President Bush attacked opponents of an immigration deal [today], suggesting they ‘don’t want to do what’s right for America.’ The fundamental question is, will elected officials have the courage necessary to put a comprehensive immigration plan in place,” and he spoke ‘against a backdrop of a huge American flag.’ So the president of the United States now is marginalizing the opponents of the immigration bill as people who ‘don’t want to do what’s right for America.’ The sad thing is it’s the exact opposite. It is the exact opposite. I don’t know what is right about proclaiming that 12 or 20 million or whatever the number of illegals are, are all of a sudden legal. I don’t want to rehash all that. I made comment earlier in the previous hour that we all know what the Democrats are trying to do here, and that is destroy as many of the traditions and institutions that have made the country what it is and make the country in their own image. They want to expand the welfare state. They want more entitlements. They want more people who need entitlements.
They love to redistribute wealth, and they want the government to grow, to become even more powerful over more and more dependent people. Republicans on the other hand are acting out of fear, and the fear that the Republicans have is of losing these particular votes and voters, these potential future voters, the newly arriving Mexicans, Hispanics, Latinos, whatever. We have nothing against those people here, by the way. What we are opposed to is the fact that there’s no assimilation, that they are illegal and that the attitude that is being conveyed to them is that somehow we’re the ones guilty for their actions and that we must apologize to them. I just want to tell you something. It’s something I learned later in my life than I wish I had learned it. When you make decisions out of fear — I don’t care whether they’re a political party or a political body or you as an individual — I guarantee you, you are going to screw up, and that’s what the Republicans are doing here. They’re looking at fear, and the fear is defeat. They are looking at this — if they oppose this — as equaling certain defeat. Now, the option for the Republicans here, as I see it, is defeat versus opportunity. But it’s this problem of looking at everything via fear that skews your judgment.
It’s almost inarguable. There are exceptions to this. Sometimes fear is a good motivator, but not in this case. If fear motivates you to go right, to be right, straighten up and fly right, then it’s one thing. This fear is not productive and not healthy at all because this fear, to them, equals defeat. Now, the other side of this equation is opportunity. They are, the Republicans, are looking at this defeat and fear solely within the confines of these particular citizens, whatever the number is, 12 to 20. Their fear is if they oppose this legislation, that they’re never going to get any of the votes of those 12 to 20 million down the road nor a majority of votes of Hispanics that are already here, legally. The opportunity that they’re missing because they are so dominated by their fear, is the opportunity to shore up a faltering base that they have ignored and basically shunned prior to last November’s elections. There is an opportunity here to educate. There is an opportunity here to inform. There’s an opportunity here to be conservative, an opportunity to do things that will guarantee them victory, and victory to them is winning the next elections. But they are so self-absorbed or so clouded in the fear that they have of losing…
You know full well, be it a sports event, a football team that plays ‘not to lose’ is going to lose. You play a game or engage in an activity ‘not to lose,’ as opposed to trying to win, and that’s what’s going to happen to you: you are going to lose. The opportunity here is profound, the opportunity to stand up for the traditions and institutions that have defined and made this country great, the same traditions and institutions that previous Republicans have campaigned on maintaining, and have ridden to huge victories — and they don’t see that! Obviously, they don’t see it. Maybe some do. Well, I’m talking about the Republicans who are, in our view, on the wrong side of the legislation. There are plenty of Republicans that are seeing this the right way. I have a story here in the stack from ThePolitico.com by David Baumann. ‘GOP Moderates Freer with Dem Majority — In public, House Republican conservatives and moderates are trying to play nice with each other. But in private, conservatives are getting sick of those they consider RINOs, Republicans in Name Only. And once again, the debate is centering on whether the RINOs are simply doing what they need to do to avoid becoming an endangered species. Having lost several of their key members either at the polls last November or because of retirement, the moderates…’
Why are they losing? It isn’t retirement!
‘[T]he moderates, who prefer their Tuesday Group moniker to the RINOs acronym, are searching for their role in the new Democratic-controlled House. Here’s the rub: They want to return the GOP to the majority. But the Democrats have pushed several bills that they favor and, more importantly, that their constituents — mostly from the Midwest and Northeast — want them to support. Moderate Republicans have insisted for years that they have had to cast votes that might run contrary to their traditional Republican districts if they want to get reelected. And they can point to the losses of senior members such as Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.) last year to back up their arguments…. ‘It was pointed out that we could have beaten back that bill,” this was the gasoline price-gouging bill, ”if we had voted a different way,’ said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), a member of the Tuesday Group. But LaHood said it would have been tough to go back home to Illinois — where gas can be more than $3.50 a gallon — if he had voted the way conservatives wanted,’ and he’s wrong about it. It wouldn’t have. If he had run as a conservative and governed as one, he wouldn’t have to explain anything but the facts to your voters.
But when you’re out there trying to make sure your voters don’t get mad… This is precisely my point. They don’t get it, and there are a lot of Republicans that don’t get it. The Republicans didn’t lose the last election because they weren’t liberal or moderate enough. It was because they abandoned conservative principles, and that’s precisely what’s happening in the immigration debate! They have a golden opportunity. I’ve marveled at this since the end of the Reagan presidency, the two terms. How in the world any Republican can look at those eight years and not want to replicate them — and they actually, when they campaign, they do. They know what wins elections, but it’s bothered them. I’ve always told you, there are two wings of the Republican Party. You’ve got the country club, blue-blooders (and they never did like Reagan), and then you’ve got the conservatives. The country club blue-blooders, the moderates, the RINOs, these are the ones that want to be seen as above the rabble that is the Republican Party, and by rabble, an example would be the 24 million evangelicals, the so-called Christian right. They’re embarrassed that those people are in their party! There’s no big move towards liberal policies in this country.
Why do you think the Democrats had to run a bunch of conservative Democrats last November to win the House to give Nancy Pelosi all of her power? If liberal policies were ruling the roost in this country, they would have run the most liberal candidates they could have, but they didn’t. They went out there and they got conservative Democrats in these southern states and they rode to victory on conservatism, not party ideology. Heath Shuler, North Carolina, out-conservatived the GOP incumbent. Now, the Drive-Bys don’t understand the difference between the two parties’ voters. The Democrats will always show up at the polls because they want more money for government or from government on a personal basis. Rank-and-file conservatives want to be left alone by the government. They vote based on vision, principles, and solutions, not self-interest. Or selfishness. (Self-interest is good. Selfishness is bad.)
We don’t expect our guys to grow the government like the Medicare drug bill, buy votes. We don’t expect them to go out and support a stupid, asinine immigration bill — with, by the way, the misguided notion that it’s going to get votes from the Hispanics? Simpson-Mazzoli didn’t clever a bunch of Republican votes from Hispanics in 1986. You know, Republicans would do wise to vote against any Democrat legislation. But they’re not. They’re looking at things through fear, folks. Fear equals defeat, and they refuse to see the opportunity that’s staring them in the face here. Look, one of the calculations that’s equally perplexing is, whatever number of illegals there are out there, the Republicans have to know they’re not even going to get half of them. But let’s say they did. Let’s say they got half of them. Let’s say it’s 20 million, just to use a nice, round number that people think is accurate. So let’s say they’re going to get ten million votes down the road. How many votes are they in the process of losing here by flipping off the people that have elected them and supported them and campaigned for them and donated to them in the past?
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RUSH: Here’s Don in Rosemead, California, Don, thank you for waiting and welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Yeah, Rush, I think that the Republican comprehensive immigration bill is a great opportunity for Republicans, because there are a whole lot of nominally liberal Democrats, you know, that I know who are really pissed off about this.
RUSH: What did you say, ticked off about this?
CALLER: Yeah, ticked off. I’m sorry!
RUSH: Yeah. That’s what I thought you said.
CALLER: I almost had a slip of the tongue there. I’m sorry. (Laughing.)
RUSH: (Laughing.) Some words sound alike in my cochlear implant. I thought you said ticked off. This is the point of a brilliant monologue I did about an hour and a half ago. The Republican look at this through the prism of fear. They’re scared to death they’re going to lose all these votes and they’re looking at therefore defeat. They’re consumed with the fact that they might lose. They’re playing not to lose. You never win when you play not to lose. They are not looking at it as the opportunity that exists for big time victory, to educate, to inform, to hold fast to the traditions and institutions that define the country and to pick off some Democrats at the same time such as you just pointed out. And why, oh, why they don’t see it and we do, and they think we’re stupid, they think we’re uninformed, malinformed, ill-informed. I’ll try to avoid sounding like a broken record here but it’s tough to do this when you gotta talk about it nonstop, six days in a row. I’m doing a yeoman’s job, by the way, of bringing new angles to this and not sounding like a broken record. It’s tough to do. Here’s Bill, Sacramento, my adopted hometown. Welcome, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks for taking my call. I wanted to address the Miss Universe contest last night where Rachel Smith was delivering her final answer and was booed in Mexico City and completely drowned out by the audience.
RUSH: I didn’t see this. What was she saying? What was her final answer?
CALLER: I couldn’t hear the answer because the boos were so loud.
RUSH: So an American, Miss USA and the Miss Universe pageant, was booed and the pageant was in Mexico?
CALLER: Mexico City, right.
RUSH: And she got booed?
CALLER: Literally drowned out by the audience booing, yeah. I thought this would be Headline News, and it’s not, and she deserves a real apology.
RUSH: See, this is the kind of thing that elected Republicans would go, ‘Oh, my God they hate us, oh, we’ve gotta do something, we’ve gotta pass this bill.’ Is this the woman that slipped and fell? Maybe they were booing her for that?
CALLER: No, I think they were booing her because she was Miss USA.
RUSH: Yeah, you’re right, you’re probably right. Just trying to put a bright spot on this disturbing event.
CALLER: She was the only contestant that was booed.
RUSH: This is the thing. Here’s another thing. We’re going about this, the Republicans are going about this in a whole wrong way. They’re trying to make Mexico love them. The evidence that you cite last night — I didn’t happen to see this. I haven’t watched the beauty pageant in decades, didn’t even know it was on. But the idea that they hate us and we’re trying to make them like us, that never works. It never works. You never remain who you are once you start down that path. And that’s what’s happening here. John in Westminster, Maryland, thank you, sir, for waiting. You’re next on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you? Hey, you know, that article you referenced earlier by Dick Morris, he correctly pointed out that a lot of these people who are immigrating to the United States turn out to be conservative. And in my opinion there’s no reason to believe that the Mexicans that do end up staying here will gravitate towards anything other than —
RUSH: You know why they say that, because some people looking at this think that it’s entrepreneurial to take the step to come here in the first place, and to get a good job, and to support your family, people think these are entrepreneurial characteristics and that if somebody exhibits those kinds of traits that they’re automatically going to end up being Republicans. History doesn’t bear this out.
CALLER: I just think that the Republicans should just do exactly what you said, vote their heart on this and not worry about the votes. I think that it will take care of itself, and I believe that a lot of these people who do become citizens in the end will be conservatives, because that’s where they want to go.
RUSH: That didn’t happen after Simpson-Mazzoli. There’s going to be education necessary. That’s just not going to happen because we want it to. But there’s a way to at least try to make it happen. That is to take this bill — this is from the Republican perspective, now — take this bill and use it as an opportunity to talk about what has made America great, that their job is to continue to make America great or opportunities for the country to remain great, use this as an opportunity to educate wayward Democrats who are mad about this bill. This is such an opportunity here to explain and define basic conservatism, which works. In the process, you can address the illegals at the same time, and you can say, ‘We have no objection to this country growing via immigration, legal immigration, this sort of thing. We want people to come here and join our distinct American culture, and these are the great things that will happen as a result of this.’ The opportunities are just boundless here. They don’t see them because they’re looking at this through the eyes of defeat and fear, and maybe part of it is they’re just afraid to stand up for what they believe because they’re going to get tarred and feathered and laughed at by the Drive-By Media. That’s a factor in all this, too.
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