RUSH: Lawrence Eagleburger, former secretary of state, former assistant to Dr. Kissinger, was on DNCTV last night. Andrea Mitchell, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent, was talking to him, and said, ‘What do you say to the conservatives who are really going after John McCain, saying he’s not right wing enough?’
RUSH: We’re trying to win. We’re trying to avoid a 50-state landslide, Dr. Eagleburger. We are trying to win! What good is having a national security candidate if he’s not going to win? By the way, who elected Lawrence Eagleburger? I’ve always had profound respect for this guy. Hitler once said to the pope, how many divisions does he have? Mr. Eagleburger, what size is your audience? You’re working where, PMSNBC? Boggles his mind in terms of what it is we think we are doing? We’ve always wanted to win! We don’t have a death wish!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Rick in Kansas City, Missouri. Rick, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. I don’t know if you remember me. I had called in a few weeks ago and ended up getting cut off.
RUSH: Well, there must have been a reason for that.
CALLER: Well, it came to a hard break, and it was back when there was still hope, but I got through a few weeks later. The reason I called in is I actually want to agree with Mr. Eagleburger, who —
RUSH: You can’t be serious. You cannot be serious about this?
CALLER: Rush I’ve been a big fan for about 17 years. Seventeen years ago I decided to quit drugs, and I was working for a pastor friend from the church, and at the lunch break, he says, ‘You want to listen to some Rush?’ And I looked at him, I said, ‘You listen to Rush?’ I thought he was talking about the band. In many ways, you completed my transformation as I shifted from a maggot-infested, longhaired, dope-smoking hippie and became a conservative. But what I want to say is that I agree with Mr. Eagleburger in that I don’t believe that you or even Ronald Reagan necessarily represent conservatism. And you have to acknowledge the fact that there’s a few different ways to define conservatism, and from my perspective, when I listen to you, you know, the question that I had asked when I called a few weeks ago, I said, ‘What is the primary, most important defining issue to you, whether it be the abortion issue, or the fiscal issue,’ and I’ve come to be convinced that you, Rush, are a blue-blood conservative.
RUSH: I remember you now.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: If I remember correctly, if somebody is not pro-life, anti-abortion, first and foremost, then they can’t be a conservative, because if that is squandered then none of the rest matters?
CALLER: Well, what I would say to you is, from your perspective —
RUSH: No, is that what you said?
CALLER: I said that basically I disagreed with you because you said that because Huckabee didn’t have a perfect track record on taxes, he’s a liberal. And I was calling to say, Rush, if someone is conservative on foreign policy, conservative on —
RUSH: He’s incompetent on foreign policy. He’s inexperienced on foreign policy. Look, is Huckabee still the bugaboo with you?
CALLER: No, not at all. Not at all.
RUSH: Because I didn’t support Huckabee means to you I’m not a conservative?
CALLER: No. What bothered me was that to you, the defining issue is the tax issue, above everything else. And here’s my philosophy, Rush —
RUSH: I don’t think — no, no, no, no, no. Don’t think that was the case at all. If you were to ask me today, what’s the defining issue of conservatism, I wouldn’t give you just one.
CALLER: Right. But, Rush, we’ve been forced to choose. That’s reality. We’ve been forced to decide what our priorities are —
RUSH: It’s over.
CALLER: — and as a result —
RUSH: It’s over.
CALLER: — look what we get.
RUSH: It’s over. It’s over. It’s over. And we have chosen somebody, done, fini, gotta move on. It’s Senator McCain.
CALLER: None of us are happy, but, hey, well, listen, I agree with you, we have to get behind the guy because we have to get our eyes on the judges.
RUSH: I haven’t said that yet, either.
CALLER: Well, we have to. We have to fix our eyes on the judges. If we don’t, we’re idiots.
RUSH: Okay. You know what, all you — Eagleburger and all these other guys, look, I’m glad you’re out there, Rick, and I’m honored to be a part in your life improving. I really am. But Eagleburger and all these guys, now you, I’m going to tell you something, everybody attacking me is not going to win anybody any votes. Anybody attacking me is not going to move us forward. Eagleburger can sit out there and he can say whatever he wants and get it wrong about me, and so forth and so can any of these other people that are doing it, it’s Hillary or Obama, gang, that represent the political enemy here. Somehow I have become it, along with several of my colleagues here in talk radio. But that’s misplaced energy. I’ll play this bite again for those of you that missed it when we come back from the break so you know what Rick in Kansas City is talking about. Nobody here has appointed themselves the leader of the conservative movement. Nobody here has. There are a whole bunch of people in Washington trying to convince you they are the leader of the conservative movement. It isn’t happening here. We just want to win, and we know we aren’t going to win with liberals in our party trying to beat liberals in the Democrat Party.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We had this guy, what was it, Rick from Kansas City, the Huckabee guy. He never got around to saying he was a Huckabee guy, but I remember he was a Huckabee guy. He agreed with Eagleburger that I am not the leader of the conservative movement, something I never claimed to be in the first place. There are intellectual conservatives inside the Beltway who are all vying to be that. I’ve never claimed it and don’t seek it. It’s not the point, not the purpose here. But, anyway, Eagleburger was on DNCTV yesterday, MSNBC. Andrea Mitchell was talking to Lawrence Eagleburger, former secretary of state, good friend with Dr. Kissinger, and Andrea Mitchell said, ‘What do you say to the conservatives who are really going after John McCain –‘ and, by the way, we haven’t gone after McCain in over a week on this program. I don’t know what’s happening elsewhere, but we haven’t gone after McCain. We were pretty hot and heavy there for a while, but, you know, things are what they are, and you move on. It is what it is. Nevertheless, her question: ‘What do you say to the conservatives who are really going after McCain and saying he’s not right wing enough?’
EAGLEBURGER: I don’t know who elected Rush Limbaugh or Hannity as the heads of this conservative movement. They throw that word around as if it were theirs and theirs alone. I thought I was a conservative, but that doesn’t mean that I have to buy off on everything that these poo-bahs think that is — what’s necessary to be a conservative. And, in the end, from their point of view, at least, and certainly from mine, national security has to be a major consideration, and how they can walk away from a McCain when they know perfectly well he is the only one of all of these candidates that has any experience in terms of national security, they boggle my mind in terms of what it is they think they’re doing. The whole thing is so confusing to me and so illogical that I cannot understand what they have in their minds.
RUSH: Well, let me help you, Dr. Eagleburger. You don’t know what we think we’re doing. You’re confused, your mind is boggled, you can’t understand what we have on our minds. It’s real simple. We want to defeat liberals. We want to win. We don’t want to become liberal-like in order to win. We want to win. And we know how it’s done. It’s been done in the past on numerous occasions, and we’re not doing it the way it’s been done in the past. This leader of the conservative movement, nothing is suggesting you or anybody else, Dr. Eagleburger, to fall in line with what we’re saying here. By the way, how large is Dr. Eagleburger’s audience? He’s asking who elected me. Who elected him? You know, all of these guys that are running around and throwing these shots aimed my way and others are missing the target. We’re not the problem. We are the solution. If they want unity, this is a strange way for these guys to go about it. They need to be looking at Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton if they really are threatened here.
I made mention of this in the first hour when analyzing where we are on the Democrat side of this. And just for the sake of discussion, although it’s not the case now, we’re going to assume it’s over and that the opponent is Obama. What is McCain going to have to do, Dr. Eagleburger? He’s going to have to compare himself and contrast himself to Barack Obama, or Hillary, I don’t care, take your pick, either one. And it’s going to be very difficult for him to do on some things. On other things it’s not going to be hard, but on some things it’s going to be very difficult for him to compare and contrast himself without being called a hypocrite because, if he goes into an assault on Obama on a few specific things because Obama’s too liberal or too pro-big government or what have you, Obama’s going to be able to come back, ‘Well, Senator McCain, I thought you were with us on that.’ It’s going to be a challenge for the McCain campaign to deal with this. All this is about is winning. This is about defeating liberals.
This Obama business, this is a clear-cut illustration of exactly why liberals need to be defeated. I’m talking about purely here in a political sense. This kind of movement that’s based on cult-like status, remember what they said about Reagan, Teflon president. Obama is the same thing now. Every lob of criticism you throw at the guy bounces right off, backfires on whoever aims it, comes right back at them. All the criticism is doing is strengthening the bond between Obama’s cultists and Obama. In the meantime, focusing on all that is obscuring the specifics of what an Obama presidency actually portends. It portends none of this flowery, vapid nothingness that gets people so worked up. It is specific, and it is leftist. It is socialist.