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Can Facts Trump Faith in Obama?

by Rush Limbaugh - Feb 28,2008

RUSH: Rush Limbaugh, the cutting edge of societal evolution, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. I am a highly trained broadcast specialist, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations daily. This is the most listened to and largest radio talk show in America.

One of our singular achievements here: We have made the word ‘liberal’ a dirty word. That’s among the many things that they hate. We have made liberal a dirty word to the point that they do not want to use it to describe them, including Barack Obama. No desire. He makes fun of the fact people call him a liberal. Oh, liberal this, liberal that. They come up with progressives or moderates or some other label for themselves. They go out and hire people like George Lakoff (rhymes with) to help them come up with language to fool people. We have made liberal a dirty word. (laughter) The point here about Obama. Dawn was, in the break, very emphatic with me about this Obama guy is not acting presidential, if he doesn’t want people calling him Hussein, calling him liberal. He’s running for president of the United States. He’s going to sit around; he’s going to talk with people that are going to call him worse than that.

Her point was, the presidential way would be, ‘I don’t care what you call me. Call me what you want to call me. There are far more important things out there than my name. I’m running for president,’ but he’s encouraging all of this censorship, and he’s thanking McCain and others who are enforcing this censorship on Republicans for not using Obama’s full name. So it’s a good point. He isn’t acting very presidential here. But that doesn’t matter. See, this is the point that I continue to make: It doesn’t matter. As far as dissuading his supporters at this stage, those kinds of things aren’t going to matter. Look, don’t ask me. I don’t know what it takes. I’ve never been able to disabuse too many people of their faith in whatever it is. I’ll give you a couple of examples: perfectly harmless people, not even ideologically inclined who have bought into Gore’s movie, bought into this whole manmade hoax. I pound ’em. I don’t mean passionately. I don’t mean shouting. I just recite fact and verse.

It doesn’t matter. It’s like shattering a worldview that they don’t want shattered, and they’d rather continue to believe what is not true because it makes them feel good, or because there’s a faith attachment to it. It’s going to be very difficult here. I’m going to be interested to see how it is that people attempt to dissuade the Obama faithful from him. Now, admittedly, this is early and there will be a lot that will happen between now and the conventions in August and September and then when the general election starts… (interruption) Yes, Mr. Snerdley? Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. All right, all right, all right, all right, I tend to disagree with you on this, Mr. Snerdley. Mr. Snerdley says I have disabused people of their faith. His example was Mrs. Clinton’s health care plan in 1992, that we effectively dissuaded people from a faithful attachment to the concept of government-run universal health care. We did it over the course of many months and with fact after fact after fact.

I think we finally got through to people on this by pointing out what the real motivation of the people who were trying to sell this program to everybody was. But I don’t know that people had a faith attachment to Mrs. Clinton, certainly not personally. She’s never had that, and I don’t think people had a faith attachment to the issue. I think what we were dealing with there was just the constant, ongoing, never-ending battle that the left has won — and that is convincing more and more people that government is there to do just that kind of thing. I think we defeated health care with ideas. We defeated health care with how bad it was. We defeated Mrs. Clinton, but look, we’re back here again. We have to keep fighting this stuff. It’s now a central theme of both Hillary and Obama’s campaigns. That’s why I watched this debate. You know, I didn’t care about the specifics of her plan versus his. I’m watching two people tell us how they are going to destroy the capitalist free market. Not only in health care, but in the oil business and in a number of other things.

I’m sitting here, and I’m transposing myself as a Democrat watching the debate, getting all caught up in the vagaries, the differences between the two plans; but not refuting and not objecting to the premise, which is the government should provide everybody health, that it is ‘a right.’ It is not! Health care is a privilege, but it is not a right. Rights come from God. They’re mighty different things. But the left has succeeded in convincing an increasing number of people that that is the purpose of government. Global warming is the same kind of thing. We have faith attachment to it. The left, the worldwide left, has convinced billions of people around the world. Billions around the world have accepted the whole concept behind the hoax of manmade global warming. Now, in this country, only half the country believes it. That’s progress. Mr. Snerdley thinks that if it weren’t for me, then 75% or 80% of the country would believe it like the rest of the world. (interruption) Mr. Snerdley thinks if it weren’t for me, Kyoto would have been signed already. I don’t know. Not even Clinton wanted to get us signed. He wouldn’t even send that up to the Senate.

He wouldn’t even sign that one himself. Well, maybe because of me. You’re lavishing too much praise on me in here and giving me a little bit too much credit for things here, but Snerdley’s point is: It can be done. Separating people from their faith, their faithful beliefs when the faithful beliefs are bogus, can be done. But the one thing that I know: It cannot be done by agreeing with a part of the hoax to show that you’re a nice guy or what have you. It’s a war, and you need warriors to fight wars. That’s another reason the left is all upset. We’re warriors out here. The old Republicans just laid down and died and hoped for the invitation to play golf with the Democrat leaders. And that’s when conservatism was good, that’s when conservatism was civil, and that’s when we all got along. That’s when ‘liberal’ was a great word, as was ‘communist.’ But now they’re dirty words, and so forth.