We Can’t Afford Barack Obama

RUSH: Dan in Muskegon, Michigan, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, what a total honor it is to talk to you, a foreman mailman dittos to you, sir.

RUSH: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

CALLER: Our local Fox affiliate is quoting Obama as saying McCain has taken experience off the table by picking Sarah Palin and McCain has made experience his campaign issue. So isn’t by default Obama saying and admitting he has no experience?

RUSH: Yeah. But he’s wrong in his analysis, too, ’cause it doesn’t take it off the table because it’s McCain versus Obama.

CALLER: This is true. Now, listen, this pick does not make everything all better with me as far as McCain goes. I think he sold out his base and I think he continues to sell out his base. The pick is good. But what about those of us who are in Democratic states like Michigan, who will probably go for Obama? Should we switch our votes from the GOP to the Libertarian party to send a signal to the GOP that we’re sick and tired of this watering down of our issues?

RUSH: This is a dilemma that we have discussed on this program for many, many months now, and I have come to this conclusion: We can’t afford Barack Obama. We can’t afford it as a nation, and the foundational values that have defined this nation’s greatness, and we can’t afford it in our back pockets. There is no guarantee the Republican Party is going to lose anything by winning. At this point, this pick is going to help the Republican Party, it’s going to help the base. It illustrates what the Republican Party needs to do to win. McCain’s the nominee. I was telling some people last night who, you know, word kept leaking out about Lieberman, and that just rubbed ’em so wrong, they couldn’t believe it but they could believe it because it’s McCain. And I said, you know, there’s nothing we can do about McCain being the nominee. There’s nothing we can do about it now. He is the nominee. Some people are saying, ‘Look, if he picks Lieberman the convention doesn’t have to accept it.’ That’s true. But you still can’t do anything about McCain as the nominee.

I reminded them of the Harriet Miers circumstance. I guarantee you that when Barack Obama nominates Cornel West to be a justice on the US Supreme Court, there is not a damn thing we will be able to do about it. But, I don’t want to say this too loud, but we kept hearing it was going to be Lieberman or Ridge, we got Sarah Palin. We got a pro-life conservative. So if, for example, hypothetically speaking — please don’t tell anybody I said this, folks, all right, just keep this to yourself, just between us, I want to whisper this. If McCain gets elected and nominates, say, Ridge, to the Supreme Court, we’re going to have a little more opportunity to have something to say about that than if it’s Obama nominating Cornel West, or whoever he would nominate. We have more to work with. We cannot afford Obama, plain and simple. The guy is inexperienced. Folks, in his speech last night, you know, we are a great nation at risk in a dangerous world. He never talked about the dangerous world we face. He talked about himself. He was trying to justify his qualifications on the basis of who he is and what party he’s a member of. We didn’t hear, in platitudes or substance, what he thinks of our enemies, how he’s going to deal with them. We had surrogates, Bill Clinton and Biden, ‘Don’t worry, when the guns start firing at us, Obama will be there.’ Well, that doesn’t reassure me. And he didn’t talk about any of these things last night. We can’t afford him.

We can’t afford the radical liberalism, leftism that Obama would bring to the Oval Office. We’ve never had anything like it with that much power in the Oval Office in this country, we’ve never had it. Liberals do not win elections, not national elections. Clinton was a liberal, I know, but he campaigned as this moderate, Democrat Leadership Council and so forth, got in there, tried to do as much liberal, but we checked him with the Republican house in 1994. We cannot risk this ’cause it’s gonna take 30 years to undo it. It’s time we started thinking progress and offense rather than just undoing and defense, and part of that, folks, as I have shouted from the mountaintop in all of my countenance, we have got to stop letting the left define the issues that we debate. We have got to stop letting them set the agenda or the premise that we then respond to, ’cause it keeps us on defense. Conservatism has to advance. It has to advance aggressively on offense, setting its own agenda. We’re not going to have a chance in heck of doing that for a long time if Obama gets in there and just populates the federal bureaucracy with people like him that are going to be there for life. Supreme Court and federal court nominees like him, like Bill Ayers, like Jeremiah Wright, for life. It’s too risky. We simply cannot afford it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Richard in Baytown, Texas, welcome to Open Line Friday with Rush Limbaugh. Hello.

CALLER: Hi there. It’s an honor to speak with you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Listening to some of the news reporters today brought me back to thinking about the Bush-Quayle, Dukakis-Bentsen race in regard to vice presidents —

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: — candidates.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: Because Bentsen was well respected on both sides, and in fact, they made a credible point, that he was possibly more qualified to be president than either of the top tickets. And the Republicans countered that very effectively, I thought, with the statement that isn’t it better to vote for a candidate and hope that he lives than vote for a candidate and hope that he dies? Even though Biden —

RUSH: Wait a minute. Are you saying you don’t like the choice of Sarah Palin?

CALLER: No, I do like her.

RUSH: Because you think Biden is going to make mincemeat of her like Lloyd Bentsen supposedly did with Quayle?

CALLER: No, I think she’ll hold her own against Biden. But we have a similar kind of ticket in that the vice presidential candidate on the Democrat side was more prepared than the presidential candidate at the top of the ticket.

RUSH: All right. I understand. I’m not using the language here. Obama and Biden are not prepared. They’re wrong. They’re dangerous. They’re prepared to be disasters.