RUSH: I saw a story that was a follow-up to Sarah Palin. Remember they’re doing everything they can to destroy Sarah Palin out there, and there was a story. We had the video, too. She was pardoning the state turkey in Alaska, while standing in front of a guy who was slaughtering turkeys for Thanksgiving. It was a turkey farm. The New York Times ran a story on this and referred to what was going on behind Sarah Palin as ‘turkey executions.’ The turkeys were being executed! Now, what is a turkey for? A turkey can’t even fly. It’s one of the dumbest birds out there, but that’s irrelevant. This is a turkey farm. The turkeys are bred for one reason, ladies and gentlemen, and that’s to be consumed. Yet Sarah Palin is standing in front of an ‘execution.’ Bush did his pardon of the turkey today, too. But with Sarah Palin involved they had to describe the turkeys as being ‘executed.’ The correct term is slaughtered. Tim in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Hi.
CALLER: Yes. Rush.
RUSH: Hello, sir.
RUSH: Yeah. Hi.
CALLER: It is an honor.
RUSH: Testing one, two, three. Tim, are you there?
CALLER: Yes, I’m here. Can you hear me?
RUSH: Yeah, I hear you fine.
CALLER: It’s an honor, sir.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: I just want to say I’m stationed in Fort Bragg, but I’m from the reddest state, Oklahoma.
RUSH: That’s right, 65% voted for McCain.
CALLER: Yes, which actually ‘Oklahoma’ in Choctaw means the ‘home of the red man.’
RUSH: Yeah, but they got a weird thing going on there now. They got some guy that wants to — what’s the deal? I forget what it is. If you don’t do what he says, they’re going to take away your Oklahoma State season tickets.
CALLER: What?
RUSH: Yes, I heard these two guys, and I can’t remember what this guy wants to do. It’s something about dictating some new behavior and it’s totally unlike anybody governing in Oklahoma.
CALLER: I think he’s a Democrat.
RUSH: No, it wasn’t the governor. It was some lowly state official. I’m having a mental block. Somebody’s going to feed me the information here from the website in mere moments, I am confident of this. In the meantime, what was it that you called about?
CALLER: Okay. My question… Well actually, before my question, I went to a McCain rally here in North Carolina, and a Palin rally, two McCain rallies and one Palin rally and there were so many more people to see Palin than there was McCain. And she has energized in my mind the base, the conservative base, like, ‘Hey, this is awesome!’ And, you know, a lot of people like me — I’m 31 years old, a conservative — we’re thinking, ‘You know, Obama is in, but, hey, we had to go through Carter to get Reagan.’ So I’m thinking we have to go through Obama to get Palin, but my question to you is: Why are all these Republicans out there, why don’t they like her?
RUSH: A-ha. A-ha. Okay, I want you to listen very carefully to this. It’s a long answer that I’m going to try to make very brief. In the first place, when you say, ‘Why don’t Republicans like her?’ there’s a whole bunch of different kinds of Republicans now. Like there’s you and me, and we’re conservative Republicans. But we also have to deal with liberal and moderate or Rockefeller Republicans in our party. So the party has lost its primary identity: strong national defense, tax cuts, smaller government. It’s lost its identity. It doesn’t believe smaller government is possible. The Republican Party has too many people who want the government to grow. Just spend the money on different groups of people in different ways in order to get votes. It’s called liberalism lite. They’re calling it redefine conservatism. Sarah Palin makes them nervous because of precisely what you cited. She inspired and revved up a Republican Party. But there are people in the Republican Party who don’t want it to stand for the things that she stands for. I think her effectiveness is making her a target.
The Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party are also not fond of her, and they’re doing everything they can to make her appear to be the face of the Republican Party, because they think most of the country despises her, too, based on exit polls. You know, Barbara Walters in the interview I did with her last week asked, ‘You like Palin?’
I said, ‘I absolutely do.’ I said, ‘I think she was great.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you like her?’
‘She was uninformed,’ Barbara Walters said, and a light went off in my head, because there is the template. The one interview she did with Katie Couric and they’ve all decided she’s an idiot and she’s uninformed. They do not know that there were people in the McCain campaign trying to sabotage her and that she was under tight controls, and she finally wanted to bust out and be who she is. Those of us that pay attention saw enough of who she is to realize that she is incredibly valuable to the conservative cause and the Republican Party going forward. But to those that don’t like her it’s simply because of that, Tim, she’s effective and she threatens the old boy network. It’s not a gender thing. She threatens the old boy network, but I’m telling you this is a fundamental thing to understand.
We can talk about Obama all we want here, and we can try to educate people as to what’s coming down the pike. But one of the larger battles we have before we even talk about trying to defeat Obama again is defining who we are as a political party, because there is a huge battle going on. There are so many factions of the Republican Party now, and many of them are gutless. Many of them, when they get to Washington, after being elected, go wobbly, they turn moderate because they think that’s what you have to be to get along. We just ran a presidential campaign based on being moderate and reaching out to all these liberal Democrat voters, thinking that’s the only way we can win, ignoring the blueprint for landslide victory. We got people who think we need to rerun this campaign over and over again. We gotta get rid of our conservative ideology. Arnold Schwarzenegger says we’ve gotta drop conservatism from the Republican Party. We’ve got our conservative intelligentsia wise men, these people in the media who also think that the worst thing that could happen to the Republican Party is to listen to me. So Tim, I’m telling you, we have a huge battle to define — and the Republican Party is it because that’s the only party that’s going to oppose Democrats, and there’s going to be a big battle for control of it. In many ways it’s subtly already started, and it’s going to intensify once next year gets going and Obama’s actually inaugurated.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It was the state insurance commissioner in Oklahoma, Kim Holland, who said, ‘We’re going to take away your football season tickets if you don’t buy health insurance.’ They wanted to make buying health insurance mandatory. It was not just the season tickets to football games that universities were going to take away. There were some other things. It’s just a proposal now, but it flies in the face of Oklahoma being 65% a Republican red state.