RUSH: I want to play a sound bite here, President Bush. This was yesterday during an interview with Chris DeMuth, who is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. Remember the president’s new tone when he came to office, and I begrudged it, by saying it ain’t gonna work, you can’t make friends with Democrats, they don’t want to be friends with you, they’re just going to take advantage of you. There’s no need for a new tone! We’re not the bad guys! The Republicans are not the bad guys. We’re coming out of eight years of Clinton, impeachment, Lewinsky, and all this sort of stuff. We weren’t the bad guys! We never are the bad guys, very rarely. Yet this defensive need that we have to somehow show everybody we’re not bad guys. So the new tone came along. Bush spoke about it yesterday.
THE PRESIDENT: I came with the idea of changing the tone in Washington and, frankly, didn’t do a very good job of it.
RUSH: Oh, no.
THE PRESIDENT: — brings up a lot of heated rhetoric and a lot of emotion. I fully understand that.
RUSH: Oh, no.
THE PRESIDENT: I know that’s the case. But surely we can do a better job in Washington of treating each other with respect.
RUSH: Oh, no.
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t want to be a self-serving fellow, but I have never used my position as president to personally downgrade somebody. So that’s something I’m not going to miss it at all. Disappointed at the words that came out of people’s mouth, and I’m very disappointed about how the process has treated some of my friends.
RUSH: See, he knows it didn’t work, but he’s such a decent guy, he’s blaming himself for this, which is compounding it. He went out of his way. Ted Kennedy writing the education bill, the Kennedy family up there at the White House theater eating popcorn watching a Kevin Costner Kennedy movie. He went out of his way, and today he takes the blame. We’re going to have to get somebody someday on our side who stands up and doesn’t take the hit in the interests of getting along, in the interests of comity, in the interests of bipartisanship. We’re going to need somebody who is willing to point fingers when necessary. We’re only talking about the heart and soul of the country here. We’re only talking about what kind of country we’re going to be. We’re not talking about whether or not Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, Caroline Schlossberg, Harry Reid, like us!