RUSH: Audio sound bite time. This is laughable. I wasn’t even here yesterday, and yet the Drive-By Media were still obsessed with me. Let’s go PMSNBC on Hardball, Chris Matthews talking with Democrat strategerist Steve McMahon and the Republican strategerist Todd Harris. Matthews said, ‘Todd Harris, so are we gonna go back to the two kinds of parties we had in the sixties and seventies where you’re going to have two parties which are both partially centrist parties, not left-right? Left party, right party, but center-left and center-right parties. We’re going to go back to that?’
MATTHEWS: (interrupting) Or else you’re going to lose the Northeast completely!
HARRIS: And — and out West.
MCMAHON: But — but as long as people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have the voice that they have in the Republican Party, and they’re out there saying we need to be more conservative. We need to stick to our values —
MATTHEWS: (interrupting) They’re not running, though!
MCMAHON: No, no, they’re not running, but they’re pulling the party.
RUSH: All right, what is wrong with this? This is a teachable moment. There’s much wrong with this. In the first place, the Republican guy — well, the premise of the question is: Are we gonna go back to the sixties and seventies where we had a center-left and center-right party? In the first place, this Democrat Party, there’s nothing centrist about it. It is as far left a party as you and I have ever seen in our lifetimes. It is a myth that there’s anything ‘centrist’ about it, as we can tell by looking at how they propose to fix the economy. The assumption that they can is from extreme leftists. Back in the good old days that Matthews cites here, we had center left and center right, that’s when the Republicans had a measly 120 seats in the House. They didn’t even go to committee meetings. They were out playing golf with Democrats.
Bob Michel was the Republican leader at the time from Peoria, Illinois, and of course Matthews and the Democrats would love to go back to the point in time where Republicans were irrelevant, and he’s close to getting that now. But the real flaw in the premise of the answer to the question is Steve McMahon. ‘Rush Limbaugh stops the GOP from moving to the center.’ Where do these people get this? Where is the GOP? The GOP has abandoned conservatism already. The GOP is centrist. All of these pundits, when the exception of Krauthammer, that Obama met with last night, these are the people that suggested… Well, George Will didn’t. He was notably on fire against McCain. But most of these other guys that attended this thing last night said that McCain was the guy! That’s the kind of candidate we need as a Republican.
‘We need somebody that’s going to go out and look at this group and that group and pander to that group and pander to this group. We need to go out and get people who are going to pander to the middle class, the Walmart crowd.’ You know, looking at people as members of groups is a Democrat game, it’s a liberal game. We conservatives believe in individual freedom. We don’t look at people as members of groups, and I’m going to be tell you something else, folks. When you look at freedom in terms of do groups of people enjoy a measure of freedom, you’re not talking about real freedom. You’re talking about grievance. You’re talking about pitting one group against the other. You’re measuring whether this group has an unfair advantage over that group — whether this group’s too big, too small, whether this group is too diverse or not diverse enough, whether that group is fair, unfair — that’s the liberal Democrat game.
And the Republican Party is starting to play it they’ve fallen prey to the notion that you win elections by going out and looking at people not as individuals and not seeing freedom as a universal human concept, as embodied and proclaimed by our founders. And that’s why we’re wandering aimlessly wherever we’re wandering, the deserts, the oceans, or what have you. The Republican Party, Mr. McMahon, make up and look at your own city of Washington. The Republican Party has moved to the center! Nobody was able to stop it. This is the strange thing. I don’t know what these guys are complaining about. They’ve got the Republican Party right where they want it. They’ve got a party that’s subservient. They got a party that’s cowardly. They have a party that’s afraid to be critical of anything, any time, if it has to do with Obama.
So what they’re doing is a preemptive strike. It’s sort of like Fox just announced now that Hamas has agreed to unconditional ceasefire. Now, how many unconditional ceasefires have we had? I would say the Republican Party has, too, but what’s the difference in Hamas and the Republican Party? We know that unconditional ceasefires in the Middle East happen when the bad guys are losing, when they’re losing big, when the Israelis are on the verge of wiping out Hamas here come the rockets from Lebanon trying to distract — and those are from the Hezbos, the gazookas in Hamas are making these homemade rockets now and they’re firing on Israel. They’re in deep trouble. So, okay, they wave the white flag, and they say, ‘We want an unconditional ceasefire,’ and all that happens during the unconditional ceasefire is that they rearm, and the Iranian mullahs try to get more armaments and bodies into Gaza for the gazookas to use. This is common.
It’s time-honored, and yet the best and brightest among us in the ‘smart power’ State Department and elsewhere think that they have occasion and the United Nations, ‘Whoa, looky here! Look at what we’ve done here and look at us. Why, we have brokered an unconditional ceasefire.’ How many unconditional ceasefires have there been in the past 50 years in Israel’s history? Look at Bin Laden. Bin Laden yesterday on a new tape calls for a jihad against Israel. Excuse me? Hasn’t there been a jihad against Israel for decades? And Bin Laden calls for a jihad against Israel? And guess what? In many sectors of the mainstream media, in many sectors of the liberal intelligentsia in this country including the media even after our sworn enemy, Bin Laden, architect of 9/11, comes out and suggests or swears out a jihad on Israel; Israel remains the problem, in the eyes of many leftists in this country. Israel remains the problem? Bin Laden inadvertently co-opts a segment of the American left, which opposes Israel? Okay, so we’ve got a ceasefire. Yip yip yip yip yahoo. Unconditional ceasefire. Not a surrender, unconditional ceasefire. This means that the gazookas get time to reload, if the Israelis accept this. In the case of the Republicans we have an unconditional ceasefire, too, but I don’t see any evidence they’re trying to reload.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I guess we’re up here to sound bite number two. This is a continuation of the discussion that took place on MSNBC Monday night in which Steve McMahon, the Democrat political strategerist, said that I, El Rushbo, am the only thing preventing the Republican Party from moving to the center. When in fact it already has! It’s already there. It’s already moved big time. This is a continuation of that discussion. Matthews said, ‘Do you agree with that?’ He’s talking now… This is Todd Harris, the Republican strategerist. ‘Do you agree with that, that they hurt your party by pulling it too far right?’
HARRIS: I don’t think we pulled the party any more to the right than Air America wass pulling the Democratic Party to the left.
MATTHEWS: They do have more pull, though!
HARRIS: They do have more pull. They have more listeners. Uhhhh, but, you know, you’ve got progressive groups on the left pulling the Democratic Party to the left.
RUSH: And then Matthews, he wants to know what state could I win, if I were to run. Totally misunderstanding what we do here.