RUSH: What an event that was on Saturday. In fact, folks, there were more people at that event on Saturday, according to the British press, than there were people who showed up at Obama’s immaculation back in January. You will not find that reported anywhere in the State-Controlled Media in this country, but in the UK press, the British press, it’s all over the place. There was something else about that event Saturday that is seminal, something that is crucial for me point out, and I’m going to do that because it’s show time. Rush Limbaugh, behind the Golden EIB Microphone. Broadcast excellence is all yours for the next three hours. It’s great to be with you. Telephone number is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
Barack Obama speaking again as this program commences. He flew to New York to commemorate the crash of the Lehman Brothers. He refused to fly to New York for the Twin Towers crash, but they actually used the word celebrate the one year anniversary of the crash of Lehman Brothers. He’s out there doing a speech on financial reform, and it’s amazing. They ought to rename 60 Minutes to 60 Minutes with Obama. He’s been on three times this year alone. Now, for those of you listening to the program right now, I have no idea how many of our affiliate stations, if any, have bumped coverage of us to carry Obama’s speech on the financial sector. Well, you never know, there might be some who have done so. I don’t know. But the point is, if any have, I’m not going to let Obama get away with this. For those of you listening right now be aware I’m going to repeat the first half hour of this program, not verbatim, I’m just going to do it all again once this stupid speech is over with, I may do it at the top of the next hour or what have you. But the attempts here to supersede the leader of the conservative movement shall not go unanswered by the leader of the conservative movement.
Anyway, a thrill and delight to be with you. Let’s go straight to the audio sound bites. We’ll start here Sunday morning, Joe Klein on the Chris Matthews Show, and Norah O’Donnell was the fill-in host, and she said to Joe Klein about criticism of Obama, ‘Why is this being voiced now in this health care debate?’
KLEIN: Because they’re being egged on by demagogues in the Republican Party by boss Rush Limbaugh, and I call him the boss because there isn’t a single Republican elected official who’s willing to call him out on his lies.
TANENHAUS: In the notorious comment Rush Limbaugh made that he hoped President Obama would fail, he was actually alluding in a serious way to the way our two-party system works, which is that we have alternating periods of single party dominance and the in party, the sun party in the famous formulation is going to have most of the debate occur within its own ranks such as we saw with the stimulus package and the health care debate. Now, my concern is that Republicans have essentially vacated the field and conservative intellectuals are not holding their feet to the fire. This issue of Rush Limbaugh having emerged as the most conspicuous spokesperson for the right was actually identified 15 years ago by Michael Lind, great political commentator. This is something that’s been with us for a long time.
RUSH: It’s not 15 years, it’s 21 but, you know, who’s counting? Twenty-one years — Rush Limbaugh’s having emerged — well, what is his point? Look, they’re playing the race card right now. They are losing this debate and they’re going back to their time-honored cliches and templates and they do not understand how it is that a Republican Party that’s being silent for the most part can bring all of this to a screeching halt, can cause this much trouble. So what’s causing the problem? They want all this passed, they want Obama to succeed. What’s causing the problem? I am, in their view. This is where they’re wrong. This is the seminal thing that I have to point out to you, but stick with me on this first because it keeps getting better. Then Saturday morning, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, the host Pedro Echevarria spoke with Perry Bacon of State-Controlled Washington Post. The question: ‘To what would you attribute the success of this organization, this rally on Saturday and what they’ve done across the United States?’
BACON: I think that they’ve tapped into more than the party here as in Washington. They really tapped into this grassroots sort of frustration about the growth in government, bailouts and so on. They’ve really captured it. There’s been a strong desire for more — a bigger small-government advocate out there. There was a push for that. And the Republicans here in Washington for a while supported Bush and conservatives have supported Bush while he was growing the size of government and versus as now Republicans in Washington have sort of heard the grassroots in some ways, and they’re acting more — they’re opposing everything Obama does and calling it sort of government takeover, the same kind of rhetoric you would hear on a Rush Limbaugh show.
WISE: It is the background noise of a lot of the opposition. You have Rush Limbaugh yesterday on the air saying first that community service is the first step toward fascism which is bizarre even for him, and then almost immediately after that saying one of the problems with America is too much multiculturalism. You wouldn’t say that unless you were trying to stoke white racial resentment and so when you say those things I want to know when are Republican leaders going to condemn that kind of rhetoric because that’s where race is being interjected.
RUSH: Race has nothing to do with this. Multiculturalism has nothing to do with race. This has to do with there being two or three completely different Americas now. We are trying to save this country as it was founded for anybody who wants to join us. We don’t care what their race, their ethnicity, their religion happens to be. Community service is the first step towards fascism. When you take the event of 9/11 they leave this out. You take the commemorative celebration 9/11 and turn it into a community service day? 9/11 is not about community service. 9/11 is about remembering the dead, remembering who killed the dead, and what we’re going to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s not about advancing President Obama’s political agenda.
Now, the great seminal moment on Saturday, and Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker along with Rosslyn Smith say this better than I could. ‘We are witnessing a very rare phenomenon, the genuine, broad-based spontaneous political movement with no visible charismatic leaders. … Most significantly of all, those in attendance had not relied in any way on members of the current political class to get them there, nor had they showed up because their livelihood would be in jeopardy had they not agreed to demonstrate, as is the union way.’ This is exactly right. We are witnessing a conservative ascendancy here and it is happening because the people of this country are scared to death and fed up and see clearly what their future is if they don’t try to stop it. We had a call on Friday from a guy who called and said, ‘I just want to thank you. My wife and I are going to this thing, first time we’ve ever done anything like this.’ Most people were doing this for the first time. They’d never done anything like this. And he wanted to thank me. And I said, ‘Sir, with all due respect, I’d love to accept your thanks, but I haven’t told anybody to go to any of these rallies.’
You don’t need a leader — Clarice Feldman is exactly right — you don’t need a charismatic leader to get you out of the house and to spend money to drive or fly to Washington and get a hotel for Friday and Saturday night and show up as part of a two million people crowd on Saturday and then leave the place as clean as you found it, like Dan’s Bake Sale. Some of the pictures after the event, there were no messes, just like Dan’s Bake Sale. Now, one other thing about this. I was reading in the New York — well, I had it pointed out to me by Ross Douthat in his — I hope I’m pronouncing that right. I’ve never heard his name pronounced. It’s D-o-u-t-h-a-t. So I’m just pronouncing it as it looks to me. He had a quote from Frank Luntz. And Frank Luntz said that this is not a Republican or Democrat thing, this protest. People are angry at both parties. Let me tell you something. I know Frank Luntz and sometimes I even like Frank but he couldn’t be more wrong about this. I’m here to tell you that when the Republicans under George Bush were spending like never before you didn’t have this kind of thing happen.
This is a conservative ascendancy. This most definitely is a Republican versus Democrat thing with Joe Wilson out there taking heat demanding to — in fact, if I were Joe Wilson what I would say: ‘I’ll apologize as soon as Pelosi apologizes to the CIA. I’ll apologize as soon as she apologizes for calling half the country Nazis.’ He said he’s not going to apologize anymore. Good for him. This most definitely is a left-right thing or if you don’t like that formulation this most definitely is a capitalist free market economy versus a fascist socialist economy kind of thing or if you want a different formulation you could say this is freedom versus tyranny. This is liberty versus tyranny. That’s what’s driving this thing. It has nothing to do with people upset with how things are going in Washington on the part of both parties. I know that a lot of people want to look at this as the independents rising up. This is not the independents rising, there are some independents out there, some moderates. These are people who are fed up and want no part of the Barack Obama Democrat Party agenda, pure and simple.
You cannot tell me that people are showing up protesting Republicans because the Republicans aren’t doing anything because the Republicans can’t do anything, the Republicans don’t have any power to do anything. They don’t have the votes to stop one thing. Well, maybe in the Senate ’til they replace the swimmer, but nevertheless, nobody’s in Washington upset with the Republicans here. You might have a few people they’re going just ’cause they’re mad at Washington in general but I’m telling you, Washington, as long as I’ve been alive, has been run by the Democrats. Washington has been run by America’s left, and now it’s in control of the most radical leftist bunch of people ever in our nation’s history, not to mention our lifetimes. And so don’t buy this notion that you’re a bunch of mind-numbed robots showing up because some leaders got you there, that you wouldn’t be doing this without that.
You’re doing this on your own, and many millions more of you wanted to be there who for whatever reasons couldn’t be. Don’t buy the notion that this is a standard, people just upset at incumbents kind of thing, ’cause it has nothing to do with that. This has everything to do with people opposing The One, Barack Obama, and Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd. Now, you find a lot of corruption on the left, there’s no question and people are upset with it, but what they’re foremost upset with is Obama and what his plans are taking over the government, socializing health care, doing as much as he can to strip freedom from people and liberty. Liberty versus tyranny, that’s what was on display Saturday on the part of the American people. It is a Republican-Democrat thing, and don’t let anybody tell you that it’s not.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, this is important, folks. There are a lot of phony conservatives out there. They get a lot of print in the New York Times. They got a lot of attention on broadcast TV. Any conservative who dumps on conservatism is going to be loved and focused on by State-Controlled Media. And a lot of these people are more interested in promoting themselves than the cause here, and so it’s in their best career interests to keep attacking conservatives, dumping on conservatism — i.e., the era of Reagan is over and so forth — to pretend that there’s something else going on out there. David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Frank Luntz, they’ve counted conservatives out there and they’ve insisted that conservatives change their principles or their message and they’re being proven wrong. So they spin.
Others claim that there’s not a world’s bit of difference between Republicans and Democrats, and that’s about as stupid as it gets. I’m not denying the Republican Party’s lost its way, no question about that, on spending and other matters. But to say that there is no difference between the radical leadership of the Democrat Party and the Republican Party is just naive. It is irrelevant. These people that showed up Saturday did not show up protesting Republicans. It is not Republicans that have them afraid for their future. It’s not Republicans that have them afraid for their children’s and grandchildren’s future. It’s not Republicans that have them afraid for their jobs. It’s not Republicans that have them afraid for the economy. It’s Obama! It’s the Democrat Party today. The Republican Party is irrelevant.
The Republican Party has got two or three people that show up now and then and say something but they don’t have the votes to stop anything. The Republican Party is not doing diddly-squat. People don’t show up and protest people who aren’t doing anything. People show up and protest people who are doing things they consider to be dangerous and destructive. Now, what some of us have been arguing here for a long time is for conservatives to take back the Republican Party from these appeasers and these phony moderates who do not understand — or maybe they do and wish to ignore — the radicalism of Obama. And they’re not willing or prepared to challenge it. What I’m arguing for here and what we’re seeing is for the rise of conservatism, and there is a conservative ascendancy taking place — and to deny that is to sabotage what is taking place.
This is all about conservatives ascending. This is not about people protesting simply Washington who come at it with no ideological point of view or frame of reference. The problem with this argument that says, ‘Well, you know, this is the independents rising up. It’s not a right-and-left thing. It’s not a Republican-Democrat thing,’ is that it encourages the creation of a third-party movement which is gonna guarantee the reelection of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party across the board. Now, one way we know that Obamacare is in trouble is that they have launched the race card. They have come out with this cliche once again. Obamacare is in trouble. The White House is in panic mode. The State-Controlled Media is in panic mode, and we have the ultimate tea leaf to approve it.
When all else fails, go to page one of the 50-year-old Democrat Party playbook and launch the race card. It’s page one of their playbook. They would have us believe that there are no legitimate problems with Obamacare. There are no legitimate concerns. It’s just racists who want to stop the first black president. I don’t know who pressed the launch button on the race card, but you can see and hear and read those who got the message. Maureen Dowd in the New York Times yesterday, talking about Joe Wilson, said, ‘Fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air.’ You know, Wilson said, ‘You lie.’ Maureen Dowd says what she heard was, ‘You lie, boy.’ Newsweek, with a cover, ‘Is Your Baby Racist?’ Your baby at six months learns to hate people of different races! This is a sure sign that they are in desperate straits and out of ideas.