What Conservatives Need to Do

RUSH: Here’s Aaron in Duluth, Minnesota. Welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Nice to have you with us.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Really nice to speak with you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: I’m a Rush Baby. I’ve been listening to you since I was probably nine years old, I guess, back in —

RUSH: That’s a good thing for you and for me. Thank you.

CALLER: Yeah, and actually, I don’t know if you’ve coined the term yet but I’m working on a Rush grandbaby, my two-year-old really enjoys listening to you.

RUSH: Well, good.

CALLER: Anyhow, I’ll get to my point. Say, you were speaking about these comments Obama was making yesterday, and one of the things he said is: (paraphrasing) ‘I know that small business owners are saying that they want to hire people, that they’re hiring people, and that all things are looking positive, generally speaking.’ I just have a hard time believing that. I mean, I’m a small business owner myself. If I had the president of the United States coming to talk to me, I don’t think I’d have the guts to say much negative, if anything negative, even though I’m about as anti-Obama as a person could get, but I don’t buy it that he’s out there having these one-on-one meetings with the small guy, the little business owners and they’re being real honest.

RUSH: He might have. You know, he’s done a lot of workshops at the White House. He might have had one of those workshops with small businesspeople in there, but that’s not the point. The fact is he has to. He doesn’t know anything about it. He has to. I’m like you, I don’t believe it. He’s being told that they have profits now. It makes no sense. It was a frightening quote that he had, just bugaboo all over the place. You don’t go borrow money to expand your payroll. It’s never, ever done. That’s not the point of it. Now, people say, what can we do, what can we do? Look, we’re going to have to hold on ’til November but, folks, even that is just barely a stopgap. There are several things at work here that we’re going to have to stay on top of. Most of you know these. We need a conservative victory, not a Republican victory per se, because if we get what is said to be a Republican victory, not much is going to change. The GOP leadership, to me, now — I hope I’m wrong about this — but the GOP leadership still doesn’t understand what we’re facing and who we’re facing and the perilous state of the nation.

They’re inside the Beltway, and to them this is just the latest Democrat president, Democrat Congress, although I do think that they’re a little bit more aware of the genuine radicalness of this bunch than they were at the outset. But this election in November is the first step in what must be several electoral cycle victories if we are to start the process of returning to a limited and legitimate government. We have to find or nurture the leaders who are articulate and strategic and can actually make a difference not at all at once but with a big-picture view that puts in place plans and policies that will reverse all of this from one generation to the next. This is going to be an ongoing thing. It took the Democrats a hundred years to get to this point. Now, we still have not taken back the GOP. There will continue to be some confusion about the GOP of old and conservative efforts to remake it as a Conservative Party. We have to continue to challenge in the primaries, win or lose, advance our philosophy. And, you know, you can’t go out and demand perfection from anyone or expect it out of anybody in any election. But you have to demand that every reasonable effort be made to return to constitutional government so that every compromise, should there be a compromise, must be focused on this purpose.

We don’t have a whole lot of time to stop what’s occurring and promote our principles. We are confronted by people who believe in the destruction of this society, and we have to get hold of the levers of power as fast as possible to stop this. Now, there are people out there that claim to be conservative or Libertarian or some Third Way, promoting third parties or worse, lecturing that we should ignore politics. They argue that all the parties are the same, all politicians are dishonest, and it’s a new form of populism, and it is not the case. I don’t think you could find one Republican — I know you haven’t. Take it back. That idiot from Louisiana who voted for the stimulus bill. But you won’t find any Republican fingerprints on this health care bill. There’s just a huge difference. So we all have our roles, and we all have our motivations, and we all have our opportunities. We all should do all that we can in our own way to advance our ideals. There’s simply no alternative here if you love the country.

The ideals that we hold dear are under assault, and they have been for decades. It wasn’t until this election cycle that the American people got befuddled by a cult leader and airy promises of utopia after a strategic seven-year hit on the Bush administration which gendered up a personal hate for the man so that anybody else would look better and make the whole concept of change and hope to anything, an improvement. But it took them 50, 75, hundred years to get to this point. It’s going to take a longtime, concerted effort to reverse all this, and it’s gotta start now and the first election. We’re going to have a chance to put the brakes on this is in November, but it’s gotta continue long past that as well.