RUSH: I probably shouldn’t say this. Every time I say, ‘I shouldn’t say this,’ the staff on the other side of the glass says, ‘You better say it now.’ We have a lot of mission statements coming out. We have the Mount Vernon Statement, all good people. They are reprising a statement on conservatism that started in 1960, the Sharon Statement, which was the Connecticut city in which Bill Buckley lived at the time. Buckley invited a bunch of people to his palatial estate and they established essentially the manifesto of what conservatism was in 1960. It’s being redone here and announced today, the Mount Vernon Statement. And then there are other people coming out with books of what we need to do, and the tea party people have their own ideas, and so you’ve got a lot of conservatives with their own manifestos coming out here. McCain, ten promises that he wants Republican Senators to make. So there are a lot of these manifestos, statements, promises, contracts with America, this kind of thing coming out, and I have mixed emotions about it because there’s so many of them and they’re gonna overlap in some areas but they’re not going to overlap in others.
Like today, Michael Steele had a four-hour meeting with some tea party people, which is all fine and dandy, and I’m told that there was some common ground that came out of it. If there was not total common ground that came out of tea party meeting with the Republicans then this is all academic. The tea party people, I heard Karl Rove say something yesterday, I actually agree with this, I think the tea party people would be better served if they did not attach themselves to a political party per se or become a political party. After all, what was it that made the tea party? These are a bunch of people that had never been politically active before who simply reacted at the outrage and the tragedy of what the Obama administration was doing to them individually. These were people that did not have a leader, there were no underground messages saying, ‘Show up here, organize there, here’s how to get there, here’s the sign to paint.’ I mean this is all legitimately grassroots, and that was the beauty of it. A lot of them were political independents; a lot of them were political neophytes.
They were not ideologues, per se, in terms of being attached to a party or not. They were just the people who make the country work, average, ordinary everyday people who I believe are the ones who make the country work and they were simply flabbergasted and overwhelmed at what was happening. They spoke up at town meetings, town halls, and then they started their various tea party things, and it was fabulous. I’m not trying to insult them at all. I think they’re great. The fact that they don’t have an identified leader, the fact they don’t have a single unit organizer, they are a cross section of the people who make the country work. They ought to strive to continue to be. So you have McCain’s ten promises to the voters by the spring. These are fraught with disaster. You start making these kinds of promises you better be prepared to back ’em up. If we’re going to have a moderate Republican making ten promises and leading the ten promises movement, then you have that up against the Mount Vernon people and then you got the tea party people over here, I just don’t know.
What gives me pause about this is that I see a potential problem, is that all of these different organizations are gonna get into a battle to see who is the leader of the movement and who gets to define it, and then there are going to be litmus tests, and if you don’t pass this group’s litmus test they start bashing you and you’re going to have a bunch of competing statements of what either a conservative is or what either a opposition to Obama movement is going to be.
Folks, it’s been going on in the conservative movement ever since Buckley died. Ever since Buckley passed away, even slightly before that, there began in Washington among the conservative media intelligentsia a vast competition to say who would be the go-to person to define what conservatism is. And you had moderate RINO conservatives saying they’re it, from David Brooks — I don’t need to go through the list of people here, but they were all vying to not get anything done but to be the smartest guy in the room, they wanted to be the one the media showered accolades on rather than being focused on accomplishment and getting something done that everybody wanted to end up being the one that everybody thought, ‘This is the brains behind the movement.’ And when we start competing with ourselves over this kind of stuff in the midst of this golden opportunity — we don’t need a bunch of competing programs that are designed to elevate individuals in a movement. We need something that’s going to advance the movement. And that’s going to be, I think consistent with people who have that as an objective.
Now, people ask, ‘Well, what would you do?’ I’ve spent 21 years saying what I would do. How could I synthesize it here? Mr. Snerdley, what do you think I stand for? You’ve been screening calls on this program for 18, 19, of the 21 years. What do I stand for? Limited government. Fiscal responsibility. Strong military. Tax cuts. Incentivizing business. Recognizing who it is that makes the country work, it’s the private sector, recognizing the history of this country and our traditions and our Constitution. That’s the only document we need. And you apply it to every issue that comes along. The US Constitution is my ten promises, the Bill of Rights. You can’t go wrong in there. We’re in this trouble because so many people are trashing the Constitution.
A bunch of people on the left think it gets in their way and so they’re trying to rewrite it or ignore it or create a judiciary that’s rewriting it on the spot, outside of the confines of the Democratic process, meaning legitimate amendments, what have you.
I wrote my own stimulus plan to compete with Obama’s shortly after he took office, it’s published in the Wall Street Journal, here’s what I would do. You’re going to spend a trillion dollars on the stimulus? Well, give me 48% of it, which is the vote Republicans got. And let me do my magic with my 48% of the one trillion and I’ll cut taxes. Real tax rate reductions, marginal tax rate reductions. I would zero out capital gains taxes. I’d just cancel them for a year or two and maybe forever. I would reduce the corporate tax rate and get it down from 35 to ten. It’s the consumer that pays corporate taxes anyway. I would do everything I could to increase the standard of living and mobilize, motivate, inspire people to go to work because there’s going to be a payoff for it. I’d get the government out of their way every which way I could, and I wouldn’t care. I got the credit for it if anybody said it was my idea because they’re not my ideas, they belong to Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, a bunch of people far smarter than any of us are.
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RUSH: You know, my friends, it’s very simple — and I have used this phrase consistently over the course of my 20 plus years behind the Golden EIB Microphone — what I believe has made the country great. I’ve addressed this. When I do my rare, overwhelmingly popular public appearances, I challenge the audience to think about something: ‘Do you ever wonder how it is, and why it became so, that a population at any one time of less than 300 million people created the highest standard of living? Progress, economic, political, education, by any standard you want to measure, the United States of America has been the greatest collection, population of human beings in the history of the world.’ There have been civilizations, countries, and populations long before us that were the trademark of their day, their standard-bearers of their day.
They can’t compare to us, and they’ve been around thousands of years. Now, what was it? What is it? What is it that makes three hundred million people special? Our DNA is no different than the ChiCom DNA. I’m talking about in terms of humanity. Our DNA is no different than any other human being anywhere on earth or has ever been on earth. What is it about this 200, 300 million people that have created by far — there’s no comparison — the greatest country and collection of human beings on the face of the earth for good? We feed the world, we relive the world, we repair the world. We defend the world. We have liberated hundreds of millions of people who have lived in bondage and slavery. What is it about us? We’re not born special in terms of our DNA. What is it? I asked people to think about this ’cause I don’t think they do.
This is part and parcel of what I call American exceptionalism. What is American exceptionalism? It’s not that we’re better people. It’s not that we’re smarter. It’s not that we have the advantage because of our geography, because we clearly don’t. So what is it that sets us apart? There’s one answer, and it’s found in the Declaration of Independence: ‘We are all endowed by our Creator.’ So we acknowledge God as a country. When we were founded, we acknowledged God: We were all created. We are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Undeniable. They’re just there. And they come from the Creator. Among them, but not just, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. That’s pretty simple to me. Those three things, the acknowledgment of our creation by God — a loving God — that our spirit has this natural yearning to be free and to be happy and that there’s nothing wrong with either of those.
There’s nothing wrong with being created, nothing wrong with being happy or trying to be, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with living. It was that codification that made one crucial thing possible: And that is for ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things. Not the smartest, not the brightest, not the well born, not the richest. Ordinary. This is a nation that became the greatest nation in human history — in however many hundreds of thousands, billions, whatever years you want to say we’ve been plodding the earth — because of ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things, made possible by the fact that our country was founded acknowledging that our freedom comes from God. Not from a government and not from some other man or some other woman. It does not come from a demagogue. It does not come from somebody promising to take care of us. It inspired people to produce, to take care of themselves and anybody else that needed it in their community via their church or whatever neighborhood organization they happened to belong to. That’s what’s been lost. Too many people think that without government doing the right things, we can’t succeed — and the government, when run by people like are running it now, get in the way and make it impossible for ordinary people to do anything extraordinary.