It’s All a Game to the Politicians

RUSH: ‘Already challenged on the right by J.D. Hayworth, John McCain is about to get hit from the left today on health care with a barrage of robo-calls. The D[emocrat]-linked Americans United for Change are firing off about 250,000 calls starting today in Arizona, basically calling McCain a rich guy hypocrite. ‘Arizona Senator, John McCain is happy to let the government pay for his health care, but last December, John McCain voted against requiring that ordinary Americans be eligible to buy the same health insurance as Members of Congress,’ the calls say. ‘Senator McCain may have seven houses and fly around in private jets, but when it comes to his health care he should be no better than the rest of us.” Now, my friends, we were talking about this with Karl Rove just a moment ago: Bipartisanship.

I thought the Democrats loved McCain. I thought these people making these robocalls loved McCain!YHe would cross the aisle and work with them and so forth. How can this happen? How can this happen? These guys are all politicians. That’s the answer. You and I are not politicians and they are. We try to understand ’em through our lens, but we’re not politicians. I’m sure you heard Karl say how ‘impressed’ he was with Ted Kennedy. Now, how can that be? You and I look at Ted Kennedy, he’s a buffoon, a dangerous buffoon who’s out destroying very important, valuable people on our side. Personally, character-wise, career wise, he’s out destroying them. But people get to Washington and see Ted Kennedy as an icon.

How can that be? A very successful Democrat.’ It’s because he’s in the game. He’s in the game. It’s kind of like not the best analogy here but kind of like if you played professional baseball back during the Nolan Ryan era. Nolan Ryan never spoke to an opposing player in his career, very seldom. Those guys were the absolute enemy. But they all respected him. Now, he was trying to beat ’em. He wasn’t trying to destroy their character or any of that kind of stuff but he was trying to beat ’em. So these guys are all in the game together. You and I look at Ted Kennedy as an absolute buffoon. We look at Obama as an absolute disaster. And other people say, ‘No, he’s elected president. He’s in the game. He’s a politician. We deal with him the way we deal with politicians. We deal with ourselves and everybody else as politicians.’

So it’s not that the two parties are the same and so forth. It’s that it is a business. Politics, like everything else, is a business, and it’s a game. And the people that are on stage in the game, and if they’re prominent in the game regardless what party they’re in, there’s, I guess, a lot of respect bestowed upon them. Whereas you and I are not in the game. You know, we’re the peasants with the pitchforks. We see these people playing the game. The country’s the Monopoly board and we’re the pieces, and they’re rolling the dice and moving us all around here. So some of us end up in jail, some of us buy worthless railroads, some of us end up Park Place, some of us end up St. James Place — and others end up, you know, on Ventnor Avenue. We move around and so forth, but they’re still the guys with the dice. We very seldom pass Go, and if we do (laughing) we go to the jail, tax jail or whatever jail it is. So this is an eye-opening thing in a way to try to understand this, because when you hear people say, ‘Oh, Ted Kennedy? I have an amazing lot of respect for him.’ I didn’t respect Ted Kennedy for anything.