RUSH: To Amarillo, Texas. This is Brent. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Mega unemployed dittos. It is an honor and a privilege to get to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I wanted to comment on an article that I saw on the Drudge Report today about how President Obama is referring to tea partiers as tea baggers.
RUSH: Yes, I’ve seen that. It actually comes from a book by David Axelrod’s stenographer named Jonathan Alter, who also works for Newsweek. By the way, do you know Newsweek — Washington Post company owns Newsweek — and they have turned to the noted financiers, Allen & Company to explore the sale. Do you know now, therefore, that the Washington Post company did not turn to any government agency to handle the sale of Newsweek, nor did they consult Obama? Jonathan Alter does a book, he’s a David Axelrod stenographer, and ABC News has a blog report, it’s in the Washington Post as well: ‘Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations. In Jonathan Alter’s ‘The Promise: President Obama, Year One,’ President Obama is quoted in an November 30, 2009, interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills ‘set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”
If you were listening to this program yesterday, you heard a guy calling here saying if he ever heard that word on this program he was going to cancel his website membership, his newsletter membership, and he was going to stop patronizing all sponsors. And I said, ‘Whoa, I mean, I’m going to be quoting others.’ ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘If I hear it on your show, I am outta there.’ So I guess he’s heard it today if he’s still out there, which means now he’s out of there. ‘Tea Party activists loathe the term ‘tea baggers,’ which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.’ There’s a story — I wasn’t going to get to it, put it somewhere down in the stack here and I want to have it in front of me rather than paraphrase it. It’s about Luke Russert. Luke Russert was on MSNBC this morning, and it turns out there are 32 black Republicans seeking office, running as Republicans who want the support of the tea party movement. And Luke Russert was stunned, and he was on MSNBC today stunned because everybody knows that the Democrats consider the tea party movement to be made up of a bunch of racists. He was literally shocked to learn that black Republican candidates are seeking the support of the tea party movement.
Also, there was low turnout among Democrats in North Carolina at the polls yesterday, it was embarrassingly bad. There is no enthusiasm on the Democrat side. They’re gonna get their clocks cleaned in November, folks, and they’re trying to spin all of this as bad for Republicans. The Arizona bill, bad for Republicans. Oil spill, bad for Republicans. Terrorist incident in Times Square, bad for Republicans. There’s nothing bad for Republicans as long as they don’t open their mouths. If they keep their mouths shut, everything’s fine. If they open their mouths, they tend to go to the center here ’cause they still get caught up in this notion that’s where they have to go. Independents are fleeing the Democrat Party in droves. Look, when David Obey, the chairman of the Appropriations — folks, that gives him the ability to write checks totaling three and a half, four and a half trillion dollars a year. The way the Appropriations Committee works is this: The White House submits a budget, the Congress, the Democrats put their budget together, they hash a budget out, it’s then up to the Appropriations Committee to come up with the money for all of the spending. It is a hugely powerful gig and David Obey has had it I think since Jurassic Park. And he’s quitting because his reelection chances are slim to none. I mean, they’re facing a Waterloo here of biblical proportions.
Here’s Kate, Rockford, Illinois. You’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Well, thank you. I hope you’re having a great day. I am very frustrated with the media. And you just said it, too. The first time a lot of us got involved in politics, we were called Reagan Democrats for a reason. We’re conservative Democrats. We didn’t leave our party. They left us. The second time we got involved, we were called Perot voters. We were not. We’re conservative Democrats. We had nowhere else to go. This time they’re calling us Republicans. We’re not. The tea party is not a Republican entity. We are tired of having a two-party system where only the extremes meet. We are conservative Democrats, and the Republican Party needs to understand, we will vote for their candidates if they recognize who we are, and the Democrats better figure it out, we’re not voting for their people until they recognize who we are.
RUSH: Well, they’re not going to recognize who you are. They are in the process of trying to impugn you.
CALLER: That’s right. They’re handing us over to the Republicans, and I’m not so sure the Republicans have it figured out, either, but if you think back, remember how negative they were with the Perot people, and who started that movement? The chairman of his party was the former Democratic Party chair in New Hampshire. Most of us came out of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. And nobody seemed to get it. Same thing with Reagan Democrats. They all scratch their heads in the media and said, ‘Huh, who are these people?’ We’re still here. We’re older now. Our babies are now adults and they’ve joined the tea party as well. We now have in my family three generations of voters, and we’ve been around a long time, and this time we’re going to get it right and we’re going to turn this country back into what it was meant to be.
RUSH: Well, I think there’s a lot lessons, you’ve learned them, there are a lot of lessons, and that is the Democrat Party claiming to be at one with the little guy, the champion of the downtrodden. Look, the president of the United States insulting American citizens, impugning their character, calling ’em tea baggers. It’s even worse than that, though, calling them racists in Arizona. I mean this is a president, this is a regime that always sides against the American people, and they do it because they know they don’t have the American people. Theirs is a pure governance of grievance, victimization and grievance. No matter how bad they think November is looking, I don’t think they have the slightest clue how bad it is actually going to be for them.