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GOP Aims at Being Reasonable

by Rush Limbaugh - Sep 13,2010

RUSH: Here’s John in Columbia, Tennessee. John, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello.

RUSH: John, are you there?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Nice to have you on the program, sir.

CALLER: Good. I’d like to bring back the topic of Sarah Palin.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Where would the number of Republicans that have been running now be without her? We would have lost a number of races.

RUSH: Excellent point.

CALLER: And on top of that, why is it that we in the upper crust or whatever you want to call it, they cannot seem to come to terms with Sarah Palin? You mention her name and they just try avoid it, try and stay away from it. Why are they doing that?

RUSH: There are a lot of people — we have advanced a theory today based on a blogger called The Chicago Boyz, and it’s all about status. I think however you strip it away it is about ruling class versus everybody else, and she’s not it. She didn’t punch the right tickets; she didn’t go to the right schools; she didn’t know the right people; she doesn’t have the right background, and she’s a threat as a result, especially to those who have a tenuous membership in the ruling class, especially a threat to those whose membership in the ruling class is not all that solid, and so the notion of what’s inferior must be maintained and upheld so that some people can feel superior and thus qualified to be in the ruling class. I think it probably comes as close as anybody is gonna get to explaining it.

Here is Gary in Fort Eustis, Virginia, nice to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush, love the show and, by the way, beautiful pictures on Facebook.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I’m doubly nervous here because, frankly, my heart is racing more than when mortars were falling around me in Baghdad.

RUSH: Wow.

CALLER: I’m calling to say the host is wrong, which is definitely a set up for failure. On the Delaware chairman, I believe his name is Ross. He’s not saying Castle is a conservative. He’s trying to nationalize the race and say vote for Castle, eat the excrement sandwich and we’ll get conservative real Republicans from the red states to run the committees.

RUSH: Oh. Okay. Well, the Washington Post just has his quote, that’s what I was reading. He said, ‘Quite frankly, I don’t know what the goal is here. If they really want to see conservatives as chairmen of committees in the United States Senate they’d step back and allow Mike Castle to become the next US senator. He’ll win the general election and she won’t.’

CALLER: What he’s saying is Castle is never going to be a chairman. He’s trying to — the way we would say when you vote for a conservative Democrat in Nebraska, it’s really a vote for Nancy Pelosi, ’cause when they vote for her to be the speaker of the House, her policies, liberal San Francisco views are going to be what’s going to dominate the week. He’s saying —


RUSH: Okay, I get you, I see. I see. Well, here’s the thing about that. If you want to compare this to the so-called Blue Dogs in the House being elected to give Pelosi the majority, that’s all true. For it to be true on the Republican side, we would have to also conclude that a majority of senators in a new Republican majority in the Senate are conservative. And that’s not the case. There’s no evidence that Mike Castle is going to support a slew of conservative causes or legislation. I’m not trying to pick a fight with this chairman. It’s a Washington Post story and it could be out of context here or even a misquote. What I’m really focusing on here is that we have to understand we face a crossroads in the country. There are a lot of people who think we are on our last legs as a representative republic and that there has never been a greater opportunity than right now to contrast conservatism and what really works and what’s gonna roll back this government and make it smaller and less intrusive. And we don’t need to play around with RINOs and just get the Republicans in power, ’cause look where that got us in 2006.

You need conservatives, people genuinely interested in saving the future of the country and reversing some of this outrageous Obamaism that has been implemented. I fear that the RINO Republicans aren’t cut out for it; they’re not interested in it; they don’t want to do that kind of heavy lifting, and they, frankly, don’t agree that we’re in that big a problem or face that big a challenge. They’re more oriented toward getting their power back for the sake of having their power. So that’s where the dividing line here really is. A lot of people are saying, ‘Okay, if you have 51 seats in the Senate, but a vast majority of the people that get us to 51 are like Mike Castle, we really do not have a conservative majority, and why have a bunch of Susan Collinses and Olympia Snowes?’ It’s no different than that. What good are they nine times out of ten for conservatism, and especially at this juncture where it’s nut-cracking time, as they say.

If we conservatives had been as successful in a year and a half in advancing our agenda as this guy has been, we’d be having parties. Look at what this guy’s done in a year and a half, folks. Nationalizing all these industries and companies, destroying the health care system in a year and a half! Imagine what’s going to happen if there’s not any break, somebody’s not able to stop this, imagine what four years of this is gonna look like. That’s why there are people thinking on a scale of one to ten, ten being country finished, we’re at eight. So politics as usual, Republican Party politics out the door. The traditional standard RINO Republicanism is not going to stop the direction we’re headed. We need people who are gonna stop this who will be consistently voting and supporting efforts to stop this. It has to be stopped, not compromised with, plain and simple. It’s not just the usual days where, okay, it’s a Democrat in the White House now for four, eight years, but we’ll get it back, let’s just trade power here and get along as best we can.

We’ve never faced this radical a president. I don’t even think Woodrow Wilson or FDR, may be close but certainly not in my lifetime have we ever faced anything this radical. And there’s no indication it’s gonna improve. There’s no indication this administration thinks anything they’re doing is wrong. I mean look at the numbers out today. We’re going to have record poverty reported in this country, a record poverty rate. And the AP, oh, just a shame that this is happening during Obama’s second year. I mean Plouffe and Axelrod on the Sunday shows, saying we’re headed in the right direction, that my God, we’d be in even worse shape if it hadn’t been for them, that if Republican policies hadn’t changed, my gosh. It’s the exact opposite. So what you’re faced with out there, what we’re faced with is millions and millions of Americans who are not looking at the Republican Party first. They’re looking at policy first, conservatism, stopping this, people that are interested once again in their children and grandchildren having a future that does not include rampant high taxation, indebtedness, and an ongoing, increasing erosion of freedom and liberty. It’s serious. And some of them think the Republicans don’t see it that bad.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, if I may, let me cut through all the noise and make the complex understandable. It’s very simple. Republican chairmanships are not going to roll back Obamaism. Conservatism is. The only thing that’s going to roll this back, the only thing that’s going to ever have a prayer of repealing health care is not Republican chairmanships. It’s not Republican majorities. It is conservatives. There is a conservative ascendancy. It is outrageous that it is being fought within the Republican Party. I can understand the Democrats not wanting it to happen, but inside the Republican Party it’s outrageous for this to be going on. But it is. We need wild-eyed conservatives to roll this back! The same old Republican Party just won’t do it. There are too many of them too eager to put a Republican stamp on Obama’s agenda.

It’s the power! They think that there is something to be gained by getting along, something to be gained by showing cooperation. Those days are long gone. According to the Gallup poll, there is only one thing Obama has passed that people approve of, and that’s financial reform and that’s only because they don’t know what’s in it yet. Congress hasn’t done one thing that a majority of Americans approve of. Not one thing. And not even the Republican Party is listening to this. The Republican Party is still more concerned with making sure that the old elders are rewarded and the old war horses are rewarded, regardless of their ideology or policy points of view. I mean, that’s party politics. It is what it is. There’s really nothing new about that. These are just different times.

Different times that call for truly drastic and desperate measures.

The American public is fed up. They want to draw a line in the sand. This Ground Zero mosque shows that. The rejection of Republican-designated candidates shows that. It’s patently obvious, and of course the Republican powerbroker structure is fighting it. And that’s what people don’t understand. Why would they? Because for the longest time people have thought that Republican equaled conservative, and it’s not the case. At this dinner party I was telling you about on Saturday night, somebody brought up the fact that Wall Street people, everybody thinks of them as rock-ribbed, big business Republicans. They’re the evil rich and so forth. How come they all supported Obama? And one of the guests said, ‘That’s very simple. Their wives have them henpecked. Their wives are making ’em do it.’

And I said, ‘You know, you have a point. That’s why they’re anti-pro-lifers, because of their wives. All these Northeastern liberal Republicans, they don’t want to hear their wives complaining about the Southerners and the pro-lifers and so forth and they don’t want to go to the conventions with these people.’ So a lot of forces are being marshaled here. But standard, run-of-the-mill, everyday Republicans are not gonna roll this stuff back. They don’t have the desire to. They want to roll the sleeves up and do it. It’s just the latest evolution of where the country is going. ‘Let’s manage it the best we can.’ That’s their point of view. ‘We’ll fight it on the margins.’ It’s a tipping point and it’s also illustrative of ‘ruling class’ versus, as Mr. Codevilla calls us, ‘the country class.’ And there’s less and less tolerance now. The days where the ruling class was thought to be best and brightest and smarter than everybody else, those days are over. The average American doesn’t think that anymore. It used to be, but they don’t.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Eric in Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s great to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Hey, I’ll drop the name of Tara Servatius to you. She’s a great talk show host down here in Charlotte. I suggested Jason Lewis years ago; you put him on. You need a lady on, and we got a wonderful lady down here in Charlotte who I think you’d love you if you ever got a chance to listen to her. But I wanted to drop a word here on my frustration as I’m sure many other conservatives have with the current crop of Republican leaderships here and their thrust. Newt Gingrich was a visionary. He gave us the Contract with America. He’s just an ideologue. I hope he runs for president. I just love his ideas. He may have some problems there with, of course, his marriage issues. But I think he can overcome that if he’s really put forward. But the problem is these guys aren’t visionaries. I wonder if there’s someone other than Boehner that you like. I like Eric Cantor, I like Mike Pence, Thad McCotter and so on, but… You know, Boehner is great — he knows a lot, he’s good — but there’s some inspiration that he just doesn’t bring. He needs to at least put forth some sort of thing to inspire this election. This is a golden opportunity that we’re missing. Even though it looks like we may get the majority the problem is that, you know, it could be even bigger if there’s some sort of vision, just like the Contract with America. Something with the title of ‘retaking’ or ‘taking back’ America or maybe even ‘get rid of Obamacare,’ something to that effect, if you know what I’m trying to say.

RUSH: Well, there are a lot of people who think that the Republicans ought to be offering more of policy-oriented agenda to have a mandate, that it’s not enough just to say, ‘I’m not a Democrat.’ Although it is. (chuckles) See, that’s the scenario. You don’t have to do any more than that to win, and if they don’t have to, they won’t. They’re not going to take a risk at offending anybody. This is the thing that bothers a lot of us, and that is they still walk into a room thinking they have to prove they’re not racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. Everybody thinks this, they believe it, and so they think they have to first prove that they’re reasonable. And I’ll tell you, that is one of the big bugaboos that I face. It’s one of the things that just really irritates me to no end is this desire to show that I’m reasonable and you aren’t.

And you know how it’s typified? One of the best examples of this, peace be upon him, is Jack Kemp. In the vice presidential debate with Algore back in 1996, Algore is up there praising Kemp for not being a racist and a bigot like so many in his party are. And Jack Kemp said, ‘Thank you,’ rather than excoriate Gore for having that view of Republicans in general. It’s ’cause it’s easy. It’s easy to take the praise, easy to take the compliments, easy to stand out. So we have people who want to be the most reasonable man in the room while the Democrats are out there trying to portray themselves as the smartest people in the room. And all too often Republicans want to be seen by the media as the most reasonable man in the room. This is another quasi-explanation for why we have so many so-called conservatives in the media who are not conservatives.

They want to be seen as reasonable. They don’t want to be seen as wild-eyed and crazy and extreme and radical like some of these conservatives are. They want to be seen as reasonable, and so they write things and they say things. ‘Oh, I can see that. I can also see it this way. I think if I were doing that…’ and of course they’re just a bunch of mush. They don’t take a stand on anything. They hope they’ll be perceived as reasonable, and that’s not gonna cut it. Is it better to appear to be reasonable or determined to produce the best result for the greatest number of people? Obviously it’s better to be determined to produce the best result for the greatest number of people. John Boehner said on Face the Nation: ‘If the only option I have is to vote for those at 250 and below of course I’m going to do that, but I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that we expand the current tax rates for all Americans.’

Now, Boehner is doing two things. He’s trying to appear reasonable there, but he also knew that he was being set up because if he had come out against tax cuts for the middle class that’s what they were setting him up for. They were setting him up. They already had ads ready to run. They just knew that Boehner would say, ‘If you don’t give tax cuts for the rich, I’m not going to be voting for anything,’ and they couldn’t wait to run that ad. But he knew it was coming, and so he went the reasonable route on them. So I give him a pass on it in this instance. But that is one of the things that they do. And, by the way, ‘reasonable’ according to whose standards? Is it not ‘reasonable’ according to theirs? We let the liberals, the media define what’s ‘reasonable,’ and then we have people who want to fit into their definition of it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Harold in Houston. Harold, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here, sir.

CALLER: Oh-ho-ho! (chuckling) I can’t believe it! If I get to say what I want to say, you ain’t ready for me.

RUSH: Maybe I am. Give me a shot.

CALLER: Okay. I’m 69 years old on the 28th of this month and I never voted. I’m gonna vote.

RUSH: Why are you gonna vote for the first time this time?

CALLER: (laughing) Well, for 42 years I’ve been frustrated with the system that my vote ain’t gonna count. I think the elites are just gonna put in whoever they want, the news media’s gonna put whoever they want in. I came to a conclusion that I’d be voting by not voting, that someday somebody would come along and want my vote and say what I say and want what I want and I would vote for them, and I’m seeing the conservative movement and the Tea Party as the people that want my vote. Here they are. I wanna vote. I pictured me walking in the booth, the voting booth, and I don’t know what I’m going to see. I know all kind of tricks are pulled to disguise and manipulate your vote. I don’t know how to see through it. Is there some way? I want to vote all incumbents out from the smallest office up. They failed. I wanna send my Mr. Smith to Washington.

RUSH: All right. Well, the first thing to do in this regard is don’t vote for anybody with a Democrat or a D next to their name.

CALLER: All right.

RUSH: That’s over half the battle, Harold. Now, in Texas I don’t think you’re going to have much of a problem because most of the Republicans on the ballot in Texas are not going to be RINOs.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: You’re going to have some out there, but the odds —

CALLER: So I’m safe going Republican —

RUSH: Well…

CALLER: — just using the R?

RUSH: With reservations, yes, but certainly much safer than… Don’t vote for any Democrat, whatever.

CALLER: No way. No way, yeah.

RUSH: No way. No, no, no, no. Not one Democrat is a member of the Tea Party, which is what’s got you jazzed.

CALLER: Yeah. Yeah. I’m on fire! I waited for them to show the whites of their eyes; now I’m ready to pull my musket out and shoot it.

RUSH: Well, figuratively speaking of course.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Because do you actually have a musket?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Yeah? I thought you might.

CALLER: A vote. My vote is my musket.

RUSH: Oh, your vote’s the musket. Okay.

CALLER: (laughing) I’m sorry.

RUSH: That’s okay. That’s okay. Look, you just stay tuned to this program.

CALLER: Oh, I — I do.

RUSH: All right. Well, then you’ll receive proper guidance at the proper time.

CALLER: And the second thing I wanted to know was: It’s my honest concern that as soon as I register as a Republican or independent, that I’m going to be audited, knowing how the elite use the IRS and the FBI.

RUSH: (laughing)

CALLER: Has anybody ever compiled statistics?

RUSH: That may be a factor whether you get health care in ten or 15 years, five years.

CALLER: Oh.


RUSH: No, it’s not a guaranteed audit, particularly if you vote independent, but if you want to register Democrat and vote Republican you could do that, too. It’s not a problem.