RUSH: Yesterday in the Washington Post, Douglas E. Schoen — a big-time Democrat pollster who was a ranking guy in the Clinton years. He’s sorta persona non grata with the Democrats these days, not totally, but he’s not the oracle that he was in the Clinton days ’cause he’s not singing the song they want to hear — and Patrick Caddell have a piece entitled: ‘One and Done: To be a Great President, Obama Should Not Seek Reelection in 2012 … This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.
‘To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012. If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose. We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. … The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents. The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment — or of the 2012 campaign. … Obama can and should dispense with the pollsters, the advisers, the consultants and the strategists who dissect all decisions and judgments in terms of their impact on the president’s political prospects.’
Now, this isn’t gonna happen. I think he’s gonna be a one-termer, but I don’t think he’s gonna announce it. I think he is gonna be rejected, and I’ve said this from the get-go, by the way. One of the early voices, when asked, it wasn’t an out and front prediction. You remember when Obama was asked about this himself, I forget the exact quote, I forget exactly what he said, it was something about, ‘I could either do what’s right or be a great president, and I would choose to do what’s right even if that meant one term,’ which means he’s going to focus on his agenda and his agenda is the problem. He even said about the stimulus that if it didn’t work he would be a one-term president. He is thinking about it, but that notion of being great or doing what’s right, in his mind being great is acceding to public opinion, to listening to columns like this from Schoen and Caddell, but doing the right thing to him means fulfilling his wish list, bucket list agenda items, whatever. And we know what that is.
I cringe every time I read somebody, particularly educated, intelligent people, saying this: ‘But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008 –‘ central promise ‘– draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.’ How many of you think that that is the central issue facing the country? That what we have to do is drain the poison from our culture of polarization, and we must end the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose. I asked the question last Friday of a caller. Can you tell me when was the last time America was truly unified? I mean by that, can you tell me when there was a period of time when there was no opposition to whatever was happening in the country? And you can’t. There has never been a time, even from the days of this nation’s founding, there has never been a time where there has not been opposition, large or small or significant or insignificant to the direction the country was headed in at the time. It’s part and parcel.
How do you drain the poison from our culture of polarization? If you ask me — and I’m sure to the left this would be proof positive it’s not possible — to me to drain the poison from our culture means get rid of liberals, means defeat liberalism, means defeat Democrats. They are the poison. You know, what came first, the polarization or the poison? What came first, the disagreements or the policies that cause them? In my mind what came first are the policies, the directions that certain people want to take the country. That spawns the disagreement; that spawns the partisanship. The partisanship doesn’t create it. The partisanship is the result of it. And so if partisanship or the poison of polarization must be gotten rid of, well, what’s the poison? What is poisoning America? I’ll tell you flat-out, the Democrat Party, the American left. That’s the poison. And we see it. The Democrat Party has been running this country for the last four years. Pelosi and the Democrats assuming office in 2007, Obama in 2008, that’s the poison. There are some Republicans who hold responsibility, too, because they behaved like Democrats.
The Republicans are also part of the poison because they wanted to get along with the Democrats; they wanted to drink the poison; they wanted to share it. They thought that’s what the American people wanted: share the poison. This notion we’ve gotta get along? This is nothing more than an ill-advised or naive or maybe purposeful suggestion to make us go away, to make us shut up, to make us calm down. ‘Just stop opposing all this stuff, Rush.’ When we ban some little kid from driving his bicycle with a flag up, ‘If you’d just shut up, Rush, there wouldn’t be any problem with it. You just let us take the guy’s flag off his bicycle, if you wouldn’t say anything, you and Drudge, then we’d be fine. If you wouldn’t oppose what Obama is doing with the health care bill, just agree with Pelosi, Rush, it doesn’t matter what’s in it. We don’t have to read it. We don’t need to know what’s in it ’til we pass it. If we just agree with that stuff, Rush, we get rid of the poison. Rush, if you just shut up, if you just agree that we need to raise taxes on people, that we need to reorder the American economy. Rush, if you would just shut up and realize that we need to redistribute the wealth in this country ’cause the rich have come by it unfairly and in an ill-gotten way. Rush, if you would just shut up, why, we’d all be happy. Rush, if you would just shut up about all this, if you would just let us ruin the country, Rush, then everybody would be happy, and there wouldn’t be any poison. Just get out of our way, Rush, just shut up, just let us go ahead and remake this into a socialist, Marxist country like we want it to be, and everybody would be fine, and there won’t be any disagreement because then the people that disagree we’ll put in jail. So if you’d just shut up, Rush.’
So where’s the poison? The poison — and it’s literal poison, Schoen and Caddell have this right — the poison is the American left. The poison is the Democrat Party, because the American left control it more so than they ever have. You and I are the antidote. If we get bitten by a snake that has poisonous venom are we supposed to say, ‘Okay, snake won. We don’t want to disagree with the snake. We certainly don’t want to make the snake any angrier. Let’s just die.’ Is that how we react to poison? ‘Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Limbaugh, you are totally incorrect. We are not the poison, you are.’ Okay, fine. There’s the argument. They think we’re the poison. So what are they supposed to do, just sit down and let us win? Neither side’s gonna do that. So this notion of draining the poison from the culture of polarization, the only way to do that is one side has to lose and profoundly, and they have to keep losing. This country has to reassert itself as a nation of freedom, a beacon of liberty, a constitutional government, a representative republic as founded. Anything less is unacceptable. That’s why people are fighting. That’s why there is a Tea Party.
That’s why there was a landslide election against the poison on November the 2nd, and it will continue. Because the American people now have realized that what Obama promised was not an elixir. He wasn’t the medicine man. He did not have the magic potion that was going to rid the country of this partisanship and all of these disagreements and this friction and uncomfortableness. Obama is a phony, totally unlike that which he was portrayed and as he portrayed himself. So Messrs. Schoen and Caddell, this whole premise that we’ve gotta drain the poison, yeah, but the poison is not the disagreement. The disagreement arises from the poison. And until we all agree, or a vast majority of us agree what the poison is, all of this is gonna continue, by definition. I mean if I believe in my heart and mind that the left, the Democrat Party is poison, why am I gonna give that up? What’s gonna come along and make me compromise that away? Nothing. Others maybe, but not me.
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RUSH: Okay, all kinds of people are asking, ‘What do you mean poison?’ I knew that was gonna get ’em. I knew. You go out and you call the Democrat Party poison. Even that some people don’t want to hear. A lot of you are cheering it, don’t misunderstand, I understand that. ‘But gosh, Rush, that’s kind of harsh, calling Obama’s presidency ‘graffiti on the walls of history.” What else would you call it? What else would you call this presidency? It’s an absolute disaster. It’s graffiti on the walls of history. We’ve got a veritable, in terms of experience, a juvenile delinquent here. We got the least qualified guy in any room he walks into. Public and private property is under assault. His own gang isn’t making much of an effort to protect him. I mean you see some efforts in the media flailing away, but this is graffiti on the walls of American history.
Okay, so you want to know what a poison is. There are all kinds of poison. There’s not just one poison out there, but here’s one, and it’s not the poison of partisanship in Washington. Partisanship is the result of the poison. Our culture of personal responsibility, our culture of rugged individualism, our entrepreneurial spirit, pursuit of excellence, that culture has been poisoned. We now have people looking to government, not for help, but for their existence. We now have government determining people’s outcomes by limitation. Anybody depending on government is going to be limited. Would you rather be limited by yourself or by the government? I have a philosophy that I evolved as a result of growing up. As I used to listen to people complaining about how life passed ’em by or they had an opportunity to do that or this, but it just never happened because of X, and the X was always they didn’t want to do something. Such as leave their hometown. Which is all fine and dandy, but that’s a limitation that you put on yourself.
Most of the limitations that Americans face, up until Obama, are the limitations they placed on themselves. But now, in addition to those self-imposed limitations, we got government limitations on everybody, and to the extent that you become dependent, you are totally limited because there is no panacea. There is no dream at the end of a life provided for by government. The power in your life is in you, but when you become a ward of the state, the power in your life is the government. And to the government, you are not a human being. You’re a number. You’re a Social Security number or a statistic or an entry on a loss and balance sheet. You’re not part of a population of accomplishment and perseverance anymore when you are dependent on government. So one of the poisons that’s flowing throughout our culture has caused people to be focused on seeking benefits and entitlements from somebody else other than themselves, and the poison is that their humanity is being destroyed under the guise of compassion. And nobody that can do better for you than you can do for yourself, because I don’t care where you go and who you are, there’s nobody that’s going to care as much about you as you do.
Nancy Pelosi doesn’t care about you one-tenth of 1% as much as you do, no matter what she says. Barack Obama cares less than Pelosi cares about you. Ditto, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Chuck-U Schumer, any Democrat who you believe cares about you. Nobody cares about you more than you care about yourself. Sadly, you care about yourself sometimes is called selfishness, which it’s not. It’s self-interest. Big difference in the two. Why would you willingly give away the person most interested in you to a bunch of people that you don’t know, you will never meet, and in truth look at you as an incompetent and hold you in contempt? I.e., the Democrat Party, the Social Security Administration, the employment compensation office, the Veterans Affairs, I don’t care who they are, you’re looked at as a problem. Oh, no, here you come again.
You think the people working at the Social Security office really like to see the doors opening there every day? You’d be treated a lot better if they did. Do you think the people at the Transportation Safety Administration at the airport really love seeing you get in line to get on an airplane? They happy to see you? They happy to see a citizen that they can serve, or, oh, God, here comes more work I gotta do. I gotta frisk a nun. I gotta feel up some teacher. Some of them like it; some of them don’t.
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RUSH: Lee in Convoy, Ohio, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Thank you for calling, sir.
CALLER: Hi.
RUSH: Oh, it’s a woman. I’m sorry.
CALLER: It’s good to talk to you, Rush. And I just wanted to make a comment about your comment on when the last time, if ever, our country united together. I have some examples of when it was pretty close to that. I was thinking back in World War II, the war effort, war bonds and the factories where we united together towards fighting the war and winning it. I was thinking of —
RUSH: Are you aware — and I know what you’re saying, but I mean genuinely unified like these people are dreaming of, are you aware that there were Americans who wanted us to lose that war?
CALLER: Oh, yeah. I didn’t say perfectly united.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I said for the most part.
RUSH: Okay, what are the other three times that you think we were pretty much unified?
CALLER: Well, actually I thought of another one in the meantime. But another one was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That was just, you know, time of shock —
RUSH: We were so unified there that LBJ didn’t run for reelection.
CALLER: (laughing) Well, still, it was over all the radios and TVs and —
RUSH: I know what you’re saying. I’m not trying to be a smart aleck here.
CALLER: Oh, right. Okay. And then also landing on the moon. That was a scientific breakthrough that we were all —
RUSH: It was the birth of the environmental movement. It was the birth of destroying the planet with emissions.
CALLER: I understand, but we’re talking about the individual event and not the results of those —
RUSH: Right. I mean we still have Sheila Jackson Lee wondering if we ever do go to Mars if astronauts will land in the same place where the flag was the put there by our early rover.
CALLER: I didn’t say I was in favor of it or anything.
RUSH: (laughing) All right, I admire your perseverance. What’s the fourth one? You were gonna say right after 9/11.
CALLER: Okay. Yeah, I had 9/11 down, but I also had —
RUSH: Let me tell you, within six hours of 9/11, certainly within 24, the Democrat Party was plotting how to make a political hay out of it, because already Peter Jennings, the late Peter Jennings was ripping Bush and how he reacted that first day. He said, I’ll never forget this —
CALLER: Oh, I know.
RUSH: ‘Some presidents are just better at this than others.’ He was talking about Clinton. They’re already making fun of Bush reading the book to the kids, didn’t have the guts to come back to Washington. There wasn’t unity then.
CALLER: Oh, I am totally disgusted with what the Democrats did there, and I think Bush acted heroically and phenomenally patriotic. I think it was one of the most stirring moments I’ve ever seen, but I’m talking about events that, for even a brief moment, had people united behind that event or in similar thought towards that event, whether there’s that party or group of people that want to decry the moment, you know, you’re always going to have that. But I think there are times in our history where the massive body of the United States really were impacted by certain things.
RUSH: Okay, maybe for a couple minutes, but it doesn’t last.
CALLER: Well, it happens.
RUSH: Yeah, it does. Look, I’m not trying to be a cold shower. I live in Literalville. I’m sorry. You know, this is what gets me in trouble as much as anything else I do, living in Literalville, because most people don’t want to be in Literalville. Most people look at reality, they say, ‘No, no, no,’ and they sugarcoat it and things like that. But I appreciate your call, Lee, I really do.
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RUSH: Lawrence, Jacksonville, Florida, hello, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Jacksonville Jaguars hail Mary mega dittos.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I saw that, can’t believe it.
CALLER: Cannot believe it. Rush, I want to go back to a point you made regarding the poison that is the ideas of the left and your thoughts on whether or not we need the left to be around forever, because in my gut I feel like if there’s not anything for us to be railing against, for us to be fighting against, then we become complacent and we lose sight of the reason that we are the right people to be running the country or —
RUSH: What are you saying?
CALLER: Well, in your earlier segment I got the feeling that, you know, that we want to extinguish the left or we were kind of going down that track —
RUSH: Well, we want to defeat them politically, yeah.
CALLER: Yeah, but do you think that we still need them around? Even in defeat I think I’ve heard you say many times that they’re not gonna go away, but do you think that we need them around, do we need something to keep our attention on the track the country needs to be on?
RUSH: Oh, yeah, how long have you been listening to the radio program, Lawrence?
CALLER: I think about five years.
RUSH: Well, then you may not have heard me say this because I think I said this many, many years ago. We always need to keep some liberals around so people never forget what they were. You know, keep a couple on every college campus doing what they do, put a couple in as museum curators, keep a couple liberal think tanks around. I wouldn’t want to totally get rid of ’em because you want people to never forget.
CALLER: If the liberals go away, what do you think would take their place in the vacuum that would be then liberalism?
RUSH: Conservatism.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: The founding of the country, the constitutional freedom would take its place because that’s what’s under assault.
CALLER: Okay fair enough. And I am a very busy business traveler, and I will try to do the reverse sex pat down request next time I get a chance.
RUSH: Give it a shot and see what happens.
CALLER: I’ll let you know.
RUSH: You never know. Be prepared to be arrested. You never know what’s gonna happen. Don’t tip ’em. No, do not offer to tip ’em. I don’t care whatever else happens, do not do that. Whoever has that idea, scrub it. And, look, I’m gonna be realistic here. The left is never gonna go away, folks. Nobody here is under any illusion. There’s always gonna be people who reject modernism, and there’s gonna be people that reject progress. There are always going to be people who are not gonna want to take care of themselves. There will always be people who are gonna be obsessed with this notion of equality of outcome defined as fairness. No, it’s a good question. If the pat-downs are not sexual, why does it matter who pats you down? Really, if this is purely devoted to security, why does it matter? Why does it matter what the gender of the patter-downer is? It’s just the way I think about things.