(wild cheers and applause)
RUSH: Thank you!
(woman hands Rush flowers up on stage)
RUSH: Thank you! Thank you very much.
(hoots and applause)
RUSH: Thank you all very much. I really want to apologize for getting a late start, but it was your fault.
(laughter)
RUSH: But there’s a good thing that happened. I understand it’s raining very hard outside, which means that the Occupy people are finally getting a shower.
(applause)
RUSH: It’s been five years since I appeared here in New York in person like this. It’s been too long. I remember I arrived here in 1988 from Sacramento, California, and I learned so many things when I got to this town. One of the things I encountered was reading, I think, the New York Post’s Page Six. It was a story about edible panties. I remember saying, “I didn’t know they had taste buds down there.”
(laughter)
RUSH: So this is going to be a fun ride. We were just talking backstage about Herman Cain. The last thing I heard about Herman Cain was that he’s considering getting out of the race. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire — and there’s generally two media people rubbing sticks together to create the smoke.
(laughter)
RUSH: But I have been… I’m trying to figure all this out. This whole Herman Cain thing when it started with these sexual harassment babes all popping up, and the original claim was, “He made ‘gestures that were not overtly sexual.'” One of the women said, “Yeah, well, he said that I came up to here on him.” (hand under his chin)
(laughing)
RUSH: And I’m trying to figure out what is sexually harassing about this? It is hot in here, isn’t it. It is very warm. Uh, now we have this woman? Thirteen-year affair? If you’re Herman Cain, how do you think this is not going to come out if you’re running for office? Now the woman that has been working with this thirteen-year woman claiming she had the affair, says, “I never heard her mention Herman Cain’s name.” So there’s a lot of mystifying things about this and the whole Republican race is kind of troubling and interesting at the same time. For example, Romney. If you look at the polling data, Romney has never gotten more than 25 or 30% of the Republican vote no matter where the poll is taken, state, nationally or what have you.
There have been a series of candidates that have popped up and have been the anti-Romney. Newt is the latest one. Bachmann was. Rick Perry was at one time. The race is said to be “unsettled” because of this, but what it looks like to me is that overall people just don’t view Romney as conservative enough and that’s why he can’t get above 25 or maybe 28-30% in all of this and some of these other people do rise up. One of the things that people say to me all the time is, “When are you going to endorse? When are you going to put somebody over the top?” I say, “It’s not my job. It’s theirs. They have to do it. They’re the ones that have to get traction,” and it really is serious. I can remember when I started my program in Sacramento in 1984. I did three years there, moved it to New York in 1988.
It was a lot different then than it is now, and I must tell you the “fun factor” in doing the program is harder to come by now than it was. I remember one of the first things that happened when I was in Sacramento. I use the philosophy of “illustrating absurdity by being absurd,” and I still do it when the situation warrants it. But I remember a minister in Ohio claimed that there was a satanic message in the Mr. Ed theme song and he wanted the TV show taken off the air. Now, I could say what I just said that the radio and be done with it, but I thought, “I’m gonna have some fun with this. I’m gonna actually illustrate how absurd and silly this Ohio minister is.” He said, “If you get the Mister Ed theme song and play it backwards, there’s a Satanic message in it.”
At the time I was doing the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament Updates; Slim Whitman was my theme song, Una Paloma Blanca. A bunch of leftists were marching coast to coast against nuclear weapons. They were trying to get everybody to nuclear disarm. It was a big thing in the late eighties, mid-eighties, and I was making fun of them with the Slim Whitman tune. So I decided to illustrate the absurdity of the Ohio minister by finding a Satanic message in the Slim Whitman song. So I went to the production studio, and we found a way to do it. You can’t play records backwards. There’s no way to do this. So even if there was a Satanic message in the Mister Ed theme song, there’s no way to hear it.
(laughter)
RUSH: You need special broadcast equipment to do this. So we went in, in the production room, we recorded the song backwards and I had a friend of mine put a message through it through a device called a harmonizer, which makes the voice sound any way you want it to sound. I opened my program the next day saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have been made aware of something due to the good work of an Ohio minister that has led me to discover that (sigh) I have been possessed, unwittingly so.”
(laughter)
RUSH: “And I have exposed you to this, and I am seriously thinking that I must resign. I’m not going to tell you what happened or what it is, because I don’t want to spread it any further.” Well, this created curiosity. People were wondering what happened; started calling the management of the radio station to get an explanation. I played it as though I was being forced to explain what this was all about. Next day I said, “I’m under duress. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m told I must tell what’s happened here. I’m very uncomfortable doing this, but there is an Ohio minister who found a Satanic message in the Mister Ed television show theme song, and it just got me to thinking. I play a lot of music on my program. I wanted to find out how widespread Satanic messages are in music.
“And, ladies and gentlemen, I have found a Satanic message in a song I have played, and you have heard it. You have been subliminally affected by it, and I can’t tell you how guilty I feel, how horrible I feel. I think if it’s happened once, it could happen again even though I discovered it now. I don’t know how I could go on.” So people would call and ask, “Well, what is it?” “I’m not gonna tell you what it is; I’m not gonna go any further than this. I’ve been forced to tell you this much already.” We’re day two of this now. Preachers, clergymen start calling the radio station, asking the general manager, “What is going on? People are calling me saying your station is playing the devil!” The general manager comes to me and says, “How long are you gonna go with this?” And I said, “The way it’s going, I think I can get five days out of it.”
(laughter)
RUSH: (laughs) He says, “Well, you better be careful with this,” and this was an instructive thing for me, too. He said, “You better be careful because people are believing this.” I said, “I know. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it. By the time I’m finished with this, they’re gonna think I am the funniest, most creative guy they have ever heard.” “Okay, fine.” So the next day, day three of this, I finally say, “Folks, now it’s gotten out of my control. Local ministers have called the radio station and they have demanded that this Satanic message be played so that you know what it is.” So I said, “It goes back to this Ohio minister. When I heard him say that there was a Satanic message in the Mister Ed theme, I played the Slim Whitman song Una Paloma Blanca that we use for our Global Peace Movement Update, played it backwards and lo and behold!
(sigh) “There’s a Satanic message in it. Now, I know I’ve not played the song backgrounds for you, but it’s still there, and this Ohio minister said that you can hear it just like you can hear it in the Mister Ed theme.” People start calling, “You’ve got to play it!” “I’m going to, but I think you ought to be careful. Folks, you need to take great care in listening to this because…” To shorten this story, I played it. The song starts backwards — it sounds better that way than forwards — and about 30 seconds in, the message to be recorded through the harmonizer was this. (impression) “Beelzebub! Yes, it’s me, the devil himself, lurking right here in the Slim Whitman record grooves! Tell me, how did you find this so easily? My disciples would be would be happy to know that you found us like this.
(laughing)
RUSH: “Well, since you found this, I gotta be heading on down the line. Waaaay down,” and I played the song back up and played the Satanic message three or four times, and I’m thinking — this is day three now — “Okay, people are gonna finally realize I’ve been poking fun of the Ohio minister. I took a little news story that long and got five days out of it,” and I’m looking at my call screener who’s got a look of panic on her face. I start taking calls, and, honest to God, folks, the first call says, “Uhh, I have every Slim Whitman record. What should I do?” I’m going, “Oh, God.” It taught me something. I said, “If I were you, I’d burn them. You never know.”
“Really?” “Yes! Burn them.” A couple of more people called in, and they believed it, too. Now here I was thinking I’ve got an invitation of Johnny Carson coming; this is going to establish me as really a great satirist and so forth, and people bought it. Until this last call. One guy calls up, “You know what? You can’t fool me. I’ve heard all of this. You think we’re all a bunch of idiots out here. Let me tell you something: I have that record. Now, my turntable doesn’t play backwards, but I can put the needle on the back end of that song and I have spun it backwards, and I have tried to find it, and it ain’t there! You are lying to us.”
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: And so, I had to think fast. I said, “Sir, what year was your turntable made?”
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: He said, “1983.” I said, “Well, see, that’s the problem. Your turntable was made before new disgronification circuitry.”
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: “You mean I go buy a new turntable and I play that record backwards just like I’m trying now, I’ll hear it?” “Yes, sir.” Now, the reason I told you this is — and this is one of my greatest hits. This is something I’ll never forget happening. There’s another event like it as well. From Sacramento to New York, remember now this is the mid-eighties, the late eighties, and at that time the defense budget — I guess as it always is — was a hot topic, how much we’re gonna spend on defense. And I have always been a big defense budget guy. I love the military. I just think these people…
(sustained cheers and applause)
RUSH: You realize those people volunteer to do what 99-and-a-half-percent of the country would not do.
(cheers and applause)
RUSH: I love them. The older I get, the more in awe I am of military people and what they’ve done and what they do, particularly now that they volunteer to do it. But back in the mid-eighties there was this discussion of the defense budget, and one of the ways the left tries to stifle any debate about things is to say, “Well, you didn’t serve in the military!” I get calls like that. “When you had a chance in Vietnam to kill commies, you didn’t go, so you don’t have to right to talk about it,” and I listened to this, and I’d respond to them, and I’d have fun with it, but after a while it got to really tick me off, this kind of thinking and talk.
So after I moved to New York, somehow the subject comes up, and during the call exactly like this I decided to try a different tack. I said, “You know what, sir? You have a point. You know, I come from a small town in Missouri. My dad was a powerful man in that town, a town of 25,000 people. My family, we ran that town. I told my dad back in 1960, I said, ‘Dad, I — I — I really don’t want to go Vietnam.’ So he went down to the draft board, he wrote them a $3,000 check, and I got a 4F.” That happened to be the very end of the program, I’m thinking (arm pump), “Another home run. I have just illustrated their absurdity. I have had it with these people up to here (hand over his head). Not here (hand under his chin), but here (hand over his head).
(laughter)
RUSH: So… (laughs) I got home about two hours later, the phone is ringing, and it’s my dad.
(laughter)
RUSH: I can’t repeat verbatim.
(laughter)
RUSH: “Son, what the hell did you say?” So I told him. He said, “Don’t you understand? They believe you, son. You can’t do that! Your audience believes you. You can’t do that,” and the rest of the family from Tennessee, Illinois, they were all calling my dad, suggesting that I be taken off the radio. I was destroying the family name and reputation. “We don’t pay off draft boards,” they were saying. How many of you believe it, by the way? It’s so absurd! Go write the draft board a check for three grand? I know it’s the kind of thing the Democrats do, but we don’t do it!
(wild applause)
RUSH: I would never suggest to go do it. I’m look out here, now, and some of you believe it happened! I can see some of your faces. Some of you look like you’re stunned that you paid money to come here tonight after you heard this.
(laughter)
RUSH: No, no, no. It didn’t happen, but these two things were really educational, informative thing for me about the audience and my credibility and the fact that people do believe me. They take me seriously, which, by the way, it’s a valuable thing, and it’s something I treasure. It is key, by the way, to my success the relationship that I’ve had with you all and everybody in the audience. But my point of all of this is, when I do show prep today — and I wondered if I should have admitted this. I wanted to tell this story, and I thought long and hard whether I should actually admit this to you tonight when I came out here, because it… (sigh) You know, it’s something I might not say on the radio. When I prepped the show today, that Ohio minister thing just hit me like that (snapping fingers). Even though it’s the late eighties, mid-eighties, Ronald Reagan’s second term — and the media hated Reagan so the times were politically intense — the country wasn’t on the brink then. It is now. I can’t get past the fact that if this guy in the White House gets four more years, you and I are not gonna recognize the country we grew up in. It’s that serious to me.
(applause)
RUSH: And I know that humor is a great way to deal with things, and sometimes using humor can even be persuasive. But there’s not a whole lot that seems funny to me right now. I mean, sure, you can make fun of Michelle getting booed at NASCAR.
(applause)
RUSH: But you don’t laugh at that, you cheer at it, don’t you? I mean, I freaking cheer when I hear that she got booed! I come to New York, I expect to get booed, you know, like she goes to NASCAR and does. But you all didn’t boo me.
WOMAN: We love you, Rush!
(wild applause)
RUSH: Now, I’m probably stunning you because there’s still a lot of fun and the fun factor on the radio show is there, but (sigh) it’s a fine line here to me. I remember my dad telling me in 1963, so I was 12 years old and John Kennedy had just been elected. My dad said to my brother and me, “If you boys aren’t careful, you’re gonna end up slaves.” To him that meant communism was going to take over. The Great Depression, World War II, Khrushchev banging the shoe were the most formative events of his life, and he took it all very seriously; and my brother and I just laughed at him, just like when he talked about the Depression. “Ah, Dad, Dad, that’s when you ere growing up. We’re never gonna have anything like that,” and here we are.
We’re not in a Great Depression, but for some people it is — for way too many Americans it is. This is not the country that I grew up in. It’s not too late to save it, but for me, it’s become… I’ve been doing this 23 years, and I get up every day and I prep the program, and it’s never been more important to me than it is today, in all these years; and there’s a part of me… I’ve done very well. I’ve had more success than I deserve; I have been blessed. And, folks, it rips my heart out to have it happen when so many others in the country are going through what they’re going through. I wish… You know, we’re all conservatives, and we love people, and we want everybody to do well. We want the best for everybody! We don’t care if…
(applause)
RUSH: We don’t care what their race is or their sexual orientation or their gender. We want a great country. We want people out there trying to be the best they can be. We want people getting up every day and pursuing excellence and pursuing self-interest, because that’s what makes everybody the best they can be and to whatever degree they want to be. Now we’ve got a president and an administration — this is from the New York Times. This is a major thing. Monday, yesterday, in the New York Times, the Obama regime has decided that in order to get reelected, they’re just gonna forget “working white Americans.” They’re gonna throw them out of the coalition. They can’t win going after that group. They think they’ve lost working white Americans. So their group now is that bunch across the street, the Occupy people, the losers in life who have this entitlement mentality —
(applause)
RUSH: — the elite professors and all those other clowns, pointy-headed academics who couldn’t hammer a nail if their life depended on it! This administration has basically said to the backbone of America, to the people who make this country work, “We’re not interested in you.” Now, these are the old Reagan Democrat types in many ways, but stop and think of this. This was in an op-ed column by a guy named Thomas Edsall who used to work at the New York Times or maybe the Washington Post. He’s a big leftist. They put this out there as though it’s no big deal. “Yep, the administration’s calculation is just to abandon those voters.” I don’t mean this in a racial sense, by the way.
Don’t interpret it this way. They do, but I’m not interpreting it that way. When they talk about they have decided to just sacrifice the votes of “working people,” what does that tell you? What does that tell you their design is? What does that tell you the agenda is? This is a president and an administration… (sigh) I’ll tell you another story. A friend of mine — I wish I could tell you his name, but I can’t, because he came to me privately Saturday night. I got up Saturday morning, and there’s a text on my phone. “You have time for a visit tonight between five and seven from an old friend?”
I said, “Sure.” I texted back, “Come on by.” You would know this guy. You would know who he is. He’s not a political person. He’s not known in political circles at all, not by the people who know him. He is involved but he’s not known that way. He came by right on time and was near tears telling me how worried he is about the country and he told me some things that I was surprised to hear from him. He really started railing on President Obama. He said, “This Obama’s destroyed the country. I’m so worried,” and then he finally got to it and my antennae went up. He said, “(Sigh). We’ve gotta find some people who can put it all aside, work together, and solve these problems;” and I looked at him, and I looked at him and I said, “No.”
(applause)
RUSH: I said, “The last thing we need to do is work with them. What we need to do is beat ’em. We need to defeat them.”
(applause)
RUSH: Now, this is a guy — and this is what we’re up against, folks. This man’s a billionaire. He is very savvy; he’s smart in his world. While telling me what he thought of Obama, he’s mentioning names of Democrats that he likes. I said, “Wait a minute. There’s no difference. If you’re gonna tell me what you just told me about Obama, then you’ve gotta think that about every Democrat, because they are the same. The Democrat Party spawned Obama, Obama is the Democrat Party, and if you’re gonna succeed in stopping him, you’ve gotta stop the Democrat Party. If you’ve been sent here…” This is what I think happened. “If you’ve been sent here to try to tell me that it’s up to me to get together with some of these people to solve some of these problems, I’m sorry. I don’t want to work with them, I don’t want to talk to ’em; I want to cream ’em!”
(wild cheering and applause)
“RUSH: I want to defeat them!”
(wild cheering and applause)
RUSH: I said, “Listen to yourself!”
(cheers)
RUSH: I said, “Listen to yourself.” The things he was telling me about Obama — the things that you say to each other, the things that we all feel, the things that we’re all afraid of — this guy’s not interested in. Like one of the things that came up was the super committee.
(laughter)
RUSH: He said, “You know, we just gotta find a way…”
I said, “Let me tell you…” I’ll call him Zeke, that way he’ll never be known who he is. “Zeke, don’t you understand, the super committee was designed to fail? It was never intended to succeed.”
“Oh, no, no!”
“Oh, yes! It was.” Why…? Why do you say that? There were good people on that committee.”
“No, there weren’t any good people on the committee. If there were good people on the committee, they would have done something about it. The purpose of that thing is to make sure nothing got done. Obama’s invested $1 billion for a reelection campaign rooted in a do-nothing Congress. There’s no way the Democrats are going to let anything come out of that committee. If the Republicans had agreed to a massive tax increase, they wouldn’t have agreed to it!”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes. Damn straight.”
You mean even if the Republicans had agreed to a tax increase…?”
“I’m telling you, the last thing they were gonna get out of this super committee was any kind of a deal. Obama’s investing too much money. He cannot run on his record. There’s not one thing Barack Obama has done that he can say, ‘Elect me for more of this.’ Nobody wants more of it.”
(applause)
RUSH: Well, I take it back. I take it back. Here’s the rub. It’s a sad thing. There are a lot of people that do want more of it. The people across the street, people down at Occupy this, Occupy this, Occupy that. They want more of it. Do you believe the number of people on food stamps in this country’s up by 50% in the last three years? It’s in the 40 millions of people on food stamps? We now have breakfast at school, we have lunch at school, and now dinner at school. You know what? My parents have both passed away. I lost a great resource when my dad died. I would love to have him alive and say, “Dad, guess what they’re doing in Memphis? School dinner!” What is the normal reaction? “School dinner? What is home for? What are parents for?”
(cheers)
RUSH: What is this? Of course, in Memphis the media writes the story as, “Oh, how wonderful this is!” They have the violins playing. “School dinner!” All it is is a sop to the SEIU, the unions. They run the cafeterias. It’s all union jobs, and all that is is a money laundering operation for the Democrats. The stimulus bill?
(applause)
RUSH: Finally, now, after almost two and a half years, the vaunted Congressional Budget Office finally admits that Obama’s Porkulus bill will be an ultimate drag on the economy. No kidding? That’s very much, 2-1/2 years after it’s over — and you know where all the money went? The money went to state employees and other federal employees. It didn’t go to “shovel-ready jobs.” I get so frustrated with people’s stupidity. So we spend $800, $900 billion on rebuilding the roads, rebuilding the bridges, schools, all this wonderful sounding crap that doesn’t need to be done. Nothing happens. All we do is make sure teachers and so forth and firemen don’t get laid off because they’re union people and they pay dues which goes back to the Democrat Party.
And then after that doesn’t work, Obama comes back for $60 billion more to rebuild roads, bridges and people go, “What is this? We tried it once.” Well, we didn’t try it. We’ve authorized this money, and it didn’t work, and we don’t have the money in the first place to be spending on any spending on any of this. So, I say that people don’t want any more of it, but clearly a lot of Americans do. Now, I don’t believe that we have reached the tipping point. A lot of people do. It’s very easy to be seduced by negativism and pessimism. I think human beings are naturally inclined to pessimism; otherwise you wouldn’t find people making millions of dollars writing books on how to think positively.
(laughter)
RUSH: It’s like Great Moderates in American History; the book doesn’t exist.
(laughter)
RUSH: How to Think Negatively and Destroy Your Life doesn’t exist, either. People already know how to do that. But the Power of Positive Thinking, people spend millions of dollars buying this stuff. So it’s very easy to get taken in by a media… See, I believe at the end of the day and people like us identified as conservatives — I don’t believe it; I know it. In terms of the people of the country, we are the majority in terms of the thinking, the way we live our lives, but it’s not reflected anywhere. You watch any of the network news shows, all we are is laughed at and made fun of, impugned, and all of the cultural rot that’s out there is built up as what’s normal because our opponents don’t want any value judgments whatsoever.
They don’t want any assessment of what’s right or wrong; they want situational morality. They don’t want to have to be told that the way they’re living is anything other than normal. So we can easily get caught up in this notion that we’re shrinking, that the people who really want to save the country and save it from the direction we’re going is a small minority; we don’t have a chance. But I just look at the 2010 midterm elections. It was a shellacking, and it’s —
(cheers and applause)
RUSH: Occupy Wall Street? Occupy Wall Street exists for one reason, and that’s because there is no spontaneous love and adoration for Barack Obama anymore. So they have to create it, and they have to make it look like it’s spontaneous. They’re so jealous of the Tea Party, I can’t tell you.
(cheers and applause)
RUSH: They are soooo jealous. They can’t stand it!
(cheers and applause)
RUSH: And now they’re out there telling themselves that the Tea Party is fading away, that the Tea Party doesn’t have any interest anymore, the Tea Party’s not rallying. “We don’t see ’em. Occupy Wall Street’s taken over!” What they don’t understand is that the Tea Party’s not really a party, and it doesn’t have meetings per se, and there’s no single organizational leader. It’s just us.
WOMAN: Yes!
(applause)
RUSH: And who are we? Well, most of the Tea Party people, a good percentage of them, are people that have never, ever been formally involved in politics at all. They just got fed up. They were shocked, scared, stunned to see what was happening to the country with all this mindless spending. All the debt being run up, they know what it means. They know what it means for the future of themselves and their kids and their grandkids, and it isn’t good — and so they started going to town hall meeting wanting to be heard for the first time; and because it was spontaneous, and because it’s genuine, and because it was real, Obama and the Democrats in the media are scared to death of it because they have to manufacture that emotion. They had it. They had it in 2008 with all this “I’m gonna lower the seas and we’re gonna raise the sky, whatever messianic stuff was.”
(laughter)
RUSH: But that’s all gone now. There is no magic, now. There’s no messiah. So we have an amazing circumstance. We now have two pollsters — Pat Caddell, who worked for Jimmy Carter; and Doug Schoen, who worked for Clinton — writing column after column now begging Obama not to run.
(applause)
RUSH: Make way for Hillary, they say. Their theory is that Obama can’t win, that he probably doesn’t even want to, that he’s not interested. They think he’s bored, but they did it the wrong way. They insulted him. Obama’s a narcissist. You don’t go to a narcissist and say, “You’ve blown it. You’re inconsequential, you’re incompetent, you’re a boob. You have screwed it up so bad, you’ve gotta leave.” You don’t tell a narcissist that. What you do is you write a column and you say, “You know what? This job’s beneath you, Barack. This president thing is so beneath you. I mean, you gotta work with these numskulls in Congress? You can’t get anything done in this — and we’re not a China, we’re not a dictatorship yet! You’re really wasting your time.
“This job is so beneath you, you gotta move to the IM! Look what happens at the Sofitel if you’re at the IMF. Move on. Play basketball whenever you want to play basketball, maybe move to the United Nations. Look what happens to those guys. You can do any number of things.” That’s the way you have to do it. I told ’em this. I said, “If you really want to get rid of Obama, you’ve got to do it that way. You can’t tell him he’s blown it. He’s just gonna firm up and say, “Oh, yeah? Watch this,” and he’s just gonna destroy it even more. But they want him out. The smart Democrats — and there are some. … Very few.
(laughter)
RUSH: But there are some Democrats who realize that he’s not only damaging the country, he is destroying the Democrat Party.
(applause)
RUSH: He is, folks. That alone is not enough because, as you know, they’ve stocked the judiciary and bureaucracy with career liberals who are gonna be there no matter what happens to the party for a long time. That’s always been their election insurance. Somebody said to me the other day, “Well, don’t you consider it a great victory that Barney Frank’s seat is now wide open.”
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: You know, I loved…
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: You know, almost 90 years ago to the day Margaret Sanger was arrested on this stage? Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood. Do you know what she was arrested for? “Discussing contraception among a mixed sexual audience.” My, how times have changed.
(laughter)
RUSH: She was arrested for that. That’s what makes me think of Barney Frank.
(laughter)
RUSH: Anyway, I loved Barney’s press conference the other day. He said (impression), “I just…”
(laughter)
RUSH: (chuckles) “I just — I just — I can’t — I can’t abandon the fisheries.” Can’t abandon the fisheries?
(laughter)
RUSH: (chuckles) Now, that’s 17 Democrats in the House that are just outright retiring. Barney’s quitting…
(applause)
RUSH: Barney’s quitting because of redistricting, and he’s never had to really campaign for his office. They’ve reduced Massachusetts districts from ten to nine. This 2010, I’m telling you, the Democrats took a shellacking, but the media doesn’t portray it this way, so it’s not really widely understood. You know, we have to tell ourselves each and every day that we are the majority, that we are the ones who are dominant.
(applause)
RUSH: Because if you don’t tell yourself that, you’re not going to believe it. It doesn’t matter where you go, you’ve got… (sigh) I have to be real careful here. I don’t know who’s in the audience. Pretty much anywhere you go in the media — anywhere now — you are going to find dominant liberalism somewhere. It’s just there, and it’s depressing to people. It can wipe away the good feelings of victory. It can do a lot of damage. You have to constantly work at it. Me, too. That might surprise you, but if you watch enough of it, and you get a completely different picture of what is actually going on in the country. Obama’s approval number, for example, is now exactly where Jimmy Carter’s was.
(applause)
RUSH: But do you see that reflected anywhere? You might see it reported, but when George Bush had these numbers, Wolf Blitzer could barely keep his pants up reporting it!
(laughter)
RUSH: He was going on and on and on counting it down. “Here we are, it’s five o’clock at CNN, and Bush’s approval numbers are down in the high thirties! It’s 5:10 at CNN, and George Bush’s approval…” They whisper Barack Obama’s numbers are down and then they do the next 30 minutes on, “What does Obama have to do to come back? What can Obama do?” I saw Chris Matthews and that famous interview now, shouting at the TV. He says, “You know what? I’m really worried, Barack! What are you gonna do in the second term? He hasn’t told us.” What is this “us”? “What are you gonna do about deficit reduction? What are you gonna do about spending? What are you gonna do about health care?” I’m watching this in incredulity. What are you gonna do about spending? Chris, more of it! What do you mean he’s gonna do about deficit control? Nothing! He wants more deficit. He wants more spending. He wants more debt. The whole Democrat Party does. They want as many people depending on them as possible.
They have a whole…
(applause)
RUSH: This is why I told my friend, “There’s no compromising with these people. (applause)(Unintelligible). You pick any name on that super committee. I don’t even remember all that were there, but this guy, my friend, asked, “What about John Kerry?” I said, “You gotta be kidding me!”
(laughter)
RUSH: “John Kerry? You came by here on a Saturday before dinner to tell me that you think…?”
“Well, it’s gonna have to be somebody like you.”
I said, “You know what? Did somebody send you here? Because they know that I like and respect you, did somebody send you here and tell you to say this? Because if they did, you’re being used.” I said, “What would you do? Let’s say I called you and said I want to come by and see you, and I came to your house and I said, ‘You know, Zeke, I’m really worried about the country. I’m so worried,'” and he almost started crying, folks, when he was telling me this. “‘I’m so worried about the country. (groans) This Obama’s just an utter disaster. We’re gonna have to find a way to work with him.'” I said, “Zeke, why don’t you go talk to Pat Buchanan and find out what you can agree with him about. Now, telling Zeke to go talk to Pat Buchanan is like telling the Ohio minister, you know?
He looked at me, “What do you mean?”
I said, “That’s what you’re asking me to do. Why is it me? Why do I have to compromise what I believe, when I firmly believe that every problem we’re having is traceable to Barack Obama, John Kerry, Chuck Schumer —
(wild cheers and applause)
RUSH: — the Democrat Party and half of the Republican Party?” It’s not just…
(sustained cheers and applause)
RUSH: And, by the way, I said to him, “It’s not just the Democrats. We’ve got a problem in the Republican establishment, too.
(applause)
RUSH: We have plenty of big-government, establishment Republicans who are perfectly satisfied with the status quo who view their only job as winning an election so they are in charge of the money, so they have the committee chairmanships. Folks, this really is true. I am 60, and strangely enough, I’m still learning. I know many people think I know everything by now, but I am still learning.
(laughter)
RUSH: I can’t tell you what a shock it was. (sigh) It wasn’t that long ago. Ten years ago? I was shocked to learn that not every Republican’s on the same team. I know there are RINOs. I don’t mean the RINOs. I know the RINOs are liberal Republicans, but I was stunned. I mean, we have people that call themselves “conservatives” in the media. Uh, they’re not on my team. I look at what they write and what they say, and they’re not interested in the same things I am. They make fun of a lot of people I believe in, a lot of things I believe in. I said, “Well, okay, what? Well, they live in Washington. Okay, that’s interesting. They’re part of the Beltway. Interesting. Establishment. It’s a whole culture there. Government’s the center of everybody’s life. Huge amounts of money.
“It’s huge power to be in control of all of that money, however you wish to use it or however you wish to siphon it for yourself,” which, as we know, happens. So it’s not just the Democrats, but ideologically it is. Finally, I told my friend — and this was hard for me. I’m not a, by choice, confrontational person. I generally let ’em say what they want to say and try not to ruffle feathers, particularly among friends — you know, the whole politics-religion thing. But this guy, I’m still not sure. I’m still wondering if he was sent, ’cause he works with people from across the political spectrum. He’s not a political guy. But this happens now and then; people do approach me. I sometimes think if I, in the last ten years, had switched to become a liberal, how rich I’d be.
(laughter)
RUSH: Don’t worry. I wouldn’t do it.
(laughter)
RUSH: I said, “Here’s the problem as I see it, and there really is no other way to look at this right now. I’m just gonna tell you what you said to me. You came here and you are worried about the country,” and he was crying. He was worried, and everybody that has any concern for this country knows damn well something is dramatically, terribly wrong. This is not how this country’s supposed to operate. We don’t have presidents that run around apologizing for the country. We don’t have presidents that tell the ChiComs that we are lazy. We don’t have this. It’s not the kind of country. We don’t have presidents that don’t believe in America, that don’t believe in American exceptionalism. This is a first, and people instinctively know this is just not right.
WOMAN: No!
RUSH: But at the same time, at the same time, he’s the president and people can’t also get their arms around the fact that we’ve elected somebody like this. So you have to be very careful when you tell people, if you believe what I believe, when you tell ’em these things. This guy, I said (sigh), “Our problem is not that we don’t get along. Our problem is not that people aren’t compromising. My party is full of ’em. We nominated, in 2008, a guy who loved (McCain impression) ‘To walk across the aisle.’ Where did it get us? The media loved this guy until he got our nomination; then they set out to destroy him. We’ve given you our best compromisers, Zeke, and all you do is destroy them, too.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be including you in this, but the Democrats are not desirous, Zeke, of compromising with me. They want to destroy me. They’ve been trying for 20 years. They want to destroy all of us professionally. If that doesn’t work, they’ll try to do it insulting our character. Doesn’t matter. But,” I said, “Zeke, don’t worry,” ’cause he asked me, “Do you worry about your safety sometimes talking like this?” I said, “No. I tried to kill myself once, and I failed. It can’t be done.” (laughter) He chuckled. I said, “Zeke, this is a battle of ideology, and that’s your problem. You don’t want to be considered an ideologue. You want to be thought of as open-minded. You agree with some of the things people on the right are saying and then you agree with some people on the left. You want to be seen as an open-minded, centrist, moderate who sees the best of both sides.
“Except, Zeke, you don’t see anything good on my side. You’ve come to me telling me I need to compromise. You don’t see anything bad on their side. I’m here to tell you that if this country is to be saved, and by that I mean if this country is to be preserved as founded.” Folks, there’s always gonna be an America; don’t misunderstand. But is it gonna be the America of a constitutional founding that we’ve all grown up with and expect or is it gonna be a European socialist quasi-democracy? I mean, that’s the option that we face here. I said, “Zeke, if…” Oh, I’m leaving out something very crucial. He’s scared to death about Europe.
He’s telling me, “(Sigh) Rush, I’ll tell you, if one of those countries goes, it’s gonna be a bad thing for us.”
I said, “What do you mean, ‘if one of them goes’? The Italians can’t pay the bonds that they sold. Who would have ever thought — do you believe this? — that Poland is asking Germany to bail ’em out? Who would ever have believed that would happen in our lifetimes?”
(laughter)
RUSH: “Zeke, if these people that you want me to compromise with aren’t stopped, we are Greece! We’re gonna be Italy or we’re gonna be Spain — and the thing is, this is where our president wants to take us!”
(applause)
RUSH: “What is so hard to understand about this?”
“Ahem. Do… do you really…? Do you really think this?”
I said, “Yes! I wouldn’t have said this to you or things like you hadn’t called me, but you came by here with a sob story about how we’ve gotta compromise, and I know that you think I’m the one that ought to do it. But I don’t want to compromise. I don’t see anything worth compromising with. I see only something that needs to be defeated. This is an ideological battle. This is freedom versus socialism. This is freedom versus tyranny, and the tyranny is represented by Obama and the Democrats.”
(applause)
He said, “Well, do you think the Republicans are all good?”
“No, no, no! Republicans aren’t innocent. There are a bunch of Republicans too stupid to see what’s going on who would probably agree with you that I need to compromise.
(applause)
“I don’t want you to think that…”
He said, “But you sound so sure of yourself.”
“I damn well am! How can you not be? How could you come here and tell me about Europe and tell me you’re fearful for the country and you don’t like Obama and then tell me that I’ve gotta compromise? How can you do this?” I said, “In your heart you have to know or you wouldn’ta come here at all, unless you’re making it all up,” which he wasn’t. We got a guy who claims he’s focusing like a laser on jobs and he wants to create jobs.
(laughter)
RUSH: Would somebody show me the evidence?
(laughter)
RUSH: He has no desire to create jobs. He profits, he benefits from chaos. He says to the Occupy people, “I ran for you.” Or, “You’re my people,” whatever he said to ’em. That’s what he seeks. You know, you and I, I’m going to assume that most of you in this room agree with me on this. If you don’t, you will before it’s over.
(laughter)
RUSH: And for those of you that don’t agree or don’t understand, let me tell you what my motivation is. My motivation is not to defeat anybody. My motivation is not to win. It’s pure. I think I speak for most of the people in this room. We have an absolute, profound, overawed love and respect for this country and the way it was founded, pure and simple.
(applause)
RUSH: And we don’t hate anybody. We want everybody to prosper and do well. I hate to tell you this, too. I am so naive. I genuinely really am naive. But I can’t for the life of me understand — and I’ve tried to — I’ve done the intellectual exercises; I’ve tried imagining being in other people’s shoes. I can’t understand people hating this country, people born here hating the country. It doesn’t compute. I don’t understand it.
(applause)
RUSH: I’ve heard all the, “Well, we established slavery.” No, we wrote a Constitution that got rid of it. We lost 500,000 citizens getting rid of slavery. We’re the country that’s gotten rid of it, we went to war with ourselves over it. We feed the world; we clothe the world; but yet there are people — and I know why they’re taught this, the Occupy crowd, they go to school, they’re taught this sometimes starting in junior high, sometimes the Saturday morning cartoons. Ted Turner’s Captain Planet was all about how corporations are polluting the planet because they want everybody to die. We actually have numskulls who think that corporations exist to kill their customers.
(laughter)
RUSH: And, by the way, the president is one of these people.
(applause)
RUSH: The president and people who think like him don’t think of America as exceptional because they think America is a crime; they think America is immoral. They think that America became a superpower and an exceptional place by stealing other people’s stuff. We stole their oil. We stole their — what else did we steal?
(laughter)
RUSH: We stole their corn. We conquered them and we imprisoned them with imperialist — they believe this. By the way, have you ever sat alone — this is an amazing thing to me, too — have you ever asked yourself how it is that in less than 250 years a single population of under 300 million people so dominated the planet for good. There are populations, countries, civilizations that have been around thousands of years. Our DNA is no different than theirs. We’re not inherently smarter; we’re not a special species; there’s nothing different about us. The only thing that’s different — well, not the only thing, but it’s where we live. Where we grow up.
(applause)
Now, but that doesn’t explain, how can this happen? I mean, the ancient Romans did some good stuff. But look at the advancement in the world in the standard of living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alone because of the United States. How did this happen? What makes this happen? What makes it possible? There’s a reason for it. Freedom. If I were Obama, I’d say, “How foolish can you be, freedom, what’s that worth?” Freedom is actually a large part of it, a major part of it. But it was also the founding of the country. It was the concept, the entire set of principles, the belief in humanity that went into our founding. It’s right there in our Declaration, it says it all. “We are all endowed by our Creator.” Ergo, there’s a God.
(applause)
RUSH: We’re all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life — ooh, that’s a problem for Molly Yard.
(laughter)
RUSH: Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Now, I ask you, which ideological movement today advances the concept of life? It ain’t liberalism. Which ideology advances the concept of liberty? It ain’t liberalism. In other words, it’s not the Democrat Party. And which movement is advancing the whole notion of the pursuit of happiness? Well, it ain’t them. They are never happy. Have you ever seen ’em smile?
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: Really, the founding of this country is a miracle. You and I know it. What is American exceptionalism? Everybody has their own definition. I’ll tell you what mine is. The rule for human beings since the creation of time, since the creation of the planet, the normal, standard operating procedure has been tyranny, dungeons, oppression, poverty. The vast majority of the people who have ever lived in the world have been imprisoned or dictated toward, lived under tyranny, been poor. It’s been the standard. The exception to that has been the United States. The exception to what life was like for most every human being has been the United States of America. That’s one definition of American exceptionalism. It’s not that we’re better than anybody else. This is what Obama and the Democrats don’t like. They think we’re saying we’re better people. No, no, no, no. We’re luckier. We have a country that was founded by brilliant people who understood that we are blessed by God.
(applause)
RUSH: The whole notion of hating the country, I know it exists, I know there are people out there who hate this country, don’t like it. Intellectually it doesn’t compute, and it saddens me to no end, but I know that they believe that this is a country that has stolen from every other country, that we have raped and pillaged and that we have conquered and that we have murdered and all this. No concept, no understanding, ’cause they’re not taught of the wonderful things this country has done for the rest of the world, the standard of living that we brought to ourselves and people around the world. And at some point, you have to say, I’m not gonna waste my time trying to persuade ’em anymore. I’m just gonna try to see to it that those people remain few in number and can’t win elections. Because it really comes down to that.
(applause)
RUSH: For me, it’s an ideological battle. I think this is one of the problems I have with the Republican presidential candidates. I really think that if there was one of them who would simply, proudly, cheerfully, happily, confidently extol conservatism morning and night, no stopping this person.
(applause)
RUSH: Newt right now is the next, as I was saying earlier, the new “not Romney.” Look, this is true. No matter what poll you look at, 70 to 75% of Republican voters don’t want Romney, yet Romney is leading everywhere. Now, it’s a fascinating thing to me, and it looks like, if you had to say so sitting here right now, given everything we know, it looks like Romney’s gonna be the nominee. But 70% of the Republicans don’t want that to be the case. So how can this be? How can this happen? Well, some of the vagaries of politics can’t be taken out of this: money, time. Romney has lost enough elections to learn how to win them. He’s been at this a long, long time. He’s very polished. Those things matter. Politics is a business. It has a ladder of success, like every other business has. And everybody says, “We need outsiders.” It’s tough because it’s a business. There are certain requirements that politics has for success, and it’s tough for somebody that’s never done it before to move in and know how to do it and survive, prosper, triumph and get to the top. That’s why it’s made up of people who are trying it two, three, and four times. Now, Newt, I got a note today from a friend, “Rush, you heard your show today?” No. “Mark Steyn was really brutal.”
(laughter and applause)
(disturbance and booing protester)
RUSH: (laughing) Now, when you see that, I wonder why am I paying thousands of dollars for security?
(laughter and applause)
(yelling)
RUSH: You know, I have a cochlear implant and I can’t hear what they’re saying, but it’s a sad thing. These are people threatened by the truth. It really is unfortunate. These are the people that think you owe them everything. These are people who have some kind of an entitlement mentality, and this is what they’ve been taught. This is what the education system has done to them. It’s festered their resentments. Everybody wants to matter; everybody wants to be something; everybody wants to have relevance; and they know they don’t. And so they try to disrupt the things that are working. Now, I look at the Occupy crowd down there, and they’ve all got iPhones or computers. How do they think that stuff happened? They’re out there protesting the very people and things and system that made it possible for them to have those things. Where do they think this stuff comes from?
(applause)
RUSH: I have people like this call the radio program sometimes, and all they’re doing is reading scripts from the latest George Soros e-mail or from the latest left-wing website.
People used to say, “Why don’t you take opportunity to try to persuade them?” You can’t do it. That’s not why they’re here. They’re not here to have their minds changed. They’re not here to even be exposed to the other side. They’re just taking advantage of a tumultuous time in the country to make it even more chaotic. There’s your average Obama voter. At any rate, evidence here again that the key to preserving what we all love is to admit that we’re in an ideological battle. It’s not just Republicans versus Democrats, or whatever third party that might spring up. We are faced with a challenge of a creeping tyranny and a socialism that has quite a few citizens supporting it and behind it. But not as many as you would think. They’re made to look larger in number than they are.
People ask me how I stay optimistic. I said, “Well, I’ve got a couple of reasons for it.” Because I’m not naturally optimistic. Most people aren’t. And especially in times like this. But I look at the things that have happened to me in my life. I quit college after a semester. I hated it. I knew what I wanted to do from the time I was eight years old. I hated school. I despised it. It was prison. It was conformity. It was what everybody else had to do. I’d go to school and I’d panic over having to paste two pieces of paper together. I’d look out the window and I would see the repair vehicles driving by or whatever, and it was like, “Gosh, what is it like to be out there?” I just hated it. And getting ready for school every morning my mother had the radio on, and the guy on the radio was having fun. He was enjoying things. He sounded like he was happy to be up. I wasn’t.
(laughter)
RUSH: I was miserable that I had to go to school. So I ended up getting a part-time radio job when I was 15 at a local radio station, and they couldn’t keep me out of it. I skipped my senior year in high school a consecutive four weeks, and I got it excused.
(laughter)
RUSH: I got the absence excused. My mother took my car away from me when she found out was skipping ballroom dance in college. I hated it. I despised it. I didn’t like it at any point. I flunked speech twice —
(laughter)
RUSH: — because I didn’t outline them. I gave all the speeches and I showed up, but they said, “You didn’t outline them.” I said, “What is this, outline 101 or speech? I’m doing the speeches.” “You’re not conforming to the class the way it’s supposed to be.” So my father thought that he was a failure as a father because I quit school. He sat me down — remember, now, he was born in 1918. The formative experience of his life was the Great Depression, World War II, and during the Great Depression if you didn’t have a college education, you didn’t have a prayer, and he was just scared to death. You see people even today, athletes primarily, after an event, they’ve been the star, being interviewed, “Yep, and I’m the first in my family to go to college.” And everybody claps. I’m the first in mine not to.
(laughter)
RUSH: And I’m the only one in mine not to. So I hear my father say to me, “Son, if you do this, you’re gonna lose all your friends. They’re gonna surpass you intellectually and socially. They won’t have anything in common with you, and they won’t care to be around you. They’re gonna go on to school and you’re gonna be a bum. You won’t find a decent girl to marry. After all, son” — imagine this, this day and age — “what woman wants to marry a man who can’t support her?” If I could have only told him what awaited me in the seventies when feminism hit. So he told me all these things, and he was dead serious. And he had hearing loss. So all of my years on the radio he couldn’t hear me. He had to listen to my mother tell him what was going on in my career. But it didn’t mean anything to him. Radio was the lowest rung of the show biz ladder. “Television, if you’re gonna do media, television, Walter Cronkite.” Oh, jeez.
(laughter)
RUSH: My grandfather, too. “Do you think you’ll ever meet Walter Cronkite?” “I don’t know. I’m not that –” I mean, at the time I’m playing Donny Osmond records as a disc jockey on the radio. But I loved it, I loved radio, and that’s all I wanted to do. And I knew it’s what I was best at. I quit once I got fired for like the fifth time, and I said, “Okay, I’m too old, 28, too old to be a deejay.” I went to work for a baseball team in sales, Kansas City Royals, sales and marketing, and the first three years it was great. But then after that it was corporate structure, conformity. I learned that I wasn’t made for it. So I quit, went back to radio, and for the first time started spoken word format rather than playing music. I wanted to find out once and for all if I can be the reason people will listen to the radio, so I’m not gonna do any guests, I’m not gonna talk about carrot cake recipes during holiday season or any of this other gunk. I’m gonna do what I want to do, what I think is interesting, I’m gonna roll the dice, and I did, and this is the result; this worked.
(cheers and applause)
RUSH: You might think I lost my place. That’s why I’m optimistic. The reason I’m optimistic, look at what I get to do every day. I get to go on the radio every day and I get to talk to you and 25 million other people about what’s happening in the country. I get to tell myself that I have a chance, I have a shot at shaping public opinion every day. How could you not be optimistic with that? “Well, Rush, what do you do when the Democrats win?” Well, you can’t win everything. I don’t define success that way. I’m just saying that’s how I stay optimistic. Success in radio is real simple: You attract the largest audience you can, you hold it for as long as you can, so you can charge confiscatory advertising rates.
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: And I managed to do that, too. But I’m optimistic because I have faith in the American people. Even in the 2008 election, I was like a lot of you: “Oh, my gosh, is this the end? Have we reached the tipping point where we have a number of people that are gonna fall for this kind of thing, that actually believe this kind of person that we’ve never seen in politics before, that’s so unique and so forth.” And I came to understand that what that was really all about was that people were just so fed up. The media had succeeded in creating all kinds of hatred for George W. Bush. And Karl Rove admits it, a big mistake, they never fought back, they never defended themselves. So the people that voted for ’em and invested in them never felt defended. They attacked Bush, attacked the people that voted for and supported him, and they didn’t respond to it. They didn’t want to sully the office, he said.
So the war in Iraq, people got tired of that, and hope and change. And what did Obama run, by the way? He was gonna bring everybody together, have unity. America’s gonna be loved again; the world isn’t gonna hate us; we’re gonna lower the sea levels; we’re gonna get green energy. Yes, we’re gonna have energy that’s never gonna pollute, and furthermore, nobody’s ever gonna die, because I’m gonna have a health care plan that’s not gonna cost anybody anything and the premiums are going to go down, and nobody’s gonna get sick. And if they do get sick, they’re gonna get cured, it’s not gonna cost anybody anything except the rich, and we’re gonna have utopia. People said, “I’m up for it.” But they don’t think that anymore. If they still did I wouldn’t be as optimistic as I am. But the Obama coalition is gone. The people, including the “yutes” of America that so blindly supported him, they’re gone. All he’s got left is this ragtag bunch out there that wouldn’t know a job if it slapped ’em in the face.
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: There are probably some people in the audience, “How can he be so mean?” Not mean. It’s the truth. But you have — do not doubt me on this — this New York Times story on Monday, the Obama campaign writing off white working voters. Now, in the past, in the past, folks, that’s always meant union people. In Democrat terminology, in their lexicon, you know as well as I do when they talk about working people, they mean unions. You know, everywhere there’s a mess in this country you’re just gonna find a union.
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: I don’t mean the rank-and-file. I’m talking about the leaders and their own political agenda and the way they’ve used the dues money that’s siphoned from all the rank-and-file. Regardless, when they put it in the New York Times that their coalition will not try to appeal, they are not going to try to get the votes of white working Americans, now, you let Newt Gingrich or any Republican candidate say, “You know what, we’ve just come up with our strategery for victory, and we are gonna abandon black African-American working Americans. They are not part of our plan,” can you imagine the hell that would descend on them? There would be no end to that. There would be hell to pay for. But the White House can put this out: Well, we can’t win white working Americans. That tells me that the magic of the Obama coalition that exists in 2008 is gone.
And what that tells me is that they really think their only chance of victory is appealing to this intellectual elite of artists, actors, singers, you know, the backbone of America, the real brilliant, the Kardashians of the world. And then of course the university professors. But after that, they’re going the minority dependent route. And this story, by the way, singled out Hispanics as a group that they’re going after. That means they need as many nonworking dependent people as possible that they can blame the Republicans for, which is what’s happening. We all know — two and a half years ago if we wanted to — we know what we have to do today. If we had as a national policy job creation, you and I know exactly what we would do. We’d do it tomorrow, we would unleash the job creators, and in six months the trend would be like this, you couldn’t stop it. We’d all know what to do.
This bunch will not do it no matter what the cost, no matter what the purpose, because it’s not their objective. “What do we do, Rush?” It’s very simple. Try this. This is just one thing, one of many things that we could do. The regime is wasting, what, $1.8 trillion a year, that’s how much we’re spending that we don’t have, $1.8 trillion. Now, the amount of revenue taken in each year by the income tax and a couple other taxes is around two trillion. So let’s just cancel all income taxes and a couple others for a full year. Let’s let the people keep the money instead of sending it to Washington for deficit spending. That’s one thing.
(applause)
RUSH: Obama actually said, “You know, the Republicans are talking about reducing regulations on businesses to create jobs. I don’t know what they’re talking about.” Well, we do. If you take the shackles off of people — what do they want people to do, hire? Obama thinks you get people to hire by promising them a tax deduction. Here’s his deal. Obama says, “Small business, I’ll give you a $2500 tax credit for every veteran you hire.” We love veterans, but why not everybody you hire? Number two, businesses don’t hire for that reason. They don’t hire for tax breaks. They hire ’cause they’ve got work that needs to be done. And right now there’s no work that needs to be done.
Furthermore, a small business guy is gonna say, “Okay, I gotta go hire somebody, it’s gonna cost me minimum 50 grand by the time I throw in health care and other benefits, and I’m gonna get $2500 back for this?” Doesn’t compute. It’s not how you stimulate job growth. But a statist, somebody that’s entirely ignorant and disdainful of capitalism like Obama and his buddies, will look at it exactly that way. You have the Reagan years, the model there of tax reduction, creating more taxpayers, more revenue. What to do to create jobs is simple, and it breaks my heart to hear that this is the new normal. I mean the labor secretary, the former labor secretary, Robert B. Reich.
(audience: chhhhhhhhh)
RUSH: (laughing) I was just waiting for somebody to do that. For those of you that don’t know, Robert Reich is the former labor secretary for Clinton and a former lecturer at Harvard, and he used to have a commentary on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and at the end of his commentary, in order to give himself stature and try to have a signature about himself, “This is Robert B. Reichhhh.” So, you know, I love impersonating people and the key to that is exaggeration. So whenever I mention his name, I like to say Robert B. Reichhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
(applause)
RUSH: But he said just today that we’re looking at the new norm, 9% unemployment. Sorry. Unacceptable. Why do we have to settle for this? We don’t, folks. We don’t have to settle for any of this. We don’t have to settle for 9% unemployment; we don’t have to settle for an incompetent in the White House. We don’t have to settle for somebody that doesn’t respect the country. We don’t have to settle for somebody who doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism. And we don’t have to settle for people who don’t understand it. I started out by telling you that it’s tougher for me to find the fun factor each and every day because I can’t help looking at it as being so serious. I’m 60 years old. I’m trying to do as much as I can with what I have to reverse the trend that we’re on and save the country from the encroachment that we face from the left. And part of me regrets that it’s taken on such a serious tone.
The fun factor is not gone, but it matters a tremendous amount to me. And I take it as seriously as I ever have. Maybe more so than ever. And I just want you to know in all of this that I am so thankful that you all are in the audience and that you’ve done for me what you have. I have people tell me frequently what I’ve done or how the radio program means so much to them, and I appreciate that. But, in all candor — I say this every chance I get — no matter what my radio program has meant to you, if it’s meant anything, pales in comparison to what you have meant and do mean to me and my life and my family’s life and my success. I pinch myself every day with the good fortune that’s happened to me. And it’s all due to people like you who are not only in the audience, but you admit it when asked.
(laughter and applause)
RUSH: So thank you again from the bottom of my heart. I want you to again accept my apologies for starting late, but it was the weather and a number of other things, and I promised everybody I’d have everybody outta here by nine o’clock, and it’s 9:35, but that’s because we started late. So, folks, thank you so much. This has been fantastic. I love you more than I can possibly say. Thank you all very much.
(sustained cheers and applause)