RUSH: The Five, the five people on Fox at five p.m. in the afternoon. Dana Perino is on that show. Bob Beckel is on that show. Greg Gutfeld is on that show. Andrea “Tarantula” is on that show. Kimberly Guilfoyle is on that show, and Eric Bolling. I guess there’s six. So they rotate ’em. There’s only five at one time ’cause it’s called The Five, The Five at Five. They rotate who gets to be host. So Andrea “Tarantula” was the host yesterday, and she was speaking with Beckel about conservatism and me, and they played a bite where I said, “We conservatives do not see black, white, male, female, gay, straight. We look at people, we see potential. We want the best for everybody. We know what’s holding them back, it’s government.” They played that bite, and then Andrea “Tarantula” and Beckel had this conversation.
TARANTULA: So Rush’s point, Rush actually says that government’s holding people back. I actually think it’s government telling people that it’s okay to sit on your butts and we’ll give you checks every month.
BECKEL: No, I don’t think that’s what the government says.
TARANTULA: Because it’s good for the economy.
BECKEL: We liberals made a terrible mistake going back 30 years ago. We made a dependent society because we thought we were doing the right thing. We had things like public housing and we had welfare payments and all that bred dependency, and it was our responsibility, we did it for the right reasons, we need to change that. But the way you change it is not to say that it’s an opportunity society alone that’s gonna do it. It’s gonna require some government intervention. That’s our point.
RUSH: He did say they were wrong, but he didn’t. This is why it’s gonna take me to translate this. Don’t try to do this at home. He didn’t say what you think he just said there. He didn’t say what you think he said. Now, just calm down in there. Snerdley’s blowing a gasket. Now, let’s review what Beckel said. “We liberals made a terrible mistake.” Forget what follows. “We did it for the right reasons.” So don’t look at the results, examine our intentions. As I always say, don’t judge the results, judge our intentions, and then let us fix it with more government. He says, “We did it for the right reasons, we need to change the reasons, but the way you change it to is require some government intervention.”
So he admits that the government got too big and made people too dependent and now it’s going to need more government to change that. How does that work? How does more government equal less government? “We liberals made a terrible mistake,” and Beckel deserves credit for this. I’m not trying to deny the credit for it, but he is also trying to paper over the results with the good intentions. “We did it for the right reasons.” See, I reject that. The reasons that they did this are the exact reasons they achieved. They wanted — maybe not Beckel — but the Lyndon Johnson crowd back then, they wanted the dependency. It equaled power. It equaled votes. They couched it in good intentions. They couched it in compassion. But they ended up creating dependency, stifling individuality, stifling creativity, robbing people of their basic identity and humanity. They made them wards of the state and turned them into perpetually voting Democrats.
Now, 30 years afterwards you admit the mistake, but that it was all done for the right reasons. We still have bigger hearts than you do. We still have nicer hearts than you do. We’ve got better hearts than you do. And we need to change it, but the way you change it is not to come along with some opportunity society. Really? Why not? What’s wrong with an opportunity society? What’s wrong with getting government out of people’s lives? What’s wrong with inspiring people to do more for themselves? That’s all an opportunity society is. “It’s going to require some government intervention.” Well, if it’s gonna require government intervention, the one guy we know who’s not gonna do government intervention right to fix it is Barack Obama, because he’s doubled down on the number of dependents. He has doubled down on the whole dependency class in this country.
CNN is reporting that Romney has called Santorum and conceded Iowa. Now, that’s a classy thing to do since the results really aren’t official or even slightly cleared. I mean they got eight, what is it, precincts that they don’t know where the votes are. And they said they’re not even gonna bother trying to find them so everybody just agreed this is the way it is, so Romney, classy move, okay, I’m gonna concede, you won it. So what we’re faced with now here is Santorum in Iowa, Romney in New Hampshire, which is predictable, and here comes South Carolina.
Now, Bob Beckel, they’re gonna misunderstand this next comment at The Five and I’m sure Dana Perino is gonna think it’s a bit harsh, but Josef Stalin thought he saved the USSR, too. He did. Gorbachev, they thought they were saving everything. These guys are the destroyers. See, Snerdley was in there, “Man, man, what a milestone, they just admitted it, they just admitted it.” And asked to be the ones to fix it with more of what made it wrong in the first place.