RUSH: Edmonds, Washington. This is Tony. Glad you called, sir. You’re up first.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking the call. Hey, I was hoping to mention about the necessity of making a mandate in elections. I mean we forget about Reagan, that he was building a mandate for cutting taxes and was, you know, lambasted by the Republicans for being voodoo economics. And, you know, the economy and Obama and the leftism of this government is the primary issue we have to face, yet one of the underlying issues of why this government is exploding is the social unraveling of our fabric. And Santorum has enough guts to mention this. And, you know, we can’t lose focus that it’s the economy and dealing with this ballooning government, but at the same time, we have to address some of the underlying causes, and Santorum has enough guts to mention this stuff but yet he’s being lambasted by our side.
RUSH: Well, everybody on our side’s been lambasted by our side. I mean there’s nobody on our side that’s immune from being lambasted. Now, our side has tried to destroy everybody else on our side since this whole process began. But, you know what, you raise a great point, and that is the role that our value-based culture and its decay, the role that plays in a faltering economy. The role it plays in lack of education. The role it plays in people being ill-prepared to work. You really are more right than you know about this.
Now, I do have to correct you and say I know you were trying to make a comparative point. Reagan never mandated a tax increase in the sense that we’re talking about mandates today. He proposed tax increases, but he never mandated them; you can’t. The only president that’s ever tried to mandate stuff extra-constitutionally and without the legislative branch — well, not the only one, but the most recent one’s Obama. You had FDR do it, Woodrow Wilson. But you’re right, Santorum is pointing out that there is more wrong with the United States than the economy, and he is also pointing out that a portion of our economic woes are directly traceable to the decay of our culture. And the government is the major factor, the government is the major player in this decay, because the government, as run by liberals, has furthered the notion that life decisions and behavioral matters have no consequences.
So there’s no question there’s a cultural rot taking place, and there has been for a long time. The culture war is always going on. In fact, that term, culture war, in its modern incarnation can be traced back to the early nineties. Robert Bork wrote a book about it. So did Pat Buchanan. A number of people have commented on the culture wars. I remember interviewing Bork for the Limbaugh Letter about it for his book, and he was insistent that you couldn’t separate economic problems and the cultural decay that’s been taking place. The Democrats need cultural rot. The Democrats need a society where there are no consequences for your actions. ‘Cause they are there to pick up the pieces of broken lives that they break. It really is a hideous thing and Santorum does have the guts to talk about it, and I’ll tell you, folks, there’s a segment of the Republican Party that doesn’t to want go there, they don’t want to hear about it.
The Republican establishment, for the most part, if they could, would simply excommunicate every social conservative Republican they could find. They’d kick ’em out of the party, and they would gag ’em. They’d find a way to make sure they couldn’t speak. That’s how much they hate ’em, detest ’em, are embarrassed by them. And it’s based on one thing, primarily. It’s based on the fact that these establishment Republicans and others who don’t like the social conservatives are primarily, singularly worried about what people are going to think of them for being in the same party with the social conservatives. It really is no more complicated than that. I mean there are other things. They think social conservatives lose elections. They think social conservatives make the whole Republican Party a big target, like what’s going on now, this contraception business.
They are, the Republican establishment is blaming — not so much Santorum; they’ll get to that — they are blaming social conservatives for this even being usable as an issue by Obama. They blame social conservatives, for, in their minds, empowering Democrats to make an issue out of something that doesn’t exist. In this case, there’s not one person, not one, including Santorum, nobody has advocated banning contraception. Not one person. Nobody. And yet the House does hearings on whether or not Obama has the authority to demand that insurance companies provide them, and the Democrats create a dog-and-pony show where a couple women walk out.
After failing to get a college student female permission to testify, the media steps right in and tells the unsuspecting idiots that watch the news and don’t know what’s going on that there was a congressional hearing on banning contraception. These brave Democrats are not gonna stand for that. These brave Democrats walked out. They’re not gonna let Republicans get away with that. They’re not gonna let these Republicans get away with making people stop screwing. It isn’t gonna happen. The Democrats are gonna make sure if you want to screw you can do it as much as you want and we’ll provide you the contraception for it. And these Republicans, they’re the ones that want to deny you fun. They’re the ones that will deny you freedom to be whoever you want, and we’re gonna make sure they don’t get — and that’s how this all works.
And the establishment Republicans sit there and they cringe. They don’t have the desire or the wherewithal to enter this fray and help properly frame it and refute it. They just sit there embarrassed and angry over what people are gonna think of them. But Tony here is right. You can’t separate cultural rot from economic problems. The two go hand in hand.