RUSH: Paul Ryan. Excerpts from his speech last night that has the Democrats discombobulated. They don’t know how to characterize it. They don’t know how to react to it. They don’t know how to smear it. They haven’t found anything smearable yet.
RYAN: It all started off with stirring speeches, Greek columns, the thrill of something new. Now all that’s left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired, grasping at a moment that is already past, like a ship trying to sail on yesterday’s wind.
RUSH: Yes.
RYAN: He said his job is to, quote, “tell a story to the American people,” as if that’s the whole problem here? He needs to talk more and we need to be better listeners? Ladies and gentlemen, these past four years we have suffered no shortage of words in the White House. What is missing is leadership in the White House!
RUSH: Right on! Exactly right. And what I love about that is characterizing President Obama as in the past, faded, tired, worn-out, old news. And I like it, obviously, for the reason that it is in the past. We are done with it, that’s our dream, but I also like it ’cause I know how irritating it has to be to Obama. ‘Cause he still thinks of himself as The Messiah. This guy is narcissist number one. He’s incapable of thinking of himself as anything other than the most important person in every human being’s life. Here’s the next bite from vice presidential nominee Ryan.
RYAN: Mitt Romney and I both grew up in the Heartland, and we know what places like Wisconsin and Michigan look like when times are good. We know what these communities look like when times are good, when people are working, when families are doing more than just getting by. And we know it can be that way again. We’ve had very different careers, mine mainly in public service, his mostly in the private sector. He helped start businesses and turn around failing ones. And, by the way, being successful in business, that’s a good thing!
RUSH: Right on. Look at the stuff that gets standing ovations. Being successful in business a good thing. Why does it get applause? It’s because success is targeted by this administration. They want to punish it. Successful people are in Obama’s crosshairs. They are the problem. That’s what he tells people, and, as such, there’s no inspiration to be your best. There’s no inspiration to strive for great things with Obama. You are born, and that’s it. You are “Julia”, that video that they made of the quintessential Obama female voter. You’re born and every step of your life is directed by government. Every move you make approved by government or not. And by the way, “Being successful in business, that’s a good thing,” gets applause. It used to not be that earth-shattering a statement, but the fact that it is, is quite telling in and of itself.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Renee in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, it’s great to have you here on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks. And I want to thank Snerdley for letting me on today. I wanted to talk to you about this.
RUSH: It sounds like you’d almost like to continue talking to Snerdley.
CALLER: (giggling)
RUSH: Instead of me.
CALLER: (giggling) Well, he’s a very nice fellow.
RUSH: Yeeeeeah, yeah. Got that.
CALLER: This phony War on Women. One of the other things that I noticed last night, and I will have to preface my statement by saying that I am Southern born and bred, and I’m keenly aware of how men love and respect and honor their women.
RUSH: Now, or used to?
CALLER: Well, yes. Historically, that has been true.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: But in the South, we still have that honor and dignity among men.
RUSH: Chivalry is alive and well?
CALLER: Yes, it is.
RUSH: Okay, good. Good. Good, good.
CALLER: And I think it still is in the GOP. But I’m not seeing it across the aisle in the Democrat Party. And last night, you had mentioned the Ryan statement about his mother and how he honored his mother so lovingly in his speech last night. Well, the other thing that I noticed was, he talked about the care-giving that he gave as a young man to his grandma who had Alzheimer’s.
RUSH: That is right. And I’ll never forget. He said, “We gave her the love she needed, even though she often was unaware of it.” Yeah, that was poignant.
CALLER: Sure. And for people who have suffered with that illness, they know that the onus is on the caregiver; that the victim of that disease has very little to give back. So that shows to me an integrity and a love of a man who really cared for his grandma.
RUSH: That’s it. You have nailed it. Paul Ryan reeked character last night, and that’s what the Democrats are not going to be able to penetrate: His character and integrity.
CALLER: Right, and if you will recall —
RUSH: Damn right.
CALLER: One thing that I want to recall is the only statement I have ever heard Barack Obama make about his “white grandma” who gave him all the privilege that any young man would be proud to have, is that she was afraid of black men. I just think there’s such a stark contrast.
RUSH: You know what? That’s right. In fact, the actual phrase that Obama used was, “She’s a typical white woman.”
CALLER: Yes. Very disrespectful.
RUSH: That’s right. That is exactly how Obama characterized her in his big race speech —
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: — where he threw Reverend Wright overboard while still continuing to sit in the pew.
CALLER: And, Rush? If you can’t love and honor and respect your own mama and your own grandma, then you’re not gonna respect and love and honor other women or other people.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: It starts at home.
RUSH: It goes right to character.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: He called the grandmother who raised him a “typical white woman.”
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: And you’re right. He said: She sees a black guy; she’s afraid.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: Which us something Reverend Jackson also admitted, that he is frightened when he sees a black guy following him in a dark street. He did say that. The Reverend Jackson did, too, one day. Anyway, Renee, that’s an excellent point. An excellent point. Another great contrast. That’d be a good ad. I don’t know if they would do it. She’s probably one of the few people who remember that and make that connection. I don’t think a lot of people have. Now, since we have made the connection here and broadcast it, of course, millions and millions will make the connection and spread the word about it.
Back to Paul Ryan’s speech excerpts. The theme of this little bite is: Time for a turnaround.
RYAN: After four years of getting the runaround, America needs a turnaround — and the man for the job is Governor Mitt Romney!
RUSH: Right on!
RYAN: I have never seen opponents so silent about their record, and so desperate to keep their power. They’ve run out of ideas. Their moment came and went. Fear and division is all they’ve got left. With all their attack ads, the president is just throwing away money. And he’s pretty experienced at that.
CONVENTION: (wild applause)
RUSH: And there again, another reference to Obama as tired. Another reference to Obama in the past. I love it.
Here’s the next one. This is one of the rare moments at this convention where we learn that the president of our country actually has a name.
RYAN: President Barack Obama came to office during an economic crisis, as he has reminded us a time or two. My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about “change,” many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory. A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said, “I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said he in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.
RUSH: Within five minutes, the Drive-By Media was on a mission to try to prove that Paul Ryan had lied. They got their bogus fact-checkers up and in gear, and, lo and behold! They put out stories themselves filled with misleading data, in order to make the point that Paul Ryan lied. Obama didn’t shut down that factory. We’ve got the facts for you, and in the next segment I’ll run through them very quickly. But the fact of the matter is, the Democrats and their fact-checkers have it wrong.
Ryan was right, and even CNN’s fact-checkers grudgingly admitted it at the end of the day. The interesting thing is that 22 million people are out of work. Twenty-two million people don’t have a factory or a job place to go (chuckles), and the Democrats are trying to hold onto one, as though it makes any difference. “That place got shut down before Obama! You can’t blame him. The other 19 million that were shut down, yeah, but you can’t blame that one on him.”
They have no place to go on this.
They’re flailing away, folks.
I love it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here are the facts on the GM plant. February 13th, 2008, Obama was in Janesville. February 13, 2008 is, like, 11 months before he’s immaculated. “I believe if our government’s there to support you and give you the assistance you need to retool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.” Well, he’s implying that if I am there — if I’m the government — I’m gonna support you; and I’m gonna give you the assistance you need to retool and keep this place open for a hundred years.
That’s what the people at the factory thought he meant.
June 2008: “General Motors announced Janesville would stop production of medium-duty trucks by the end of 2009 and stop production of large SUVs in 2010 or sooner.” Any wonder why Obama let this place go? They’re making the cars he hates: Trucks and SUVs. In October of 2008, before the election, Obama said, “As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so that we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow, and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and across America.”
So he promised, in October 2008, that he would retool that plant, get rid of the trucks and the SUVs, and start making “the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow,” like the Volt. Then, in December of 2008, “General Motors idled production of SUVs at the Janesville plant. The truck manufacturing continued. So in December 2008, it’s open. In April of 2009, four months after Obama was immaculated, “GM shut down the production of the medium-size trucks.” In April 2009, it’s still open.
January 31st, a week or ten days after Obama is immaculated, it’s open and producing trucks. He has promised to keep it open, to retool it to make whatever his efficiency cars are. So Ryan is right. The point is, Ryan’s right. Ryan did not lie about anything. “In September 2011, more than two years after Obama was [immaculated], General Motors reiterated that Janesville is on a standby status. An automobile industry observer, David Cole, told the Milwaukee Journal, ‘It would be premature to say that the plant will never reopen.'”
So it wasn’t bulldozed. Manufacturing was ceased, but it was still there as a factory, perhaps to be reborn. Today, it has not been reborn. It has not been retooled. There are no fuel-efficient cars or SUVs or trucks being made at the plant. So Paul Ryan was dead-on right, as right as anybody can be. Obama was gonna save it with green technology. He was gonna save it with green energy! He was gonna turn it into a Solyndra. It just didn’t happen. They’re falling flat right on their faces trying to say Ryan lied about this.
Here’s another excerpt, and this is about Obamacare…
RYAN: [I]f everyone out of work stood in single file, that unemployment line would stretch at length the entire American continent. You would think that any president, whatever his party, would make job creation and nothing else his first order of economic business. But this president didn’t do that. Instead, we got a long, divisive, all-or-nothing attempt to put the federal government in charge of health care.
CONVENTION: (booing)
RYAN: Obamacare comes to more than 2,000 pages of rules, mandates, taxes, fees, and fines that have no place in a free country!
RUSH: You know, I got the biggest kick out of the boos. Ryan would utter a line that nobody liked, and they’d cut to the crowd. “Booooo!” I just… For some reason it amused me when the crowd, on schedule, started booing. Here is the truth about Obama and the Medicare cuts…
RYAN: The biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover — even with the new law and new taxes on nearly a million small businesses — the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So they just took it all away from Medicare: $716 billion funneled out of Medicare by President Obama.
CONVENTION: (booing)
RUSH: Boooo! Boooooooooooo!
RYAN: The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it!
CONVENTION: (wild cheering and applause)
RUSH: There you go, there you go. You gotta cheer this stuff. This was another truth being told. And he wasn’t through talking about this.
RYAN: My mom started a small business, and I’ve seen what it takes. Mom was 50 when my dad died. She got on a bus every weekday for years and rode 40 miles each morning to Madison. She earned a new degree and learned new skills to start her small business. It wasn’t just a new livelihood; it was a new life, and it transformed my mom from a widow in grief to a small businesswoman whose happiness wasn’t just in the past. Her work gave her hope. It made our family proud. And, to this day, my mom is my role model.
RUSH: And viewers could see a tear in his eye. It was at that moment, it was at that moment in the speech, for those watching, that women and undecideds were turned to Romney-Ryan, at that moment, among the women and undecideds watching.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: For many people, this next sound bite was the line of Paul Ryan’s speech.
RYAN: The issue is not the economy that Barack Obama inherited, not the economy that he envisions, but this economy that we are living. College graduates should not have to live out their twenties in their childhood bedrooms staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.
RUSH: Oh, yeah! Love that. As I told you, we were watching five minutes behind. We paused the whole thing on our DVR, phone call or something came in. We resumed and promptly forgot we were watching five minutes behind, and I started getting e-mails from people about this. And I hadn’t heard it. I’m thinking, oh, my gosh, my hearing is getting worse than I even thought, did I miss that? And five minutes later here it came, and I knew what people were talking about. Faded Obama posters, in the past. This is pure Reagan, this next bite on the American dream.
RYAN: None of us should have to settle for the best this administration offers: a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us. It’s the exact opposite of everything I learned growing up in Wisconsin or at college in Ohio. I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey, where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself. That’s what we do in this country. That’s the American dream. That’s freedom, and I’ll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.
RUSH: I’ll tell you, you don’t even need to mention Obama there. Coming after Condoleezza Rice’s speech, it melded great. It just could not have been better in terms of reaffirming for people what this country’s all about: Inspiration, ambition, desire. And all Paul Ryan’s doing, all he was doing was explaining conservatism, folks. Who are we as conservatives? What do we want? We want the best for everybody. We understand the blessings of being Americans. We understand the greatest opportunity a human being has is being born in this country. The opportunity for realization of dreams exists in this country more than any other time in American or human history. And we want that for everybody, because we want a great country.
We want boundless opportunity, boundless prosperity for everybody. We want everybody looking at life this way, the way Paul Ryan described his life. Not stuck in some station, not having to settle for whatever you can get from a central planning government, a life without adventure, where you just go from one government plan to the next. You decide for yourself what your dream is. You decide for yourself and define for yourself what your happiness is, and then you go for it. And if it doesn’t happen the first, second, third, fourth time, you keep trying. You find people who are inspiring. You find out what it is that you love. You pursue that. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, the American founding. This is what we want for everybody, and it’s what he was saying.
You could hear the frustration. He told a story about mowing yards in his early twenties, making some extra money. He didn’t think that was his destiny. He didn’t think that was the rest of his life. While he was doing that, in his mind, he’s planning his life, he’s planning his future, determining for himself what he wants to be. And this is the life that’s been sucked out of so many Americans. This is the Americanism that’s being denied so many people. They’re told daily by their leaders, by their president, their political party, that that America doesn’t exist. And furthermore, it never did, they’re told. This game has always been stacked against you. The rich, they make sure that they got everything and that you’ve got nothing. It’s a cynicism that destroys the very things about humanity which set us apart. And they do it for their own power, all the while claiming they’re the ones who have all the love and compassion for people, when it’s we who do.
Related Links