RUSH: Let’s grab Honey in Glendale, Arizona. Hi. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. Dittos from a retired Navy nurse.
RUSH: Well, thank you very much. Great to have you here.
CALLER: This is such an honor. I just wanted to comment, earlier you said that Dr. Carson, something about him quitting his practice and going to reach out to the low-information voters, or low-information people. I think he’s been listening to you because that’s exactly what you think that we need to do. Get a hold of them, educate them, and then they will come up to understand what’s really going on.
RUSH: Well, that’s very nice of you to say about me. I frankly think Dr. Carson is probably too busy to listen to me or anybody else in the media. After all, he’s a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins. But nevertheless, he’s not specifically saying he’s going to, but he’s not ruling out speculation he could run for office.
CALLER: Well, that’s the first thing I thought of, he needs to run for president. I was so moved by his speech. I had my husband, my ninth grade daughter, my seventh grade son, sit down and listen to that speech because I was so moved by it.
RUSH: What was it that moved you? No wrong answer. Just curious. What was it that moved you?
CALLER: It was that he was standing up and speaking the truth and not afraid to do it when Obama was sitting right there, and this is really getting down to the heart of how our country needs to change. And we start by education. And I think that was his biggest thing. And I think we can start like right now, like my kids go to a school that is a charter school. Most of their teachers graduated from Hillsdale College. They teach by the Socratic method, they teach critical thinking, and there is no pop culture allowed in the school, and they just teach from the soul of America. And I agree with you. I’m optimistic about the future because my kids are learning what they need to learn to be just like Dr. Carson.
RUSH: A lot of people are.
CALLER: I’m all for it.
RUSH: I think a lot more people are being educated the way you describe than is known. Dr. Carson, with Obama sitting there, said, “Someone has to be courageous enough to stand up to the bullies.” And by bullies he of course meant Obama and everybody else in the Democrat Party who are systematically destroying and tearing this country apart. But it was so rational, it was so simple. That’s why it was so powerful. It wasn’t complicated with hand-wringing and reaching out and marketing and stuff.
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RUSH: Dr. Benjamin Carson was on with Neil Cavuto yesterday night on the Fox News Channel. Cavuto said, “Many of your critics on the liberal side said you were trying to showboat for an occasion. There were a number of Democratic legislators who said as much. But you argue not so.”
CARSON: No. What we need to do is we need to be able to discuss intelligent ways of solving the multitudinous problems that threaten to destroy our nation. And there are a group of people who would like to silence everybody and have everybody go along to get along, but that’s not going to be very helpful for us in the long run in terms of solving our problems. And somebody has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to the bullies.
RUSH: And why not him, he’s saying. If not me, who? “[S]omebody has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to the bullies.” You notice that all these people say, “It was very inappropriate! You shouldn’t say that at the prayer breakfast with the president.” Why not? That’s the time to say it. If you happen to believe like I do and obviously Dr. Carson does that our country’s being destroyed right before our eyes, and you have a chance to talk to millions of people with the guy who’s doing the destroying right next to you, why not do it? This used to be called “speaking truth to power.” This used to be called courage. This used to be called speaking the truth!
What are we supposed to do now, shrink up and shrivel away and not say a word because the Dear Leader is nearby? That’s exactly what people on the left think we’re supposed to do. “It’s insolence to disagree! It’s insolence to speak up with him sitting there. Who are you? How dare you!” The real question is: Who is he? Here we have a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, a man who’s made medicine his life, and somehow he’s not permitted to talk about health care, but a man who’s done nothing but rabble-rouse on the street corners of Chicago is qualified and is permitted? A neurosurgeon we tell, “Sorry, sir, you can’t talk about health care. It’s disrespectful to Barack Obama!”
Barack Obama, who wouldn’t know a Band-Aid from a rubber band, is somehow the expert in health care, and only Obama can fix it, and only Obama can do something about it — and anybody else who speaks up is being disagreeable and inappropriate? Whatever happened to United States freedom of speech and so forth and so on? This is nothing more than statist intimidation what they’re trying here on Dr. Carson. I mean, he’s just a neurosurgeon! He’s just one of the most acclaimed neurosurgeons in the country. What does he know?
What gives him the right to talk about health care? “Why should we listen to him when we have Barack Obama?” who doesn’t know anything about it. So Dr. Carson finds himself in the same place that the man destroying the country is, and he’s not supposed to speak up about it? Cavuto said, “You’re an accomplished, well-respected, internationally renowned doctor. You head one of the most prestigious departments in all of medicine at one of the most prestigious schools in all of medicine. Why did you take it upon yourself to go beyond just medical policy and talk about tax policy? What were you getting at, doc?”
CARSON: Five physicians signed the Declaration of Independence and were involved in the framing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and several other things. There’s absolutely no reason at all that physicians, scientists shouldn’t be involved in things that affect all of us. We’re people who’ve learned how to make decisions based on facts, empirical data rather than on ideology. And one of the geniuses, one of the real things that made us a great nation, is that we brought people from all backgrounds into the legislative process so that all of us would be able to place our interests there, and we’ve gone significantly away from that.
RUSH: Now, Cavuto is playing devil’s advocate. But he said (paraphrased), “Okay, look, you’re a doctor. What the hell you doing talk about tax policy?” Why not? He’s a citizen. This is like I’ve been told all my life: “You didn’t serve in Vietnam. You don’t get to talk about the defense budget.” I’ve been told this all my life, and all it is is the left attempting to silence opposition, to intimidate people into shutting up. Because the left cannot handle opposition. Particularly on ideas. They know they lose. They’re gonna find it very difficult to demonize Ben Carson, but they will try. You watch. He’s now in the crosshairs.
The Obama campaign team is gonna get into gear if this guy keeps talking, and they’re gonna try to find ways to smear him and ruin his life and do to him what they did to Romney. That’s all they can do. They can’t beat him in the arena of ideas. (summarized) “Look, five physicians signed a Declaration of Independence.” There were 56 people who signed the Declaration. Five of them were doctors. What did they know about independence, Neil?” But even the nature of the question is troubling. You’re a doctor. What are you speaking out to tax policy for? Well, you know, I’m just a guy on the radio. I talk about everything. So? Am I only allowed to talk about radio things here? That is the implication of the question. So next, Cavuto said, “I want to focus on the reaction from the president as you were making your remarks. Did you know or did you suspect what you were saying was going to gibe him a little bit?”
CARSON: There’s no question that, uh, he has advocated basically a policy of tax the rich, and I have advocated a policy that comes from the Bible, which is a very fair policy of proportional taxation. If it was good enough for God, why wouldn’t it be good enough for us? The minute you deviate away from that, you begin to get into all kinds of biases, and one could legitimately make the argument that the rich pay too many taxes. The top 1% pays 37% of the taxes. The top 5%, 59% of the taxes. But they don’t make that much of an income. One could make that argument. It depends on your philosophical disposition, which argument you’re gonna make. But you take those arguments away as soon as you go to a proportional tax. I believe that’s the reason God did it.
RUSH: Whoa. Whoa. That’s the reason God did it. No, no, no. What do you mean? Obama didn’t do that. What do you mean, that’s the way God did it? And the left and their appointed talkmeisters, the Beckels and the Scarboroughs, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?” Chris Matthews, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?” I guess these guys would all bow down in total acquiescence to Obama, the king, on his way to dictatorship. And that’s okay, that’s fine, there’s no problem with that? King gets to set tax policy. King gets to write whatever we’re gonna do on guns. King gets to say when we dealt with the debt. The king gets to say, “We don’t have a spending problem; we got a pay-for-it problem.” The king gets to say, “We don’t have a spending problem; we got a budget deficit problem.” The king gets to say, “Don’t ask me any more about Benghazi. I’ve answered everything. There isn’t anything else. It was the guy with the video.” And we go, “Okay, whatever king says is it.” Carson goes on to say that he’s gonna retire from surgery later this year and then try to combat the problem of low-information voters.
CARSON: I’m actually gonna retire in June from surgery. I will still teach, I will still be involved, but I gonna retire from surgery. So it does open up a lot of possibilities for me. I’m very focused on education and getting the populace back to where it used to be back in 1831 when Alexis de Tocqueville came here and was so impressed, because an uneducated populace will fall for anything, and if you go and you talk to most people, they mean well, but they don’t have much of a breadth of education, of knowledge, of understanding what the real issues are, and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they’re supposed to think and they keep repeating that and pretty soon they say, “Oh, well, that must be true.”
RUSH: That’s the definition of the low-information voter. That’s Dr. Benjamin Carson from the Johns Hopkins hospital, director pediatric neurosurgery, which means he saves the children.
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RUSH: Here’s another thing about Dr. Carson that we were talking about yesterday. There are doers and people who don’t do. They just sit outside the arena and offer expertise, commentary, criticism, but they don’t do diddly-squat. He’s a doer. He is in the arena doing. He is practicing health care. And because he is intimately involved in it, he knows better than most what to do to repair it because he knows what’s wrong with it, and he knows full well that Obama has no clue what he’s talking about because Obama’s not even talking about health care. Obama is simply expanding an ideology. Obama is simply coming up with a way to build and grow government, and using health care as his way.
And of course journalists who also don’t know anything, don’t know how to deal with Benjamin Carson. He doesn’t fit the template. He doesn’t compute. They don’t know what to do with a guy like this. So they’re gonna have to figure out a way to cancel him out. He’s certainly not on their side. But I think he’s obviously prepared and equipped to deal whatever comes his way.
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RUSH: So Bob Beckel on The Five yesterday talking about Dr. Benjamin Carson, who operates on the brains of babies, Dr. Benjamin Carson, who actually saves the lives of little babies, Bob Beckel said (paraphrasing), “He just wants his 15 minutes of fame, make a million dollars when he leaves surgery.” Beckel said that Ben Carson offers nothing but extreme right-wing talking points.
Ben Carson is a self-made man from Detroit. The media didn’t make him; they can’t destroy him. He’s got an amazing story, from Detroit, where he came from.