RUSH: Here’s Joseph in Charleston, South Carolina. He’s been waiting a long time. I appreciate your patience. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Yeah, good afternoon, Rush. I wanted to call back to something you talked about in the first hour when you said Steve Schmidt was joining up with the ACLU —
RUSH: Yes, that’s back when I was in a good mood.
CALLER: — to help promote gay marriage.
RUSH: Yeah, that’s the ACLU story. This was back when I was in a good mood, the first hour.
CALLER: The thing I wanted to say about that is it always baffles me why the Republicans go in for something like this. Because it’s not like if every Republican in the entire country decided that they were gonna support gay marriage at the state level, the gate vote would shift over to the Republicans. The Democrats would still get credit for it anyway, and I think the Democrats enjoy watching the Republican Party self-destruct over trying to liberalize itself even more than they enjoy destroying it themselves.
RUSH: Yes, of course. Good point. Grab sound bite number 15. You want to know why this is happening. I have a sound bite here, Dana Perino was on The Five yesterday afternoon on Fox, and they were having a discussion about the Supreme Court rulings on DOMA and Prop 8. This doesn’t take long, it’s 16 seconds, but this is what she said…
PERINO: Politically, I think that in some ways this begins the long road to having gay marriage no longer be a political weapon used by either side and gives people a chance to maybe then focus on other important issues that we have in the country.
RUSH: Now, that way of thinking, Joseph, is probably pretty reflective of the Republican Party establishment. So what she’s saying there is, “Look, we’re losing on this. We’re losing bad. We gotta get this behind us. So let’s agree to it! Let’s just say, ‘Okay, fine. Gay marriage? Fine. Go do it. We’ll get that behind us,” and same thing with immigration! “We’ll get that behind with us,” and then those are no longer issues, they think. That’s what you’re saying: They’re blowing it.
CALLER: That’s what makes me mad about the party. You have low-information voters; you have an anti-information media. The party gets out and as soon as they hear anything that sounds liberal, certain members of our side go chomping after it, and what they do is they just spiral downward. Like what is it, 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck? That means 76% of Americans are broke. There’s your demographic; there’s your brass ring.
RUSH: Exactly.
CALLER: I’m sure there’s some gay people and Latinos and African-Americans and that demographic (unintelligible), too.
RUSH: That is exactly my point again from the first hour, and again when I was in a good mood. The economy, jobs, those are the things that matter to the vast majority of the people no matter what their sexual orientation or their nationality, their gender, or any of that happen to be, and it’s being ignored.
CALLER: I think —
RUSH: The Republicans are living in abject fear. So when Dana Perino says, “Okay, this is no longer gonna be a political issue,” what she means is, “This can no longer hurt us.” But what’s gonna happen is, this is gonna keep coming back until they get this constitutionally recognized nationwide. If the Republicans continue to oppose it, they’re gonna be scared to death that the party establishment is gonna lose votes from the gay community, lose money. You hit the nail on the head. When all this stuff happens, the Republicans aren’t gonna get a dime’s worth of credit for it. They’re not gonna get a dime’s worth of campaign donations from this group.
CALLER: Oh, and, Rush? They’re doing this, by the way, in my opinion, for the youth vote.
RUSH: Well, that’s true.
CALLER: The number one concern of young voters this last election was the economy.
RUSH: That’s true.
CALLER: And the economy is terrible still. So they have climate change now on the docket, gay marriage, immigration, and student loans. They will not fault the economy. They want the American people to accept that the economy is going to be this bad in perpetuity. So here’s the things that tug at your heartstring; and the younger voters, the crowd that has only seen Clinton and Bush and Obama as president, will see the Democrat Party as the party that’s really fighting for the issues that touch them deep down in our chewy, nougaty center. They’ll vote for them even when they should have shifted to a conservative voting pattern. They will continue to vote for liberalism and do it for themselves, and the Democrats will be even happier about that than they are about losing the Republicans.
RUSH: I don’t think that’s disputable. This thinking is really not yours. The thinking that we can get this behind us is really unfortunate. Because the truth of the matter is that nothing that can be used against Republicans will ever be taken off the table, even if they have to make it up! There’s nothing that they can use against Republicans that will ever be taken off the table. So the Republican Party establishment is trying to make all these things go away because they think that’s the source of opposition.
What they’re gonna end up doing is imploding.
They are driving their base away — and when they drive their base away, they’re not gonna remain viable with gnat’s eyelash chance of winning elections. They think they’ll join the ACLU, join a project with the ACLU — Republican campaign consultants — to go now work on the states to get the Republicans in the 50 states to agree to gay marriage to get the issue behind us. “We’re being killed by it, Mr. Limbaugh! They’re killing us. They’re killing us with immigration. We got to get it behind us! We can move on to things that really matter.”
Why don’t you stand for things that really matter?
Come up with an agenda about things that really matters? To hell with that stuff! Stop letting the Democrats stet the agenda. We haven’t put slavery behind us and it was 150 years ago, right? Slavery, for all intents and purposes, as far as a lot of people think, still exists. The Republican Party still wants it! We haven’t even put that behind us, and it’s been 150 years. So gay marriage we’re gonna put behind us, immigration we’re gonna put behind, and all of this is designed to make those who hate us love us, by putting it behind us?
There’s no putting it behind you, and there’s no taking it off the table. It really is dumbfounding, folks. It’s dumbfounding to watch this. I had friend of mine say, “You know what you’re having trouble coming to grips with is that the Republican Party hates its base and they’re really trying to drive ’em away.” I said, “I think there are things that are more important to them than that. I know they’re embarrassed by the base, the pro-lifers and the gun people and so forth.
The guy said, “They’re going to be happy as a permanent minority because they won’t be embarrassed by anybody else in their party.” I said, “You gotta be kidding. You really think that’s what’s going on?” He said, this friend of mine, “I do. I do. I think they so hate their base — I think they so dislike us, I think they’re so embarrassed about some of us — that they’d be happy to go back to the mode of Bob Michel with 125 members of the House and 30 senators and occasionally win the presidency and be liked by everybody.
“Because, Rush, they’re not like us. They think the reason liberals hate them is because of their base.” So there’s that theory. There’s all kinds of theories. But regardless, to listen to the rationale for not fighting on these cultural issues — “Well, we gotta get it behind us! Just get these issues over with and make ’em no longer viable as political weapons” — see, the problem with that, sadly, is that anything that can be used against the Republicans will never be taken off the table. Slavery, I offer as an example. A hundred fifty years ago, and it may as well still be what Republicans want, in the minds of low-information people, ’cause who tells ’em this?
Related Links