RUSH: I’ve been thinking about how this has happened. The fact that the Republican leadership is throwing in with the Democrat leadership on amnesty and Obamacare and take your pick of issues. And, you know, you and I, folks, have discussed and theorized for a long time, and it has become obvious — and we’ve talked about this — that the GOP agrees with Obama on amnesty because they, too, see a pool of potential new voters.
And they also think that they’ve got a supporter for the Hispanic vote. You know the drill. But it turns out that they also do not oppose Obamacare when it gets down to talking about repealing it. They really don’t want to repeal any of Obamacare. So we have to assume they either don’t want to do it, don’t want the fight, or actually don’t have a problem with it.
We had a chance here to take control of government spending with the omnibus versus continuing resolution for a couple of weeks. They chose to go big and just have all kinds of wacko, crazy spending, and there’s no difference between them and the Democrats on that. But I’ve always thought that it goes deeper than the Republicans agreeing with the Democrats on a few issues. I think that what’s happened — and it goes right back to the article we made famous here on this program by Angelo Codevilla in the American Spectator called The Ruling Class.
It is apparent now that there is, overall, a Washington establishment, not just a Democrat establishment, not just a Republican establishment, there is a Washington establishment. Call it the ruling class if you want, and it’s made up of people of both parties, and it is devoted to big government. It’s devoted to big government because they all want the power of running it and controlling it. Republicans and Democrats alike. Not everyone. I’m talking about leadership now.
So there’s an aphrodisiac about the power of spending all that money and what that can mean to you and the power of doling that money out and running the government. And therefore, anything that comes along that threatens big government, they are united in opposition to, such as the Tea Party, or just average, ordinary American citizens who want to streamline government, reduce its size, limit it, get it out of people’s lives. They become the enemy of this Washington establishment.
John O’Sullivan, as I quoted last week, said any organization that is not actively conservative will, over time, become liberal. Liberalism is easy. Liberalism is gutless. But conservatism is a daily adherence. It’s a daily application. And so what we have now, the Republican majority is actually a very happy Bob Michel type minority.
They are the majority in the House and Senate with a minority frame of mind brought about by the media and the Washington culture.
But I think there’s something else. A friend of mine gave me his analogy, and it makes some sense if you compare the Republican, the Beltway GOP with the State Department. Now, the State Department, there are plenty of good people there; but they’re not there, they’re in the field offices and various places. Your average State Department person is not as bad as, say, the average anti-American UN or euro socialist bureaucrat. But the people that run the UN and some of the people at the State Department, it’s not that they are committed anti-Americans. A better way to describe them would be post-American.
They think that they have evolved beyond these trite notions of patriotism and American exceptionalism. That’s quaint, and that’s old-fashioned, that’s really schoolboy, schoolgirl stuff. You know, patriotism, that’s beneath these people. And American exceptionalism, that’s 200 years ago. That’s not today. We are much more progressive than that, these people say to themselves, and we are citizens of the world. And they think that the Constitution is a relic of a time that was unsophisticated, not very advanced, and they don’t think they’ve got anything in common with the people who founded America, wrote the Constitution, or any of the founding documents.
Instead, they are transgressive, if you will, transnational progressives. They deal on a daily basis with these small-minded Americans who have these quaint old-fashioned notions of exceptionalism and patriotism. And they’re embarrassed about it. This guy sees the Republican establishment the same way. They’re post-conservative; they are embarrassed by conservatives; they are much more invested in Washington than they are in representative government, and they have much more common ground with progressive Democrats than they do with us, because we are hicks and hayseeds, and we’re quaint pro-lifers and American exceptionalism.
It’s almost a class thing where they’re just so superior to us. We’re kooks, you know, and we rally around all these old-fashioned, quaint notions, and they’re no longer realistic and so forth. And they suffer us sometimes not gladly. I have to take a break, but I thought it was an interesting characterization to go along with the things that we also think are true about it.
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