RUSH: Kevin in Dayton, Ohio. You’re next. It’s great to have you, sir. How you doing?

CALLER: I’m great, Rush. Appreciate you taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: I want you to know you’re in my family’s prayers with everything you’re going through. One of the things that I’m curious about is what happened last night in the debate about, you know, Joe jumping on President Trump about when he knew about all of this and how he didn’t want the American people to panic, Joe said, “Well, we’re the American people. We don’t panic.” Well, I’m sorry, but we did kind of panic when we found out about it ’cause you couldn’t find toilet paper, you couldn’t find meat. What is your take on all that?

RUSH: I think it’s Biden flailing away. I think if you go back and look at the early days of the virus, you can find everybody saying what they’re saying today saying the exact opposite of it in February and March. You can find Fauci saying, “No big deal! Don’t worry about it. No need to wear a mask.” You can find Pelosi saying, “Come on down to Chinatown! There no reason to hide.”

In the very early days of this, you could see every government official not wanting people to panic and trying to keep ’em from panicking by saying, “Come on, everything’s fine. This thing is no different than the flu.” Everybody was trying to downplay the potential badness of this thing, and then as time went on one guy — one guy — didn’t have the freedom to act like, “Hey, everything’s fine.”

Trump banned all incoming travel from China, and guys like Biden and the rest started calling him a racist and a xenophobe. The one guy that was trying to do something about it. And Trump saying, “I didn’t want people to panic.” You’re exactly right. We do panic! There’s no reason for there to be a toilet paper shortage, no reason for a run on toilet paper in any kind of a viral pandemic.

But yet there was. It was no different… There must have been a hurricane coming in. Hurricane virus, what have you. I just… I think it’s all an exercise here in finger-pointing that is not going to carry any weight with anybody because everybody was in one degree of panic or another back in the beginning and didn’t know anything about it.

Everybody was alternately scared or not. You can find people contradicting themselves from the highest level of expertise our country has to offer. I don’t think there’s much to it, don’t think it matters.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I thought this was profound last night. This is Joe Biden doing a segment on the COVID-19 pandemic.

BIDEN: He says that we’re, you know, we’re learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it. You folks at home will have an empty chair at the kitchen table this morning. That man or wife going to bed tonight and reaching over to try to touch their — out of habit where their wife or husband was, is gone. Learning to live with it? Come on. We’re dying with it.

RUSH: “Come on. We’re dying with it.” The problem I have with this is that Biden is treating this like any other political issue. And it’s a mistake to do that. Nobody, nobody wants anybody to die from COVID, and nobody’s doing things to facilitate death. Biden is attempting to say that Trump doesn’t care. Trump doesn’t think we can stop it, Trump doesn’t care, so people are dying, and that’s why Trump says we gotta learn to live with it.

Biden doesn’t understand. If I may be so bold, Biden doesn’t know what it is to be a man. There’s a reality out there. There’s a virus. There’s one of countless viruses out there. Most viruses we do not have a vaccine for. Most viruses we do not have a cure for, by definition. We still don’t have a way to deal with AIDS. We don’t have a vaccine for AIDS. We certainly don’t have a cure for it. We don’t have a cure for the flu. We don’t have a cure for the common cold. What do we do? We live with it. We adapt. We do whatever we have to do. We can’t do anything else.

We can’t, as Trump said, hide in the basement. Leaders sure as hell can’t. Trump can’t find a room in the residence and just hole up in there until this thing goes away. That’s not how men deal with it. And real women. I’m not trying to be gender oriented here. I’m trying to be mature oriented.

But what does Biden want? Biden wants to make it look like, “Oh, Trump’s given up, thrown up his hands in frustration. Trump can’t do anything about it, and so you’re just gonna die.” No. That’s not at all. Trump is working as hard as anybody with others who are working as hard as anybody to do what can be done to stop a virus. But the dirty little secret is nobody’s got the answer. We’re working hard.

All kinds of people are sacrificing time and money and effort to come up with a vaccine, a therapeutic. And we’re making great strides. We’re making great headway. Look at how quickly Trump was able to recover. It means it can be done. Biden wants to take that, “Ah, he doesn’t care.” I don’t know if Biden even knows what Trump means when he says we’ve gotta live with it. I really don’t. I don’t know if a liberal man knows what “we have to learn to live with it” means. If they think like Biden does, that we have to give up and we don’t care who dies, they haven’t the slightest idea about maturity, about limitations.

There’s nothing, there’s not a single thing Joe Biden could do differently that would have made a hell of a difference, any kind of a difference in what we’re doing with COVID-19 and how we are advancing it. And how we are dealing with solutions to it. There’s not a damn thing Joe Biden knows or anybody else on the Democrat side. There’s nothing any of them could do differently.

So they have to resort to: “Trump doesn’t care. Trump doesn’t care if you die. Well, I do. That vacant chair next to you at the breakfast table.” The mature way to react to this is, we are learning to live with it. That’s why we have to reopen. We cannot continue to keep massive American cities responsible for so much of our economy shut down. We cannot run away from this. We cannot keep the schools shut down.

None of this is dealing with it! Further shutdowns, further lockdowns don’t advance anything. They just delay the inevitable, and what’s the inevitable? Dealing with it! What’s the inevitable? Living with it! We live with the flu. We live with cancer. We live with all kinds of terminal diseases. We do not run and cower in the corners.

Why do we want to run and cower in the corner from COVID-19? Because it’s a political issue where people like Joe Biden and the media think they can destroy Donald Trump over it. Think of all the things in our daily lives that harm us. How many of them do we fail to live our lives because of? How many of us never leave home? How many of us never go do this or do that because of potential deadly dangers outside?

But yet COVID-19 (sputtering), “Why, we need to hunker down! We need to — we need to lock down! We need to shut down. We need to — we need to — we need to come to grips with dying with it,” and I hate this pessimism. I hate this negativism these people want to force on us. I hate this can’t-do-itism that they are trying to permeate our culture with. They are not who we are as Americans.

The left’s way of dealing with this stuff is not the American way of dealing with it. Biden’s running around talking about, “We’re learning to die with the virus.” No. We’re learning to live with it! We’re learning what we have to do to live with it. We’re learning what the options are if we want to actually live instead of hunkering down in a basement.