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<\/a>CALLER: Oh, thanks, Rush. This morning I was just fumbling around trying to decide if I should have a cigar, and it dawned on me that, you know, this deep state — this tangled web of bureaucrats and so forth and people that are trying to stop Trump — you know, it\u2019s rampant and it\u2019s widespread. Interestingly, if you go back eight years ago to 2009 when Obama was taking over, there was very, very little opposition. And perhaps… You know, I don\u2019t want to make you a part of the deep state because you weren\u2019t deep.<\/p>\nYou know, you were out there. But you opposed or you spoke out against Obama, saying that you hoped that he would not be successful for reasons that a lot of us conservatives understood. But you were the essential deep state of 2009, and nobody else was. And it\u2019s really interesting that we don\u2019t… As conservatives, we\u2019re just not as good at some of this undercover, dirty football that the libs can pull off.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Well, the first thing I have to ask you is… You know, I\u2019m a cigar lover myself. So you got up today; you\u2019re thinking about cigars. What does cigars have to do with the story? Anything at all? Did the cigar help jog your memory about this, or did you just throw that in there as an added element?<\/p>\n
CALLER: You know what, Rush? It\u2019s only 9:30 here and it\u2019s a beautiful day, and —<\/p>\n
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RUSH: It\u2019s okay. I have my first cigar of the day when I get here. If it\u2019s eight o\u2019clock in the morning — and my favorite one. I don\u2019t do this, “Start mild and build up strong for after dinner.” If you have your favorite cigar, you smoke it every time.<\/p>\n
CALLER: I do the same thing, Rush.<\/p>\n
RUSH: All right. There you go. In fact, cigars are a huge part of the Ernie Els for Autism<\/a>. I mean, the cigar makers are there, too, and they got cigar comfort stations every three holes where you can choose whatever you want. Folks, if you wanted a Bloody Mary on the first tee yesterday, it was there. I, of course, do not do so during golf, but you can. It was just… It\u2019s all fun. Look, your point… You know, he\u2019s right. If you go back to 2009, I even said that my hope was that Obama\u2019s policies would fail on January 16th<\/a>. This is a week before he was inaugurated.<\/p>\n There wasn\u2019t any opposition to Obama to speak of because of fear, Smokey — and the fear was palpable, and the fear was of race. I mean, here we had the first African-American elected president in the history of the country. I guarantee you, even if they had no fear, there was no way the Republican Party was going to publicly, vividly oppose anything, particularly right off the bat and right out of the box. And Obama and the Democrats knew it, and that\u2019s why…<\/p>\n They had that stimulus bill written and ready to go on January 9th. Two weeks, essentially — a week and a half — before Obama was inaugurated. They had it on his desk his first day in office. You contrast that with any Republican. They\u2019ve supposedly been working on repeal and replace of Obamacare since Obamacare, since 2010. And it was just last week that we had the bill presented, and it wasn\u2019t anything like the six repeal bills that they sent to Obama that he vetoed.<\/p>\n Look, the Republicans are not made out of the same stuff Democrats are. I mean, Democrats are born to use government, to take it over, to wield its various levers of power to their benefit. Republicans, conservatives, they\u2019re not… We\u2019re not… We don\u2019t even think of government that way. We want to get it to be as invisible as it can and still function. But there\u2019s more to it than that too. I just have run out of time here. But I promise you, Smokey, I\u2019m gonna answer this in full detail when we get back.<\/p>\n BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n RUSH: Now, I\u2019m thinking back. Our first call, Smokey referred to me as an early example of the deep state, and I know what he meant, but I\u2019m in no way the deep state. I\u2019m not in the state. I have no power whatsoever. I\u2019m not an embed anywhere. I don\u2019t have a job, never have had a job in the bureaucracy. I\u2019m not hidden or visible anywhere there, and, as such, I don\u2019t have any official Washington power which members of the deep state do, obviously. But what he meant was that I was at the time… You go back to January of 2009, actually, when Obama was inaugurated.<\/p>\n They didn\u2019t see any value in it. They thought to do so was to be seen as nothing more than a contrarian and that you wouldn\u2019t be taken seriously. You know, I don\u2019t care anything about that. My attitude was, “Yeah, it was historic, but you get past that in a couple of days. And then after that he becomes president and he has genuine ideas and he has incredible policy suggestions,” and I disagreed with every one of them. “Are we just supposed to stand aside, let him have what he wants because of the historical nature?”<\/p>\n I just… I never looked at it that way, and I don\u2019t care that they started throwing around this label of racist, \u2019cause that happened within six weeks of this show starting in 1988. I\u2019ve never been accused of hating anybody or being a racist or anything until this show, and six weeks into it — Bammo! — I\u2019m all of those things, and I knew that it didn\u2019t matter. Whatever I said to the contrary, I was still gonna have those labels attached, so why not just be honest? But there wasn\u2019t any energy for that in the Republican Party. They were feeling full-fledged defeated, folks.<\/p>\n They were down in the dumps. They lost the House, they lost the Senate, George W. Bush\u2019s approval rating was in the thirties. I mean, they had had their just ideal, exquisite establishment candidate, and the media and the Democrats had driven his approval numbers down to 30, and the Republican Party was a defeated mass. So there was no outspokenness, no disagreement whatsoever for at least the first year. And the disagreement, the opposition finally began to surface with Obamacare. There were pockets of it. But, I mean, the Republican Party as a political entity began to finally push back.<\/p>\n Well, it used to not. You know modern conservatism? You go back to the middle of the Obama years and I can point you to editorials in the Weekly Standard, for example (Bill Kristol\u2019s magazine), and David Brooks (supposed conservative at the New York Times) and they were talking about, “You know, the American people have spoken. The American people want Big Government,” and as conservatives, they were prepared to give people what they want. The difference was in their mind was:<\/p>\n “The American people want Big Government, and they want an active, engaged executive,” meaning president (intellectuals never say president; they say executive), “doing smart things. They want somebody smart administering a Big Government. They want somebody competent administering it.” They were ready to throw in the towel on the big-versus-small government argument. And we\u2019ve never thrown in the towel on that, me and my fellow conservative brethren and sisteren in the media — and, of course, all of you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" RUSH: Here we had the first African-American elected president in the history of the country. I guarantee you, even if they had no fear, there was no way the Republican Party was going to publicly, vividly oppose anything, particularly right off the bat and right out of the box. And Obama and the Democrats knew it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/650-031017-Rush-Is-Right.jpg\")
Folks, nobody (nobody but nobody) wanted to speak out. It\u2019s too risky. The assumptions were that the nation was feeling this new glow of — I don\u2019t know — contentment, happiness, really liking itself because we had just overcome racism. That\u2019s right! We had just erased it. In one election, we had just swept it away by virtue of the election of Barack Hussein Obama. And it didn\u2019t matter what the guy was gonna do. Nobody cared… Well, you cared. I\u2019m talking about publicly. On the Republican side, so-called conservative media, nobody — nobody — wanted to speak out.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Rush-Thinking.jpg\")
They couldn\u2019t do anything about it, but they began to push back with the Obamacare debate, which actually, you know, was 2009 and signed into law in 2010. The Democrats have learned how to use government by infecting and polluting government to turn all of government into the implementation process of their agenda. Our agenda is to unwind all that, unpack it, and reduce the federal government in size and scope and intrusiveness. We don\u2019t seek to use government as a method of advancing our agenda because our agenda does not involve…<\/p>\n