{"id":29835,"date":"2008-07-14T01:01:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T03:35:31","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-05-19T03:35:31","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T03:35:31","slug":"bill_moyers_conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2008\/07\/14\/bill_moyers_conservatives\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Moyers Conservatives?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

RUSH: International Herald Tribune, which is the international version of the New York Times, from today: ‘A New American Reality: the Government as Provider.\u2019 Yeah, this is what I was talking about in the first hour. He didn\u2019t hear much of it, Snerdley, because you\u2019re screening calls. ‘In a country that holds itself up as a citadel of free enterprise, Washington has morphed from being the lender of last resort into effectively the only resort for home loans for millions of Americans engaged in the largest transactions of their lives. <\/p>\n

‘Before, the government\u2019s more modest mission was to make more loans available at lower rates. Now it is to make sure the loans that matter most to middle class Americans are made at all.\u2019 Damn right. This is not good. The government people love it, but it isn\u2019t good. ‘The new reality,\u2019 it says here, ‘is scorned by libertarians and conservatives who fear intrusions by the state in the market, and by populists and progressives who rue a society in which education and housing increasingly rest upon the government.\u2019 Don\u2019t tell me progressives are upset about any of this! They don\u2019t even call themselves ‘liberals\u2019 anymore in the New York Times. They call \u2019em progressives. They love this. If you\u2019re socialist, you love what\u2019s going on, and most liberals are either socialists or leaning in that direction. <\/p>\n

Audio sound bite time. This is related to what we were discussing in the first hour of the program. All of this Big Government and all of this activist government and government ‘helping people.\u2019 This is what our conservative intelligentsia thinks conservatism needs to morph to so that we can get the votes of the middle class, the working class, like Ronald Reagan did. See, the big difference is — and I, again, hearken back to LA Times last week. The big difference is Reagan converted. He moved the electorate to the right. Reagan didn\u2019t move to the ‘center.\u2019 Our new guys and some of our old guys want us to move to the center to where they think people are rather than attracting people on the foundations of our own philosophy! So you remember Mickey Edwards, retired congressman from Oklahoma who had some fairly critical things to say of me on C-SPAN once. I forget exactly what he said. Oh! He was asked about the election of McCain, said it probably wouldn\u2019t make Rush Limbaugh happy, or whatever. Anyway, he was on. Bill Moyers goes out and finds ‘conservatives,\u2019 quote, unquote. I gotta tell you, if you are a conservative and you accept Moyers\u2019 invitation, you are not… Well, I don\u2019t want to get into who\u2019s a conservative and who isn\u2019t, but let\u2019s face it. If Moyers wants you, there has to be some question. Let\u2019s just put it that way. You know, if Moyers is out there looking for people he thinks are conservatives to come on his show, there has to be a reason. You should be suspicious if Bill Moyers calls you and says he wants you to come on and discuss conservatism. He had Mickey Edwards, and here\u2019s the exchange. There is the question from Moyers and Edwards is all contained here.<\/p>\n

EDWARDS: The people who are attacking me are post-Reagan people. I don\u2019t even know what they represent, but it is not conservatism. You know, but (crosstalk)<\/p>\n

MOYERS: Don\u2019t they think Rush Limbaugh considers himself the voice of — of conservatism? Don\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

EDWARDS: Well, yeah, I am sure he considers himself the voice of everything. I mean, he — but — but, look, the fact is the people who created the conservative movement, the people who were the Goldwater, Reagan people who wrote those platforms that — that insisted that the District of Columbia have a vote in Congress. Arizona, Planned Parenthood gives an annual Barry Goldwater award, you know, because we believe in free choice.<\/p>\n

RUSH: What? (laughing) Do you see? Do you see what…? Goldwater? Goldwater went over the edge later in life. Planned Parenthood was part of Reagan\u2019s conservative planks in his conventions, and free choice? This is precisely what I mean! So here\u2019s Mickey Edwards who I don\u2019t know — he\u2019s from Oklahoma; he\u2019s a retired member of Congress — telling me that I\u2019m not a conservative. He doesn\u2019t even know what a conservative is, but he\u2019s now defining it. This is exactly what is happening. Now, also on this show, Ross Douthat. I don\u2019t know how he says it. Do you know how to pronounce Ross Douthat\u2019s last name? It\u2019s D-o-u-t-h-a-t, and he and a buddy have written a book which also describes this. It\u2019s their book that has the belief that we need to, as conservatives, adapt some of the things from the New Deal, as a means of getting the electorate back into our camp so that we can win. I do not know how to pronounce his name. I\u2019m sorry. D-o-u-t-h-a-t. Douthat? Douthat? Douthat? Douthat? I don\u2019t know, and I\u2019m not trying to make fun of it. I just don\u2019t know. But he was also on with Mickey Edwards, with Bill Moyers. And Moyers says, ‘Well, all right, somewhere between you and Ross, then, the radicals of conservatism took over?\u2019 (laughing)<\/p>\n

DOUTHAT: Mickey and I, I think disagree on a lot of stuff and represent kind of different visions for the Republican Party, but I think Rush Limbaugh would pretty much hate us both.<\/p>\n

EDWARDS: Yeah, I\u2019m not longing for a golden age. Yeah, I\u2019m longing for adherence to the Constitution of the United States, because when we talk about American exceptionalism, that\u2019s what it is. It\u2019s not our wealth; it\u2019s not our military. What makes us exceptional is our form of self-government, you know, that keeps most of the major powers — over whether to go to war, what our tax policies ought to be, how much should be spent — keeps it in the hands of the people through their representatives.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yeah, Mickey, do you see what\u2019s happening out there today? The form of self-government that you lionize here, is vanishing. Self-government equals limited government, and there\u2019s not much limited about our government these days, particularly in the financial markets. Now, American exceptionalism, I would define it in a far deeper way. And I\u2019ve done it before. I don\u2019t have time to do it now because I\u2019ve got break coming up and I\u2019ve got one more bite. But I can get close by asking the question. We\u2019ve been around for less than 230 years, right, 240 years as a country. Now, compare us to populations, cultures, societies who have been roaming the planet for thousands of years. In less than 250 years, the people of the United States of America have outrun the rest of the world in everything. I don\u2019t care how you define it. I don\u2019t care what measure you want to make. <\/p>\n

And this is not an accident. There is an answer to the question, how did this happen? How is it that societies and cultures, say in Europe and elsewhere, have been on the planet for thousands of years, did not come close to doing what we did? And we\u2019re no different as human beings. The DNA is the same. We\u2019re not better people. We\u2019re not a better quality or class of human being than anybody else is on the planet. How did it happen? There are definite answers to this, and those answers define American exceptionalism. You can\u2019t take the military out of it; you can\u2019t take prosperity out of it. You can\u2019t take wealth creation out of it and say that\u2019s not what you mean by American exceptionalism, \u2019cause it all works together in driving these things. This business about Ross Douthat saying that I would ‘hate\u2019 both him and Mickey? I don\u2019t hate these guys. Where did this come from? Anyway, the next question from Moyers: ‘Is John McCain a conservative by your definition?<\/p>\n

DOUTHAT: I believe in a — you know, a big tent for who is and who is not a conservative. I think it\u2019s fair to define Mickey as a conservative. I think it\u2019s fair to define Rush Limbaugh as a conservative. I think, you know, there\u2019s a lot of variety within the conservative family, and I think, you know, McCain falls into that camp, broadly speaking.<\/p>\n

RUSH: We\u2019re talking the difference here between Republicans and conservative. You know, ‘conservative\u2019 doesn\u2019t have any modifiers. Conservative has a singular foundation: individual liberty. That individual liberty and freedom is never going to go out of style, and so conservatism does not need to be remade, reformed, reflaked, reshaped. But the Republican Party is in the process of trying to remake, reform, and reflake itself so as to appeal to more voters rather than to stand for something and attract voters. <\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: You know, it is kind of interesting here. We have some Republicans who seem hell-bent in throwing away the one proven winning formula twice that won 49 states, they want to just throw that out. These guys, Mickey Edwards and Ross Douthat, have more enmity for me than they do Democrats. And that\u2019s one of the things that\u2019s sort of becoming apparent to many of us here on the right side. Our presidential candidate seems to have a closer relationship with Democrats than he does with members of his own party and seems to want it that way. It boggles my mind. It\u2019s right out of the blueprint for success, overwhelming success. You want to win, you want to win 49 states, this is how you do it. ‘Ah, throw it out, gonna throw it out, we gotta throw it out, we need to moderate it, modify it, we need to upgrade it, version 2.0, we need big tents and so forth.\u2019 If you want to big-tent the Republican Party, go right ahead. You start big-tenting conservatism, and you\u2019re going to have it end up meaning nothing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: International Herald Tribune, which is the international version of the New York Times, from today: ‘A New American Reality: the Government as Provider.\u2019 Yeah, this is what I was talking about in the first hour. He didn\u2019t hear much of it, Snerdley, because you\u2019re screening calls. ‘In a country that holds itself up as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nBill Moyers Conservatives? - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2008\/07\/14\/bill_moyers_conservatives\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Bill Moyers Conservatives? - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"RUSH: International Herald Tribune, which is the international version of the New York Times, from today: ‘A New American Reality: the Government as Provider.\u2019 Yeah, this is what I was talking about in the first hour. 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