{"id":5605,"date":"2015-08-17T17:29:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T17:29:43","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2015-08-17T17:29:43","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T17:29:43","slug":"trump_sparks_war_within_conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2015\/08\/17\/trump_sparks_war_within_conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Sparks War Within Conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

RUSH: Let\u2019s go to the audio sound bites, because this is the next phase of this, and that is this internecine war going on within conservatism. <\/p>\n

First up, CNN\u2019s Reliable Sources on Sunday morning, Brian Stelter the host, and he brought in Jackie Calmes from the New York Times who wrote this big, long piece last week about how talk radio is steering the Republican Party down the wrong path and everybody\u2019s afraid of talk radio. The Republican Party, it\u2019s just a shame. Washington was so much better before there was talk radio, Washington was so much better before there was Fox News, and now this has messed everything up. <\/p>\n

So she\u2019s studying the impact of conservative media on national politics, and to start the discussion, Brian Stelter said…<\/p>\n

STELTER: Your main take-away from your research was that — and your title of your paper, even, They Don\u2019t Give a Damn About Governing — is that these conservative media, uh, powers, the Rush Limbaughs of the world, that th-they\u2019re not necessarily interested in what the Republican Party establishment is interested in. Where does Trump fall in that? He\u2019s clearly anti-establishment.<\/line><\/p>\n

RUSH: You see, the title of this? “They Don\u2019t Give a Damn About Governing.” Where does this come from? What does “governing” now mean, being led by liberals? Is that what governing means? What does governing mean? Controlling? Government is not controlling. That\u2019s what the modern practitioners of it, however, think it is. We want to be liberated from a controling government. What does that mean, can\u2019t govern? What does that mean? <\/p>\n

“Well, we can\u2019t work together with Democrats to get legislation.” Maybe that\u2019s a good thing. Maybe we got too many laws. Maybe there\u2019s too much legislation. We got too much Obamacare. We got too many EPA regulations. We got too many onerous regulations in the way of people. We got too many tax laws. What do you mean, we can\u2019t govern? Seems to me the people that have been governing have making mistakes and botching everything.<\/p>\n

From the stimulus to Obamacare to this Iran deal, to everything else Obama\u2019s done on the economy, somebody tell me where it\u2019s working. He sure as hell is governing, though. What does this mean, “don\u2019t give a damn about governing”? I\u2019ll tell you what it means. Conservatives don\u2019t care about governing means they\u2019re not willing to sit on their hands and let liberals have their way. So Jackie Calmes, it\u2019s her turn to answer. This is what she said.<\/p>\n

CALMES: Right. And that\u2019s, uh, part of the secret of [Trump\u2019s] appeal. He\u2019s tapping into something. Because as much as Fox is valued by conservative voters, I found, eh, to my surprise somewhat that there is a really healthy strain on the right of people who have now grown suspicious of Fox News as well. And even before that Fox News debate, I picked up a lot of complaints from people who are for Ted Cruz.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Okay, now, to put this in proper context, this woman\u2019s original piece was how Fox News (just like they said about talk radio in the early days) created a bunch of mind-numbed robots that can\u2019t think for themselves. Fox News is this mindless, strident, extremist, conservative organization that\u2019s screwing everything up, and the audience is a bunch of idiots, blindly following whatever they hear. <\/p>\n

She writes the piece, she goes out and she does some research, and she finds out — and it took research for this — she finds out that there are a really healthy strain of people on the right who\u2019ve grown suspicious of Fox News as well. She\u2019s one of the brightest minds on the left and she had to do research to find out that Trump is anti-establishment? She had to do research to find out that Fox is viewed by many as part of the establishment? That\u2019s not news to people. It is to her. So she ends up pleasantly surprised. You know what, there are conservatives out there angry as Fox, too, as though she honestly did not know that. <\/p>\n

Esther Goldberg writing in the American Spectator: “Trump Derangement Syndrome<\/a> — It affects not just RINOs but establishment conservatives as well.” And this thing takes no prisoners. Esther Goldberg. “Thursday morning,” she begins, “Thursday morning I prepared a lovely prune-based compote. My husband adores this dessert, but I wondered if I shouldn\u00c2\u2019t send it over to George Will\u00c2\u2019s house, as an act of mercy. For Will has never before seemed as constipated as he did in his Thursday morning column on Donald Trump, whom he describes as ‘an unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate.'”<\/p>\n

Esther Goldberg says, “What exactly does Will mean by ‘vulgar\u2019? Is it an epithet that Washington arbiters of taste use to describe the regular vernacular and humor of everyday Americans? If you eschew complex ambiguity in favor of language that everyone can understand, does that make you vulgar?” I mean, this is a huge hit on George Will by Ms. Goldberg here. Vulgar? What is vulgar? “If you eschew complex ambiguity in favor of language that everyone can understand, does that make you vulgar?” In other words, if you speak plainly are you vulgar?<\/p>\n

“In a nod to personal liberty, Will grants that Trump\u00c2\u2019s ‘squalid performance and its coarsening of civic life are costs of freedom that an open society must be prepared to pay.\u2019 Yes, democracy is like that. It is exuberant, and accommodates a glorious diversity of taste and expression. ‘Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,\/Stains the white radiance of Eternity,\u2019 wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in Adonias. I, for one, adore the stunning display of colors and shapes with which God endowed this world. There\u00c2\u2019s room here for the Trumps as well as the Wills.”<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the pull quote, the money quote. “The problem for ruling class conservatives like Will –” and she quotes also a National Review writer Charles Cooke. “The problem for ruling class conservatives like Will and Cooke, is that the left has emasculated them. They tremble lest they let slip a faux pas that the left can jump upon. They must at all times show that their conservatism is ‘intellectually respectable and politically palatable,\u2019 and worry that Trump will make them look bad to the liberals and their media. They are unable to grasp the fact that, notwithstanding all their efforts, the left will never regard them as respectable and palatable. To achieve that goal, they must first become liberals themselves.”<\/p>\n

Well, this is just a reworking of an often-stated belief held by me on this program, and that is that many inside the so-called conservative media, Republican Party, you name it, are very much concerned, when they go after talk radio, the reason they do it is they don\u2019t want to be thought of as being vulgar like talk radio, or extreme or whatever. They want to be thought of as brilliant, smartest people in the room, acceptable by people on the left. In other words, the left are still the powerful people. The left are still the people you must please.<\/p>\n

The left are still the people whose approval you must gain, even if it means you must relentlessly attack and smear people on your own side, and that\u2019s essentially what she is saying is happening here. Ruling class conservatives have been emasculated by the left because their primary motive is to be accepted by the left. And that\u2019s the town, by the way, when I say that the left runs everything about Washington, they run the political culture, they run the social culture, they run it all. <\/p>\n

And if you want to be a big guy inside that universe, those are the people that you have to be on good terms with. And the way you do that is by doing and saying things palatable to them. That\u2019s the point she\u2019s making. And then she says Trump doesn\u2019t care. He makes clear he doesn\u2019t give a damn what liberals think. And everyday people of all political persuasions applaud when he stands up to the self-important, elitist media just as they did with Newt Gingrich in 2012 at one of the debates, and just as they did with Newt Gingrich back in 1994. <\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: Right on. Right on. And to the phones we go. We\u2019re gonna start with Joe in Bear, Delaware. Joe, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Hi, Rush. On Friday I was listening to you, you made a comment regarding you said something about your number one priority was to defeat the Democrats. That was the most important thing. And you were talking about the debates. You were saying that anybody on that Republican debate stage was preferable to Hillary or any other Democrat. Rush, I gotta disagree. I think unfortunately our number one priority has to be to defeat the Republican establishment first, \u2019cause we\u2019ll never make any progress against liberalism or Democrats until we stop the establishment from undermining conservatives.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Well, you may have a point, but for those who didn\u2019t hear Friday\u2019s program I want to — you quoted me accurately, but I want to put it in context. We had a couple seminar callers on Friday, I could spot \u2019em a mile away. I\u2019m an expert now at this. And because there have been whispers out there about why I, Mr. Conservative, the Mister Big, have not condemned Trump, have not disowned Trump, have not thrown Trump overboard, and of course the reason for the question is maybe he\u2019s not the conservative we\u2019ve always thought. Maybe I am, somebody else would say. Maybe Limbaugh\u2019s always been a — because everybody\u2019s always gunning for position one. <\/p>\n

And I, in explaining, you know, I was not gonna take the direct premise of the question \u2019cause I recognized it as a trap and a trick, so I told the guy my objective here is to beat Democrats, and I went on to give a long reason why. I think the only way to save this country from the direction we\u2019re heading is to defeat the people who are driving that bus, and that\u2019s the Democrats. We\u2019ve got to stop this country going in the direction the Democrats are taking us. And I said this is my first priority, not purity of ideology or anything else; in real life, the Democrats have to be defeated. Now, that may include similar type thinking when found in the Republican establishment. I\u2019m not gonna argue with you about that, but who do you want to aim at?<\/line><\/p>\n

CALLER: I want to aim at Republican establishment politicians and also the media, which brings me to what I heard yesterday. I heard George Will say something so asinine, I could not believe what he said on Fox News Sunday. He was talking about the people who e-mail in to him and to Chris Wallace complaining, conservatives who complain, and he\u2019s saying, well, the people who e-mail in and complain about Boehner and McConnell not getting anything done really should be complaining about James Madison because of the separation-of-powers and, you know, that\u2019s why we can\u2019t get anything done. So he threw a Founding Father under the bus in order to defend Boehner and McConnell. He said we should just get over separation of powers. I was stunned.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yeah, I got a lot of e-mail — I didn\u2019t watch. I don\u2019t watch Sunday shows anymore for a host of reasons, but I heard via e-mail practically everything that was said on that show yesterday. From Arthur Brooks calling people like you a low-information voter simply because you do not realize the dangers portended by Trump, and I some reaction.<\/p>\n

CALLER: What he said was such a perfect example of why we need to first direct our fire at the establishment, whether it be the media or the politicians.<\/p>\n

RUSH: You put it out there. I\u2019m sure some people will react. Have to a quick time-out. Thanks very much, Joe. I appreciate you got through. <\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: We\u2019re coming straight to you. But since we had Joe from Delaware on talking about Fox News Sunday, let\u2019s go to some of those sound bites. Rather than speculate, let\u2019s just listen to \u2019em. We\u2019ll start with George Will. This is during the Sunday panel of All Stars, analyzing things after the guests have finished. And Chris Wallace said, “You know, interesting poll results. Candidates like Jeb Bush, who voters say overwhelmingly is qualified to be president, are now lagging in the polls.” <\/p>\n

He\u2019s talking about the Fox News poll, Trump up 25%. That\u2019s not supposed to happen. Trump was… I mean, this is the first quote\/unquote “real poll” since Republican debate. All the polls previous to this one have been phone polls, Internet polls, the kind of polls that some would say are unserious, needed to wait on this. And this Fox poll shows pretty much what all those others said. Cruz, Carson, and Trump are the winners. <\/p>\n

Jeb Bush lost ground. John Kasich lost ground. All the supposed winners didn\u2019t do well in the polling data. So, anyway, Wallace is talking about that to George Will and says, “Interesting poll results. Candidates like Jeb Bush — who voters say overwhelmingly is qualified — are now lagging in the polls. And, meanwhile, candidates like Trump and Carson and Cruz, who voters say are not qualified, are the three front-runners. Which raises the question: What\u2019s going on here, George?”<\/p>\n

WILL: This is a version of the 1960s fad called primal-scream therapy. They\u2019re supposed to shout and get rid of all your repressed pain from childhood. This is, of course, particularly so for Mr. Trump. And what makes him fragile as a candidate is, first of all, he\u2019s a one-trick pony. He consists of saying, “I\u2019m rich, everyone who disagrees with me is stupid, and all our problems are simple if you\u2019ll put me in charge.” Since we are at the end of this gonna send [sic] a president, people have to say, “Do we really want to give nuclear weapons to Donald Trump?” at which point, I think things change.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Okay! (laughing) I didn\u2019t hear about that one. That\u2019s… (laughing) Can anybody say Barry Goldwater? I mean, these are the exact things that the Democrats said about Barry Goldwater back in 1964. They ran TV ads… You remember the Daisy Ad? For those of you too young or too inattentive back then to remember, Barry Goldwater was running against LBJ 1964, and they ran an ad of a little girl picking daisies out in the fields, some field.<\/p>\n