RUSH: The Democrats are in Washington. Well, that doesn’t really cover it because they’re always in Washington. But there’s a meeting of Democrats in Washington and it’s called: “A Campaign for America’s Future: Taking Back America,” and it’s all these lib groups, and they got seminars there being conducted by George Lakoff (rhymes with), the Berkeley linguist, telling them how to recapture these golden era moments with the right use of language and words. I mean, they’re getting up and they’re ranting and they’re raving and we’ve got some audio sound bites of it, but first, the sound bites we have from yesterday, today Howard Dean showed up. By the way, their fund-raising continues to plummet. Dean is not succeeding at all with his tactics or techniques at fund-raising. The gap between the RNC and the DNC is continuing to grow. But Dean showed up and he told the activists today at the Take Back America Conference that they have an extraordinary opportunity to provide an alternative to the country after more than four years of the dark, difficult, dishonest vision the Republican Party offers for America, and he said that there are three opportunities that the Democrats have to win back power. Here are the three: Making pensions portable so they can be taken from one job to the next. He then criticized President Bush’s private accounts for Social Security. The second opportunity that Dean told the Take Back America crowd was, changes to election laws, making Election Day a holiday or moving it from Tuesday and making it easier for everyone to vote such as illegal aliens and felons. I added that. He didn’t say it but we know that’s who are they’re targeting if you ever listen to Hillary or Sheila Jackson Lee.
SCHAKOWSKY: In politics, you say something a hundred times and it starts to add up to something. Take the repeal of the estate tax, clearly a giveaway to, as my mother would say, “The filthy rich.” The president calls it the death tax. Then, every Republican in Congress makes a speech about the death tax. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and right-wing talk radio call it the death tax. The Washington Times writes about the death tax, and before you know it, the New York Times reports on the death tax and since everybody dies, the public wants relief from the death tax.
RUSH: That’s what it is. It’s what it is. What are we supposed to do? The estate tax doesn’t tell anybody what it is. It’s the death tax: 55% of their estate when they die, 55%! — unless something is done about it. I find it laughable that the Democrats are complaining here about essentially talking points. I find it laughable they think there’s all this coordination when that is the essence. They got a guy teaching them how to talk, teaching them how to use the language, this Lakoff guy from Berkeley, and they’re up there complaining about talking points. Do we need to remind you of the talking points that went out on gravitas? We find a new Democrat word or phrase every week here that they all utter. More from congressperson Schakowsky. She admits that Democrat internal polling shows that their scares on Social Security haven’t worked, but that doesn’t matter.
SCHAKOWSKY: We were looking over poll numbers, most of which are very, very favorable. The pollster warned us, however, that most Americans just don’t believe that President Bush would propose a plan that actually destroys Social Security even though of course he does and it does. What these poll numbers tell me is that we all need to say over and over again that the president’s plan destroys Social Security until the American people do believe that it destroys Social Security.
RUSH: Wrong. Ms. Schakowsky, let me help you understand this. The president’s proposal might contribute to the eventual destruction of the Democratic Party, but it will not destroy Social Security. A president who proposes the destruction of Social Security is finished. Any party that supports it is finished. There’s no such claim. There’s no such proposal. It’s simply a reform. I could cite for you the Zogby poll which shows, when it’s presented factually and honestly in the form of questions to poll respondents, that a vast majority of the American people, particularly the younger you go, support the president’s plan, including private accounts. So what she’s really afraid of and all the Democrats are afraid of is the destruction of the Democratic Party because it’s that link to FDR and the New Deal that established dependence on government as the primary weapon the Democrats use to stay in power. Create more and more dependent people dependent on you in government for whatever they have, whatever they want, and many of their needs, and, bammo! You own them. You own their votes. This would put a big chink in that whole legacy, and that’s what they’re fighting.
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RUSH: A couple more sound bites from the fanatical Take Back America Conference in Washington. Donna Brazile, managing director of Brazile and Associates, gave a speech entitled: Mobilizing and Persuading the Base. I want you to listen to a portion of Donna Brazile’s remarks. She fires up the kooks in the audience by making fun of white people in suburbia.
RUSH: All right, so I guess what she’s saying is the Democrats have spent too which time targeting white suburban people, I guess where the moderates live. We’ve got to spend more time focusing on the inner city populations instead of… I’m just at a loss to understand this politically. If the Democrats are doing anything they are taking the inner city blacks for granted, but the thing that’s ironic is, for 50 years they’ve been promising to get people out of the inner cities and to the ‘burbs. They’ve been promising to elevate their standards of living, and they have failed, and I think they don’t like going to the inner cities because it’s just a constant reminder of the failure. We have Howard Dean this morning with some of his remarks at the Take Back America 2005 conference. Just a portion of what the chairman said…
DEAN: Frankly, we ought to have voting, either make the Tuesday a holiday or move it to another day where people can get out and vote. You think people can work all day and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever and get home and still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Republicans I guess can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives, but for ordinary working people who have to work eight hours a day, they have kids and they’ve got to get home to those kids. The idea of making them stand for eight hours to cast their ballot for democracy is wrong. We ought to make voting easier to do.
RUSH: And there you have the backbone of the proposal for the Democrats to Take Back America. “They’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives.” (Laughing.) It’s not… (interruption) Hey, he’s not trying to attract Republicans, Mr. Snerdley. Republicans aren’t in this audience. He’s trying to fire up the kooks, pure and simple. This is all about fund-raising and he’s failing dismally at it. The Democratic National Committee’s fund-raising is way down. Hey, look, you’ve got to cut the guy some slack. If I can sit here and say, “Why do they need a national holiday, most of their voters don’t work anyway.” I mean, how can I get mad at Dean for saying Republicans haven’t done an honest day’s work in their lives? Well, I know, comedy depends on an element of truth. That’s why what I say is funny and so forth. The thing that’s ironic if you ask me, it’s not a question of the Democrats not having time to vote. They’ve got too much time to vote. Most of them vote five times a day on Election Day. They file in advance, they file provisional ballots, they file absentees and they show up at the polls and they go to a different poll, dead Democrats vote in different cities. I think there’s too much time to vote out there. The reason why Democrats are standing in line is because it’s the fourth polling place they’ve been that day and they’re behind in line a bunch of Democrats that are also moving from polling place to polling place.
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