RUSH: Gainesville, Florida. This is Tom. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: I was just thinking. I’m far too young to remember the years of President Reagan, but I do recall hearing his common phrase of “trust but verify.”
RUSH: Yeah, it was about the commies.
CALLER: Yeah, I realize it was about the commies. I think part of it maybe — maybe you can help me — but maybe it was his whole stance on government and that the people should perhaps be a little bit wary of what the politicians are up to, and it seems to me today’s conservatives are willing to trust the government, as you’ve been, you know, asking for reasons why we should support this nomination, that we’re supposed to be willing to trust the president, yet when are we going to get around to verifying what we’re being told about this nominee and whether or not she actually is a conservative?
RUSH: Well, that will happen during the confirmation hearings.
CALLER: I mean, and I frame this from the point of view that this is not a president that I see as being very conservative, and therefore it seems to be a bit of a reach to say that someone who’s rather moderate would appoint a Scalia or a Thomas. I think he’s not demonstrated very many conservative actions, although his rhetoric is conservative.
RUSH: No, he has. This is the thing. It’s an enigma because he has done quite a few conservative things. The thing that people look at that don’t attach much conservatism to is the fact he hasn’t vetoed any spending bills and the federal budget has grown faster than even it did under Clinton, and there’s been no brakes put on it. People say that’s not conservative, but his judicial nominees for the circuits and the federal district courts have been on the money.
CALLER: Can I say one quick thing about that?
RUSH: Yeah. I wonder about that, too, because is that perhaps a smoke screen for them to point at and say, “Well, if my appellate nominees are conservative you must assume my Supreme Court nominees are also conservative.” I don’t see how one necessarily implies the other.
RUSH: No, I mean that’s basically what people are saying. There are plenty of people out there with proven records that we wouldn’t have to guess, roll the dice, wait ten years, or what have you.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: No, that’s true. I was just speaking under the context of you don’t think he’s very conservative. He is on a lot of things, tax cuts.
CALLER: Tax cuts are great. But we seem to be using a policy right now of guns and butter, and I think that violates every economic law from the beginning of time. I mean, we’re in a wartime yet we’re still increasing Medicare, we’re increasing the Department of Education, again, Ronald Reagan said let’s get rid of it and now we’re doubling it.
RUSH: Yeah, but he didn’t. See, that’s the thing. Reagan didn’t get rid of the Department of Education.
CALLER: They were talking about it. We’re not hearing that rhetoric now.
RUSH: Fine. Well, now, wait a second, now. Let’s take these. He talked about it, and everybody went, “Rah-rah-rah!” and then the Newt Republicans said, “We’re going to get rid of the NEA.” It’s still there.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: A lot of talk.
CALLER: Well, I read an interesting point of view on that today, actually, on the web. It was talking about when you have Republican leadership, they’re going to try to “reach out” to the voters that they don’t have on the left so that the Republicans are actually going to move the country to the left, whereas the Democrat Party is going to reach out to the moderate Republican voter and actually maybe nibble away at the size of government a little bit, and I think that’s been empirically shown in the past 15 years or so.
RUSH: There is something to that. It’s much easier to get votes by buying them, particularly if you have a population that’s gotten used to it, and you put more and more people on the entitlement mentality. It’s much easier once you get power of showing that you’re not mean. A lot of this is why we want to have the debate.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Follow me on this. The left has said, “We are cold-hearted, mean, cruel, mean-spirited, racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes who don’t care if people are starving.” So what do we do? We act defensive. “Oh, no, we’re nice guys! Watch us, and we’ll rebuild New Orleans at three times the cost of the Democrats, and we will make sure that seniors who don’t even want it get free drugs as part of Medicare. 
See, we have big hearts?” It’s the problem. The definition of how you prove that you’re a compassionate person. This is what’s pervasive about it. The left has for 50 years been defining these terms. So you’re right. The Republicans become the majority and they get sensitive to all these charges, they say, “We’re not this, we’re not these rotten scalawags, we’re not mean-spirited,” and the definition of that is how much money do you give people. This is why we want the fight. This is why conservatives are saying, “It’s time to straighten all this out. We’re sick and tired of being tagged with this racist tag, homophobes and all this, when none of this is true.” The real racists are on the left and it’s time to say this.
CALLER: I know you’re right, Rush, but it all goes to the unity argument and the only way we’re going to be unified with these people is if we all join MoveOn.org which is not going to happen, but I think the real problem is the voters who decided they were going to vote for John Kerry to send a message that they didn’t agree with President Bush and all that did was undercut the apparent amount of support that the conservative movement had. Think about if the president had actually gotten 55, 56, 57% of the vote, he would have had a much larger mandate and he could really point to that and say, “See, you know, the support for the Democrat Party really is dwindling,” they did even more pathetic this time around than they did in 2000.
RUSH: See, now you’re singing my tune. I don’t want to wait around ’til we get 55 or 56. We got the trend. We got, whatever it was, 53. We got a four million vote margin. We still sit around and accept the terms of the left. “Well, this isn’t a mandate. Why, with 55,000 votes change in Ohio, Kerry would have won.” BS. It’s an absolute lie. It’s an absolute myth. The fact is the Democrats are losing elections more and more often — and there’s a trend going, and it’s time to hammer the nail. You’re making my argument out here, and this is the thing people have been fighting for 40 and 50 years on the conservative side of things, and to have to continue to frame everything we do in the bibliography and the vocabulary of the left is frustrating and to continue to have to act defensive and stealth and use “trickinology” or whatever to run end runs around these people, the longer we do this and the longer we avoid acting confident and strong and decisive, the longer we’re going to have to put up with this duality here of having the liberals becoming more and more irrelevant yet still appearing to define the terms under which public policy is debated, and I for one am fed up with those terms and I’m fed up with the definition of compassion, and I’m fed up with the way we’ve gone about trying to prove to black people that we’re not racists.
I’m fed up with the way the left has gotten away with defining that when they’re the ones that perpetuate it. I’m tired of the superiority of the left, I’m tired of them sitting on their ivory towers and telling us, you know, what’s what and how is how, and I’m sick and tired of people that are not offended by it. I know that there are a number of different strategeries that you can employ to battle these things, but I’m going to tell you this, folks — and this is where the rubber meets the road; this is putting the pedal to the metal; this is where the hot knife goes through the butter; this is where the elevator goes all the way to the top: When it comes to winning elections, it has been done by articulating strong, fervent, decisive conservatism. It has not been done trying to fool people into thinking we’re something that they don’t think we are. We’ve not adopted the language of the left to go win elections, and we don’t have to do this. It’s amazing to me that conservatism wins elections and then after that the very people who benefited from the conservatism all of a sudden think they have to start speaking liberal language in order to stay in power and to prove to people that they’re not mean-spirited racist, sexist, bigot, homophobic and so forth, and that’s what I mean by acting defensive, or embarrassed, or what have you. Anyway, I’m a little long here, but that’s a great call out there.
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