RUSH: All right, folks, the left is out there Well, maybe at some point that was an analogy that might have had some weight. The problem is, the conservative movement
We want a triumph here that’s based on the triumph of ideas, the triumph of ideas in the minds and hearts of voters. That gives it legitimacy and that creates mandates, and majorities that are real not via spin and fakery and so forth, which is what the left is into. So right now — and you can see by what happened with the ABC World News Tonight report last night. Take me out of context, make it sound like I’m anti-female and that’s why I’m opposing Harriet Miers, when I wasn’t even talking about me. I was talking about what Jim Dobson says that Karl Rove told him! This is what the left is doing. They’re salivating. They’ve got Karl Rove in jail. They’ve got “Scooter” Libby in jail. They’ve got the conservatives cracking up. They have the conservative movement falling apart. It’s
So they think that 1994 is about to be repeated, and this is one of their
“Already, the response to Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and soaring gasoline prices have taken a toll on the popularity of President Bush and Congressional Republicans; new polling by the Pew Research Center shows the approval rating for Congressional Republican leaders at 32%, with 52% disapproving, a sharp deterioration since March. The ratings of Democratic leaders stood at 32% approval, 48% disapproval.” This is margin-of-error stuff. It doesn’t show them having gained anything. There may be problems in the Republican world here, but there aren’t any gains being made by the Democrats — and that’s what Jim Carville has been running around trying to tell these people. You know, you can sit there and wail and moan and complain all you want, but you’re not
Culture of cronyism and corruption? Yeah, okay, just put a P in there. I’ll come up with a word for it here in just a second. “What they need, many Democrats acknowledge, is their own version of the ‘Contract With America,’ the Republican agenda — tax cuts, a balanced budget, a stronger military and an array of internal reforms — that the party campaigned on in the 1994 landslide election, when it won control of the House and the Senate. ‘I think Democrats understand we have a great opportunity,’ said Senator Charles E. Schumer… ‘We’ve gotten much better at blocking some of the bad things the Republicans would do, but we know you can’t be a party of long-term majorities unless you put forward the things you would do.’ … Charles Cook, the influential nonpartisan analyst of Congressional elections, said: ‘Right now, if I had to bet would the Democrats take the House and Senate back, I’d say no. But are the odds a heck of a lot better than they were three months ago or six months ago? Heck, yes.'” I’ll give you a little reality spin on this. There are 435 seats in the House of Representatives, and all of these districts out there in the states, you’ve heard the term gerrymandering. What has happened here — and this happens whoever the majority is — is every ten years you rewrite the districts and so forth. You know how many of these 435 seats in the House are competitive? At most, 20. By the way, a lot of that is thanks to campaign finance reform (the Incumbent Protection Act of whatever year it was authored) 20 seats in the House — 20, out of 435 — may be competitive, and the Democrats would have to win almost all of them to get their majority back, and what their thinking is that the number of competitive seats is now on the rise, because there is so much anger and sadness and distrust at the Republicans. Now, if you go back and look at all these things, “the response to Hurricane Katrina, war in Iraq, and soaring gasoline prices,” none of these things were
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RUSH: All right, let’s move on here to Howard Fineman, who, as I say, is no doubt Iraq, but the ‘neocons’ who convinced him to go to war there have developed one of their own — a political one: Blame the Administration. Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.” Now, this lead here is based on the fact that the Weekly Standard — that’s who the neocons are. The Weekly Standard and Charles Krauthammer and a number of other conservatives are the ones that convinced Bush to go to war in Iraq. Bush didn’t come up with the idea on his own. Bush was sitting there minding his own business, reading a book on goats or whatever, and here came the Weekly Standard and the neocons and told him to go to war, and Bush said, “Okay, because when the neocons snap their fingers, I go to war,” and now the neocons are all upset, and so Bush doesn’t know how to get out of it but the neocons are going to get out of it by blaming him because they’re not going to take the hit. Now, folks, this is symptomatic of inside-the-Beltway culture.
These people
It’s just like the Hurricane Katrina was not nearly as bad as it was reported. The aftermath was not nearly as bad. The media got
He.
Wait ’til you hear some of the analysis in this piece. “In 1973, Karl Rove met George W. Bush, and became the R2D2 and Luke Skywalker of Republican politics. At first, neither was plugged into ‘The Force’ — the conservative movement. But over the years they learned how to use its power. By the time Bush was in his second term as governor, laying the groundwork for his presidential run, he and Rove [R2D2] had gathered all of the often competing and sometimes contradictory strains of conservatism into one light beam. You could tell by the people they brought to Austin. To tie down the religious conservatives, they nudged John Ashcroft out of the race and conducted a literal laying on of hands at the governor?s mansion with leaders such as James Dobson.
“For the libertarian anti-tax crowd, they brought in certified supply-sider Larry Lindsey as the top economic advisor. For the traditional war hawks they brought in Paul Wolfowitz, among others, to get Bush up to speed on the world. For the traditional corporate types ? well, Bush had that taken care of on his own. But now all the constituent parts are — for various reasons — going their own way. Here’s a checklist…” All right, well, let’s take this item by item. So Bush and Rove never were conservative but they realized they’re going to have to once again fool conservatives into thinking they were. So they brought in people that they really didn’t believe in but that they knew would placate people. So they brought in Larry Lindsey, a “certified supply-sider.” They brought in Wolfowitz just to get the pro-war side, the national neocon movement. Bush, he already had these corporate people nailed down. That was easy and, “To tie down the religious conservatives they nudged John Ashcroft out of the race and conducted a literal laying on of hands at the governor’s mansion with leaders such as James Dobson.” So the point of this is that Bush and Rove were never conservative but they knew they couldn’t get anywhere without the conservatives so this was the window dressing to fool conservatives. Item by item. He says to religious conservatives Harriet Miers’ “nomination was the final insult. Religious conservatives have an inferiority complex in the Republican Party.
“In an interesting way, it?s the same attitude that many African-Americans have had toward the Democratic Party over the years. They think that the Big Boys want their votes but not their presence or their full participation. [W]hat really frosts the religious types is that Bush evidently feels that he can only satisfy them by stealth — by nominating someone with absolutely no paper trail. It?s an affront. And even though Dr. Dobson is on board — having been cajoled aboard by Rove — I don?t sense that there is much enthusiasm for the enterprise out in,” Dobson’s office. “I expect that any GOP 2008 hopeful who wants evangelical support — people like Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum and maybe even George Allen — will vote against Miers’s confirmation in the Senate.” What’s wrong with this whole thing? What’s wrong with this whole analysis of religious conservatives? Well, the primary thing is that they’re not frosted! The religious conservatives are full-force behind Harriet Miers. The religious conservatives are not angry about anything being stealth. I’m talking to religious conservatives on this program who, if they’re angry at anybody, it’s people like me. They’re angry at what they think are the elitist inside-the-Beltway conservative intellectuals. They’re not mad at Bush. The idea! Howard, how can you miss this? How in the world can you miss it? He must think that everybody in the Republican Party is a religious-right conservative wacko and that all those people who oppose Miers are no different than the religious right anywhere else. You know, they You can’t reason with those people, and even Bush knows that, but these people are smarter than we knew because they recognize now that Bush didn’t really mean it. There’s nothing stealth about this, as far as that goes. Bush even said yesterday that her religious views played a role. I’m at a loss to understand how somebody with as great a reputation as Howard Fineman has can so miss who is not supporting the Harriet Miers nomination and who is. If it weren’t for the religious right, the nomination would already be dead, if I may be honest. The religious right is who’s saving it. He thinks they’re killing it! Enough said. “Corporate CEOs,” is the next item of support Bush is losing. “For them, Bush?s handling of Katrina was, and remains, a mortal embarrassment to their class, which Bush is supposed to have represented — at least to some extent. These are people who believe in the Faith of Management — in anticipating problems and moving mass organizations. They also like to think of themselves as having a social conscience. And even if they don?t, they are sensitive to world opinion. The vivid images from the Superdome were just too much for these folks. Recently, a prominent Republican businessman, whom I saw in a typical CEO haunt, astonished me with the severity of his attacks on Bush?s competence. And Bush had appointed this guy to a major position! Amazing.” Howard, you’re missing this one, too. CEOs upset with Bush? Over Katrina? The pictures from the Superdome, all those things?
Those were lies, Howard! All those things that “went on,” didn’t. We now know why people didn’t go in there, because there was reports. There were reports in the media of mass murder, rape and anarchy, people with guns firing them into the air at relief workers — and these CEOs know this!
“For them, Bush’s handling of Katrina, was and remains a mortal embarrassment to their class,” meaning their class of existence, not their style, but like you have the CEO class, then you have the upper middle class; you have the middle class. It’s an economic and social designation that he’s talking about, and he claims that they’re all embarrassed about this, and are peeling away with one anecdote. “A prominent Republican businessman, whom I saw in a typical CEO haunt…” What the hell is that? What is a typical CEO haunt? A golf course? A hunting club? A restaurant on the top floor of the tallest building in town? What is it? “…astonished me with the severity of his attacks on Bush’s competence, and Bush had appointed this guy to a major position.” Well,
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RUSH: I want to go back to this Fineman piece where he says that one of the groups that’s deserting the conservative movement, i.e., the president is CEOs, and he’s got this one anecdote with one disgruntled ex-Bush appointee who is the CEO, and that establishes the case. Now, everybody knows that all CEOs do not vote Republican. This is one of the biggest myths in American politics, that big business is pro-Republican. Most big business give equally to both parties to cover their bets because it’s an extortion racket! Look at Microsoft. They learned the lesson. You don’t give enough to the Democrats, when you get in power, we’ll sue you, anti-trust and all that. Bill Gates has opened an office in Washington, I think, now to deal with this. He didn’t have one before that. The idea that CEOs are monolithic and always Republican, and are fed up is silly. Look at the Hollywood left CEOs. There’s so many CEOs out there that are liberals and left-wing, it would stun you. But then, the further notion that they are
“Well,” you say. “Okay, what’s causing this? What’s really lighting the fires of the left?”
It has to be the falling poll numbers, and it has to be what they think is dissension in the ranks over the Harriet Miers nomination. Those two things have got them all fired up on the left, the Democratic Party and the media. “It’s ours. We own it; ’06, ’08, ours!” Well, the people at the Power Line blog have done some interesting research — actually Real Clear Politics and Power Line. Bush’s average, his approval-disapproval average right now to 41.7% approval at this point, and Power Line says, “Are they really that bad? That is at or about the low point in nearly five years in office. How does it compare to other presidents’ lowest poll ratings? Actually it isn’t that bad. Here are the low approval ratings for the last seven presidents. Johnson, 35%.” Remember now Bush is at 41.7%. “Nixon, 24%; Ford 37. Carter 28. Reagan 35. Bush One 29. Clinton 37%,” and you heard right. Every president since 1963 has had approval ratings at one time or another during his administration at least five points lower than Bush’s current low point. Bush has a
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