We’re Stigmatized, But the Enemy Isn’t

RUSH: Richard, Sanibel, Florida, you’re next. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Yeah. Mega dittos. How you doing?
RUSH: Fine, sir. Thanks very much.
CALLER: Rush, what I called about, and this ties in to what I called about, this “mission accomplished” sign on the carrier, why doesn’t anybody in politics, Bush or Cheney or somebody, ever point out the fact that, first, it wasn’t Bush’s sign, it was the aircraft carrier’s sign. He didn’t put it there, and second, the mission was accomplished. The mission that that aircraft carrier was on was in fact accomplished, and that’s why they were back in port.
RUSH: Well, I myself have pointed this out. There are two phases to this. The invasion of Iran, the deposing of Saddam was successful, and it took place in less than two weeks.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: The mission was accomplished. What we’re doing now is building the peace. What we’re doing now is allowing the Iraqis to put themselves back together, and we’re supervising it, and it’s an ongoing mission. But the fact that there are people that want to portray both as failures is part and parcel of what Shelby Steele is talking about here. I don’t care whose sign it was. I don’t know why Bush doesn’t come out and defend himself on this sort of thing. I couldn’t begin to tell you.
CALLER: Well, what is happening in this country? I talked to you once before. It was shortly before the 2004 election, and my point then is really the same as it is now, and that is, the left carries the day in dialogue and conversation. I get depressed. Well, not really, but down when I go to a cocktail party, almost everybody is a Republican, and they’re all mouthing things that sound like they came out of the New York Times, like we don’t want to be perceived as the “evil empire” ourselves, and “I hope Israel doesn’t fly off the handle,” and —

RUSH: That’s Shelby Steele’s point. Now you’re able to recognize it and see it for what it is, and people will see it in themselves. Look, this is all good. We continue to make progress in understanding certain things and why we’ve drifted in certain directions in this country. Shelby Steele identifies this stuff. It’s not a reason to get depressed. It’s a reason to, you know, be joyful. We have ways of understanding and explaining it to people. What you’ve just described among your Republican buddies is precisely the stigma that Shelby Steele says exists over the sin of white supremacy or superiority — and he doesn’t mean this in a racial sense. He is black but he’s not being critical of it.
He’s simply saying it’s caused a massive transformation because the white supremacy or superiority was brought about and existed on a flawed moral foundation, and the flawed moral foundation in our case was slavery and racial discrimination. Regardless of the steps we’ve taken to fix it and the progress we’ve made, there are those who don’t ever want to forget it and will continually bring it up. They are forever convinced that we are forever sinned and in this case there ain’t no savior, there ain’t no savior to absolve us. They don’t want our sins absolved, because they are self-loathing themselves.
They have an animus toward the country over the inequities, the inequalities, the prosperity, our superpower size. So when you hear your Republican buddy say, “I hope Israel reins it in,” the explanation for this is so simple, and it wouldn’t work, none of this stigmatization would work, were it not for one thing, and that is everybody is so obsessed with what everybody else is going to think of them. In the meantime, while you’re worried about what everybody else is going to think about you, they’re worried about what you think about them because everybody is like you. Everybody is like we all are. We’re all worried about what people think.
Well, I’m not anymore, and professionally, career-wise, I never have been. It’s just a natural human thing, folks. We’re all egocentric to one degree or another, and I’ll tell you a short little story. I don’t want to mention any names. At one point in my life I met this woman, and it was a good friendship and she was available and I was available, and I was not interested, because I was on the cusp of great things, and I had other things on my mind. I didn’t want to cut myself off from half the population in this country in terms of opportunity, female-wise. So nothing ever happened, and it was years later she asked me, “By the way, why? Why didn’t we ever amount to anything?”
I told her what I just told you. She said, “Thank God. I thought it was because you thought something about me you didn’t like,” and that’s all I mean. Everybody is always assuming that there’s something about them that people are reacting to, when in truth, everybody you’re dealing with is worried about what you think of them. But the point of it all is, is that when you go through life obsessed with what people are going to think of you because of what you say or what you do, you are naturally restricting what you would otherwise normally, naturally want to say or want to do. So in the case of Shelby Steele here, we allow the stigma.

Even your Republican buddies, Richard, allow the stigma of what some people are going to think, people you don’t even know in this case. “I hope Israel doesn’t go nuts. What will everybody think of us?” You have to forget that, and you have to focus on what’s best for you. All of us have to do that, and you start letting what people are going to think of it stop you from doing what you think is best or what you want to do or whatever pursuit of happiness you’re engaged in, you’re giving them a whole lot of control over your life that they don’t deserve and they’re probably not even trying to exert anyway. You just think they are. So the stigma is allowed to survive. “I don’t want anybody to think I’m racist. I don’t want anybody to think I’m heartless or I don’t care.” So we don’t fight the Iraq war to really win it. We’re going to win it, but we fight it in a minimalist way so people don’t get mad at us for how we won it, because, “They’re a Third World country and they’re so poor and we gotta give them a chance.” It’s like in the Little League spotting the better team 12 runs before you start just to feel good about it.
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RUSH: Marcus in Portland, Oregon, Marcus, great that you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thanks for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I wanted to get back to the point in the Shelby Steele article, but in a different way. I was reading about all of the accounts of the protest yesterday, and I was really just struck by the well-meaning people that really want to help these people that are disadvantaged, but that there’s an unintended consequence of basically not encouraging these people to follow a general path that this country has been on for quite a long time that has created this wealth. I’m really concerned that these people that have great intentions but don’t quite understand that they’re really doing a disservice to a lot of these immigrants that want to come here by not encouraging them to follow the rules, or to not encourage people to —
RUSH: That’s because these people think the rules are “unfair,” and so the rules have to be modified, changed, gotten rid of, or else slinked around. The rules are unfair. If you have a modicum of guilt… I’ll tell you a story. I’ve told this story before but it’s been a long time, but I’ll tell you this story because it fits to a T today. I’m out in California. I’m playing golf with some friends. We’re going to have dinner Saturday night in my friend’s club, and that’s fine and dandy. When I get out there, a friend picks me up at the airport, says, “By the way, so-and-so is going to join us for dinner. He’s a well-known national TV personality. He’s going to join us because he’s a guest here of another member, and he asked if he could join us for dinner.” I said, “Okay, no problem.” So this guy shows up, national TV star, and we sit down to dinner and the host starts provoking me and trying to get me. You know, all these libs think that I’m going to show up and start biting their heads off and telling them what a bunch of louts they are and so forth, and so they start taunting me in a way to get me to behave as a circus act and behave as they think I am.

I just sit there. I’m just here to have dinner and play golf. I don’t really care to sit here and talk politics with a bunch of airheads. When I leave the office, I leave the office. I didn’t go out there to talk politics with a bunch of Nimrods. So I didn’t rise to the bait. At some point they brought up immigration, and my host is loaded for bear on immigration. Once the subject comes up that’s all that’s going to be discussed the rest of the night and he’s going to do 90% of the talking. So in the process of him sharing his opinions and how illegal immigration is destroying California, is not going to be around as we know it much longer and it’s terrible and all that, the nationally known TV host starts popping up with his own opinions and ignoring all of the facts and the sources for the facts that my friend has postulated.
This frustrates my friend, because he’s not just offering opinion. He’s backing it up with facts from stories in the LA Times about the number of emergency rooms that have shut down because the people going there don’t pay, and about all the advertising on television, how to get around having to pay an emergency room, how to get around, having to pay for an ambulance. “Don’t call an ambulance, call a cab if you need to go to the emergency room,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or, “Call an ambulance, don’t call a cab,” whatever, however it works.
Of course it’s going over the head of the nationally known television star because facts were irrelevant. All that mattered to him was his feelings about this, which continued to frustrate my host. The host, after not too long a period of time, started making pointed comments and questions to the nationally known TV star, and the nationally known TV star’s answers were just breathtakingly vapid. Breathtakingly. Everything he thought he knew came from the New York Times, and that was it. His only source. The host continues to get exacerbated and said, “Well, let me ask you something. If one of these illegals decided to climb the fence, come into your backyard, and date your daughter, would you care?” No. Wouldn’t bother me a bit. And he ended up saying, last thing, this ended the evening because the host couldn’t handle it anymore. The nationally known TV star said, “I just want you to understand where I’m coming from. If there are poor brown and black people in the world who want to come to my country to improve their lives, I am not going to stand in their way,” and the host, exasperated, almost starts spewing sputum, he’s so angry.
“I can’t relate to this. Do you think that’s all this is? This is not even immigration. We’re not even talking about immigration to you, nationally known TV star.” So we’re driving home, and the host is still upset because this topic is… I mean, it owns him. We’re driving home, and the host still just can’t believe what’s happened here, because he was armed with facts that should have persuaded anybody that there’s a problem, and I said, “Host, you have to understand that the nationally known TV star had one objective tonight, and that was to make sure nobody at the table thought he was heartless, cold-hearted, cruel, had no compassion. You’re not going to get him to say that poor people of color from around the world should not be allowed to come here. He can’t. He is so absorbed with what you think and what he thinks of himself,” and the host slammed the steering wheel.

“By God, that’s right,” and it is. It is. So, Marcus, you talk about these people that are trying to help and end up not serving their cause because they’re not doing the best thing for these people who are actually coming here illegally, play by the rules, come here and become an American like immigrants in the past have always done. We are a melting pot, but these people are not part of the melting pot; these people are just coming here for work. At one point they’re just three feet away from us. You know, they’re not getting on a ship, sailing from the far corners of the globe. They’re coming here for work, but they don’t care to assimilate and acculturate; they’re demanding to continue to be exempt.
They want to remain illegals. They don’t want to go through the process. If they can be automatically declared legal they’ll take it, but they don’t want to have to go through the process. So you have these people encouraging them and it’s the same thing as the nationally known TV star. “Well, you know, we have it so lucky and so good and so fortunate we are in this country and these people are so downtrodden and they don’t even have high school educations. We must help them.” This is the stigma that Shelby Steele is talking about. This is the original sin here. We just get so caught up in the stigma and what people are going to think — and what we think of ourselves in a phony way — that we stand in the way of doing the right thing.
Not just the right thing in terms of law and order, but the right thing morally, the right thing in terms of character. We will allow this stigma to be a huge obstacle that gets in our way to stop us from doing that because somehow we make ourselves feel better in trying to help. “Ah, we have great intentions,” or we’re afraid what somebody else is going to say about us or what have you, and it’s a paralyzing thing, and as such in the immigration debate, it’s reached Washington, and there’s a minimalist way of dealing with this. They’re not about to go about solving the problem because they can’t even say what the real problem is. If the problem-solvers (and I say that laughingly) in Washington cannot even honestly address what the problem is, how in the hell can they solve it? You can’t. If you don’t honestly identify the problem, you can’t.
So we come up every 20 years with a piece of legislation that acknowledges the legitimacy of what is illegitimate. We tell ourselves we’re good people. We fabricate reasons why we need this to happen and so forth, all the while abandoning the right thing to do because of an overwhelming sense of guilt at our prosperity, or the use and wielding of our power that we have. We’re sort of paralyzed and hamstrung a lot of times in doing the right things where minorities are concerned, people of different color or of lower socioeconomic circumstances. It’s why the left has always been more interested in understanding why violent criminals do what they do rather than protecting people from them, and in fact, much of the left wants to blame socioeconomic circumstances for the evil acts of others, and by so doing, absolve them of their actions and transfer the blame because of their collective guilt over the circumstances that exist in the country. Again, the foundation or basis for my comments here is found in Shelby Steele’s piece today at OpinionJournal.com. I cannot recommend this strongly enough.
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RUSH: Let’s look at the other side of this. Let’s take the war in Iraq, as an example. Again, playing off Shelby Steele here. He says the guilt, the white guilt that we face and that we deal with in this country causes us to hold back on the full use of our power, the full projection of our power, that we’re fighting a minimalist war because we’re so concerned of what the Europeans are going to think. In fact, he even makes the point that if we lose this war the Europeans will like us better because we will have practiced the proper restraint against an enemy that can’t really compete with us. “It’s just a bunch of insurgent terrorists, after all, and they can’t compete with us. It’s really not fair. It’s a Third World country and these people are just misguided but they’re trying and so we have to back off.”
The terrorists, on the other hand, I don’t think conscience or guilt exists in them. They can behead; they can blow up mosques. They can murder 3,000 innocent people at one time, or they can murder one or five or 20 at one time. They can do it on videotape for all the world to see. They can kidnap an Italian journalist. We end up being blamed for the way she’s rescued! They on the other hand can slice off an American’s head, and the father of that American will get mad at the United States, not mad at the terrorists. No, they’re given a pass. For some reason they are not held to the same standard. No, of course, not! They’re uncivilized, backwards, fourteenth century people.
They don’t have any guilt. They’re not dealing with any guilt. They’re not fighting minimalist wars. They’re doing it best they can with what they’ve got, and if they got hold of a nuke, they’d use it, and they wouldn’t think a thing about it. And there are probably people in this country who, “Yeah, we deserve it.” Like the state department after 9/11 conducted a very public seminar, “Why do they hate us so?” after 9/11. So the terrorists can run around and they can behead. They can slice; they can dice. They can put people on TV. In fact, do whatever they want, blow up innocent people in cars, and nobody condemns it.
Not nobody, but I mean the people condemning. Abu Ghraib, Club Gitmo, you think that our prisoners aren’t going through literal hell before they get their heads cut off? But what do Democrats and leftists in this country focus on? They focus on our so-called inhumane treatment. They force on us this stigma, this guilt, that we don’t deserve to win. We’ve got to let these people out of our prisons. This is unfair. We want to grant them constitutional rights! We want to have this get taxpayer funded lawyers so they can try their cases all the way up to the US Supreme Court, in the middle of wartime, and it’s more than just the fact that the left is anti-war and so forth. You’ve got a lot of factors that go into all this, but the enemy is not held to the same standard. We’ve gotta make sure that we grant them official status under the Geneva conventions, when they do not deserve it.
They don’t qualify. But that doesn’t matter. So the terrorists can do whatever they want. They are not burdened by shame. They are not burdened by guilt. They are not burdened by conscience. Yet we allow ourselves to be restricted and restrained by all of those things, and it’s so bad that a majority of people in this country cannot even bring themselves to condemn the tactics used by our enemy in this case, and in fact have actually made it difficult for us to achieve victory. There is an ongoing effort to sabotage victory over this enemy from the standpoint of not using military tribunals, to trying to shut down this NSA program to identify when the next 9/11 might happen and blame us for “spying.” This is a very, very, very pernicious thing, and it causes us to say and think the most horrible thoughts about ourselves while excusing behavior and tactics that are pure barbaric and almost animalistic, while we’re in the process of making sure not too many of them die, just enough so that we can claim victory. If they could wipe us all out, they would do it.

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