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RUSH: David in Louisville. You’re next, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I need your advice, and I really believe it’s panic time for the conservatives right now.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: We’ve shown that we can go out and educate the people, get Republicans elected, and win the legislation. The problem is, I think, that we have an institutional problem in government that voting is not going to be able to fix. What’s the good of putting Republicans in office when the judiciary and the education and the media can just have them all thrown in jail?

RUSH: This call is plagiarism. I made this point yesterday, two different times.

CALLER: Yes. But my question is: What do we do about it? Because educating the people did not fix the issue. What you said yesterday, I heard you say it, and I needed to call you because I had said the same thing an hour before.

RUSH: Oh, so I plagiarized you?

CALLER: No, you didn’t, but we were on the same wavelength.

RUSH: Ah.

CALLER: I just want to know, what are we supposed to do? It feels like it’s 1775 and we have no Bill of Rights. What are we supposed to do?

RUSH: Well, in terms of the judiciary, that is the result of who wins elections. The judiciary we’re talking about — the federal judges, appellate judges, Supreme Court judges — those are all appointed by the administration in power. It’s obviously important to have the same party running the Senate when those appointments are made. So that’s something that can be changed. It takes some time because these are lifetime appointments. The Supreme Court is a good example of it. The Supreme Court, you know, the liberals are quaking in fear that there’s going to be another opening there before Bush leaves. That Supreme Court has seen some fairly decent progress, with Alito and John Roberts to go along with Clarence Thomas and Justice Scalia. There’s some health issues and ageism issues on the Democrat side, the left side of the Supreme Court.

As to the other things, one of the points that I made yesterday — and it is contradictory, when you talk about the liberals populating government bureaucracies and agencies like the CIA, state department, Pentagon, where there are career people. There’s a stark difference between the way liberals look at life and their futures and the way conservatives do. You know full well that liberals aspire to these jobs because they aspire to power over people. They want the government to be the biggest entity it can be, and they want to run it, and they want to be in charge of the regulations and the laws that come out of government because they have a basic contempt for the average citizen. They think the average citizen is incompetent and incapable. But it’s beyond that. They literally want to change the way this government is, and the way the country is. They want to make it an image in their own ideology.

CALLER: Can I ask you a question?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Putting the right judge in place in the Supreme Court, how does that fix the problem that the judiciary is still too powerful and has authority that was not granted to it by the Constitution? It still doesn’t fix the problem because that just means that we’ve bought ourselves some time.

RUSH: No, no, no, no. You misunderstand. It’s not just the Supreme Court. Look at how many Clinton judges have ruled to take power away, constitutional power away from the president —

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: — regarding the war on terror.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: Well, those judges were appointed by a Democrat president.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Now, you go back to last November’s election, and does anybody recall the appointment of federal judges, Supreme Court judges, being on the table?

CALLER: Yes, thanks to John McCain, it got punted because of the Terrorist Bill of Rights. He distracted the Senate away from it and weren’t able to fix it, the Gang of 14.

RUSH: Well, it’s not just this. The conservative voters did. They were so angry at Republicans for a host of reasons, and maybe angry at Bush over Iraq. You know, there are all kinds of Republicans out there saying, “Republicans need to be taught a lesson. They need to lose. They need to find out what it’s like to lose.” Okay, they did. Well, elections have consequences. So my point is that somewhere during the campaign it should have been important. I made the point that it’s important for the Senate to be held by Republicans so that when these judicial nominations come up, they can be confirmed — and of course that wasn’t part of the campaign. That’s my question. Far and away what McCain was doing, speaks for itself. But look, the judiciary is something that can take awhile to change but it can be changed by elections. Now, what I was going to say about this other stuff. You’re right in confirming how difficult it’s going to be, because most conservatives who are going to Ivy League schools are not there to finally take over positions in the bureaucracy.

CALLER: Right. Conservatives don’t seek government jobs. You said it yourself.

RUSH: They don’t aspire to it.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Conservatives, by definition, do not seek power over people. Conservatives want to remove government power out of people’s way. Liberals want just the opposite.

CALLER: So how do we do that?

RUSH: Liberalism’s whole existence revolves around government and having control of it. Ours doesn’t. Well, the strategery has to be one of getting into government to deny them that power. But look, when you get a president elected, the president is going to have to clean out as much of these places as he can. He can’t clean it all out obviously because there are career people in there, but you need a president who is also a conservative and a movement conservative who’s leading a movement, not just a Republican. We can’t storm the agencies and force people out of there. Look, I think all this can be done, but it’s just going to take time, and those areas where it can’t be done, strategies need to be developed to blunt the effect and the power of career liberals in some of these institutions. Now, education is another place. Institutions of higher learning, academia? I don’t know what about that.

CALLER: I talked to you awhile back about conservatives buying up media networks, and you said it wasn’t a good idea. How do you feel about that now? We talked about five years ago about that.

RUSH: (sigh) This is something that sounds sexy. It’s not that I’m opposed to it. I just don’t see it ever happening.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Individuals don’t own these networks anymore. Corporations do. The news divisions of these corporations are just that: they are divisions. You look at General Electric. Jack Welch ran General Electric when NBC was what it was. It’s one of the liberal institutions of the Drive-By Media, and Welch wasn’t going to change it, and Welch is not that. He has his underlings. The last individual to own a network was Ted Turner.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: So it would be cool. It would be nice. I just don’t see it as something that’s realistically going to happen. I think maybe I’m more optimistic than some people are because I’ve been involved in this evolution of change that has brought about this new media. To me, what exists in the media today is so much better and diverse than it was in 1988 when I started this program, and I see it as progress. I think demographics is going to take care of some of this. For example, the age of the people who watch the nightly newscasts is 65-plus (you can tell that by the advertisements), and that largely is all they watch. They’re watching soap operas during the day or playing croquet, whatever they do. That’s all they watch. Some people, all they read is the New York Times. Some people, all they read is the Washington Post. We conservatives, I think, sample all of this media. But the liberals do not. They’ve been trying to get the Democrats to cancel the debate on the Fox News Channel even though it’s going to deliver a larger audience than any other cable news channel could.

I think that as the yutes of America who are getting their information a whole different way (Internet, cell phones, and who knows what), the evening newscasts are going to go the way of the dinosaurs because it’s not going to be ‘appointment television’ for people who are now 30 and 40 to sit around and watch an anchor at the end of the day. They already know what the news of the day is before that happens. But these seasoned citizens are the largest voting bloc, and that’s the only view they got. So demographics is going to take care of some of this. The trick for conservatives is to stay on the cutting edge of technology in terms of how the information is gotten. But it’s all about content, content, content. If conservatives are going to continue to do well in the media, it has to be stuff that people want to hear, listen to and read, and it can’t be just totally ideologically based.

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