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RUSH: Let’s go to Crestwood, Missouri, outside St. Louis, and Martha, great to have you here. I love that name, by the way, Martha one of my top 50 favorite female names.

CALLER: (Laughing) Top 50.

RUSH: Actually, it’s in the top ten.

CALLER: Well, I would hope so. (Laughing.) Listen, I’m calling about the monologue you gave yesterday which was brilliant and —

RUSH: Which one? They all are. I’m trying to remember, which one are you talking about?

CALLER: Oh, one of the many, the one that really explained how dangerous the terrorist threat is to our country and the people better wake up and realize it before it’s too late. You’ve been saying the same thing today, and so has the president, that the threat is so real, people better wake up to it and hope that there’s somebody in the Oval Office the next election.

RUSH: I’m very flattered that you would say this. The president did talk about it today, but everybody asks me, everybody, because they know that I know him personally, and I’ve made no bones about it, when you get him personally, he’s a total different guy. Put him on a camera, everybody marvels at the difference. I was talking about this the other day when talking about the Republican elites and so forth, versus Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan had the ability to connect to people. He had the ability to make 25 million people listening to him on TV think that he was speaking to them individually. I think that’s what Bush misses because he said all of those things that — well, many of them that I said yesterday, but he didn’t personalize it. He didn’t say it in a way any differently than he has, and he didn’t reach through the television in such a way as to make people stop what they were doing when listening to it and reflect.

CALLER: Well, he was probably trying to copy you, because —

RUSH: No, no, no.

CALLER: Because you can do that.

RUSH: No, no, no.

CALLER: But will you let me ask you my question?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I mean I just didn’t want to —

RUSH: Well, look, even though I’m giddy and I’m working on little sleep, you inspired a whole bunch of little brain movements there. I apologize, yes. Go ahead and ask the question.

CALLER: Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get very much sleep, because this is a serious question. But anyway, along with your brilliant monologue yesterday, I’ve heard you say a lot of times that the Democrats are eventually going to be sorry because they’re digging their own graves and they’re going to self-destruct, and when that happens, the Republicans are going to be right there waiting to retake their control and their power, but that it might not be in 2008 —

RUSH: That’s right.

CALLER: — it might be later than that. In view of what you have told us about the dangerous threat and the president, too, it just seems to me that that’s not much of a consolation. And we should, you know, not be taking — I don’t find much comfort in that thought, that, gee, maybe after half of us are dead, the rest of us might live to take that power.

RUSH: What’s the question? You made me stop another brilliant monologue for a question, and you made a monologue. What’s the question?

CALLER: I’ve heard you say many times as if we should all feel better about the way that the Democrats are beating up on Bush —

RUSH: Oh, no, no —

CALLER: And the Drive-By Media is always, you know, telling us lies and stuff, that we should feel better because we’re eventually going to get our power back but maybe not in 2008, and I’m saying isn’t that going to be much too late?

RUSH: That’s not what I’ve said, and it’s interesting that that’s how you heard it. What I said was that the Democrats are sowing the seeds for their own landslide defeat. Part and parcel of that is that the Republicans win. But it depends on who the Republicans are at that point whether that makes any difference. I’m not assigning automatic improvement, if the Republicans win. I can’t predict this stuff. I’m just giving you the —

CALLER: Yeah, but you’ve also said there’s a pretty good chance Hillary is going to be our next president.

RUSH: Yeah, I’ve said 80% as we sit here today —

CALLER: I listen to you every day and I know what you said, not that you don’t know what you said, but I know that —

RUSH: Are we arguing?

CALLER: I guess so. I’m sorry. Our first fight. I apologize.

RUSH: Not even married.

CALLER: Our first fight, and you haven’t even had a lot of sleep. But no, I’m serious, I do listen to you all the time, and I know that’s what you say.

RUSH: I’m not denying it. But I never said the Republicans will be back in power. That’s not the point of it.

CALLER: But they have to be!

RUSH: I was just offering an analysis of where the Democrats are going. I was not saying what that’s going to mean. Yesterday, I did. If they do win in ’08, in the context of this monologue that we are referencing from yesterday, we’re in deep doo-doo, because they do not want to admit that we face. They’re out there actively the past six years denying that we face it. Remember what the peg was. The peg was the Breck Girl at the Council on Foreign Relations saying the war on terror is nothing more than a bumper sticker slogan.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: All right. So it scares me. I am frightened to death of these people. If somebody like that, with that attitude… You know, the United States is a great nation at great risk in a dangerous world. If we elect somebody that doesn’t understand that, then it frightens me.

CALLER: Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying. We can’t feel good about maybe we’ll get somebody in the White House other than Edwards, you know, not this election but the next election. We have got to get one in this election.

RUSH: Let me ask you a question, Martha.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: I wasn’t suggesting we’re not going to try to make that happen. I don’t know when they’re going to implode. I just know they are. I don’t know when the effects of their implosion are going to be felt. Could be ’08. We’ll wait and see. Still a long time off. But my question for you, as an American citizen sitting out there near St. Louis in Crestwood, Missouri, what’s your daily attitude about the country? Are you worried? Are you wringing your hands? This is not a setup. There’s no wrong answer. I want to know how you really feel. Do you think the country has lost some of its oompff, do you think the country is not as great as it used to be?

CALLER: It breaks my heart every day because I think this is the greatest nation there ever has been and exists today, and I think it’s going down in flames. I think there are things that we could be doing about it that we’re not and it frustrates me every single day and I’m terrified.

RUSH: Literally, I mean you’re terrified?

CALLER: I am. I am always terrified. Every time I listen to the news.

RUSH: How much news do you watch would you say in the course of a twelve-hour day?

CALLER: Well, I listen to talk radio, and I watch, you know, Fox. I never watch CNN. I know what’s going on every single day, and I know what the Drive-By Media is saying as opposed to what actually —

RUSH: All right.

CALLER: — is actually happening. So I know what’s happening.

RUSH: Well, the reason I ask you is that, while I agree with your assessment that there are warning clouds on the horizon, the immigration bill portends a tremendous amount of destruction demographically or change, but despite all that, people ask me constantly, ‘How do you stay optimistic?’ It’s not something I have to try to do. I go through periods like everybody else does of feeling, well, not helpless, I never feel helpless because I have this microphone. But I still look at this country as you just said, as the greatest country on the face of the earth. And while we hear stories about Iran’s building up and the Russians are starting to beat the drums again and all this stuff going on in the Middle East, there still is nowhere in the world that can compare to us. We’re fed the daily notion that we’re the only nation in the world in trouble. We got Venezuela, it’s going great guns. We got China, man, their economy is growing. They’re in trouble. Don’t let anybody tell you they’re not. The Russians, everybody has problems, and they are far worse than ours. The problem we face is not from these external threats — well, I can’t say that because there are always going to be those external threats posed by nations that think that we’re enemies.

The thing that concerns me most about the country and its future is the American people. When I see 35% of Democrats, 35 — a huge number of Americans think that George Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened. You have to conclude, then, that they also might think he let it happen if he knew about it, and then what you conclude after that, you need somebody that studies the insane to be able to tell us. But aside from that, people like you, and there are more people like you than you know who are willing to fight for the country, to maintain the institutions and traditions that have defined it and have made it great, there are more of you than you know. We still have an opportunity here for a rosy future. The nation has always been threatened from outside and from within. It has always faced threes threats, and it’s because of our freedom. I asked somebody over the weekend while I was out in Los Angeles, I was stunned this person in their late forties or early fifties, had not even considered this question. I said, I don’t remember how we got on to this. ‘You travel to Europe, right?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘Have you ever asked yourself how a country 250 years old runs rings in virtually every way you can imagine around countries that have been around thousands of years? How is it we are the world’s lone superpower? How is it that we come to feed the world? How is it that we, Americans, the United States of America, is the economic engine, the technological engine of this world? How is that possible? We’re no different. We came out of the womb as human beings just as everybody else around the world did, those of you lucky enough to make it out of the womb, what’s the difference? How can this be?

The answer to it is freedom, our Constitution, and our founding documents. The founding documents, the Declaration of Independence is so crucial. We are all endowed by our Creator. These guys can spend all the time they want telling me that our Founding Fathers were atheists, agnostics, all day long, but it ain’t going to fly with me. We are all endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable lights, included among them the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. That’s the opening of the Declaration of Independence. We have enshrined in our founding documents our definition, our foundation. Then the Bill of Rights in the Constitution, it’s freedom. We have had more freedom than the rest of the world combined so that individuals here have been allowed to pursue their passions with as much ambition and application of excellence as they like. Now, a lot of people think that we have lots of restrictions on our freedom here. We do, as the government grows, so do restrictions on our freedom. This is one of the things that really worries me today. I’ve got a story coming up in the stack about Algore. He wants censorship in the media. He considers a balanced media to be only liberal media. Anything else is unrealistic. You will not believe this. Well, you will believe it when you hear it. I’ll get to it, I promise, before the program ends. But there are constant assaults on freedom in this country, particularly free speech and expression, political correctness.

If those freedoms are truly ever infringed upon where people are afraid to be who they are; if they’re afraid to say what they want to say; if they’re afraid to pursue their passions because they’re going to offend somebody, because they’re going to make somebody mad or because they’re going to get in trouble or what have you. If people surrender the basic freedom to be who they are, to pursue their passions and so forth — and I’m telling you, the American left would love to stifle that. Individual freedom on the part of more and more Americans is a direct threat to their whole world view of a big central state that runs and controls everything and views average Americans with contempt, average people with contempt and condescension. That threat to me is as large as any we face. So when I get calls like this, from people concerned about the future, be vigilant as well about what’s happening. How many of you will only say certain things to certain people when you think there’s nobody around listening? How many of you, ‘Follow me to the bathroom, I gotta tell you something.’ When you’re in public, a restaurant or wherever, you want to say something, and you pause, ‘Gee, I wonder, can I say this?’ You’re letting them win if you do that. That’s what happened in the old Soviet Union. We’re not that bad yet today, but this is also scary stuff to me, which is why I am not going to allow it to happen to me conducting this program or anywhere else that I happen to be venturing out. I gotta run, Martha. Thanks for the call.

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