Lott: Talk Radio Misinformed You

RUSH: We’ll go to Bloomington, Illinois, and start. This is Jack. Nice to have you, sir. Welcome.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. J. B. Three here from Wilmington. I need to talk to you about something. I believe with this bought-and-paid-for Congress, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, doesn’t make any difference, they’re all in the same pocket on this illegal immigration business, and if the American people don’t stand up and be counted, and they can’t do it by calling into talk shows. We need — and talk shows are great — but we need something more important. We need somebody that’s in the bully pulpit that’s going to rally and blow the bugle and have us charge on Washington, and I’m talking about eight, ten million people from this country. I’ll be there, but we gotta have a date certain to go after, and it’s gotta be publicized and I don’t know how to do it, but if we don’t get to the Congress of the United States, we’re going to get the dangedest problem in the next 50 years with illegal immigrants and with all of those people coming in here, and we’ve got no control over their skill, we don’t have any control over whether they’re criminal —

RUSH: Yes, we do. We don’t care. That’s the bottom line. We don’t care that they come in. The more uneducated they are, the better. This is the Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act of 2007. It’s to expand the welfare state. It is to expand entitlements from the Democrat side. By the way, I understand what you’re saying, get a march of eight to ten million people in Washington led by a powerful media figure and I think I know to whom you are referring here. I have to tell you, they all know how you feel. Their phones have been ringing off the hooks. They’ve been at home. Trent Lott’s complaining that you don’t know what you believe, that you don’t have the facts because you’re listening to talk radio. They know how you feel. They know that you’re upset about this. Their attitude is that you’re wrong, that you are misinformed, and that you don’t have the facts on this. Eight to ten million people march, that would no doubt be impressive. Whether it would change their minds, I think this is etched in stone already.

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RUSH: I have a story here from the Christian Science Monitor from last week, and the headline: ‘Fury Grows Over US Immigration Bill.’ And what the story says, I’ll just sum it up for you here before I give you some excerpts, what the story is saying is that we, the voters, are too dumb to understand this, and some of you, in addition to being too dumb to understand it, have been misinformed by people like me. ‘Trent Lott doesn’t usually answer his Senate phone himself, but when angry callers are burning up the lines — as they are over this week’s debate about revising America’s immigration laws — the Republicans’ No. 2 Senate leader has picked up to hear what they’ve got to say. A lot of the talk is misinformation, he says. Talk radio and the blogs were blasting the compromise bill, which includes a guest-worker program,’ blah, blah, blah, blah. Lott said yeah, talked to one caller ”for 15 minutes. I can’t talk to everyone in America for 15 minutes… But if you cower in the shadows, you’ll get pummeled…. You’ve got to stand up.’ Withering attacks on the bill aren’t only by phone: Deal-busting amendments are surfacing on the Senate floor. … Harry Reid had planned to wrap up the immigration debate before this week’s break. But he delayed the start of the debate until this week … Critics of the legislation, who cross the political spectrum, plan to use next week to turn up the pressure on senators at home. ‘People are going to be piling on their senators at public events, media events, and in their offices over the break,’ predicts William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, based in Raleigh, N.C. ‘They can expect large angry mobs of their constituents. I’ve never seen this degree of disparity between lawmaker actions and the electorate.’

‘Nearly half of US voters oppose the proposed reform, and only 26 percent of US voters support it, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll this week. Last weekend, two senators who helped negotiate the bill were booed at their respective state Republican conventions. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was shouted down when he called the reform ‘the best bill I think we can get to President Bush.’ In Duluth, Ga., Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia was booed when he said the nation needs a ‘meaningful guest-worker program.’ … Sen. Jim DeMint (R) of South Carolina says he’s ‘never seen [his] constituents so angry and emotional.’ His opposition to the bill was cheered by those at the GOP convention in his home state. His office has received more than 2,000 phone calls on the bill, most opposing it. ‘People pulled me aside [at the convention] and told me to fight it,’ he says. … Senators interviewed for this story say that their calls and e-mails have been running overwhelmingly negative on the bill but that they’re just beginning to answer critics.’

The bottom line is, they know how you feel about it. They’re not idiots. They can get a pretty good idea from the phone calls that are coming into their offices and the e-mails, but this just boils down to it’s one of those events. It’s not like the Dubai Ports deal. They couldn’t wait to make you happy in your opposition to the Dubai Ports deal. On this you’re misinformed, you’re uninformed, you’re malinformed, you’re ill-informed, you’re ignorant, and it’s all because you’re listening to talk radio and reading the blogs. What is this out of the shadows business? Have you noticed that phrase being bandied about? The president uses it, Senator Kennedy, everybody on the pro-immigration legislation side uses this ‘out of the shadows.’ It’s asinine because what it does is convey this silly notion that we’re the bad ones, that the country is bad, that the illegal aliens are the victims. ‘They’re having to work in the shadows.’ I guess they should be able to walk across the border with their family and friends, have a legal status and entitlements conferred on them immediately. It’s the same thing with this word sanctuary. A bunch of cities are out there granting sanctuary status to illegals. Sanctuary cities. These are phrases that remind me, an informed person, of the Third Reich, where Jews and others were given sanctuary from the brown shirts who were breaking down doors to take them away to concentration camps. This is the thing I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that is constantly amazing to me, and that is we act like we owe these people something, we owe them an apology. The bad thing is that the language is not being used just by radicals. It’s being used by Republicans as well.

Now, George Will in his piece, let me read a couple paragraphs to you. ‘Sensible immigration policy must arise from more than monomania about the disturbing fact that at least 12 million immigrants are here illegally. Affirming the rule of law is, however, where to begin because when a large and somewhat cohesive cohort succeeds in living in defiance of the law, the scofflaw spirit can have myriad manifestations.’ Let me pause here before getting to the story details about this. Somebody called last week and wanted to go on and on, ‘Rush, they’re illegal.’ I said we’re beyond that now. Not we’re beyond it, but as far as the lawmakers, people who write the laws, the fact that they’re illegal is exactly what has to be gotten rid of. That’s why they will be automatically conferred legal if this legislation ever sees the light of day in the form of a bill that the president signs. Will’s point here is it has to be about the fact that they’re illegal. ‘Affirming the rule of law is, however, where to begin because when a large and somewhat cohesive cohort succeeds in living in defiance of the law, the scofflaw spirit can have myriad manifestations.’ And get this. Here is one of those myriad manifestations.

‘Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute gave a sobering example: ‘Protecting one form of lawbreaking may require protecting others as well. The city of Maywood in Los Angeles County declared itself a sanctuary zone for illegal aliens this year. Then it got rid of its drunk-driving checkpoints, because they were nabbing too many illegal aliens. Next, this 96 percent Latino city, almost half of whose adult population lacks a ninth-grade education, disbanded its police traffic division entirely, so that illegals wouldn’t need to worry about having their cars towed for being unlicensed.” So once you overlook the fact that they’ve broken the law, you have to keep exempting them from it when they break other laws, and that’s exactly what’s happened in this city. ‘Mac Donald says that although some data suggest that many Hispanic immigrants live in increasing cultural and linguistic self-segregation, clearly some have assimilated in the sense of acquiring one of the nation’s unpleasant current attributes, the entitlement mentality: We are here, therefore we are entitled to be here.’ It’s added to by the fact that we’re acting like it’s our fault that they weren’t here, or it’s our fault that they were here illegally. They’re the victims and we owe them an apology.

‘The immigration debate, which may become even more heated when Congress reconvenes after getting an earful from constituents during the Memorial Day recess, would be confusing enough without today’s fog of careless language. Journalism and political rhetoric about immigration are ludicrously reliant on the trope ‘out of the shadows.’ At the announcement of the compromise legislation, Ted Kennedy said it would bring illegal immigrants ‘out of the shadows.’ The next day, the lead paragraph of The Washington Post’s page-one news story said the compromise would bring illegal immigrants ‘out of society’s shadows.’ The White House fact sheet said, earnestly but ungrammatically, that under the legislation, ‘The undocumented worker comes out of the shadows to acknowledge they [sic] have broken the law.”

Now, this is absurd as we have pointed out. Out of the shadows? These people are being interviewed on television all over the place. CNN interviewed a guy in Los Angeles, and he said on camera that he has been here illegally for 12 years. ‘Referring to him, with the delicacy that serves a political agenda, as an ‘undocumented worker,’ today’s synonym for ‘illegal immigrant,’ CNN’s reporter said Arias was eager to ‘come out of the shadows.’ So, Arias can simultaneously be ‘in the shadows’ and discussing his illegal status on worldwide television. Who knew?’ There’s so much here that’s perplexing, all of which we have recounted. We know what the Democrats are trying to do. The Democrats are trying to destroy the Republican Party, remake the country in their own image, expand the welfare state, expand welfare payments, the so-called redistribution of income. The Republicans are acting like they are clueless about this and they’re stuck simply on the notion that if they don’t go for this, that the Hispanics out there going to hate ’em and never vote for them, and that they’re going to be up a creek.

Dick Morris had a column last week, I didn’t reference it the day it came out. Now, Morris looks at things purely political, that’s his business, that’s what he does. He said if the Republicans blow this, if they don’t come around and support this, they can forget Hispanic support forever and they can forget being a majority party. Nothing else matters to people in the political world looking through everything through the political prism. That’s where the Republicans are. They are scared to death to stand up for traditional American values and culture. They’re scared to death to stand up for it, and apparently willing to risk losing all of your votes in the quest to see if they can get a certain percentage of these new arrivals’ votes. Whenever you start operating out of fear, I don’t care what it is you’re doing, when you’re operating out of fear, I guarantee you your judgment’s clouded and you’re going to make the wrong decisions.

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RUSH: Let me tell you what I think. All of this talk from people like Trent Lott and others in Washington that we, we nativists, we restrictionists, and they’re calling us all names, the elites, we’re too stupid to understand it. We don’t have what it takes. We need to get our minds made right on this. And you people, of course, you are really at a disadvantage because not only are you too ignorant to understand it yourselves, you’re being misled by people like me. What I think is just the exact opposite. I think the media covering this is who is ignorant. They are not investigating this at all. They simply follow the templates and the action lines as dictated by their accomplices, which happen to be the big guns of the Democrat Party. They’re not investigating this; they’re not getting into the details of this legislation; they’re not examining it at all, in any degree, not to the degree of detail that I am or other people, or that you are. The fact of the matter is, you are more informed on this than the Republican senators pushing it; you are more informed on this than the media, and you probably don’t need me to be more informed on it because your passion is leading you to find out what’s in this legislation on your own. Your instincts are telling you this ain’t right. Your instincts are telling you that something’s drastically wrong when we’re just going to sweep 12 to 20 illegal people out of the shadows, make ’em legal.

You know full well the rule of law is one of the things that’s cohesive in this society, and when it doesn’t matter, when it can be waived and when it is waived it’s going to have to be continually be waived in order to make the first waiving stand up. If you’re going to say that illegal aliens are not illegal simply because we say so, then any other action they engage in that’s illegal, you’re going to have to wink at that and let it go as well. You understand instinctively this. I think one of the things that’s frustrating to you and me and all of us is that we know this is wrong. We know instinctively that it’s the wrong way to deal with this. And yet you sit up every day and you hear how you’re stupid, we’re ignorant, we’re nativists, we’re restrictionists, when it’s the people in the Drive-By Media who are making no effort to really understand this. And of course the height of the frustration is trying to figure out your own elected officials on this, Republicans, though they think that you’re too ill-informed, uninformed to understand this. Maybe you’re too stupid even if you were told the truth. It’s too complex, we can’t have extracurricular politics get in the way of this, Senator McCain said. But the truth of the matter is that, in this circumstance, it’s all of you who are vastly more informed than the people telling you about it, and that’s what frosts me because that means that they are willingly insulting your intelligence. Nothing grates on people more than that. Here’s Patrick in Surry, Maine. Nice to have you, Patrick, welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Rush, it’s a pleasure and an honor.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: I was listening to the radio this morning, came cross an NPR piece believe it or not that was doing a story on the meat packing plants down in Georgia that were raided, was it last fall or last winter, and they purged all the illegals out.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And they did a follow-up story basically to see how the plants are doing, were they able to fill the jobs with, you know, the jobs that Americans won’t do.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And, lo and behold, they did find out that these plants had done a pretty aggressive advertising campaign locally and also had reached out to a community out in the Midwest among these southeast Asian Mongs that were refugees back in ’79 from Vietnam.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: But had helped us out and fight. And lo and behold, they did find out that these plants were able to fill all of the jobs. The one thing I found interesting as I listened to this piece is, they had pointed out that all of the illegals in that community had basically vanished, with the exception of only a handful, and they had interviewed one business owner, he owned a Mexican restaurant, and the thing I find ironic was he couldn’t speak English, and yet all of the Mong — and there were at least a half dozen that they interviewed — could speak English and not only could speak English, but fairly well. They were pleasant people, they had nice things to say —

RUSH: Right. Right, right, right, right, right, right, they have come here to assimilate.

CALLER: Exactly. And, you know, I thought to myself, that’s fine, the Mexicans, wherever they’ve gone, they’ve gone, but the jobs were filled and they were filled with law-abiding people that pay their taxes, most likely have valid driver’s license, and, lo and behold, keep their money inside the country, not send it out of the country.

RUSH: Right. Look, this whole thing about doing jobs Americans won’t do, and that’s largely said, by the way, in regard to the agriculture industry in this country, 26% of agriculture workers are illegal immigrants, best estimate. That means that 74% aren’t. That means that 74% of the people doing these jobs are Americans supposedly doing jobs that Americans won’t do. I can’t get away from this. I mean your story that you heard on NPR, they were able to replace the jobs, the Mexicans fled, rather than do what it was necessary to come back and apply for the jobs legally. Look, folks, human behavior is subject to being conditioned. If you dole out the entitlement behavior for years and years and years and now when it comes to this legislation you act like they are the victims, we’re guilty, we owe them an apology, you just cement the whole entitlement mentality. Believe me, that is one of the attractions to people who are coming here who choose not to assimilate. So it’s a huge problem. Of course you can find evidence of jobs that will be filled by people other than illegals. This is another big myth that’s attached to this, that these jobs are going because Americans are above those jobs, won’t do them. From the Democrat point of view, don’t forget this, this is about destroying the Republican Party and making the welfare state as big as they can make it.

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