RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, just one more thing here on the monologue I did in the last half hour. I will tell you when all is lost, and all is not lost. I will tell you when it’s time to panic. And panic is not what’s called for here. Vigilance. Greetings and welcome back. Rush Limbaugh, the man running America. You know it, and I know it, at 800-282-2882 if you want to call, the e-mail address is Rush@eibnet.com.
I just had a conversation with Mr. Snerdley back in his office. ‘Snerdley, are you confident what you told me?’ Snerdley is confident this thing is not going to become law. The immigration bill will not become law. May happen in the Senate; who knows. Claire McCaskill of Missouri says she doesn’t think it will. She doesn’t think it will pass cloture tomorrow afternoon. Well, we’ll see. The House is an entirely different matter. Let me give you some headlines here in the Drive-By Media. Remember the things I told you yesterday, Republicans in the House were going to vote, Pete Hoekstra, the little one-sentence statement saying that the Republican caucus opposes the immigration bill currently in the Senate. They voted on it late yesterday afternoon or the day before, whatever it was — the days are running together for me here — and a hundred and some odd for it, only 20 Republicans voted against it. It’s nonbinding, so it’s symbolic in nature, but it does give a little bit of indication. Nancy Pelosi said she’s not going to even bring the bill to the floor unless she’s assured of having 60 to 70 Republican votes.
Now, the Republicans in the House are a different animal than the Republicans in the Senate. These guys have no power. You have to understand something. In terms of running that institution, they can use procedural maneuvers to block things that happen, but they really don’t have any power, and they’re not going to have any power, not real power ’til they win control of the place back. I’m here to tell you that the Republicans, there are a slew of them in the House that know damn well if they end up letting this bill become law, if it comes out of the Senate, they’re cooked, too. All of them are going to be at risk here, at least the ones that enable it to pass if it ever does get to the House. I’ll tell you why I kind of agree with Mr. Snerdley, and I’ve been reluctant in mentioning this because any time you make a prediction about something and it’s a positive prediction, it can cause people to relax and not stay as involved. That’s not what’s necessary here. So when I tell you what I really think is going to happen here, I don’t want you to relax. I want you to pretend you didn’t hear it. I agree with Snerdley. I think at the end of the day, whenever that is, this is not going to happen in this country, precisely because of all of you. At some point you, we, the people of this country are going to succeed in stopping this. Because I think the country still works. I think the structures still work. Ah, we have blips like this, but in the end, the end of the day, this is why I can’t give up. Until I tell you to give up. I will know when it’s time to pack in the chips and head offshore. But that time is nowhere near. I’m not often wrong. As you know, my opinion accuracy rating is now documented to be almost always right 98.7% of the time.
Some people think that it makes so little sense, that none of it makes any sense at all the way we all understand the way the country works — that the fix is in and it’s going to happen regardless. I just have more faith in the structures of the country and the power of the people in this country to effectively eventually get what they want and what is right, the majority in this case. Lots of evidence in the past to recall, to cite, to back up this little feeling of confidence. Now, I meant to get to this yesterday, and I didn’t have a chance to, but there was a column in the Washington Post yesterday by Richard Cohen, ‘How the GOP Could Win.’ I’ve got stories here in the immigration stack. ‘Immigration Bill’s Support Slipping.’ Fewer Democrats supported cloture the second time around than the first time. The Los Angeles Times says in this story ‘that Democrat votes make the difference between failure and success and fewer Democrats actually supported cloture than Republicans.’ That’s its own problematic thing. On the website, ThePolitico.com, ‘Highest immigration hurdles yet to come.’ GOP and House passes their resolution. We disapprove of the Senate bill. In a conference vote, 23 supported the bills I just told you, Pelosi said she needs 65, 70 votes before she’ll even bring it to the floor.
The San Francisco Chronicle: ‘Fractured Democrats obscured by fight between Bush and conservatives.’ Now, the headline of this story in the Chronicle is, ‘Boxer’s vote switch helps revive immigration bill, but as compromises on legislation pile up, odd alliances of backers starts to fall apart.’ This story is about the odd alliance of Democrats. We told you this yesterday, and it’s about unions. Nobody’s reported — well, the Chronicle reported it locally, but I mean the Drive-Bys are not talking about the fractured nature of the Democrats on this because they’re so hepped up, they’re so excited about the fight going on between Bush and the conservatives and Bush and the Republicans. And of course they’re excited about Paris Hilton getting out of jail. They’re excited about Lindsay Lohan still being in rehab. They’re all excited about the Fairness Doctrine. They’re all excited about Slick Willie saying his wife won’t be swift booted. There’s another example. Boated. We are losing the language — I like swift booted better. Not one allegation that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth charged made against John Kerry has ever been shown to be false, and yet the Drive-Bys say they are unfounded allegations.
Clinton’s out there saying I’m not going to let my wife get swift booted. What he means to say is, I’m not going to let a bunch of lies told about my wife stick. We’re going to fight back. That’s the way Clinton, Inc., works. But the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had truth on their side. So you’ve got discord on the Democrat side, and now this Richard Cohen piece comes along, ‘How the GOP could win.’ Some of you might think this is sophomoric, but to me it indicates two things, and I’ll give you the details of it here in just a second. Cohen is worried about the McGovernization of the Democrat Party, something I have told you is happening for two years, because of their anti-war stance, because of their open hostility to victory, because of their investment in defeat, they own it. You know it, and I know it, that this is gonna come back to haunt them at some point. It’s just off the page right now because of the immigration bill. People only have an emotional reservoir of so much content, and the immigration bill is attracting all the attention. But if you dig deep, you can find the Democrats out there are a little worried.
He starts his piece this way. ‘There are two ways to predict the winner of the 2008 presidential race: Check the polls or read some history. The polls tell you that with George Bush’s approval ratings abysmally low, with the war in Iraq becoming increasingly unpopular, with the GOP lacking a dominant candidate and with the party divided over immigration, social issues and even religion (Mitt Romney’s Mormonism), the next President is bound to be a Democrat. History begs to differ. The history I have in mind is 1972. By the end of that year, 56,844 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, a war that almost no one thought could still be won and which no one could quite figure out how to end. Nevertheless, the winner in that year’s presidential election was Richard M. Nixon. He won 49 of 50 states – and the war, of course, went on. Just as it is hard to understand how the British ousted Winston Churchill after he had led them to victory in Europe in World War II, so it may be hard now to appreciate how Nixon won such a landslide while presiding over such a dismal war.
‘In the first place, he was the incumbent, with all its advantages and with enormous amounts of money at his disposal. In the second place, back then the Vietnam War was not as unpopular as you might think — or, for that matter, as the Iraq war is now. In 1972, almost 60 percent of Americans approved of the way Nixon was handling the war. Maybe more to the point, most Americans did not endorse the way the Democrats would handle the war — nor the way the antiwar movement was behaving. Nixon seized on those sentiments and, in a feat that historians will be challenged to explain, characterized George McGovern as something of a sissy. In fact, the Democratic presidential nominee was a genuine World War II hero, a B-24 pilot with 35 combat missions under his belt and a Distinguished Flying Cross on his chest. Nixon, in contrast, had served during the war but never saw combat. He had, however, seen the polls. This is similar to what happened in the 2004 campaign. The Bush-Cheney ticket consisted of two Vietnam slackers. George W. Bush had served in the Air National Guard, and Dick Cheney had obtained five draft deferments. Their opponent was the much-decorated John Kerry– Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Yet during the campaign, the Republican ticket and its allies in the Swift boat veterans movement managed to paint Kerry as a quivering liar. The character attack was so bold, so outrageous, that it of course worked.’
No, it worked because it was true. The guy’s a fraud! He’s a total phony, and people were able to see it. ‘Now we come to the current race. The war in Iraq is not — or not yet — an issue for Republicans. With the exception of Ron Paul and, more recently, Jim Gilmore…’ Well, of course he doesn’t factor in Lugar and Voinovich jumping ship yesterday. But lets get to the end of this. He says, ‘This is where history raises its ugly head. The GOP is adept at painting Democrats as soft on national security.’ It’s not hard to do, Mr. Cohen, especially now. The Democrats have embraced defeat. They’ve already proclaimed that we’ve lost. They’re the best propaganda machine Al-Qaeda has. And he says, ‘It is equally adept at saying so in the most scurrilous way. And while most Americans would like the war to end, they do not favor a precipitous withdrawal and neither have they forgotten Sept. 11, 2001. … Will history trump the polls? It will if, as in the past, the Democratic Party so wounds itself fighting the war against the war, it nominates a candidate beloved by a minority but mistrusted by a majority. It has happened before.’
So you could make of this what you will, but I mean the point is, all this talk about how confident and arrogant they are, that’s true, but there are cracks, there are fissures out there. I’m telling you, I think he’s right. I think they’re McGovernizing themselves, and I think with all this attention being paid to immigration, people are not cognizant of it, the Washington elite is not cognizant. They know how we feel about immigration, but I don’t think they’re on the page at all about the Iraq war. They don’t want us to lose. If the American people wanted us out of there lickety-split, you know the drill, they wouldn’t have had to buy all those votes in the House with pork, the Senate resolutions would have passed, but those guys were not hearing from the American people on get us out of Iraq, they were hearing from their little fringe kooks in the blogosphere that comprise their base. So as you know, it may not eventuate in ’08, but these people with their immigration stance and everything else, the war in Iraq and their attack on the essence of this country, capitalism, they are sowing the seeds of their eventual landslide defeat. Cohen knows it.