RUSH: I guess it’s a column. No, it’s a story. I don’t know what it is! It’s an article. There used to be a difference between columns and articles in the Drive-By Media. Today, it doesn’t matter. All articles are columns anyway, essentially. Now, this is about the immigration bill. We have a fairly decent immigration stack here, too. ‘On the morning the immigration bill died — again — the ideological Washington Times exposed a supposed plot on Page One: A photo of Sen. Charles E. Schumer, the liberal Democrat from New York, conspiring with a Republican ‘traitor’ from South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham, to put something over on the American people. In reality, they could have been checking a takeout menu. That Thursday morning, however, Schumer and Graham were in agreement that the Senate should keep talking and voting on revising laws on illegal immigration. To the conservative media, Schumer and Graham symbolized the enemy. Hours later, the senators’ cause was lost. And the new media — websites, e-mails, conservative talk radio and television — scored their most clearcut [sic] victory since the reelection of President George W. Bush in 2004.’
Get this next line: ‘This time the new media did it without strings being pulled by Karl Rove…’ (Laughing.) These guys in the media just can’t get past their action lines and their templates. It’s like the Washington Post referring to me as an ‘untamed piece of the GOP message machine.’ They actually believe that all of these things that I say or anybody else that you listen to might say, all comes in fax or e-mail form, that we get talking points, marching orders every day from Rove’s office and that’s how everybody is on the same page. They can’t believe that conservatism as an ideology and has certain principles that its believers adhere to. So this time it happened, but we did it despite Karl Rove. The idea that the conservative movement was opposed to this and most conservatives were opposed to it… Most Americans were. In fact, the Democrats had an interesting poll released Tuesday — and this is the San Francisco Chronicle. This is back during the debate. I just wanted to remind you of this, because this was a factor in this thing going down, too. This story is dated June 20th: ‘A new Democrat poll released Tuesday could spell trouble for the big Senate immigration bill scheduled for another key procedural vote this week,’ it’s a Democracy Corps poll, by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, ‘showed intense voter concern about immigration in battleground congressional districts. Voters were far more likely to support proposals that could tighten the border and stop illegal immigrants from getting government benefits than efforts to legalize them.’
The Democrats’ poll ‘said most people didn’t really care about the amnesty.’ That wasn’t what it was. It was that they’re going to be on the welfare state rolls, and that they’re going to be pouring over the border with nobody checking it, and we’re going to lose control of the country. The numbers on this poll: ‘Democrats were evenly divided, 47-47% on whether the immigration bill should become law.’ Yet this little guy in the Buffalo News is all convinced that it was the new media that single-handedly got this done. It couldn’t possibly be that the legislation was bad. It couldn’t probably be that Grahamnesty and Schumer were indeed conspiring in ways to go over the heads and ignore the wishes of the American people. No, couldn’t possibly be that. The most interesting thing in this guy’s piece, though, is the last paragraph. This guy’s name again is Douglas Turner. ‘The stunning victory scored by new media in this episode raises a big question for the power structure: The lobbyists, the political Establishment and their friends in the mainstream press. How are they going to manage the message in the presidential election, when more and more people out there are looking elsewhere for details?’ Now, what strikes you about that last sentence? ‘How are they going to manage the message in a presidential race when more and more people out there are looking elsewhere for details?’ Manage the message? Lobbyists, politics establishment, and the mainstream press? Well, thanks, Mr. Turner, for confirming what we’ve all suspected, what we’ve all known. There’s an agenda, and it’s no longer hidden — and now managing the news, ‘managing the message,’ is something that’s been alluded to here, and they’re worried, they’re concerned, as they should be. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and it’s why they’re constantly trying to do everything they can to diminish the, quote, unquote, ‘power of the new media.’
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is from USA Today. ‘Businesses target failed immigration bill. The business community is already pushing to resurrect portions of a wide-ranging immigration bill that died in the Senate last week. Among the priorities for business are provisions to allow more highly skilled workers into the country each year and expand programs for farm workers. ‘We’re going to have to go back and see how many things from the bill we can pull out and get fixes,’ says Angelo Amador, director of immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who also said his group would push to give undocumented students who have been raised in the USA a chance to earn legal status and finish their education. … Amador added that businesses face increasing immigration raids and new legislation at the state and local levels,’ precisely because the federal government is lax on this. They’re lax on all areas of enforcement of existing, current immigration law.
‘The American Farm Bureau Federation will continue pushing for a farm worker program, probably more expansive than the one in the failed bill. That program provided a path to legalization for about 1 million current agricultural workers and made it easier to use a guest worker program.’ What do you mean, one million? By the way, isn’t that interesting, path to legalization? Now they start talking about what was in the bill for real. Now they start talking about the truth! In all these stories prior to this one, it was path to citizenship. There was no path. Well there was a path there, but it was so loaded with land mines that the average illegal wouldn’t bother trying to walk down the path. All these fines, all these fees, there was no way. Path to legalization is what it was. But it was certainly for more than one million. ‘Paul Schlegel, director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said, ‘It’s an issue we’ve been working on for a long time … we’re not going to stop.’
Nowhere in this story is there any reference to border security. Nowhere in this story is there reference to border control. You know, Scott Rasmussen, the pollster, says according to his data, the primary reason that there was so much opposition to this was no border control, no stopping of the invasion of illegals into the country. Amnesty was bad enough, but it wasn’t the one thing that bothered everybody. It was border control. Note that in Washington they still don’t get it. And, folks, they’re not going to, because the people that are behind this and want this to happen want there to be a constant flow of ‘farm workers,’ they are called here in this story. The current crop of low skilled and uneducated people that form the labor pool that business would love to have. Now, there is one thing good to be said about this. One of the problems with this bill, one of the many — I mean it’s hard to single out one as being the overriding problem. But when you see on a piece of legislation the word ‘comprehensive,’ that is the wrong way to go about anything, trying to fix everything under the sun and add a whole bunch of new provisions that nobody knows about because it’s not happening in sunlight, no committee hearings, no nothing. The way this thing ought to happen is incrementally.
This whole debate ought to be part of the presidential campaign both in the primaries and in the general election. It ought to be. It is that important to the American people. This effort to get this thing passed in comprehensive form was simply a way to ram it down people’s throats while nobody knew what was in it. But, of course, because of me, talk radio, and all this other so-called new media, you people who would not have known anything about this at all on your own because you’re a bunch of dolts, because of me, they were unable to sneak it through. I say this with due sarcasm and cynicism because you’re not idiots, and it’s about time that they stopped looking at you as idiots. There are plenty of idiots in this country, but you people in this audience are not idiots, and furthermore you are voters, and they secretly know it, but they try to relegate that status of yours to something of lesser importance than it ought to be.