Why Gridlock is Good

RUSH: Monroe, Ohio. This is Larry. You’re next on the EIB Network, sir. Great to have you with us.

CALLER: Thank you, sir, and good afternoon. I just have a quick question. Which is better for America, conservative talk radio — i.e., you running America — or gridlock like we had in the nineties when we had one Clinton in the White House with a Republican Congress?

RUSH: You know, actually a lot got done in the nineties. After the budget battle of ’95, a lot of things got done: a balanced budget, welfare reform. Welfare reform happened and so forth. But, look, I always love gridlock. I am not one of these people that believes that unless Washington’s producing mounds of legislative, the country is not moving forward. That is asinine. We have enough laws. We have a $3,000,000,000,000.00 budget! The idea that we don’t have enough money and budget cuts and all this? We don’t have gridlock enough. I love gridlock. I actually do — and it provides a lot of fun, too, because the people that are sitting up there defining their existence by ‘getting good legislation get frustrated,’ and that gets fun to watch, too.

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RUSH: Scott in Shreveport, Louisiana, thank you for waiting, and welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, thanks a lot, Rush.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: It’s an honor to speak to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I’m in the good part of the state, by the way, in the Piney Hills up north. I just had a quick comment, or really to get you to comment on, as I was telling your screener… Liberals and Democrats seem to do always want to project this ‘progressive image.’ Yet they always want to live in the past. They want to relive Vietnam. They want to relive these protests in the sixties and relive these concerts for peace and everything, and I just kind of wanted to get your take on that.

RUSH: Oh, it’s a common theme that I have recited on this program for many years. The liberals have a playbook that’s very, very old. They never update it. Well, look at now. You’re focusing on the fact ‘progressive.’ Progressive is simply to hide the word liberal. ‘Liberal’ doesn’t poll well. There aren’t a whole lot of people that really admit to being liberals. They call themselves ‘progressives’ because they think they can sound forward-thinking and forward-moving — whereas conservatives are rock-ribbed; stuck in the mud; want to stay focused on the old-fashioned, putrid ideas of the past. When in fact when it comes to strategy, when it comes to vision, dealing with problems and so forth, winning elections, there’s nothing new in liberalism. You know, liberalism has its roots in Marxist-Leninism, and that stuff’s old. There’s no reason to update it. It is what it is. So they keep coming up with new ways to execute the same plan. Global warming is nothing more than the modern era of Paul Ehrlich’s seventies book, ‘The Population Bomb,’ or remember when everybody was worried about acid rain, or everybody was worried about nuclear holocaust and runaway arms races and so forth? All of these things are just tools, and they change from generation to generation, sometimes year to year, but their objective is to keep you on the edge of your seat scared, mired in a midst of doom and gloom. They don’t want you happy. They want you miserable.

They want you constantly thinking things are falling apart so you will want ‘change’ and they come out and promise to be ‘architects of change.’ In many situations, as in global warming, they blame you for the problems facing the country, saying that you must take the blame for this by paying higher taxes, but you can assuage your guilt by going along with bigger government programs and so forth. It’s the same objective. They just have different issues that they use to move all of these things forward. Like in the Iraq war. They’re trying to remake that in the public image, in the public’s mind, as Vietnam. They’re trying with all of these investigations to paralyze and weaken the presidency. They’re trying to create a Nixonian flavor and air about the Bush administration, because they think those are two, big successful periods in their past. I think ever since Watergate, they have decided that the simplest way to get rid of political enemies is to criminalize everything they do: criminalize their beliefs, criminalize their policies, get rid of them via scandal, since they really have so much trouble getting rid of people at the ballot box. They have trouble winning because they can’t go out and be honest about who they are, hence they come up with the term ‘progressive.’ Liberalism, Clintonism, Democrat Party-ism, it’s all oriented around, ‘How can we fool ’em today? How can we depress them today? How can we scare them today? What crisis can we create to make them think only we represent solution and salvation to this horror that is the future that’s waiting to unfold right before our very eyes?’