RUSH: I want to go to the audio sound bites. I want you to hear what happened last night, Chris Matthews interviewing Laura Ingraham about — well, theoretically about — her new book, Power to the People.
RUSH: He told Laura Ingraham she’s beautiful, ‘one of God’s gifts to men in this country.’ I happen to know Laura and she’s not that way. (chuckling) Snerdley’s eyes are wide open; you should see him. Let’s go back, August 12th. Well, ‘God’s gift to men’? August 12th, Chris Matthews is talking to ‘the Street Sweetie,’ Erin Burnett of CNBC.
MATTHEWS: Could you get a little closer to the camera.
BURNETT: What, is it? Is it zooming in strangely?
MATTHEWS: Come in further. Come in closer, really close.
BURNETT: What are you…? What are you doing?
MATTHEWS: HA! HA! Just kidding. You look great! Anyway it’s — Thanks, Erin. It’s great. Look at that look. You’re great.
BURNETT: I don’t even know…
MATTHEWS: (snickering) No, no.
BURNETT: I’m gonna have to look at the tape here. I’m at a strange location.
MATTHEWS: I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. You’re a knockout. You’re beautiful! I get in trouble for this. You’re great looking, obviously. You’re one of God’s gifts to men in this country.
RUSH: Now, as a man, I have a reaction when I hear this kind of thing. I can’t share it with you, ladies and gentlemen, because we have standards on this program, but when I hear this kind of thing I have… (sigh) I mean, it’s not even a question. I know what’s going on here. I just do. But I want to take the time here to talk about Laura’s book. I get phone calls from you all the time, phone calls in frustration, because of a lack of leadership or visible, apparent leadership, from the conservative movement and the Republican Party. People call and ask, ‘What can we do? What can we do? We’ve gotta stop Hillary! What can we do about this part of the culture that’s rotting? What can we do?’ Laura has written a book that basically deals with that, and I would strongly suggest that you get it. It’s out now. It’s called Power to the People, and she worked as hard as she’s ever worked on anything. I’m not using a Bill Clinton line, but she worked extremely hard on this because she genuinely cares about the future. We all do. There are a lot of people who are wondering, ‘What can I do?’ They just feel lonely, and unattached, and unable to be influential, and Laura’s book contains a bunch of things that will end up being inspirational. First, a perfect laying-out of the problems that face the country, the culture in a number of different things, and how they’ve deteriorated and how they’ve gotten this way; how we’ve lost the national pride over our culture.
We used to be very proud of it. You have to go back some years for that, but people want to feel proud of their culture. They don’t want to feel embarrassed about it, and they don’t want to turn on television every day and think, ‘My God, everything is going to hell in a hand basket. We are going to hell. We literally are falling apart.’ A lot of this is due to 24/7 media. A lot of it isn’t new. In any society of people, population of people this large, you’re going to have a certain percentage of deadbeats, miscreants, perverts, purse snatchers, rapists, muggers, criminals, and this kind of thing. It’s just they all get coverage now. It’s 24/7 entertainment channels. There are specific channels aimed at kids whose primary purpose is debauchery and to break down any guardrails along the road that they might follow to keep ’em on the straight and narrow. People watch this and parents are feeling helpless about it: what can we do? All of these things are traced from where Laura thinks the deterioration began, and the pride that accompanied this national culture that we were once proud of and how to get it back and what people can do about it. It is really, really well done. In my best Chris Matthews impersonation, ‘The picture on the cover ain’t bad, either.’ But it’s called Power to the People. I don’t recommend a whole lot of books, because the market is flooded with them, and they’re constantly coming out. There’s a new flood of political books that comes out every so often that’s timed with either elections or Christmas, or some sort of gift season.
Laura’s a prolific writer. She’s written a lot of books. She clerked for Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court. She was instrumental in turning the Dartmouth Review into a conservative publication. She’s got her street cred on this. She’s been a commentator at CBS and MSNBC. She’s been fighting the wars for a long time, and she’s done it in a number of different venues, and this book is the net result of all of this time that she has spent, all the compassion, and concern, and care, and love she has for the country, and, in addition to that, it’s just really well done. It’s inspirational, and, in its own way, it provides leadership and will get anybody who reads the book fired up, remove some of the feeling of hopelessness that people have — which I think is not necessary, but it exists. People need leadership, and this book will provide it. I would strongly recommend it, ladies and gentlemen. It’s called Power to the People, and it’s out, and it’s from Regnery. We’ll link to it on our website when we update it for the content of today’s program. But it’s really worth your time because this answers the basic question that we get all the time: ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ There are a lot of great tips for what you can do here. Some even, ladies and gentlemen, I will admit in all humility, that not even I have come up with. (interruption) Yes, Mr. Snerdley, it’s true. See, this is humility, ladies and gentlemen, something the Democrats do not have. I don’t have to admit very often that people came up with things that I didn’t, so it’s easy for me to do. If I had to do it every day, then I’d have a problem. Nevertheless, it’s Power to the People by Laura Ingraham, who’s even able to melt the cold hearts of liberals like Chris Matthews.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more thing about Laura Ingraham’s book, because I know a lot of you are worried about your kids getting off track. This is a great read for everybody. This would be something to pass on to them or get for them. She makes an interesting point in this book and in the interviews that she’s given about it, that there are people in our country who want nothing to do with politics. They just eschew it; makes ’em nervous; too filled with confrontation, conflict, and they don’t want to deal with the fact that there are real problems and solve them. She thinks, and she’s right, that those people are wandering aimlessly through life with no sense of purpose.
I have a phrase: Without struggle, there is no purpose. These are people who try to abandon struggle. They don’t want any part of it, because it’s hard, and they don’t want to have to make up their minds about something. Now, her point is, these people are a problem, because they can’t be reached. There are a lot of them, and they’re just wandering aimlessly out there doing a lot of damage by not joining the right side. They haven’t joined the bad side, but they haven’t joined the right side. They’re too eager to remain thought of as politically correct and open-minded and not closed-minded and so forth. The new castrati, and they’re basically wandering around not helping anything. This book attempts to reach them. We’ll see if it does.