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RUSH: No, I’m quite serious, Mr. Snerdley. I don’t want Hillary Clinton getting out of the race! I know a lot of people have this romantic notion: ‘Well, it will be the end of the Clintons. I can’t wait for it to happen.’ Yeah, I understand that. But this guy, Obama, needs to be roughed up a little bit politically. He’s been getting a free ride. He got a free ride because of Bill Clinton’s ham-handed, racist approach to attacking him in those Southern states rather than attacking him on his record — which is virtually nonexistent — and on his campaign tactics. Now, you might say, ‘They can’t attack him on policy without discrediting themselves.’ They’re the Clintons! Surely, they can come up with something, here. Obama’s been free to define himself as some kind of uniting figure when, in fact, he’s a blank slate. There have to be a couple issues out there that Mrs. Clinton can cream him with. She should have found them by now. Now, you might think, ‘Well, go after Michelle Obama.’ Michelle Obama’s a rich target, by the way. Michelle Obama is a rich, rich target. Mrs. Clinton might not be able to go after Michelle Obama, because if she goes after Michelle Obama, who’s she going after? She’s going after the wife of the candidate and, of course, the same thing has happened to Hillary. So she might be a little bit off-put there.
This is what Hillary Clinton’s lived for the last 35 years. Everything is fair game. She should have jumped on that patriotism issue. I’m sitting around here, and, frankly, I am stunned at the incompetence and the ineptitude of the Clinton campaign. So you’ve got Michelle Obama out there talking about, for the first time in her life, she feels proud of her country. Okay. If I’m a Democrat, if I’m Hillary Clinton, here’s how I attack that. Hillary should have jumped on this — and, whether she believed it or not, she should have said she’s proud of the New Deal. She’s proud of the Great Society. She’s proud of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She’s proud of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She could have cited every liberal achievement that these people think has been the greatest thing since sliced bread, to talk about how great the country is from a liberal perspective. But for some reason, she didn’t do that. She could say there’s a lot more to do, too. There’s a lot more to do. Many liberals and civil rights leaders have paid the price to get us where we are, blah, blah, blah. There’s any number of things that she could have said, that the Obamas would have had no comeback for. But she’s gotta find reasons and ways to attack him beyond form and beyond process.
What Hillary said, this ‘celestial choir’ business, that’s nothing. That’s not even a little pinch. At some point — and Hillary could take the lead on this, folks — at some point, the public, some of the public is going to demand that Obama actually put together a coherent case for national security, for homeland security, for economic growth, for entitlement reform, for family values. We don’t have to wait around for Hillary Clinton to demand it because she doesn’t represent us, either. But we can. But no, no, no, no! The big story here in the stack today is the Republican National Committee sending out memos on how not to attack Obama. Don’t do it on the racist scale. Don’t do it on a sexist scale. Go with the issues and so forth, kid gloves. They’re walking around in a defensive posture. We’re talking about the presidency of the United States and we’re letting liberals’ creation of political correctness dictate to us how we’re going to attack a McGovern-style liberal right out of 1972 if he gets the nomination: Barack Obama, and the same thing with Mrs. Clinton. We know who she is. We know all about her, and guess what? Because we know so much about Mrs. Clinton, is why 50% of the country can’t stand her. Gotta do the same thing here about Obama.
She’s the one that’s gotta do that. She’s the one in the best position to do that, as the opponent in this campaign. The media’s not going to demand anything from Obama. He campaigns around the country as if he’s Billy Graham — and they’re sitting there and they’re just idolizing him. The Drive-Bys are just in awe. Well, there’s some evidence that the bloom’s off the rose here in certain sectors of the Drive-By Media — and that is all coming up. But here’s the bottom line here, folks. We are a great country, a fabulous country, with myriad responsibilities. We cannot rely on Hillary and the media to educate us about Barack Obama. She’s proven herself incompetent at it. The media is running interference for him. And in the midst of all this, a lot of people on our side are urging Hillary to drop out! What in the hell for? How does that make any sense to our side? Mrs. Clinton should hammer away harder, take it to the convention if possible, fight over superdelegates, fight over seating Florida and Michigan — and I think she will. I don’t want her to get out; I don’t want her to quit this. This is her life! This is what she’s been living for. She’s not going to get out. I’ll be disappointed in Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton both if she quits. If she gets out of the race, I’ll be disappointed. That will be their legacy: quitters. They’re looking for a legacy, they’ll get one. They quit before their latest firewall states.
You might be saying, ‘Rush, why…?’ because, folks, I want to see their party damaged! I want to see their agenda damaged! I want as many people as possible knowing just what that party stands for, what that party has already given us and what their agenda for the future is. I want as many people as possible knowing it. That’s why Obama must be unmasked. We already know it about Hillary, as I say, which is why 50% of the country can’t stand her. This is serious stuff. I want to see splits in all their coalitions. I want to see the racial coalition split between the Obama supporters and the old guard, John Lewis types, because that’s going to make it more difficult for them to unite for the general. I want to see the blood spill over into the congressional races. I want this party imploding, and that’s not going to happen if Mrs. Clinton quits. Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, this is why politics is best practiced by those who understand it, not a bunch of navel-gazer intellectuals writing in journals of opinion inside the protected special little Beltway enclave they have. An enemy divided is weak, and I am seeing less and less evidence in our own party that we look at the other side as the enemy. In a political sense, they are.
They certainly look at us that way. We have sat around and we have let them destroy Robert Bork. We didn’t sit around and let them destroy Clarence Thomas, but they’ve tried. They have tried to destroy every conservative leader who has popped up, from the judiciary appointments to attorney general appointments, you name it. They are out to destroy us politically. They want us a perpetual nonfactor minority. We, on the other hand, want what? Bipartisanship! For all the sordid, sick, psychological reasons. We have an inferiority complex; we feel we must show the country that we’re not all these horrible things they say we are. So we’re going to be nice, like Trent Lott did, and give control of the Senate — when the Republicans had won it — to the Democrats and to Tom ‘Puff’ Daschle, and that engineered the switch of parties by Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords in Vermont. We thought we would get praise and accolades. ‘Gee, they’re really going to like us now,’ and the whole point was to make us inconsequential and ineffective. So this continuing résumé enhancement that we somehow have the ability to reach across the aisle and come up with bipartisan solutions of these people, when the bipartisan solution is always theirs, is always in their interest.
You’ve gotta look at this like it’s a military operation. If the enemy is breaking into factions that fight among themselves, who does that help? It helps you, helps the good guys. An enemy divided is weak. So we need Mrs. Clinton to stay in this. We need her to ratchet up the criticisms of Obama. I doubt that she will, because she can’t criticize them on policy; they’re one and the same. But I’m sick and tired of a party that wants to pick up the crumbs of the left’s losing policy arguments and make ’em our own. Be it CAFE standards, be it energy policy, be it environmental policy, whatever, and then after they do that…. By the way, this is what really frosts me, and I was pounding the table both nights this weekend — Saturday and Sunday nights — dropping the F-bombs, folks. It wasn’t pretty. I apologized to both hostesses. They said, ‘Don’t be silly. Your rants were the highlight of both nights.’ I hope. But we sit around and we pick up the little crumbs of their policy things, the establishment that the premises that they establish, CAFE standards, you name it, whatever — can’t drill in ANWR, what have you — and then, after all of that, we claim our conservative principles can’t win elections, when they aren’t even tried, when they are abandoned!
And then the blue-blood country club types in the party say, ‘Conservatism can’t win. You gotta do it our way. We gotta join ’em halfway on gun control, join ’em halfway on CAFE standards, join ’em half way.’ Why? If their way is destructive to our way of life, to the future of the country as we’ve known it, why meet ’em halfway? Why not go out and beat ’em, like they’re trying to do to us? Almost like we surrender without a fight in all this stuff, and our demise is going to be self-fulfilling, folks. That is we are rejecting and smothering those elements of our society that make us stronger: capitalism, a bigger military. CAFE standards are a perfect example. It’s a symbol. CAFE standards are a symbol of our self-imposed decline. Rather than have a bunch of bureaucrats who haven’t run diddly-squat in their lives in Washington DC, tell us what experts in various fields of manufacture can and can’t do, how big they can and can’t be; what we need to do is unleash the private sector. We’ll turn ’em loose. It’s always worked. It’s made us the greatest country in the history of the world. Let the private sector do what it does best, instead of dictating constraints under which it must operate, particularly under hoax premises and other such things.
It’s the same thing with health care. The whole liberal premise, you see, is a lie. It’s intended to achieve one thing and one thing only, and that’s expanded government, pure and simple. That’s what liberalism exists for. And for government to expand, people have to lose liberty. That’s liberalism, and we’re losing liberty. You can’t do as much with your property as you used to be able to do. But I bet your property taxes are going through the roof, aren’t they? You can’t really drive the car you want to be able to drive or you’re soon not going to be able to. You just had your lightbulbs banned. I could go on and on and on. We are like the stupid frog that gets thrown in a pot of cold water, and the liberal comes in and turns it on warm. In a couple days we’re dead. We’re not in boiling water when we get thrown in. This creeps up on us. Yeah, see, the lightbulb has been banned. Where you can and can’t smoke, don’t get me started on this. Some of the ridiculous… While they’re trying to fund health care programs with the sales tax revenue from tobacco products, and we just sit around and we let this happen. In California, by the way, you gotta go and get solar panels. They’re trying to push solar energy, solar panels on your house. Guess what? If your neighbor has a redwood tree that blocks your solar panel, you can have your neighbor cut down his redwood tree! That’s been mandated. Your redwood tree! Redwood trees are protected. You can’t touch ’em, except when your neighbor’s redwood is getting in the way of your solar panel. Between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., if 20% of the sunlight’s blocked by your tree, then you gotta go cut the tree. This is not the solution to our energy problem. It is nowhere near it. Neither is changing out these stupid lightbulbs. Nor is turning off turtle lights five days from now.