EIB Callers on William F. Buckley

CALLER: Hi, Rush. You are right to explain before the break that if we are exposed to ideas, liberals can be changed. This is my Bill Buckley moment. I was in my early twenties just moved to Florida from two years of University of Minnesota liberal teaching, and I had a roommate who was in political science down here, and he said there’s this guy Bill Buckley that is going to be speaking, Miami-Dade Junior College, and I went and for two hours listened to him espouse conservative ideas and critiquing the liberal ideas, and it was an immediate conversion. I thought of it more of common sense and logical ideas compared to pie-in-the-sky as opposed to liberal and conservative. Bill Buckley really had an ability to speak to young people and to relate his ideas to them even with his intellect. And I think that’s really a quality that I see in him.

RUSH: Absolutely, you’re right about that. A lot of people would say he was above them, that they couldn’t understand him, that you did is a testament. But something that Buckley did, and you mentioned it here, in explaining conservatism, he explained liberalism. And in explaining liberalism, he used conservatism as a refutation or as a comparative, which is what we do on this program, too. We explain liberalism better on this program than most liberals would honestly talk about it if they came on this show.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Cincinnati. David, nice to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hello. How are you? Good afternoon.

RUSH: Very good.

CALLER: Doing my usual thorough and comprehensive analysis and reading of the Wall Street Journal and reading the Buckley history article, I called a very liberal friend of mine and quoted something out of the article, which was the thing from Laugh In in 1970 when Henry Gibson says, ‘Mr. Buckley, I have noticed that whenever you appear on television, you’re always seated. Is that because you can’t think on your feet?’ Mr. Buckley’s reply was, ‘It’s very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know.’

RUSH: (laughter)

CALLER: Which I think — well, it’s very appropriate, because when I called my friend, who thinks knowledge is everything, versus other things to be considered, Mr. Buckley was quite a heavyweight and quite knowledgeable. My point and comment to ask from you is, going up to the Northeast, I being in the Midwest, I run into this theory that they know everything and probably have as much knowledge as he did — and I think that’s a far cry from the truth.

RUSH: Are you talking about Northeastern elites?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Oh. I couldn’t agree with you more. I think they’re so arrogant and condescending. I don’t think they’ve learned anything. I think their worldview is the belief in a system without much detail, without much reasoning behind it. It’s interesting you say it because it’s very frustrating to try to talk to these peopling in a logical, rational way. Facts, actual information, doesn’t permeate. It is irrelevant to them.

CALLER: Correct. Facts do not matter. I deal in American antiques; so I go up there to do shows, and one of the promoters after Bush got elected said that for the next four years, said she was going to wear a black dress. I mean that’s how bad it was.

RUSH: Oh, yeah, well, how about all these clowns that promised to move away from the country, move out of the country and leave? Look, let me tell you something. Liberals, the elite liberals you’re talking about are basically a bunch of spoiled people. But the dirty little secret is, they have genuine contempt for conservatives and Republicans; genuine contempt. If anybody is really practicing the art of hate… For example, I gave you all of the examples of the Clinton campaign and their personal attacks against Obama. He’s selling drugs, not just using them. His middle name was Hussein, he may be a terrorist! Bob Kerrey — and of course they go out and apologize for all this. But notice the MO. They put all these things in the public domain.
Then you have the first Republican that happens to use Obama’s middle name, the entire left has a conniption fit, and points fingers. ‘This is outrageous, these personal attacks must stop.’ Nobody has that reaction when liberals mount these attacks on others, including themselves. Do you remember…? A little trivia question here. I’m sure you all remember the Willie Horton ad. I’m sure you all remember that it was falsely linked to Roger Ailes, that Ailes had produced it. You all remember that it was said to be bogus, that it was inflammatory. It certainly wasn’t true, and it was just typical mean-spirited right-wing racism. Do you know who first cited what Willie Horton did at a gas station while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, the furlough signed by Michael Dukakis? Do you know who first brought it up? Algore! It was Algore, in Democrat primaries. It was Algore, trying to cream Dukakis, who told everybody about Willie Horton.

So they put this out in the domain, and this is their MO, they put it out there, all these derogatory names and slurs — and then, of course, when the slurs (or when the case of Willie Horton), the truth happens to be put in the public domain and Republicans start using it, then here come the counter, ‘Why, this is beneath contempt, racism and hatred,’ and they never hold themselves to these standards, and this is why I’m perplexed why we have anybody with any brains on our side that wants to reach across the aisle to these people and try to become friends or appease them or gain their acceptance, when it’s fully obvious what their efforts are, what their attempts are. I don’t know. It’s like, to draw you an analogy — it’s a little bit flawed but a good analogy would be — let’s go back to the Cold War days and assume that there were some Americans who were eager for Soviet agents to infiltrate American life. We seem to have people on our side of the aisle who are eager to bring in people who despise us — into our side, into our party — so that we can all get along for some reason, which is mystifying to me.