RUSH: Bob in Lakeland, Florida, welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Hey, I’ve always wondered why the conservative part of my beloved Republican Party has always felt a need to enforce their values and morals. Why do you have to put your morality on top of us?
RUSH: Wait. Are you asking me that personally, why do I have to put my morality on top of you?
CALLER: Conservatives.
RUSH: Are you a conservative?
CALLER: I am not, I’m a Republican.
RUSH: Okay, so you want to know why conservatives insist on a morality in a political party and political candidates who are Republicans?
CALLER: Not just for the party, but as a whole.
RUSH: Well, do you really mean that? Are you confused about this?
CALLER: I guess I’m one of those Jell-O-minded —
RUSH: Moderates.
CALLER: — moderates that you call, yeah. I despise the Democratic Party. I am a hawk. I also want you to stay out of my pocket. But also I want you to stay out of my bedroom.
RUSH: Wait a second. You’re making this personal. You’re saying you think I, as a conservative, want to be in your bedroom?
CALLER: Not just you, Rush, I’m talking about the entire conservative branch of the —
RUSH: I don’t care what goes on in your bedroom. But the question about morality, it’s rooted in decency, it’s rooted in human dignity.
CALLER: Rush, I have a very good sense of self-worth, and I also know what is wrong and what is right. But I mean a public official is one thing, they’re a higher standard, so this entire Spitzer thing is wrong. But if I’m single and it’s Friday night, there’s nothing wrong with a prostitute.
RUSH: Well, that would be a Libertarian view.
CALLER: Yeah, but this —
RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait a second. What about if you’re married? Now, if morality is not that big a deal, why do you have to be single in order to feel guiltless in paying a prostitute?
CALLER: Because when I said my vows to my wife —
RUSH: Well, without morality the vow doesn’t mean anything.
CALLER: That’s your own —
RUSH: No —
CALLER: That’s your own sense of honor. I should not be forced —
RUSH: This is not my construction. You know, morality is not defined by individual choice. This is the problem. Morality is what it is, and people have a problem with that. We all sin. There is not one of us that doesn’t. We are all immoral at times, some of us all the time, some of us very rarely, but some of us are immoral. The political answer to your question is that there is a huge voting bloc of Republicans to whom it matters in their leaders, because they believe that leaders set the example. And these people are sick and tired of seeing what’s happening when no morality exists in the production of television shows or movies or music or what have you, and they see literal filth that their kids are subjected to that is being put out there for profit because there’s no morality. The same gunk that these executives are putting out in the marketplace, they wouldn’t dare let their own kids watch or listen to.
CALLER: Yes, sir, but where does it say in my Constitution that it should be legislated?
RUSH: That’s not the point.
CALLER: I thought that was the point.
RUSH: That is not the point. In a political sense, these people are a large voting bloc, and the reason why the Republican Party pays attention to them is because they vote, and elections are about being won. Look, I’m going to continue this after the break here, because I’ve got a hard break that I can’t miss here. Thanks, Bob, for the phone call. I mean that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
Let me just ask you a question. Go back to the nineties. You know how frustrated we all were back then, Clinton was getting away with everything, all the lies, all the interns, everything. The public opinion poll numbers kept him in the mid-fifties, the low sixties. The press was back there marveling, and the Democrats circling the wagons. Did you ever think that you would see the day where at least half the Democrat Party is dumping on these two? I never thought there would be this many Democrats alive to do it. I never thought there would be this much courage in the Democrat Party. The press was the first to turn on the Clintons, and now others, Greg Craig and all kinds of Democrats are turning on the Clintons, and it tells me that there has been a pent-up frustration for a long time over the fact the Clintons have been running the Democrat Party show and now that there’s an opportunity to take ’em out, there are a lot of Democrats that want to do that, and don’t think the Clintons don’t know it.
Now, about this morality business. Our last caller wanted to know — he’s a Republican, but he doesn’t like this morality in politics, it’s not in the Constitution. Actually, it is in the Federalist Papers in the section in which the criteria for the president was being written and debated about, the number one aspect in the Federalist Papers, I think it was John Adams in this case — I think it was John Adams writing number-one, most important thing in the executive was character. If there was an absence of character in the executive, then the republic, the country would have big problems. Now, what is character if not morality? So it’s easy to say you don’t find the word morality in the Constitution, but if you’re not familiar with the Federalist papers, if you haven’t read them, you don’t understand the importance that the founders placed on morality, character, integrity, these kinds of things. It was crucial, it was there. Leadership by example. There are ways that society stays cohesive. There are ways that society stays strong and evolving. When there are no guide rails, no guardrails, for example, on the highway, the opportunity for you to drive off is easy and get into big trouble.
Morality is simply guardrails on behavior. By the way, the thing about the law, a lot of people get very upset when you say that law descends from morality. People just don’t like hearing that. But the fact of the matter is that the law and morality are linked in our society and in our country. They may not be direct descendants, but in fact they do have a lot to do with one another. Human dignity, this is something that is rooted in morality, because everybody has choices. You can choose not to live as best you can, you can choose to be a reprobate or what have you. Reprobates are not the kind of people we want leading the country or holding elective office. And, by the way, making something legal does not make it moral. Don’t misunderstand. How does making something legal make it right? How does making something legal address the destructive effect, for example, of prostitution that it has on the family and therefore society in general? To look at prostitution as a mere commercial transaction is to reject the entire moral belief of conservatism and the structure of conservatism, because there are attitudes that lack a moral belief structure.
The law is intended to reflect the standards of a society. Presumably those standards include moral attitudes of the society. So how can one say, for example, that it’s okay to legalize prostitution even if it is morally repugnant to the society, and even if everybody knows it’s wrong? What was it that Moynihan said? He had a phrase ‘defining deviancy down.’ Senator Moynihan, a Democrat, by the way, looked out over our culture over the course of his life, and he saw a degradation, and he saw a cheapening, he saw a coarsening of the culture. He saw morality going by the wayside, and he said the way we’re dealing with it, rather than trying to straighten it out and fly right, we’re simply saying, ‘Okay, it’s no longer a crime.’ So what used to be immoral and what society had judged as destructive, we can’t stop it, so we just legalize it, we no longer make it illegal. So we define deviancy down. Now, some people may like that, but the fact is the standards by which a society governs itself and defines itself can go by the wayside.
By the same token, if an elected official does not have the integrity to do what’s right in private — and, by the way, you can define character, integrity, one of the best definitions of it is ‘doing the right thing when nobody is looking.’ A lot of people can do the right thing when everybody is looking at them. A lot of people, when they have an audience and they know people’s eyes are on them, they’ll do their best to do the right thing. Character, integrity, is doing the right thing when nobody is looking. So if a public official, elected official doesn’t have the integrity to do what’s right in private, then how do we know that his lack of respect for what’s right won’t carry over into his elected office? He can do whatever he wants, but we can say no thanks, we want to elect somebody else next time because you’ve done this. We have standards. Now, the political equation on the presence of morality in the Republican Party is simply this. A lot of morality is rooted in religion, and the Republican Party is the home of the Christian right. Not just the evangelicals, but just Christian people who are conservatives. It is one of their standards, it’s one of their measuring sticks. They’re gonna judge people on that basis and vote for them on that basis, then that party is gonna pay attention to it. Problem is that too many people, elected officials, mouth the words but don’t live the life or walk the walk. Then again it’s impossible for any of us to walk the talk and be clean and pure as the wind-driven snow 100% of the time.
It’s impossible for us not to sin. You know, it’s a tough question. But if somebody’s not even trying, if somebody’s making no effort whatsoever — we all have a little voice inside ourselves, folks, call it the conscience, call it whatever you want, we all have a voice inside ourselves that when we’re about to embark on something we know is wrong, we know is wrong why? Because the little voice is telling us, conscience, our upbringing, we know it’s wrong, and yet some of us still do it. If people would just listen to that little voice inside them, they could spare themselves a whole lot of trouble. For example, you can’t convince me that Spitzer didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. He knew full well it was wrong. Now, you can go the Dershowitz route and say, ‘Yeah, but he wasn’t thinking with his brain, he was thinking with the male sex organ.’ Yeah, is that an excuse? A lot of men would love for it to be. I have whole different theories about this. I think you’ve got a guy like Spitzer, there’s no question arrogance is his number-one characteristic. I think he believes that he’s insulated from the standards that would apply to everybody else, and I think people like him think, ‘If I get caught, I can get away with it. My wife will stand by me, I’m a Democrat, the voters love me, New York needs me,’ who knows what kind of things these people tell themselves.
But somewhere he knew it was wrong and yet still did it. I’m convinced he knew that what he was doing trying to ruin people on Wall Street was wrong, and yet he still did it. Why? Power. It wasn’t just the desire to acquire it and hold it. It was an obsession to use it. Having power is one thing. Using it is another. Spitzer used it in ways that were clearly immoral and wrong, unfair, and what have you. But he had the power of being the attorney general behind him, the power of being governor behind him. He threatened people left and right. John Whitehead, who used to run Goldman Sachs, wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal, defending Hank Greenberg when Spitzer was going after him. Spitzer was going after Greenberg and AIG, threatened to indict AIG. When you indict a company, that’s the end of the company. Spitzer said to Greenberg, ‘You quit and I won’t indict,’ and the board of directors said, ‘Hank, you gotta go.’ To this day, Maurice Hank Greenberg’s never been indicted for anything, nor has he been apologized to. Whitehead writes a column, writes a letter defending Greenberg; Spitzer gets hold of Whitehead, ‘I’m coming after you, that letter is going to be the biggest thing you regret in your life.’ Nothing happened, but that’s the kind of guy Spitzer is.
I have some golf buddies, who haven’t done diddly-squat, who have been targeted for ruination by Eliot Spitzer. I was on the golf course here in a place out in West Palm Beach back in November. I bombed the drive to the fairway to the left, I went out there and all of a sudden as soon as I got out of the golf course some guy drives up and said, ‘You have a name for a good criminal defense attorney?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Eliot Spitzer is after me.’ Part of this stuff going on in New York involving Joe Bruno and — look at that episode, too. This is who the guy was. So clearly you’re looking at somebody that morality didn’t matter. So if you want to say, ‘Why does morality matter in politics?’ look at Spitzer, look at Clinton. Are these the kind of people that we want setting the standards of leadership for everybody else? That’s why it matters. These guys aren’t even trying. It’s one thing if somebody falls off trying to do right and be as good as they can, but these people weren’t even trying. They didn’t care. They were invincible, they were untouchable. So what they’re doing in private is an indication what they’ll do in their public life. If Spitzer’s out there essentially treating his own family with disgust and disregard, might he do that in his job? He did, with the way he went after people he thought were his enemies.
I gotta take a brief time-out here, folks. A little long in this segment so the next one is going to be appropriately shorter than normal. You have been warned.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It was James Madison. Actually, he wrote one-third of the Federalist Papers, the forerunner of the Constitution. He also was the principal author of the Constitution. It was James Madison in the Federalist Papers who laid out the requirements for the executive, number one being character. It’s crucial, and we’ve seen what happens when we have elected officials without it, and if you… (interruption) Well, it did call for an informed public, and we’re working on that, Snerdley. The public in this program is informed. Now, let me take this a step further, all right? Let’s take this character stuff, let’s take this morality stuff that some of you don’t like. It makes a lot of people nervous because it’s judgmental. If you have morality, you’re going to be judged, and some of us don’t want to be judged, because nobody else is perfect. But just because people do something wrong doesn’t mean they’re disqualified from knowing what’s right. We all make mistakes.
Sometimes the mistakes we make help us and inform us, and we can become better coaches, better parents, advisors, teachers, because of the mistakes we’ve made. But libs want to say whenever you make a mistake and fall off the moral wagon, ‘You’re disqualified from ever being able to talk about it again,’ because they don’t like the judgmentalism of morality, which is why they have none, or why they subscribe to none. In your wildest dreams, would you think that any group of people, smart or not so smart, could come up with a plan as incompetent as this so-called Democrat primary race? Could any group outside the funny farm, the cuckoo nest, come up with a scheme that is this inept? We’re not talking about ordinary people, here. We’re talking about the smartest people in the room, people that got the best grades at the best schools, the liberals who care more about your needs than you do, supposedly. And this is what they give us?
This is what they begat? I mean, we’ve had our fun watching these liberals suffer through the mess that they alone created, their Uncivil Civil War. What they do to their own party, what they do to their own voters is their business. But I want to drop the other shoe on this. I don’t care what they’re doing to themselves. I’m interested in what these same inept boobs want to do to us. These people that can’t even manage their own primary, these people that try to come up with a scheme to get somebody coronated, and it’s all falling apart on them, and now it’s an absolute joke and there’s chaos throughout their party. These are the same people that want to design your health care. These are the same people that want to manage your health care, control and ration your health care. These are the same people that want to run the oil companies. They want to run retail businesses. These are the people that promise a universal health care utopia, and they can’t even run their own business in a way that makes any sense whatsoever!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, I just sent this up to Koko. We’re going to link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. Eighty-five Federalist Papers, number 69, written by Alexander Hamilton, The Character of the Executive. I want you to read it when we update the website this afternoon, this evening, to reflect the contents of today’s program, because it was said earlier here today that, ‘I don’t see the word ‘morality’ in my Constitution.’ The Federalist Papers informed the Constitution, same Founding Fathers that wrote the Constitution participated with the Federalist Papers. They were forerunners of the Constitution, and so it’s not accurate to say that morality is not part of the Constitution.
Now, back to the Democrats and the same theme here. I mean, here we have a bunch of people who cannot even run their own business. They have gunked up their own primary. They can’t blame this on Republicans; they can’t blame this on voters. They might try, but they can’t. They goofed up their own business. Now, the Democrat hierarchy, when this whole shebang started, put these primaries together in order and in a concentrated fashion so as to coronate Hillary Clinton on February 5th, and that she would have all the rest of this year to hone her message, learn how not to screech, go out and raise a bunch of money, and be able to pummel whoever the Republicans nominated. It’s gone all haywire. Nothing that’s happened here has been planned. Nothing was anticipated. In other words, Mrs. Clinton was so certain of her own coronation by February 5th, she didn’t have campaign organizations in any states following February 5th. And yet she lied to her own people, ‘I knew it was going to come down to Texas,’ she said a day or a week before the Texas primary. These are the same people who want to run your health care; they want to manage your health care; they want to tell you when and where you can go get health care; they want to design your health care; they want to control and ration it.
These are the same people that to want run Big Oil. They want to take their profits and throw ’em into alternative energy sources, or whatever other gunk that they describe. These are the same people who buy into the global warming hoax. These are the people, if you look at their enemies list, it is every successful US corporation and business in this country. You know why they hate Wal-Mart? It’s not because Wal-Mart’s not unionized, although that’s a factor. They hate Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart does more for the American people than the US government and liberals combined have done. Wal-Mart brings products at prices people in the middle class and lower classes can afford. Democrats can’t do that. All they can do is try to give it away and create dependents and so forth. They despise people that do what they claim to do better than they do it. They try to destroy those people so there’s no competition. Liberalism does not like competition because it will lose on a level playing field.
So now we’re back to morality. Now we’re back to integrity. Why, the Democrats said that if Florida and Michigan went ahead and ran their primaries prior to when the national committee said they could, that their delegates wouldn’t be seated. I guess that’s out the window now that Mrs. Clinton needs them. So if they can change the rules on Florida and Michigan, can’t they change the rules on examinations and procedures when it comes to health care and so forth? If they can’t decide what a winner is in Texas, how can they decide what good health care is in your hometown? How can they decide whether or not Big Oil is being fair with you? But see, here’s how Democrats get around this, we’re back now to morality. There are no rules, and if there are no rules, they can’t be broken. There are only traditions, there are customs. I’m not making this up. You watch. They’re not going to be breaking any rules here. By the time this all happens, if Florida and Michigan have these primaries with write-in or mail-in ballots, they’re going to be talking about the fairness of it all. They’re going to be talking about disenfranchisement and how the Democrats don’t stand for that, that’s what Republicans do is try to disenfranchise people, but we Democrats, we think every vote ought to count, twice.
But they’re going to be breaking their own rules, even though there aren’t any rules. This is how they get around it. If you are a person without integrity and character and morality, how can you have rules? Rules are simply a way, a life, a game, a contest, a business, governed and administered not for fairness alone, however that is a factor, but that doesn’t matter here. I wish I could say I came by this whole analogy of rules and no rules versus customs and traditions on my own, but I can’t. This was pointed out to me some years ago when talking to a friend who is a member of a famous golf club in this country, and it’s not in the southeast, so don’t get any ideas. When this man was newly asked to join, he went in, and he was assigned somebody to explain to him how things worked at this club. And he said, ‘What are the rules here?’ They said, ‘Why, we don’t have any rules at this club. We only have customs and traditions.’ ‘Well, how do I know what I can and can’t do?’ ‘Well, there’s nothing you can’t do unless it violates a tradition or custom. You know what the traditions and customs are.’ The point is, the concept of rules is something the club didn’t want because it didn’t want to be seen as restrictive. I’m telling you, the Democrat Party, when it comes down to all this, doesn’t have any rules.
There are no rules here. They’re not going to be breaking rules as a result. They’re just going to be maintaining the great traditions and customs that every vote counts, twice, that every vote matters. Now, what’s happened with all this? What’s the upshot of all this? ‘Rush, what’s the morality, what’s the integrity?’ Well, where are we? According to the rules of the Democrat primary system, we’ve got a winner. On the pledged delegate side, there is no way Obama can lose this. But wait a minute. We’ve got these superdelegates, and those superdelegates, by definition, go to whoever they want, so what does it matter, these pledged delegates for Obama? How about all these people who have voted for Obama whose votes may never count? We’re not talking the Electoral College system here. We’re talking a superdelegate system that dates back to the McGovern era because that was such a debacle that the Democrat Party said, ‘We have to find a way to protect ourselves from the idiocy of our own voters.’ So they don’t nominate somebody as hapless as McGovern, again, we’ve gotta have a system whereby we can go in and overrule ’em. Morality, integrity, character, you won’t find it here. What you’re finding is a bunch of schemes. ‘But, Rush, this is politics.’ That’s my point. Exactly right. Politics. It’s exactly what the Democrats have made of politics, is what liberals have made of politics.
Unless we are prepared to take them on in this way — I’m not suggesting we become them, but if hypocrisy is a crime only we can be accused of committing, it’s time they got a taste of it because they’re engaging in more hypocrisy here with their own stupid primary system that is inept and it is incompetent, it has been blown sky high and these are the same people that want to run your life and every aspect of something you consider the most important thing in your life outside your family, and that’s your health care. And I ask you to look at what they’ve done with their own business and ask yourself then what makes them qualified to run something they really don’t know anything about. Is it not frightening that so many dummkopf Americans will be willing to turn over the administration of something as massive as one-seventh of our economy to this bunch of klutzes, this bunch of power-crazed klutzes, who don’t care about your health care, who don’t care about your health. They care about their power, acquiring it and using it is what they’re all about. Hello morality, character, integrity, don’t tell me it doesn’t matter.
If this bunch is willing to take away the decisions of their own voters and give them to their superdelegates, what’s to stop them from taking your health care away from your doctor and giving it to a doctor they prefer. What’s to stop them from telling you, you can’t go to that doctor, you can’t use that procedure, you can’t spend this much. And, by the way, you have to buy insurance and you have to do the government program, if you go private you’re really screwed. If the liberals and Democrats can screw up something as simple as a primary contest, in their own party, imagine what they can do with something as complicated as national health care. Imagine what they can do trying to punish the oil business. Imagine what they’ll do in the whole field of energy. You can talk about your health care and all that, yada yada yada. The last I looked, we’re not dropping like flies in this country. Life expectancy is getting better and longer, general health is improving. We want to punish the drug companies that have helped contribute to that, by the way.
You let them get their hands on the program of energy creation, development, and usage in this country, and you watch what happens. You think that you are losing a little liberty here and there and a little liberty now, you wait ’til these people have a chance to get hold of the energy program via global warming and that hoax. I am warning you, it matters whether somebody has integrity, character, and morality, knowing full well that nobody’s perfect, we all sin, but there is a difference between people who try and those who aren’t trying when it comes to morality and integrity and character, and we don’t want any part of those who aren’t even trying, folks, trust me.