Why Rush Remains Optimistic

RUSH: A friend of mine asked me last night after I said, ‘Democrats probably going to have 60 seats in the Senate next year. If they don’t have 60 seats they’re certainly going to get 60 votes with these RINO Republicans we’ve got in there: Collins and Snowe and take your pick, Lindsey Grahamnesty.’

‘How do you remain so optimistic?’

‘Well, my optimism is based long term. You’re always going to lose elections. You’re always going to have disappointments. We’re always in cycles.’

We’re always going to end up with dingbats like Jimmy Carter. It’s going to happen. But I believe, and I think with plenty of evidence, that the American people have the clear ability to recognize doom and gloom in who they elect or who they have elected at some point. They might be fooled by Obama or Hillary this time around, but four years of an Obama presidency doing what he says he wants to do? I have faith the American people are not going to fall for it and think that’s the new America. The history is just the opposite. Long term, your kids and grandkids, I know the challenges look bad — and I know, ‘My God, they’re growing up into a country that more and more people think they’re entitled, and tax rates these kids of ours are going to face. We’re not facing this problem. We’re not getting rid of Social Security. We’re not reforming it. We’re not reforming welfare enough and so forth.’ All of my life — I’m fifty-seven — I remember my dad talking this way. My dad told me, my brother and my friends in junior high and high school, ‘You boys are going to be slaves if we don’t do something about the communists.’

We laughed. We couldn’t imagine it. We were just junior high school kids. We laughed. Well, we didn’t laugh openly, but we never thought we were going to become slaves. He did. He was concerned. We were his kids. He knew the threat. Well, lo and behold, we came along and we wiped out the communists in the Soviet Union. We haven’t gotten rid of them. Communism resurfaced in the global warming movement, in a number of places. They call themselves different things now, but essentially leftists and communists. They’re still out there, and they still have to be defeated, but we always seem to do it. But my whole point is that throughout my life I can remember I’ve heard people, adults and then my peers as I grew older, ‘Oh, God! This is horrible. I don’t see how we can recover.’ I remember the economic malaise after Watergate, ’73 to ’75. I was in Kansas City, ’76, ’77, during the Carter years. I remember people in business in Kansas say, ‘It’s over. This country cannot come back from this, Rush. It cannot! It just can’t. It’s never been worse than this, and there’s no way we can come back. The government’s going to come in and take over all these businesses and regulate them to the point we’re never going to recover,’ and we always do.

So my optimism is based on histoire. But, not saying it isn’t going to be uncomfortable, or there aren’t going to be rough patches. Any time the government runs the show, folks, you’re going to get screwed. Ask the people in Michigan, ask the person in certain parts of Ohio, ask the people in New Orleans, not only post-Katrina, but pre-, and who’s fixing it in New Orleans? A conservative: Bobby Jindal. Ask the people in California. Ask the people of New York. When you got liberalism running the show unchecked, life’s hard. But even in those places people plod away and they keep doing what it takes to overcome it as best they can. In some of these places they keep voting for these liberals. San Francisco is gone, in that sense. You ought to see what they’re doing: San Francisco and immigration. I have the story. ‘San Francisco is Reaching Out to Immigrants.’ This is in the New York Times from yesterday. ‘The city of San Francisco has started an advertising push with a very specific target market: illegal immigrants. And while the advertisements will come in a bundle of languages — English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese — they all carry the same message: You are safe here. In what may be the first such campaign of its kind, the city plans to publish multilanguage brochures and fill the airwaves with advertisements relaying assurance that San Francisco will not report them to federal immigration authorities. …

‘The television and radio campaign will tell immigrants they have ‘safe access’ to public services, including schools, health clinics and — perhaps most importantly — the police, something that local law enforcement officials say is a chronic problem in emigre communities.’ Now, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen here. I can predict this, just as soon as I can predict this program is going to be over in seven minutes. These good citizens of San Francisco opening their town up to every illegal in the country, ‘Come here. You’re in a sanctuary. You’re safe,’ when they find out what the result is, they’re going to say, ‘Well, we need to move ’em to Marin, or we need to move ’em to Tiburon, or we need to move ’em somewhere. We don’t want them around here. We don’t want them amongst us, but we want them somewhere in the state.’ I don’t know. It’s classic, ladies and gentlemen, to watch these things, their unintended consequences and these people who think that life and America can be perfected and that anything short of perfection is failure, and the only thing that matters is our desire to make it perfect, our intentions. If we have good intentions, it doesn’t matter how much we screw up. If we have good intentions, it doesn’t matter how much people get hurt, because we’re trying, ‘Which is more than you’re doing, Mr. Limbaugh! You don’t even think perfection is worth achieving.’ That’s right, sir, because it isn’t! We need a little realism. There’s no such thing as perfection. It is not there, and certainly not in a population of close to 300 million people.