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John Adams Prophecy on the Constitution and Morality

by Rush Limbaugh - Feb 17,2009

RUSH: This is Joe in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Great to have you here, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. How you doing?

RUSH: Just well, just fine.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, I wonder if you remember me from over a year ago. I called you in ’07 complaining about George Bush, and I likened him to our Jimmy Carter in the Republican Party. I was just really complaining about his support for Specter, and now I’m just so angry to see what we have today with Specter supporting the stimulus bill and everything. And the only reason, I think Bush could have gone on to be one of the greatest presidents this nation has ever had. But his association with the Democratic Party, and where he brought us, has just really outraged me, and you called me a whiner back then, but it’s just that, you know, me a businessman back here, I see the direction our country is going in, and it’s just outrages a lot of us out here.

RUSH: Yeah, Joe, you called back, you’re whining again, and you gotta stop that.

CALLER: (laughing) I know that, Rush. I know that. You know. But I guess what it is when I listen to all of us conservatives out there and everything, we’re all frustrated out here. I know a lot of great businessmen here in the Lehigh Valley and we’re really hurting because of what’s happened to our country, and we’re really upset.

RUSH: How many of these businessmen voted for Obama?

CALLER: None of them. Not a one. And actually I worked for one businessman who was a tremendous Obama supporter, I talked to him about two weeks ago, and he is even changing his tune right now.

RUSH: Well, you know, I’m hearing individual examples of that. I don’t put much stock in how much that’s happening around the country. I’ve heard two or three people tell me that they’ve had Obama friends of theirs, Obama-voting friends of theirs all of a sudden, ‘Wait a minute.’ We gotta see evidence of that in far more than just anecdotal ways. Now, I’m not saying what your friend said is not true, don’t misunderstand.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: But it’s going to be a while. The media is still propping up the guy. I mean he’s only been in office a month now, and he’s still in the honeymoon phase and getting accolades for getting this thing passed faster than anybody. And by the way, you mentioned Specter and Snowe and Collins, there’s a story today in my stack, I forget which newspaper it is, but liberals, if you want to laugh, liberals are angry as hell at Harry Reid. Oh, it’s Steny Hoyer. Steny Hoyer in the House, he’s mad as hell at Harry Reid for letting — get this, Joe — for letting Specter, Snowe, and Collins, water down the Senate bill.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: It’s a $790 billion boondoggle, and the left is mad, they’re running stories that Specter rolled Harry Reid along with Susan Collins and what’s-her-face, Olympia Snowe, and Steny Hoyer’s mad there was a little bipartisanship in the Senate. And so while we think they have just robbed the bank, they’re mad they didn’t get as much as they hoped to.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: And while you’re mad at Specter for joining them, they’re mad at Specter for cutting spending.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Now, figure that.

CALLER: Right. Right. I understand. Hey, Rush, can I say one other thing?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Hey, you know what? I just listen to all these conversations going on back and forth about our country and everything, but I still am very optimistic as a businessman. I mean I started a company with two guys and now I am up to about 30, and I feel nothing but opportunity in front of me. One thing I’ve come to learn, and I know a lot of your listeners think like me and everything, I don’t believe the greatness of our nation is our presidency or our government or our military, but I think that the greatness of our nation was always in our God. And I think as we as a people, when we start depending on Him more than our government, and that’s something that has really outraged me about a lot of the ministry and stuff out there on the world’s left supported the man on the issues of abortion and gay rights, I think it’s an outrage. When you have to have the government say that I am free, you are not really dependent on God. But I think the greatness of our nation is our God, and I think the more people like us are really crying out to our God, I think we’ll bring change. I think that’s the greatness of our nation more than anything.

RUSH: Well, John Adams has a famous quote and I’m going to have to paraphrase it. He was one of the Founding Fathers, and I don’t have it right in front of me. But he said, (paraphrasing) ‘Ours is a Constitution written for moral and religious people. It will not work for those who are neither.’

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: So I think you’re on the same page here as one of our most brilliant Founding Fathers, the second president of the United States, John Adams.

CALLER: I know, I watch it all the time. I’ve got the DVD.

RUSH: This is a great country. The economy, you’re right, the economy is going to rebound. It always does. Anyway, it’s going to manifest itself in different ways this time. It will be interesting to chronicle for you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s the complete John Adams quote: ‘We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’ That’s John Adams and that’s the full-fledged quote.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go through this little quote from John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers once again. I went through it rather quickly in the first sentence here. It could maybe perhaps not be understood as quickly as I went through it. He said, ‘We,’ meaning the Founding Fathers, the United States, ‘We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions which are unbridled by morality and true religion.’ Meaning, we have not written a Constitution, we do not have a government here that is capable of dealing with the kind of human emotions that are found outside morality and true religion. ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’ That’s John Adams, one of the founders. Now, of course, people who are unbridled by morality or the immoral, if you will, and the people who are not truly religious, this Constitution — and he’s dead right, I mean he was one of the founders — this Constitution is a restriction to them. I mean it is punitive to them. And he said this Constitution cannot deal with people like that.

It’s an interesting prophecy he had essentially here because the very people trying to undermine the Constitution because it’s an obstacle to them are the very people that we put in power lately over the years, both at the state level, in some places the city level, and in some instances at the United States government level, the federal level, the Constitution is under assault by people who come find it restrictive and unpalatable. This is one of the great battles in which we find ourselves today. How do you come to a compromise with people like that? Everybody said, ‘We ought to compromise, Rush, bipartisanship, we gotta all get along.’ How do you do that? How do you compromise good versus evil? How do you compromise victory with defeat? As I said last week, should Jesus have made a deal with Lucifer? Should Jesus have made a deal with Satan? How would that deal have come out? What would the compromise there be? So it’s a great illustration.