RUSH: Paul in Albuquerque, New Mexico, you’re up first today, sir. It’s great to have you here.
CALLER: Rush! Over-10,000-tea-partiers-in-attendance dittos from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: It is an honor to talk to you. This is awesome. I called because as one of the organizers of the Albuquerque tea party, it’s really burning me up to hear these reports that this was somehow —
RUSH: I didn’t know that you worked for Fox News.
CALLER: Yeah, well, and I’m kind of mad at you, too, because I haven’t received my check from you or Fox yet. I’m wondering where that was. You were supposed to call and bolster me on all day yesterday. What happened there? But yeah, this was… We had, I want to say, about seven or eight people in our core group. This couldn’t have been a more grassroots thing. This couldn’t have been a more all volunteer function. Yeah, we had sponsorships, we had local businesses come out of the woodwork — mine included; that’s how I originally got involved — to help get this thing off and help get it going.
RUSH: Yeah. By the way, what the hell’s wrong with that? What the hell is a local business getting involved with this, what’s wrong with that? For crying out loud, General Electric’s joined the damn global warming movement! You know, screw these people out there, Paul. Don’t let them… You know they’re going to lie about you. You know they’re going to try to discredit what you do. When you put yourself out there like you did, you’ve got to expect what’s gonna come back at you, and you’ve got to learn to ignore it, particularly when it isn’t true. You can’t let them make your focus change to convincing them.
You don’t want to play this — I’m not saying you are– on their field. Just keep doing what you do and screw ’em! But what they want you to do is be all upset the way they report, they want you responding and pandering to them, they want you worried that they’re misreporting it. Just be above ’em — which is not hard, ’cause you are. You’re smarter, you’re more involved, you have a much more open mind, and you’re clearly more informed than half the journalists at CNN combined. Journalists are not even informed anymore. They’re just activists. They’re just agenda drivers. They don’t bother to inform themselves. Kim in Chicago, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Rush, I just want to say: you are a true gift to the citizens of the United States. Thank you for your service.
RUSH: Well, that’s very nice of you to say. Thank you very much.
CALLER: I want to say, I heard your comment earlier, someone standing out in the Drive-Bys saying, ‘Where are the African-Americans? Where were the African-Americans?’ and I just want to say, my husband and I were in Chicago at the tea party yesterday, and if they would have been in Chicago they would have seen some. We were really encouraged to see a great mix of ages and ethnic groups. We saw Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. There was a man on the street from Russia telling his concerns about what he’s seen in his country and what’s being paralleled here, and I think the only group that was missing was the media.
RUSH: (laughing) Well, the media has its templates, and the CNN babe shouting, ‘There’s no African-Americans!’
CALLER: (laughs)
RUSH: It’s not just the template.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: ‘There are no African-Americans ’cause conservatives are racists, and that’s why African-Americans — they’re smart — they don’t show up at these things.’
CALLER: Well —
RUSH: And in fact you said there’s some there?
CALLER: Yeah. They were in Chicago, and I was encouraged to see, like I said, a mix of ethnic groups, a mix of ages — and these people were angry, but this was a peaceful crowd, and it was an amazingly polite crowd. If people bumped into each other, they said, ‘Oh, excuse me. Sorry.’ We were talking to each other, and I have to say the thing I thought was the greatest is at the end of this rally the people that were organizing it asked us all to look down and if we saw any litter on the street, at our feet, would we please pick it up and dispose of it properly on our way out, and everybody did it. It was just great. I was proud to be a part of it, and I’m just really sick to see how they misrepresented this.
RUSH: Yeah, but you knew it was going to happen.
CALLER: Oh, yeah. We knew it, but it was encouraging to —
RUSH: These people are not as smart as you. Do not think that they’re any smarter than you, just because they’re on TV. They’re not.
CALLER: Oh, no.
RUSH: These people are such narrow-minded, so narrow-minded in their focus. They show up. (sigh) They don’t even have to see. They just know it’s going to happen because you’re you, and they’re going to report that it happened whether it did or not.
CALLER: Well, I hope that the people that were there will be encouraged to come out, even more of us, the next time.
RUSH: They will, because they all had a good time.
CALLER: Yeah, we did.
RUSH: All had a good time, and it was worthwhile, and it was worth the effort, and it had substantive meaning. You know, this was about substance. You guys are not following some personality cult out there. This is not about that. You were out there on your own. I think it was fabulous. I appreciate your phone call. Dorothy in Salem, Missouri, it’s nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Oh, thank you, Rush. It’s good to talk to you.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I tell you what, I want to thank you, and, you know, you talk about God, you’re a gift from God? You are. You are, you are, you are.
RUSH: Thank you. Talent —
CALLER: You’ve the courage, the boldness —
RUSH: Talent… Talent on loan from God. I appreciate that.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You’re very kind. I appreciate that.
CALLER: You have the guts, the courage, and the boldness to stand up for what you believe in. I’m from Salem, Missouri, and we had a little gathering in our park. I didn’t get to go because I was working yesterday, but I would like to have been there. I watched yesterday evening as much as I could of Glenn [Beck] and different ones, and I also saw the reporter. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. But I have to give the man that she was talking to that had a little child in his arms credit. He had manners, even though she was coming against him. He had enough manners to let her go on and just make a fool of herself, to be honest.
RUSH: She did.
CALLER: Yes. And I admire Sarah Stillman and Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri. I admire those women very much. The rest of them as a whole — to me, if I had anything to do with it — we’d kick ’em out and we’d start anew.
RUSH: Well, you know, this is an interesting reaction that you are having. Remember, now, I don’t know if you heard the first half hour of the program — I’m going to say it again here, but I don’t mean to be throwing cold water on things. But one of the things I sense is effervescing out there on these tea parties is turning this into a third party movement, and there are a lot of people that want that to happen ’cause they want to be in charge of it. They want to get the credit for leading it, creating or what have you, or they want to use it to create a niche identity for themselves. I’m not going to mention names because it’s not the point. The point is that third parties lose.
A third-party candidate will end up electing the alternative. Perot elected Clinton, for example. What instead needs to be the focus is largely what happened in 1994, and that is: Just get rid of as many incumbents as you can, because that’s the problem here. Incumbents in Congress, incumbents in the Senate, that’s the big problem. And right now, aside from little boulders in the road to try to stop Obama, there aren’t the votes in Congress to stop anything he’s doing. There’s no way to stop the Democrats on this, and there’s no way to stop the media. That’s why these tea parties yesterday are important because this is the first step. This is something that’s going to pop up from neighborhoods, from the grassroots, and this is the kind of thing that leads to the election of enough new members of Congress in 2010 that can maybe perhaps have a difference.
Don’t forget this, that a lot if not most of the stimulus package, the pork spending in the Porkulus bill doesn’t really kick in ’til 2010 and after and if you get significant enough majorities — and it’s a long shot but — you might be able to write legislation that cancels some of that spending, Obama would veto it, and it would depend on the majorities and if the Democrats have enough votes to override it. But these little movements that started yesterday were actually not little. There were 800 of them, 189,000 people is what I heard. So that’s hundreds of thousands of Americans. The Democrats are trying to characterize this as something that it wasn’t, but they’re just frightened of it.
And I’ll tell you, a lot of other people look at this and they’re probably a little surprised, too, because the casual observer and someone that pays casual attention to politics probably buys the media notion that Obama is universally popular in this country, that he’s just great. Everybody loves him, loves his policies, loves him, and this kind of stuff happens and people say, ‘What, what, what?’ It’s like the guy that called yesterday, the 19-year-old called yesterday from Texas, ‘Obama does such a good job. Why is everybody so upset?’ which was a great opportunity for me to try to explain it. And the more people think and realize that there are a lot of people that are not on line with this, the better the opportunity to oppose it.
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RUSH: Nathan in Dallas. I’m glad you waited, sir. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. It is a pleasure to speak with you.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Thanks for taking my call. And I just want to say first of all I acknowledge you and I thank you for being a voice for so many that just really don’t have one or they can’t find their voice to stand up. So thank you. The point I wanted to get to, though, is the reason I think the liberals are so put back and so upset, defensive, about yesterday, I think it’s because up until now, they’ve had the exclusive right to activism, and now nonliberals, whether it’s, you know, so-called independents or conservatives, they’re stepping up and they’re finding a way to use what liberals have used for so long —
RUSH: You’re right, but even with that there’s a difference. A lot of liberal protests are rented, rent-a-mobs. Do you remember a couple, three years ago a million people came out to protest illegal immigration and so forth? That’s all put together by the unions. The unions get hold of their members and say, ‘You will show up at X and X location.’ Nobody had to be cajoled or prodded, nobody had to be threatened to show up at these tea parties yesterday. There are so many substantive differences. The public protests, you’re right, is the liberal province. They’ve owned it and they use it as a tool. And they pay people. That’s why the name rent-a-mob exists. In fact, Nancy Pelosi, in her comments, said, ‘This is not a grassroots movement, this is an astroturf movement.’ Now, Steve Gilbert at Sweetness-Light.com informs me — I didn’t know this — that the term astroturfing was invented to describe actions by none other than David Axelrod, who is essentially Barack Obama’s teleprompter.
David Axelrod had a PR firm and he worked in the private sector. One of the things that Axelrod did was to create phony grassroots movements in order to pressure competitors of his clients or to push the concerns of his clients. Astroturfing pretty much, as Nancy Pelosi described it, is phony. Astroturf is the creation of the image that there’s a big groundswell of grassroots movements when there isn’t one behind it, sort of like a Wag the Dog kind of thing. Astroturfing, from what I understand, is the term described, or invented, to describe the practices of David Axelrod. So they’re out there, Pelosi and the media, trying to diminish what happened and what you people did yesterday by calling it astroturfing, which means fake grassroots, phony grassroots, when, again, as is the case in so many things, when the Democrats start accusing you, when liberals start accusing you of something, the odds are they do it themselves and you don’t.
Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Mike, nice to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. I want to, first off, say thank you, and prostrate myself at the feet of the master.
RUSH: Well, that’s not necessary. I am not President Obama. Get up.
CALLER: (laughing) And I want to apologize for being one of those rich Republicans from Bucks County. But the real reason for my call —
RUSH: You don’t really mean that, you said that with a laugh. You’re not apologizing for being rich.
CALLER: You’re darn right I’m not because I work 14 hours a day to be there.
RUSH: And besides, you won’t be for very much longer. So enjoy it while you can.
CALLER: Yeah, that’s the real point. But what the media is trying to do is say, ‘Hey, this tea party was only how many hundred thousand, 180,000–‘
RUSH: Did you go to one?
CALLER: No. And that’s one of the reasons for my call is because I was actually working, as I have to do, so the point is, not how many people showed up, but how many people agree and really back the same kind of sentiment like myself, and believe me, there’s a lot —
RUSH: Quite a few.
CALLER: — and this was only the first volley, the first shot over the bow. Because, let me tell you, you know better than I do what’s going to happen. The taxes that will follow the cigarette tax, the liquor tax, the price going up for gasoline, socialized medicine, schooling, one thing after the other is going to break the camel’s back. And you talk about sentiment bubbling up, pretty soon it’s going to be like a volcano erupting, because it’s going to pile on and pile on and pile on. And I believe all of these taxes, all of this money being taken from those who have is going to actually set a second wave of foreclosures on houses —
RUSH: Which is what Obama wants. I think Obama wants the largest welfare state he can get. I really do. I think this is about as much federal control as he can secure for himself and the Democrat Party. Now, Mike, I’m going to end your call right now because you’re talking about the first shot over the bow. Don’t forget, Department of Homeland Security is monitoring us now, and you’ve identified yourself as coming from Bucks County, and you’ve admitted that you are rich. I mean you couldn’t make yourself a bigger target by having admitted all this on the program today. In addition to that, we have learned here that the National Security Agency does all the monitoring of phone calls and e-mails, has been collecting even more information than usual on domestic phone calls made by us, made by Americans.
So I’m going to try to protect you from any more risk that you put yourself under by being so open about this. If you’re right, if Mike is right, if there are going to be more of these — and I’ve heard that they’re going to try to gin these things up again on July 4th — if that happens, I have a funny little suggestion for you, because you know the media will show up again, the Susan Roesgens of CNN and all the rest will show up. When they show up to start asking you questions as Susan Roesgen did with a guy holding a baby in Chicago yesterday, here’s what you need to do. Promise me you’ll do this. If you want to answer the questions, that’s fine, if you want to try. But what you need to do first is say, ‘Where are the journalists? I don’t see any journalists.’
If there’s somebody from CNN, with a camera and a microphone in your face, and they ask you some stupid questions, ‘Where are the journalists?’ You know, and look around like you’re trying to find them, ‘Where are the journalists? I don’t see any journalists here.’ Oh-ho. That will be fun. Nobody will ever see it on TV. They will edit it out, but you could have a friend of yours videotape it and post it on YouTube, like those two idiots at Domino’s.
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RUSH: Ashland, Ohio. Bill, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: It’s an honor to speak to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’m an 82-year-old, World War II Navy vet, and I’m glad to be part of the shot across the bow.
RUSH: God bless you, sir.
CALLER: It’s the first protest I’ve ever attended in Ashland, Ohio. About 500 gathered there. It’s a small farm community, and a young lady Marine read your, I think grandfather’s, article on the Framers of the Constitution.
RUSH: That would be, I think, my father, who —
CALLER: Your father.
RUSH: — on the signers of the Declaration?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Somebody at the tea party read my dad’s speech? It’s on my website. She read my dad’s speech on the signers of the declaration at the tea party?
CALLER: Yes. Yes. And you could have heard a pin drop. It was a very, very respectful crowd, and when she finished, there was cheering for quite a while.
RUSH: Wow. That is cool. You’ve made my day out there, Bill. I tell what we’re going to do. Koko, I want you to — ’cause that’s in our archives. That’s in the stack, the Essential Stack of Stuff at RushLimbaugh.com. Put the link to that speech, the text of it on the free side of the website tonight so people can read it. Put it up as soon as you can put it up there, in fact. Put it up at RushLimbaugh.com as soon as you can, signers of the Declaration of Independence. This will bring you to tears.
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RUSH: Dan in Portland, Oregon, you’re next. Thank you for waiting, sir. You’re on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Yes. This morning I picked up my boss, who is from Texas, and had to take him to the airport, and first thing he said was, ‘Boy, you got a lot of freaks in Portland.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He goes, ‘Well, last night there was a demonstration, and they had piercings where they shouldn’t have piercings and the tattoos where they shouldn’t have tattoos,’ and I said, ‘I’ve been down there several times and usually it’s a gay rights demonstration, something like that,’ and he goes, ‘No, it was an anti-Obama, anti-tax demonstration,’ and, Rush, I’m here to tell you, I’ve lived here all my life, those were not conservatives. I just want to let you know that all the people demonstrating are not conservatives, I’ll bet.
RUSH: All right, so that’s your point, that there were some leftists that showed up?
CALLER: Well, no, according to him —
RUSH: Okay, but here’s the thing about that. You’re just getting the story from your boss, who watched it on TV.
CALLER: No, no, no, no, no. He was down —
RUSH: Oh, he was down there?
CALLER: He saw it.
RUSH: Oh, okay, this is not TV coverage, he actually saw it.
CALLER: He actually saw it, yes.
RUSH: Well, now, we know, we were told that a bunch of leftists were going to try to infiltrate these things to try to give them a bad look and so forth. I don’t know that that would qualify, but if you’ve got people down there, did you say tattoos and piercings?
CALLER: Yes. Again, I know they’re not conservatives.
RUSH: The odds are pretty good that they’re not conservatives, so they are a bunch of liberals, but were they there on purpose or did they just happen to accidentally show up on the way to some parlor? This we don’t know.
CALLER: No, no. They were definitely — according to him, they had signs, you know, tax without representation, all that kind of stuff, and he said that’s who was there at the demonstration.
RUSH: It might have been marijuana growers.
CALLER: It could have been. Who knows. (laughing)
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RUSH: Here is Melissa in Manassas, Virginia. I’m glad that you called. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Rush?
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Thank you so much for taking my call. I’ve listened to you for years and you are such an inspiration across the board for all of us.
RUSH: Well, thank you very much.
CALLER: I wanted to share my experience yesterday. Myself and four other gray-haired terrorists went into the Washington tea party. It was an awesome experience, and I hope all of your listeners will at least gather some inspiration from my own enthusiasm. I was coined by my own mother when I was a teenager, I was so straight I was boring, which for most teenagers is a pretty odd thing —
RUSH: Wait a minute.
CALLER: — and I guess —
RUSH: This is at the White House, right? Across the street from the White House?
CALLER: Yes. I was right across the street from the White House, and now can say I’m feared by Homeland Security and 57-year-old radical extremists. The folks there were fabulous. It was a great crowd. It was wonderful to be with other people who have the same thoughts about our government that I do, that it’s too big and spends too much and taxes too much.
RUSH: Look, I need to ask you a question because time is —
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: — is dwindling.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: Somebody threw a box of tea bags over the fence. What did they do? They got you out of there, right?
CALLER: I actually… We had left right after Laura Ingraham spoke. I bet I know who it was, though. There was a gentleman who had on a fishing hook that was to mimic, I think, a colonial tea bag box. It was wrapped in some — what do I want to say? — fabric with a hemp tie on it.
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CALLER: He was absolutely benign.
RUSH: Okay, so somebody was casting a line. That’s what happened. Somebody cast a line to throw the thing over the fence.
CALLER: Yeah. I think I know who it was.
RUSH: They shut everything down for a while, because they didn’t know what it was. They sent a little miniature robot out there to make sure it wasn’t a bomb, and they forced all the journalists back into the White House. Anyway, gotta take a time-out, folks.