RUSH: This is Moscow Mills, Missouri, and Rich. Hello and thanks for calling.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, great to get through and talk to you. I’ve been enjoying the show more so than ever with everything that’s going on.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: The reason I’m calling is, you know, this Senator Cornyn’s comment. You know, I understand the truth. Us folks out here in flyover country, we get the truth, we understand the truth when we hear it. And I think that’s why the mainstream media, with very little truth telling, is losing popularity every time. I’m sure you’re doing pretty good by telling the truth. I saw Dick Cheney’s polls go up eight points by coming out and telling people the facts. All we need is politicians to state the truth, to talk to us honestly. Now, what we have is a lot country club-type, I guess, limp wrists. I don’t know. I always thought Cornyn was pretty strong conservative, but evidently it offends their sensibilities to talk about race, racism — or if it’s not racism, abortion. You know, they want us to go away because even though it’s true what we’re saying, it offends them.
RUSH: Senator Cornyn is up for reelection I believe this year, is he not, Mr. Snerdley? He’s up next year, 2010? And I think one thing I must say in defense, in slight defense of politicians: getting votes is a far different thing than acquiring an audience. Politicians really don’t think that they can survive with voters hating them. I, of course, have proven that you can prosper when people hate you. But I’m not a politician. By the same token, I don’t have the power they do. So when Senator Cornyn sees the need, as he did on NPR yesterday, to distance himself from me — or Newt Gingrich, or Tom Tancredo — I guarantee you it’s the result of polling in Texas over this issue of Sotomayor and the Hispanic vote.
And the Hispanic vote is something the Republican Party is as frightened of as they are of conservative Christians. The Republican Party desperately wants the Hispanic vote, I think, to replace conservative Christians in their coalition ’cause they’re embarrassed by them. I want to tell you something, Rich. I was in Texas last night. I was in Houston. I flew in for a fundraiser for a member of Congress named Michael McCaul, and I met a lot of people there last night. Louie Gohmert, who is a member of Congress, who’s fabulous, Senator David Vitter from New Orleans flew over for this. Tom DeLay was there. There were about 200 or 250 people at this fundraiser — and I must tell you, every one of them was a conservative Republican. There wasn’t a moderate in the bunch.
I talked to them all because there were photo sessions and so forth and so on and when I made my remarks I could see the applause. I didn’t get booed. Nobody came up to me and said, ‘Shut up, you’re hurting the party.’ It was the exact opposite. Now, you might want to call Texas flyover country. Some people might, and it’s hard to extrapolate from audience of 200 people. But I will tell you that I bet you if I went to every state in the country and did a fundraiser for a Republican candidate, I could give the same remarks I made last night and get standing ovations. It’s the same thing I say on the radio each and every day. There’s nothing earth-shattering there.
But my point is that it’s all of the Republicans in Washington and conservative media people in Washington who have this fear of moderates and Republican voters going away in droves if the rhetoric is too strident. And they define rhetoric as too strident as simply being truthful. Words mean things. I mean, if you want to communicate properly you use the right words to communicate the thought. Except we can’t do that because it’s going to offend somebody. It’s going to offend Hispanics or it’s going to offend someone. We can’t do this. I want to stipulate and remind everybody again: my analysis of Judge Sotomayor is not aimed at keeping her off the court. There’s no way, realistically, that can happen. The Republicans don’t have the votes and they’re not interested in keeping her off the court.
But there is an opportunity here to tell the country who Obama is by telling the country who she is. This reluctance that our party has to contrast itself with its enemies is dumbfounding to me. I understand it. I understand why. I don’t agree with it, but it nevertheless is dumbfounding how this is happening. It’s almost like the Republican Party today and some in the Republican media are content to share power as losers, to be in the club but be losers. The club in Washington. The people that elect ’em don’t want ’em to be in the club as losers. The people elect ’em because they want winners. And the party’s not acting like it’s interested in winning.
Nobody wins playing defense. Nobody wins worrying about what everybody else thinks about you. Nobody wins who doesn’t tell them what they stand for. That’s where we are here. So I’m just telling you, the people… Whenever I travel this country, and whenever I happen to make political remarks, I don’t have people boo me. I don’t have people run away. I don’t have people say, ‘You know, you need to tone this down ’cause it’s really hurting.’ I only hear this from so-called conservative people on television, so-called conservative people in media — and not all of them, just some. So I have become America’s piñata.
I am the passkey. You bash Rush, and the media gives you a free pass. John Cornyn can be loved by NPR. All he’s gotta do, bash me and Newt. Same thing if any Republican wants to be invited on any of the Sunday shows, get an interview in the Style section of the Washington Post (if anybody still reads it) or be profiled on one of the nightly newscasts or show up on a cable show. All they gotta do is bash Rush, bash America’s piñata and, they get a free pass! They’re loved. That’s how easy it is — and that’s, sadly, what some of them seem to want, especially if it’s reelection time.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right. John Cornyn. I’ve gotta retract what I said, giving him a little slack. He’s not up for reelection in 2010. He was reelected in ’08, so he’s not up ’til 2014. He was just elected last year. So he’s not running for reelection any time soon. So polling data in Texas is not the reason why he is trying to distance himself from critics of Judge Sotomayor. Now, I am told — and I’m going to have to fact check this because lately I’ve been misled by a whole bunch of contributors. Well, one of my contributors the other day told me it was 40 days until Obama’s birthday, and it’s not. It’s like 85 or 90. I am told that there is a reason judges wear black robes, and it’s to hide them.
It’s to hide any bias, to essentially present the image of fairness. A black robe hides whatever bias, whatever economic circumstances there are. Whatever there is to know about the judge that is not supposed to be known is hidden because of the black robe. In this case, if that’s true, then the robe that Sonia Sotomayor will wear on the Supreme Court is transparent. Because we have already seen who she is. She has told us that she will make policy, she will legislate from the bench.