RUSH: From the New York Times yesterday: ‘Tea Party Victory Opens Rift Between Moderate and Conservative Republicans.’ Last time I looked the real rift is in the Democrat Party. You have 34 Democrats who won reelection in their primaries by running against Obamacare. You have all of these Democrats in the House and Senate who don’t want Obama anywhere near their campaigns. You have a number of Democrats openly distancing themselves from the Speaker, from Pelosi and from Reid. The Democrat Party is expected to lose an historic number of seats in the House in the upcoming November election. The Rasmussen poll numbers are breathtaking. ‘Fifty-two percent of voters say their views are more like Sarah Palin’s than Obama’s. Sixty-one percent favor repeal of the health care law.
‘That is up eight points from a week ago and the highest level of opposition measured since last May,’ and there’s a letter to Pelosi and Steny Hoyer signed by 31 Democrats in the House of Representatives dated September 15th begging Pelosi to extend the Bush tax cuts. Now, if the recession’s over and we’re coming out of it in smooth sailing, why in the world is all of this going on? The bottom line: It is going on and there is no sense of improvement. Obama’s even going to church now! Obama is on television right now on CNBC with Wall Street people. They couldn’t get any Wall Street people to show up. They had to stack the audience at this thing, and the New York Times writes: ‘Tea Party Victory Opens Rift Between Moderate and Conservative Republicans’?
So here you have a template and here you have a premise and of course since it’s in the New York Times, get ready: This is going to be the focal point for all the cable chat shows today and tonight with the never-ending roster of guests, ‘experts’ from the media to explain this divide. Olympia Snowe is quoted in the story. ‘We can’t be a majority party if we can’t appeal across the spectrum, if we have an exclusionary approach in general,’ said Ms. Snowe, who considers Mr. Castle a personal friend and was crestfallen by his defeat.’ Last time I looked it’s Castle who will not support O’Donnell! Every time I’ve looked, when the conservatives have lost to the moderate Republicans they’ve always admonished us, ‘We need to get in line, here. Party unity. Yada yada.’ For the most part people do. But now these ruling class elites start talking about ‘a 100 percent ideological purity test’?
Olympia Snowe: ‘I don’t live in that utopian world; it’s not reflective of the real world.’ Then Scott Brown the other day: ‘Oh, there’s no room for moderates in the Senate,’ while he’s surrounded by ’em. It really amazing we step back and look at this. The New York Times is coming to the defense of Republican incumbents defeated in primaries like the brave and courageous Lisa Murkowski, who is now going to run a write-in campaign and she’s going to lose big time. She just can’t give it up, proving that what all this is about is personal power and access to it. But I love the fact the New York Times is coming to the defense of Republican incumbents who are losing in the primaries — in one case at a convention in Utah. We’re talking here about seven or eight seats where the Republican nominee is a Reagan conservative.
Let’s be honest: That’s what we’re talking here. When you strip it all away, what the party should be about is Reagan conservatism, and the Washington crowd is going nuts. And the Washington crowd includes Republicans. They still run the Senate and they still will, even if we picked up these seven to eight seats. They’re still going to own the federal government. But they’re concerned about any effective opposition, whether it involves seven seats, eight seats, or five seats. Look at the panic. But they’re still gonna run the show. We’re talking about the establishment here, the Washington establishment, the government establishment, the Republicans’ and Democrats’ establishment.
I mean, they may fight for power among themselves, but how dare we, the people intervene in their games? How dare we, the people decide what we want and actually participate in record numbers in Republican primaries? Who do we think we are? People who many of us thought were the real deal — they’ve been telling us that they’re on our side, that they’re conservatives, that they really wanted huge reductions in government — now they’re finally exposing themselves, and they don’t like it when it’s pointed out that they are exposing themselves. They’re on the run. The fact of the matter is here is that this election that’s coming up here in November needs to be replicated for many, many elections to come, and the elite forces are not going to go away, folks. This is just the first step. They’re not gonna succumb.
They’re not going to be slapped upside the head and say, ‘Ooh, we get it now.’ They’re going to be continually fighting. This is the elites holding onto power — status anxiety, whatever you want to call it. It’s their admission at the table of power. They are going to continue to smear and try to destroy any of the conservative opposition. When the hard work of reducing government occurs, watch ’em then. Watch ’em attack those who have the guts to actually try to rein in this massive bureaucracy and all these entitlements. You watch what happens. The real bloodbath is going to be after the election when the people who win this, these Tea Party people then start making moves to actually implement what they believe. They are going to be attacked by the usual crowd, the statists, but they’re going to be undermined by more of these people supposedly on our side. They’re gonna complain, ‘It could have been better. It shoulda been done differently. We need a different tone. We shouldn’t have bitten off so much. We should do it our way, slowly but surely and so forth,’ all the while the left is undermining true conservative reformers and having Republicans join them in a whisper campaign of sorts.
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RUSH: Yeah, I guess it’s like okay for Lisa Murkowski to break the Buckley Rule. The Buckley Rule is: Vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. You’re supposed to support that person. I guess it’s okay for Lisa Murkowski to abandon the Buckley Rule. Now, folks, I must tell you something. Last Thursday in this program I had run across a quote from Mike Murphy, one of McCain’s campaign managers and a Republican consultant, campaign consultant. I’ve met him a couple of times in Washington. He was at a website called Ricochet and he was all outta sorts. He said, ‘All right, you think you know how to do it in Delaware. You think you know how to win? Palin and rest of you, you go to Delaware and you show us how. Those of us here in DC at the Georgetown cocktail party circuit, we’ll just sit here. We’ll sit here and we’ll watch you.’
And it was obvious that Murphy was taking this personally. ‘Cause he was of the school of thought, ‘This woman O’Donnell can’t win anything. This is crazy. It’s a suicide pact nominating this woman,’ and I made the point to all of you that these guys (these campaign consultants like Murphy and to a certain extent Karl Rove, they) while they may be conservative and they may think they are, they work in a different world. They work and live in the 15 to 20% undecided world. They believe that the electorate is 40% solid Democrat, 40% solid Republican, and in the middle are these precious independents — and they are hired on as experts to be able to get the independents in the general. In the primary, you know, they know how to tell candidates to get the primary voters. ‘Here’s how to win the primary. You go pedal-to-metal conservatism, whatever it takes.’
‘But when we get to the general, well, that’s when our experts rise to the top. That’s when we show our strengths. We know how to go get those independents,’ and there is no ideological loyalty in that quest because independents by definition are not ideological, correct? I remember telling you about this now famous dinner party I’ve talked about. It was a dinner party a couple Saturday nights ago in New York — well, suburban New York. I was on a roll. I said, ‘The fact that in these elections everybody focuses on the independents, the moderates, bugs me to begin with because these are people with the guts to tell you what they think. They’re out there and their votes are being sold and they want us to believe they’re smarter than everybody else, that they’re more open-minded, that they decide issues issue by issue.
‘I would rather go try to persuade these people by being pedal-to-the-metal conservative because conservatism is nothing more than constitutionalism. It’s nothing more than the principles that built the country. There’s no reason to be defensive about it,’ but these guys all are, and they make their money convincing candidates that they know how to get a majority of the undecided vote to vote for them. Okay. So I spent a lot of time explaining this. And a lot of people sent me e-mails saying, ‘I’m glad you did that because I was under the impression that a conservative is a conservative, that a conservative consultant is a conservative consultant. And, Rush, you explained to me that they’re not. They’ll do whatever it takes. If they have to tell an independent that their candidate believes in dabbling in cocaine in high school as a resume enhancement, they’ll do it. Or if they think they have to run around and condemn a high school kid for dabbling in witchcraft on Halloween as a disqualification, they’ll do it.’
Well, imagine my shock and my surprise — I really was — when Thursday on the Fox News Channel, on the O’Reilly Factor, Charles Krauthammer said this about Christine O’Donnell.
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, let’s see it. I’d like to see, eh, DeMint, Palin now go down to, uh, Delaware, spend a couple of weeks and elect her now. You tell her that she is electable? Okay, you got her elected as the — the nominee. Get her elected as the senator. I hope I’m wrong on this. I’d like to see Delaware have a Republican Senator and the Republicans have a majority in the Senate. So I hope I’m wrong. Now show me.
RUSH: Well, that’s almost word-for-word what Murphy said the day before (or earlier that day, maybe the night before), and then Karl Rove got on the bandwagon. ‘Okay. Well, DeMint, Palin, you know how to do it? Go to Delaware and show us.’ That’s what Murphy said. I spent all this time on Thursday explaining it to you and then that night, Charles Krauthammer says the same thing. And I’m thinking, ‘Is there a memo going out among our guys now with talking points? Or do they arrive at this independently, this same sort of, ‘Okay, you show us.” (interruption) Well, Murphy never said, ‘I hope I’m wrong.’ Murphy said he’ll just sit there sipping cocktails in Georgetown. His nose is clearly out of joint, that he’s considered a cocktail invitee and wants to hold onto that. But I don’t know quite how to express this.
I was a little shocked. ‘Cause, you know, I’m used to talking points going out among the Democrat media. They’re always saying the same thing. We do montages on it all the time. So I’m wondering, who stole from who here? Did Krauthammer lift this from Murphy or did Murphy lift it from Krauthammer in a private conversation, or did somebody we don’t even know say this at a mass cocktail party one night and they both ran with it? I have no idea. Well, rather than getting on board here and everybody lending their expertise to make this happen… I thought we wanted 51 seats. It was fine and dandy to get 51 seats from Castle being the nominee but now Christine O’Donnell is they’re saying, ‘Okay, you go get the 51st seat on your own. You guys show us how it’s done.’
We all thought that these people were on the same page with us. Now, I have to tell you: Polling-wise, Christine O’Donnell right now at this moment is closer to this ‘Marxist in a beard guy,’ this Coons, than Scott Brown was to Martha Coakley at the same point in time in their campaign. She is much closer, O’Donnell is, meaning that Brown had a lot more ground to make up than Christine O’Donnell does. Now, what if we had observed the Buckley rule in the Scott Brown race? So what’s happening here is the Tea Party, whatever you want to call it — the American people, the country class — are taking charge and they really are beginning to reject all the intermediaries areas telling us how to think. We don’t need priests or mullahs to tell us what the right thing to do is and who our candidates ought to be. We’re deciding this on our own. Well, I speak for many of you, I think. You all thought you were on a team. Right? Now we’re finding out that, well, the starters (laughing) so to speak really don’t want you in the game. And when you, the bench, the backups (in their minds) get in the game, they hope the other team wins!
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RUSH: Okay, Jim DeMint, Sarah Palin, you go to Delaware and show us how it’s done. Didn’t that already happen? Hasn’t it already been shown how it’s done, how a conservative can beat a moderate or liberal anything? Phase one. But this attitude, ‘Okay, okay,’ when Specter wins we’re supposed to get on board, party unity, we’re supposed to get on board, and we did. But when Dede Scozzafava loses, what happens? She endorsed the Democrat in her race. And Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords, after being reelected as a Republican, became a Democrat and gave the Democrats control of the Senate. Arlen Specter became a Democrat when it became obvious he was gonna lose in the Republican primaries. This is the kind of loyalty that moderate Republicans, the reasonable Republicans, the ruling class Republicans are famous for. That’s their idea of party unity, big tent, join the other guys, endorse the other guys. Castle hasn’t endorsed O’Donnell, has he? I don’t think he will.
What we are seeing here, ladies and gentlemen, is just like with every other segment the ruling elite, the RINO Republicans will not give up power willingly. They’re going to have to be forced out kicking and screaming, hanging onto the drapes — which is something I think we’ve all known, certainly you do. But I just marvel. We’re supposed to put it all aside. McCain wins and we’re supposed to stay loyal. Except General Powell can endorse Obama — the ideal, cookie cutter, if you could get hold of DNA and make the ideal Republican we’re told it would be General Powell, and he went and endorsed Obama. And then Powell, (paraphrasing) ‘Oh, yeah, I got all kinds of illegals working in my house. I bet you do, too.’ Did you hear that? He’s got all kinds of illegals working and he’s glad. I guess we can assume that if these illegals become legal he’ll hire the next wave of illegals. This is our role model. We’re supposed to support McCain, he doesn’t have to. He supports Obama and then lectures us on the way we criticize Obama. Colin Powell is exactly why we have a Tea Party movement. He’s not the only reason, but he is a classic illustration of why there is a Tea Party movement.
Let me go to the phones. We’ll start in Jacksonville, Florida. This is Rob. You’re up first today on the Rush Limbaugh program. He’s gone. That helps.
Natalie in Winchester, Virginia. Nice to have you, and welcome.
CALLER: Hi. It’s great to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: I just wanted to make a comment about the Christine O’Donnell. I guess what Republicans are calling a snafu at this point, but I think what she has proved is that we’re all paying attention now. It’s not one small group here, one small group there, we’re all paying attention, and no one is gonna get away with it anymore, and we’re done, we’re done with the people that are part of the elite, the ruling class that are not listening anymore, they’re already sort of in the system, and they’re just not willing to listen. And I think that they really had to kind of step back and go, ‘What’s happening here? I thought we were the good guys?’ But they’re just so disillusioned with either their power or —
RUSH: No. No.
CALLER: — their agenda —
RUSH: No. I know what you’re saying, and it sounds right, but they’re not disillusioned at all. They’re not surprised. They’re mad. They’re not surprised. No, they’re not surprised. They’re mad. They know what’s coming here. They can read the polls. Now, they might have been surprised that Castle lost. I mean that might have shocked ’em. There might be an element of lying to themselves, but the thing you have to understand is they’re mad, and they’re not just going to roll over and say, ‘Okay, I guess we’ve seen the light.’ It isn’t going to happen, Natalie. This is just the first of what I said moments ago is going to have to be an election cycle repeated and repeated and repeated. And then after, if these people win and start proposing legislation to actually roll back some of this stuff, limit spending, you watch the opposition to it. Even with Reagan, they just bided their time for eight years.
It’s like I said last week, it’s Washington versus the rest of the country and it’s gonna go on for a while. Just because they got an R beside their name does not mean — (interruption) Well, Snerdley’s asking me: ‘After November you don’t think some of these opportunists are going to see the light?’ I think they’re going to make it look like they do. They’re gonna try to convince us they’re seeing the light. But the things that make them elitists are not gonna change. In fact, they’re going to be filled with more resentment. They’ll probably express it more privately, but just like when the Republican freshmen came to town in 1994, they weren’t welcomed. Those guys were really conservatives. They were not all welcomed, certainly not by the media, remember what I told Cokie Roberts, these guys, the media, did not want to be your friends, now that you’re majority. It’s not that they want to be friends with the majority. It’s not that they want to be close and have access to the people in the majority. They don’t like you being in the majority and will do everything they can to get you back in the minority.
Let’s say Christine O’Donnell comes to the Senate. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. They’ll go to McConnell: ‘What’s it really like working with her here?’ They’ll go to Olympia Snowe: ‘Are you able to –‘ ‘Well, you know, she’s a little green. We’re having to walk her through things.’ It’s not gonna change. I mean, how best to put this? Uncle Scrooge is not going to all of a sudden say, ‘Hey, join the club, pal, glad you’re here.’ It ain’t going to happen. The royal family never accepted Princess Diana. They never really liked Princess Diana and she was universally more popular worldwide than they are, which is one of the reasons why. I mean elitists, narcissists, whatever, they’ve worked hard to get into this club and they’re not just going to welcome you into it because you happen to have won an election. They’re gonna hate your guts because you have won an election. You’re making them look bad to their Democrat buddies, their Democrat friends. You’re embarrassing them. ‘You mean, Senator, you really had to go to a caucus with Christine O’Donnell? Oh, God, I don’t know if we want you at our next cocktail party. You mean you’ve actually hung around with her?’