‘Whether or not the Republicans win big next week, it is already clear that the ‘transformative’ [perspirations] of the Obama…’ I know it’s aspirations. I’m just playing around. ‘[T]ransformative’ aspirations of the Obama presidency — the special promise of this first black president to ‘change’ us into a better society — are much less likely to materialize.” Whether or not the Republicans win… There will be enough Republican gains to make the ‘no’ in the ‘party of no’ even more formidable, if not definitive. But apart from this politics of numbers, there is also now a deepening disenchantment with Barack Obama himself. (He has a meager 37% approval rating by the latest Harris poll.)’ Thirty-seven percent! We’re talking Bush 43 territory. Are you hearing about this? Are you seeing that number trumpeted in State-Controlled Media headlines?
You are not. Harris poll: 37%. The Gallup poll is forecasting a tidal wave on the generic ballot. Large turnout, which we’re all going to have, there’s a 55-40 Republican advantage. Unprecedented. Unheard of. And now Obama in Harris has ‘a meager 37% approval’ number. ‘His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But for Mr. Obama himself there is no road back to the charisma and political capital he enjoyed on his inauguration day.’ Amen!! with a couple of exclamation points, and it is illustrated by the fact that Obama’s on television multiple times a day and has been trying to recapture that. In fact, he’s out trying to energize his base to recapture the same feeling they had during the campaign of ’08, and they can’t because the bloom is off the rose.
‘His embarrassed supporters console themselves that their intentions were good; their vote helped make history. But … there is no road back… How is it that Barack Obama could step into the presidency with an air of inevitability and then, in less than two years, find himself unwelcome at the campaign rallies of many of his fellow Democrats?’ This is not hard for me to answer, but I shall read it to you as Shelby Steele writes it. ‘The first answer is well-known: His policymaking has been grandiose, thoughtless and bullying. His health-care bill was ambitious to the point of destructiveness and, finally, so chaotic that today no citizen knows where they stand in relation to it. His financial-reform bill seems little more than a short-sighted scapegoating of Wall Street.
‘In foreign policy he has failed to articulate a role for America in the world. We don’t know why we do what we do in foreign affairs. George W. Bush at least made a valiant stab at an American rationale — democratization — but with Mr. Obama there is nothing. … But Barack Obama is not an ‘other’ so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new ‘counterculture’ American identity. And this new American identity — and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned — is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself…’ Let me read that again: ‘[B]ad faith in America as virtue.’ Bingo! Your country is flawed! Your country is immoral! Your country is unjust! We’re being led by someone who believes this at his core. The sixties, counterculture identity ‘is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America.’
‘There is an ‘otherness’ about Mr. Obama, the sense that he is somehow not truly American. ‘Birthers’ doubt that he was born on American soil. Others believe that he is secretly a Muslim, or in quiet simpatico with his old friends, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, now icons of American radicalism. … Bad faith in America became virtuous in the ’60s…’ Another way of saying this is: Hating America, blaming ‘America became virtuous in the ’60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the ‘imperialism’ of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the ’60s: that America was characterologically evil.’
By virtue of its character, America was evil. I don’t know about you but I’ve always believed Obama felt this. All I’ve ever needed to see is who he’s hung around. To this day I am amazed that people continue to write, people on our side continue to write how they were shocked or are shocked to see Obama revealing his true identity. ‘He’s not what he said he was going to be in his inaugural address! He’s not what he said he was going to be during the campaign,’ and I scratch my head and say, ‘Why are these smart people two years late in seeing what was plain as day in front of their very faces?’ We’ve got a radical who’s got a chip on his shoulder about this country. This country’s evil, unjust, immoral, and he’s here to get even with it.
Maybe it’s hard to get your arms around; maybe it’s hard to actually think somebody like that has been elect. But it was without question, and so now we have somebody who believes that America is of evil character. ‘Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America’s natural default position,’ and if that’s the natural default position of America, that’s the starting point for making us decently and goodness and whole. ‘Among today’s liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness.
‘More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil,’ and when you’re intervening against evil, you have the right to do anything including shred the Constitution. When you’re fighting evil, there are no rules. You can do whatever you must do. Those are my words. I have added here to Dr. Steele. ‘I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.’ That’s what Obama did. I need your vote to make this country fair again. I need your vote to make this country moral again. I need your vote to get rid of this nation’s basic evil.
That’s what elected him.
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‘When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there’ like ‘the tea party.’ The Tea Party is the embodiment of the old evil of America. The Tea Party embodies all the racism, the sexism, the bigotry, the homophobia that is this nation. That’s why they are the enemy. ‘But isn’t the tea party, on some level, a reaction to a president who seems not to fully trust the fundamental decency of the American people?’ The Tea Party is a reaction to Obama, who doesn’t trust the decency of people because he doesn’t see it. He doesn’t believe this country has decency. The Tea Party fills a void left open by Obama and his ethos of bad faith, and that void is being filled, big time, and it will be seen as such on Tuesday. ‘Aren’t tea partiers, and their many fellow travelers, simply saying that American exceptionalism isn’t racism?’ And they are offended. We are all offended that Obama’s view of America is us as indecent, immoral, and unjust. We will not tolerate it. That is not our country, and that is not who we are, and we’re not gonna put up any longer with being characterized that way — and it starts Tuesday.
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RUSH: So in the eyes of Barack Obama and many of his supporters, the United States — the freest, the fairest country on the face of the earth — is the worst offender of all time. To Obama, to Reverend Wright, to Bill Ayers, the entire generation of sixties kids, we oppress people of color. We oppress women, we oppress homosexuals, we oppress Latinos, we oppress union workers. So, as Dr. Shelby Steele rightfully puts it, we are so thoroughly wicked, that anything they say or do to bring us down as a nation is justified. In fact, not just justified; it’s long overdue in their minds. We actually have Republicans who think this kind of thinking is gonna moderate after next Tuesday. It’ll move in our direction, realizing the American people have rejected them. Ha! It’s going to get worse. This view of America will get even worse precisely because of the election.
Obama and his supporters will look at the results next Tuesday and see, in their minds, a confirmation that racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia and all of these things have again risen to the top; and their efforts to punish will redouble. They don’t see decency in this country; they don’t see goodness. They see evil, immorality, unjustness. They must bring the nation down. That’s why I said, ‘I hope he fails.’ I don’t know about you, but the Shelby Steele piece sort of nails it for me, enables me to verbalize the emotions I’ve been feeling. I have been… Not just in the ’08 campaign with Obama, but throughout my life, I have been livid at liberals for characterizing me and this country as evil, indecent. That’s really been at the core of all this. It goes beyond being offended. I generally try not to give people the power to offend me, but throughout my life…
They have no desire to lead a great nation. This explains, in part, Obama’s first reaction to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. One of his first reactions was to feel empathy for the terrorists. We’ve played you the sound bites. We have read you the quotes. It’s embodied in the State Department, the Pentagon whoever doing a seminar shortly afterwards: ‘Why do they hate us?’ As though there’s a justification for it. There was a justification for 9/11. We had to come to grips with it and find out why we deserved it. Reverend Wright: ‘America’s chickens have come home to roost!’ President Obama is happy to be that chicken. Barack Obama is happy to be Reverend Wright’s chicken who has come home to roost. We deserve it! We have a need to understand what motivated them, just like his spiritual mentor called the 9/11 attacks ‘a wake-up call for white America.’
Barack Obama and his crowd see this country as a great Satan. We are the ones who have polluted the world. We are the ones who are destroying the climate. We are the ones who are stealing all the resources. We are the ones guaranteeing and causing poverty in Africa. We are the ones who are responsible for all the atrocities committed by various communist regimes. They have simply been reacting to us. What kind of self-loathing must you feel in order to occupy the position that Obama and his crowd does? And the Tea Party is a direct reaction to this. Whether they are cognizant of it or not, one of the things that’s inspiring this effervescence is they are sick and tired of being blamed for, in essence, making a great country great.
They’re sick and tired of it. They’re sick and tired of seeing this nation apologized for. They’re sick and tired of this nation being attacked from within, being brought down from within. People are sick and tired and fed up with the notion that this country must pay a price, must pay its dues for whatever transgressions these sick people think we have committed over the course of our existence. People wonder why Obama doesn’t wear a flag pin. We wonder why it’s news when he does. We wonder why it made news when he put a flag pin on going into West Virginia during the campaign. We wonder why his supporters might give him a little grief for doing that and why he would have to say: Stick with me. I have to do this in order to win this particular state.
The thing that worried a lot of us was: Does he speak for a majority of America? Did his election mean that a majority of America looks at the country the way he does? And I think we’re finding out now that it does not and did not and that Obama did not represent them at all and lied to them and — now slowly but surely and maybe en masse — people are starting to understand how they were hoodwinked.
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RUSH: Oak Lawn, Illinois, with Al. Great to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Great to talk to you Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Your fellow enemy. I see Obama as the American Mandela. You’re talking about a domestic view of how the people of the United States are divided. He sees us as being an imperialist country that conquered other countries and vanquished them, and that’s why the apology. That’s why this sense of urgency to support the United Nations and to make America humble itself in front of the rest of the world. You know, he’s an unadulterated apologist, and there’s no question about it. We’ve seen it all along.
RUSH: He’s worse than an apologist.
CALLER: Well, I’m trying to keep it clean.
RUSH: Well, I know, but I mean he’s doing more than apologizing. He is destroying. He’s not just apologizing. He’s reforming, in his view. I think Obama would take it as a huge compliment to be seen as the American Mandela. It’d be a huge, huge compliment. Obama is a proactive anti-American. He’s not just an apologist. I’m not trying to be rude, Al, to you as the caller. I’m just trying to be accurate here. He’s doing more than apologizing. If all he were doing was apologizing we could live with it.