RUSH: This is Regina in Crugers, New York. I’m glad you waited, Regina, great to have you here with us.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I want to wish you a very happy Veterans Day, and as a Vietnam-era vet, and former commissions officer of the United States Navy, I commission you as honorary admiral of the fleet of conservative talk radio programs.
RUSH: Thank you very much. I’m honored by that.
CALLER: Well, thank you. I am also a Feminist for Life, and as such, I am very concerned about this Freedom of Choice Act which is in Congress and has been promised by Mr. Obama to be passed, or he’s going to sign it.
RUSH: Let me… I want to define terms here. You said you’re a Feminist for Life, which means you consider yourself a feminist, but you’re pro-life?
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Now, when you’re talking about the Freedom of Choice Act, which act are you talking about?
CALLER: Well, it’s a bill that’s in Congress, and what it will do is it will shut down parental consent laws nationwide and cause right-to-know laws to be overturned.
RUSH: Oh, yeah. Well, you know Obama can’t wait for that bill. He supports infanticide.
CALLER: I know that. There were many people who were running for Congress who are very pro-life. Deborah Honeycutt in Georgia.
RUSH: Yup.
CALLER: Allen West in Florida.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — New York, Michael Lawlor. I can’t remember all of them, but many, many, many.
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: And Russell, who is running against that guy Murtha out in Pennsylvania.
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: So I think most of these guys lost.
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: So a lot of our hopes were dashed. Now, I know that in former cases we’ve flooded the lines of these representatives —
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: — and senators to get them to ward off this horrible thing, but I don’t know if there are other types of pressure that we can put on them.
RUSH: All right, let me be blunt.
CALLER: (silence)
RUSH: May I be blunt?
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Elections have consequences.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: And we lost, and we lost numbers. The Democrats are dangerously close to having a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority. If they get Franken, they’re one step closer, and all they need is a couple of pro-choice Republicans to go along with them and they got a filibuster-proof vote in the Senate on this. I don’t think too many pro-life Democrat senators are going to buck their party on this thing. You go to the House, and we don’t have the numbers to stop these people. I’m telling you, Regina: Obama and his team are good old-fashioned Chicago machine politicians. What they want, they are going to ram through, and they’re going to do it as quickly as they can. I laugh at all this talk that Reid and Pelosi are going to be dealing with this little man-child amateur and they’re not going to let him get away with all he wants because there’s a natural tendency for these two branches to fight it out over power. (snorts) I’m going to tell you who’s going to lose these fights: it’s going to be Reid and Pelosi. They don’t know what has hit them. You think you’re going to be burning up phone lines opposing the Freedom of Choice Act? Obama’s going to have 3.1 million people e-mailing recalcitrant Democrats, threatening them with loss of fundraising if they don’t go his way. Regina, hang on. I have to take a break here but I want to hit you between the eyes with reality when we come back.
RUSH: Back to Regina in Crugers, New York. Regina?
CALLER: Oh, Rush, can I just ask something, being it’s Veterans Day? I have a nephew, Major Edmund Riley over in Afghanistan. I’d ask that you keep him in your prayers and thoughts and all of the people that are listening, and all of our troops that are over in Iraq and Afghanistan.
RUSH: By all means. You know, Veterans Day is an important day. I just want you to know that I, all of us here at the EIB Network and throughout this audience, we celebrate veterans every day. We thank God for veterans every day, and we always have. We always will.
CALLER: The other thing I wanted to ask you is relating somewhat to this pro-life stuff. There are a number of organizations, basically constitutional lawyer firms, that are pro-life that go after abortion mills and try to help them out. Jay Sekulow has one. Sears has another one. Liberty Council is another. Anyway, how many openings are left in the federal circuit court and other federal courts that Bush was not allowed to fill and will be filled?
RUSH: You don’t even want to know. You don’t want to know. The numbers are striking. The Democrats have blocked them. There are so many vacancies. There are so many nominations for the circuit courts, the appellate courts. There has been some action on the district courts, but even there. There are nominees that have been waiting for three years, Regina, and the Democrats are just stalling everything — and they stalled it on the basis they knew Obama was going to win. Obama is going to get these appointments. Look, here… (sigh) Again, I hate doing ‘I told you so.’ I just hate it, but I gotta hit you between the eyes. You want to know how we’re going to stop the Freedom of Choice Act?
Tell me how we’re going to stop the tax increases. Tell me how we’re going to stop anything. We do not have the votes to get even close to stopping anything in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, they don’t have a filibuster-proof everyday majority. They don’t have 60 seats, but depending on if they steal this election in Minnesota, they’re going to get close to it, and we’ve got enough wishy-washy moderate Republicans in the Senate who might feel the need to go along with the majority on some of these things. Ironically, ironically — let’s go to the House of Representatives for a moment, because ironically — the best hope that we might have for stopping any of Obama’s stuff is Democrats in the House: Blue Dog, conservative Democrats.
Rahm Emanuel starting in 2006 was assigned by Nancy Pelosi to get enough Democrats elected to make her speaker. Well, Rahm Emanuel knew that he couldn’t get liberal Democrat members of the House elected in certain regions of the country, so he went and he recruited conservative, pro-life, low tax, small government Democrats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, a number of other places. They got elected. They were running against Republican incumbents, who had lost their way, who at one time used to be conservative. But they’ve either come out against the war, they were criticizing Bush, or they had spent wildly or they had abandoned their own conservatism, and they were sitting ducks.
We had some more of these run in 2008, and there are more conservative Blue Dog Democrats in 2008, or will be next year, than there were in 2006 in that election. So ironically, when it comes to cultural issues, the best hope we might have legislatively is conservative Democrats opposing their own party. But you can’t put a whole lot into that because they’re going to be so outnumbered. All Pelosi has to do is drag them in the office and say, ‘You want to be reelected? In fact, let’s not even talk about reelection. Do you want to ever make it up the leadership ladder in this place? Because if you do, you better vote as I tell you, or as Steny Hoyer tells you — and if you don’t, then you may be here two years or ten years, but you won’t matter a dime.’
So a lot of pressure is going to be brought to bear on them. Ironically, that’s the best hope that we have at blocking Democrat action in the House. But there aren’t that many of them. There are a significant number, but it’s not that many. It pains me to say that some of the most conservative members of the House are Democrats. It pains me to say this. (Cosell impression) ‘But it’s true. It’s true out there.’ So here, folks, is the reality. Legislatively, whatever Obama and Reid and Pelosi unite on and want to do, we can’t stop. Not legislatively. We can’t stop it. During the election, during the campaign, I went deaf, I went hoarse, I went everything trying to say to people, ‘They’re going to redefine what this country is made of, how it functions, and it’s gonna take a generation to roll it back.’ It’s gonna take 25 years to get rid of this stuff.
These judicial appointments they’re going to make are for life. They’re going to populate the bureaucracy, even more than it is now, with career liberals. This is what they do. The Bush administration, by the way, announced to its career people that when he leaves, they leave. Bush is not playing that game. Bush is not leaving any, quote, unquote, ‘career Republican appointees’ in the bureaucracy. He’s making them all leave with him, because that’s the right thing to do: leaving it open for the next administration. But we’re playing against a team whose whole reason for living and existing is to control the government. Ours, of course, is to limit it. So we don’t have the same objective even. They live and die to work in government, to get paid by government, to rob from government, to lead it, to populate it, to grow it, to make it the central thing in as many people’s lives.
That’s their objective, and they have succeeded! The most radical Democrat ever has been elected president by ‘acting presidential.’ They have succeeded. We have an administration led by a guy who is going to do everything. They’re not going to make the mistakes the Clinton people made. They’re telling themselves that. They’re not going to go middle road to get things done. They don’t have to, now. There aren’t enough Republicans who can stop them. They’re not worried about the Republicans winning the House in 2010. I frankly believe that when you have this much hubris and this much arrogance that you can overreach, and I think they will overreach. I don’t know when it’s going to be.
When they overreach is when all these people that think they’re at the Princess Di funeral again, that’s when the lights are going to go off in their heads and that’s when they’re going to realize, ‘Oh, my God. What have we done here?’ Not all of them, but enough. They will overreach, and on some of these things they overreach, they’re going to get, they’re going to get away with. You remember after the 2002 Wellstone memorial, I said, ‘I’m not worried about this election. These guys, they’re not going to win anything. They’re not going to take the Congress back after that display.’ I was right. But every time I predicted similar things, I’ve been wrong. I thought this kind of rage and hatred aimed at the president, I thought the rage and hatred aimed at the US military, I thought the desire to lose in Iraq, I thought the effort to make people think their country was finished, that there was no economic future…
I thought, ‘There’s no way a majority of people are going to vote for this. There is no way the people of this country are going to reward this kind of insane, lunatic-based anger, rage, and hate,’ and I was wrong. I was wrong this year, and I was wrong in 2006. So let me ask you something. Do you think we ought to start acting enraged and angry? Do you think we ought to start marching in the streets, even though that’s not who we are? I don’t mean the word ‘acting.’ Should we be angry? I know the rage is real. I know everybody’s mad as hell. I understand everybody is filled with rage out there on our side. There’s 58 million people that are angry that did not vote for Obama. Okay, so should you start replicating the behavior of the Democrats? Should you start calling Obama names?
Should you start treating Obama the way they treated Bush? It worked for ’em, when everybody in the world thought that it wouldn’t. It worked for ’em. I noticed Charles Krauthammer on the Fox All-Stars said, ‘Yeah, it did work for them but we should not do it. Republicans ought not do this.’ Why, if it worked? The sad thing is, it obviously did. It did not hurt them. All this insane rage and anger, all of these personal attacks… I mean, writing books and movies about assassinating Bush and to have them critically acclaimed! To wish for defeat of the United States in the war on terror, and countless other things I can’t even recall now. I just said, ‘Human nature is such that this is not going to be rewarded,’ but it was.
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just the power and the charismatic demagoguery of Obama who did not come across as angry. But regardless, we lost, and we are hip deep in doo-doo. We have the most radical leftist extremist disguised as something much tamer and milder, who is insisting on putting an imprint on this country such as it has never had. You think the Great Society and all that stuff was bad and you think Jimmy Carter was bad? These people are going to look at that as kindergarten, Romper Room. They’re going to overreach and they’re going to destroy a lot of things; and eventually… Those of you who have kids and grandkids, the primary source of your concern is, ‘What kind of country are my kids going to grow up in? Where will be their opportunity? Is their opportunity going to rest on calling the government agency? Oh, no! We don’t want that!’
Well, you voted for it! Or not you, but some people did. So how do we stop the Freedom of Choice Act? We don’t, not in the legislative bodies. How do we stop Card Check? We don’t. We gave up the chance to stop it when we lost the election, when the Republican Party refused to have an identity, when the presidential candidate refused to even campaign on behalf of other Republicans. You could say we deserve what we got and it might be true, but it’s still frustrating as hell. So how do we stop this stuff? The Obama team is going to have three million people whose job is going to be to hassle Democrats who don’t toe the line in Congress and in the House.
They’re going to threaten them with no more fundraising; they’re going to threaten them with being heckled at various public appearances. Folks, we haven’t run into anything like this before. So what do we do? Do we march in the streets? Do we call Congress? Do we send out e-mails — and to whom? Do we send it to our side, or do we send it to Chuck Schumer? Do we send it to Harry Reid and so forth? What are they going to do when they hear from a bunch of angry Republicans that are not going to vote for them anyway? It’s sad thing to say, but the best option is to let ’em overreach and screw it up on their own. It will happen, but in the meantime, they’re going to get a lot done.
That’s going to take a long time to undo, and I’m not trying to depress you or be pessimistic. I’m being realistic here. I’m not saying there aren’t ways to beat them. Don’t misunderstand. I’m just saying our guys do not have the numbers in the House or Senate to do so, even if they’re all unified. They may have some parliamentary procedures to play and things like that, but the way I’m hearing everybody talk right now, I think there’s going to be a lot of fear of going against Obama anyway. ‘The first black president is historic! Why, give him a chance,’ everybody is saying. He’s going to run through that window. He’s going to run through that window faster than Deion Sanders. We’re not even going to see him go through that window when he gets all this stuff done.