RUSH: This is the Florida Keys and Marion. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: (severely garbled) Hey, Rush. Hi. How are you?
RUSH: I’m… You sound like you’re underwater on your cell phone connection, but I’m doing fine.
CALLER: That’s good. That’s good. Sorry about that. I’m driving down the Turnpike and my dog just put the window down. (giggling)
RUSH: Your dog just put the window down?
CALLER: Yes, she did.
RUSH: That’s interesting.
CALLER: She got up on the door handle, and all of a sudden the window went down. That’s what that noise was. I’m sorry about that. (giggling)
RUSH: Oh, oh. Okay, cool. You’re good.
CALLER: All right.
RUSH: You sound good now. You sound okay now.
CALLER: Great, great show today. I just can’t tell you how great it makes me feel. This is one of the best days of my whole life, and I appreciate you taking my call. I just want you to know that as lifelong Republicans, both my husband and myself, we just reregistered, and we just changed our party affiliation to independents, and we’re just so frustrated with the Republicans. I’m really proud of Senator Paul and I’m so thrilled that somebody has finally taken some positive steps. You know, intellectually everything he has done is just spot on.
RUSH: Look, it’s what has been missing, and it may still be. Only time is gonna tell. A number of people think that what happened last night signals a big shift in energy. Some people think it signifies a change in momentum, combined with the fact that the sequester is not working out for Obama the way he intended. I’ve got more detail on that coming up, but one of the examples of that is Obama’s getting hit by the media on kids not being able to tour the White House. ABC and some other networks are not playing that story the way Obama wanted it played. He’s actually being hit for that.
But let’s take a look here at liberals versus conservatives in one sense. On the left, they’ve got their guy, Barack Obama. They’ve got their hero, they’ve got their star, they’ve got the guy that’s their leader. He’s the guy that motivates ’em, inspires them, what have you. They’ve got the guy. They’ve got somebody that people can respond to, can rally around, can focus their energy on, either to promote or defend if he (or what they believe in) comes under attack. Now, on our side, there isn’t that.
There isn’t anybody. There is nobody — I mean, nobody. I’m talking about in electoral politics, there’s nobody yet. Some people are emerging, but there’s nobody yet that fulfills that role on our side. There is not the one person that leads the team that everybody has faith in, confidence in, and wants to defend come hell or high water, and wants to promote. So everybody’s on their own, and we are absent leadership. So what we, on our side, are faced with is the internecine battle going on in the Republican Party as exemplified by this.
Here you have young blood. You have Rand Paul doing the filibuster, aided and abetted last night by Senators Cruz and Rubio. Senator Thune showed up and some other people. On the other side we’ve got the old bulls, the old guard, the ruling class establishment Republicans who are out having dinner with Obama. They don’t like what these young bucks did last night. They’re upsetting the applecart. So that’s what we deal with every day. We deal with the lack of unity.
On our side, there isn’t even any unity on opposing Obama. There’s nothing for people to get behind here. There’s not a single person that’s the object of hero status. I don’t mean hero worship. I mean somebody in whom we have the confidence to rally around, support, and defend. There isn’t that. There is this ongoing battle on our side that’s very frustrating because, for us, the enemy is the president. The enemy’s the Democrat Party. They are the ones taking our country to places we don’t want to go.
We’re scared to death what’s happening in this country. They’re destroying it!
People on our side don’t seem to see that — or if they do, they don’t seem to care. It doesn’t seem to register, and that’s frustrating as it can be. We are literally watching the traditions, the institutions that we hold dear under assault with impunity. There’s nothing stopping it! The people doing this damage are not paying any price whatsoever for doing it. They have what appears to be a free road, a clear path, nothing in their way to stop them.
That makes us all feel utterly helpless and frustrated.
So we look around and we want to attach ourselves to anybody that we have confidence in that is willing to advance the things that we believe in. Right now that really means standing up to, fighting, and stopping this. What happened last night with this filibuster is essentially very simple. One man stood up and took on Barack Obama and his party and his administration over the Constitution, and that means over freedom and liberty and the role of government and the effort to keep it small.
Well, “keep it small.” Just keep it out of our lives, and now to prevent it from randomly unleashing drone attacks on us — and look what happened. It invigorated people! It fired people up on our side. Something happened last night they we haven’t seen. They didn’t even see it in the presidential campaign. They didn’t see it, we didn’t see it during the eight years of George W. Bush. Our guy was in the White House, but he was under assault constantly. There was not one day it was ever defended, and thus we weren’t.
So there hasn’t been the sense among people on our side that the people on our side even realize the threat that we all understand, that we all see, that has us all scared to death. Many of us think that we’re about to storm the beaches at Pointe-Du-Hoc here. This is it. The Republican House is going to authorize and vote for a continuing resolution that funds Obamacare. All we heard during the campaign 2012 was, “Nope, we’re gonna do everything we can to defund it. We’re gonna make sure we do everything we can. We lost the presidency but we’re still going to fight it.”
They caved.
We saw the chief justice of the Supreme Court, for some reason, be intimidated into ruling this law constitutional when everybody knows that it isn’t — and there doesn’t seem to be any justice in all this. There doesn’t seem to be any fairness. The other side talks about fairness and equality and balance, and there’s none. Some people on our side ask, “What have we done to be punished this way? What in the world have we done that we deserve our country being taken from us?” and the answer is nothing!
It’s just that there’s nobody that we see that has any courage to stand up to the people who are doing the damage. Even when we have the White House, there’s no standing up to the people assaulting the country. Even when we’re campaigning, the candidate doesn’t stand up. Now, I know the president’s race frightens a lot of people away from criticizing him. (No two ways about that. It’s just the way it is.) But Rand Paul did it last night, and nobody’s calling him a racist today. Nobody’s calling him an extremist, and nobody’s calling him names — and he doesn’t care anyway.
But he stood up for freedom. Last night people finally had somebody to rally around. Somebody finally spoke up and reflected what you all think and what you all fear. And somebody, in addition to speaking up, was actually trying to put the brakes on the direction this country’s being taken. So, yeah, it made perfect sense for people to rally behind it and rally to it. And then today after that we get the old guard, the ruling class, Republican establishment types belittling what happened last night. Casting it aside. It’s insignificant. Violated the rules of the Senate. Bad image. Silly to say that the president wants to launch drone strikes on America. Why do we even have to answer that question. That’s so absurd, it’s silly. Why, it was embarrassing last night.
That’s what they’re saying. Yet everywhere you look — and the most recent, I mentioned it mere moments ago, Washington Post/ABC poll, by 61 to 33%, the American people support across-the-board budget cuts. Not tiny little sequesters, but a 5% across-the-board budget cut, 61-33 supported by the American people. And, in the same poll, they don’t want the defense budget cut. So another thing we know is that taking the universe of the entire population, we know we’re in the majority. And then it just rubs us even further raw to learn that we’re being governed by a minority that got elected because our side didn’t even have the proper campaign to energize Republican voters to show up. So angry were four million Republicans that they said, “There’s no difference. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter whether I vote.” Six of one, half dozen of the other. That was what they thought.
So here’s where we are. This is where the Republican establishment had better pay attention. It’s the laws of supply and demand. I had a great interview yesterday with Angelo Codevilla coming up in an upcoming issue of the Limbaugh Letter. He equated this to supply and demand. Basically his point was, if the existing parties do not offer, if there isn’t a supply of what we as the public want, we’re gonna go somewhere where there is, i.e., third party. He says it’s possible. He knows it’s not the best way, but he says the law of supply and demand might create it, if the Republican Party remains unresponsive.
If the Republican Party participates full bore in the full authorization of Obamacare — 61% of the American people oppose Obamacare — if the Republican Party goes along with it, why would anybody vote for them? In other words, his point is, where’s the party? Where are the people in the party that are willing to reflect, stand up and represent the majority thinking in the party? At some point somebody like that is going to surface. It’s either gonna be a new party or the Republican Party is going to be overtaken. At some point this is going to have to happen.
You cannot have this many millions of Americans continually ignored and unrepresented in a representative democracy without a price to pay for it.
So Rand Paul does his filibuster, and people flock to it. Even Democrats flocked to it, all over Twitter, which is normally owned, run, and operated by the Democrats. All over Twitter last night, Rand Paul had people saying, “Well, wait a minute, I understand this.” I mean, the left, this should be a natural for them. This is the kind of stuff, this is why Code Pink exists, for example, among other things.
The administration ought to be just taking it on the chin over this. And they may be. Time will tell. My whole point here is I understand why people are rallying to Rand Paul and Rubio and Ted Cruz. And that’s going to continue. And the Republican establishment, as long as they continue to pretend this is 1990, ’98, 2000, as long as the old rules which guarantee defeat continue to dominate, then at some point something’s gotta give.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here is the Republican ruling class. Here is the old guard. This is Senator McCain on the Senate floor in Washington today talking about Rand Paul’s filibuster last night.
MCCAIN: All I can say is that I don’t think that what happened yesterday is helpful to the American people. What we saw yesterday, what we saw yesterday is going to give ammunition to those critics who say that the rules of the Senate are being abused.
RUSH: What am I missing? How can you be more out of touch? Which critics is he talking about? You know, I pride myself. I’m well aware of what’s going on. I don’t know anybody, we talk about the future of the country, I was out my golf buddies the other day, and not one of them, nobody’s ever said to me that they’re worried about the rules of the Senate being abused. I don’t hear that as a concern from anybody. What happened yesterday is not useful to the American people? You have to look long and hard to find a disconnect larger than this one.
Here’s Farouk in Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to the EIB Network, Farouk. Hello.
CALLER: Good afternoon, sir. What an honor to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I had an observation last night. I’m a proud citizen, an immigrant, a citizen by choice. And I had an epiphany moment watching The Ed Show. Don’t ask me why I was watching The Ed Show. I was basically shuffling channels. But I recognized at that moment that the threat regarding these drone strikes within our own borders was more significant in the way it’s being played out in the media. When I recognized is that there was a panel discussing who the potential targets, justified or justifiable targets for such drone strikes would be. And these people that they were showing on their video clips were, in their words, people clinging to their guns, Americans that are becoming paramilitaristic in their approach and protecting the Constitution. I immediately recognized that perhaps it’s not just the constitutionality of the drone strikes within our own borders, but deliberate manipulation of what the definition of a terrorist would be to this administration.
RUSH: Or an enemy combatant. Well, that’s exactly it. So you watched these clowns on MSNBC say, “Oh, yeah, there’s some valid targets, gun nuts, right-wing extremists. We have to wipe those people out.” I didn’t see that. You’re the first person telling me about it, but for some reason I don’t doubt you. You heard them say that. Appreciate the call.
Related Links