RUSH: Reince Priebus at the National Press Club, after explaining what happened in the last election, said, “The focus groups described our party as narrow-minded and out of touch, stuffy old men. We gotta be more inclusive and I agree.” Okay. The question is longer than the answer. The president of the National Press Club was reading questions from members of the audience. Her name is Angela Keane.
Anyway, she said, “This questioner says that, in spite of the RNC staffers trying to make inroads into communities of color, there are some people with the Republican message that are saying unwelcome, if not offensive, positions to communities of color. They cite Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. What’s your strategy to make sure the message of interest and welcome to the RNC staffers that they’re going to be out espousing will be making its way into the communities that you’re targeting and not subsumed by comments from Republican or conservative-leaning media personalities and others?”
PRIEBUS: Well, first of all, I think our whole team is a blessing. If you have unscripted moments that are problematic in a campaign, and clearly there were a few — if you don’t have a serious granular presence in communities to help explain, to help promote, to help educate — well, then you have sort of a vacuum, and those moments end up taking on a life of their own. I, for one, am not in the business of throwing anyone under the bus. In fact, I welcome everyone into our party, uhh, no matter what spectrum, uh, in our party, and wherever they’re at on the conservative — in that bandwidth, they’re welcome, and we’re appreciative.
RUSH: We’re a bandwidth, Snerdley! Ha! We are a bandwidth. Hee-hee-hee-hee. In the spectrum, we’re a bandwidth. That’s cool. We’re appreciated, yep — and a blessing. So we’re not gonna be thrown under the bus. He’s gotta be given props for that. Do you realize how easy it would be? I mean, the easy thing for Priebus to do would be to throw not just me, just throw any of these people — Todd Akin, Murdoch — under the bus. It would be easy to do. He’s got the instincts to know that that’s not gonna help anything.
That’s just gonna make the Democrats demand even more, until finally they demand that Priebus just end the party. “Why don’t you just do the right thing and just cancel the Republican Party? Just go out of business. In the interests of tolerance and openness and fairness, why not just quit?” He knows that’s where it would lead. But now we go to CNN, where it was discussed: Can the Republican Party exist with me alive and breathing and talking? This, of course, occurred on the program hosted by our stalker, Carol Costello.
Well, former stalker.
They gave her an anchor job so she doesn’t stalk us as much anymore. She’s not a reporter. But she had on Democrat strategerist Robert Zimmerman and Republican strategerist Ana Navarro. She said, “I asked an official involved in this RNC study whether Republicans would… Well, for example Donald Trump and his birther stuff. Many African-Americans thought that amounts to racism. A lot of white people think that way, too. So I asked him, ‘Will people like Donald Trump no longer be welcome in the party,’ and he said, in essence, ‘No. That doesn’t mean that.’ But,” Carol Costello asked, “should it” mean that people like Trump are no longer welcome in the party?
ZIMMERMAN: There’s gotta be a zero tolerance for hatemongering, for homophobia, for discriminating policies against women. And I’ll tell you something, that’s really the challenge for your party. You can’t stop, of course, candidates from saying ugly, stupid things. But what’s intolerable is when you see the congressional Republican leadership tolerate it. Look the other way when Rush Limbaugh engages in his behavior or, in fact, try to excuse that kind of conduct. There have to be standards. And that, I think, is gonna be critical to building that big tent picture you’re talking about.
RUSH: See, it’s gonna happen at some point. It will happen ’cause they’re bringing the pressure to bear here. But how about the arrogance of this guy. “There’s gotta be a zero tolerance for hatemongering, for homophobia, for discriminating policies against women.” This is what we’ve been talking about all day long. This Zimmerman guy is setting it up, Democrats are the party of liberty, liberation, freedom, hedonism, whatever you want to do is fine and we don’t care who you are and what you do. We need the government to get bigger to control you, but we still want you to be able to do whatever you want to do.
The Republicans are the old fuddy-duddies — the old white guys — who don’t want you having any fun whatsoever. They’re the racists and the bigots and that’s why you need to be liberated. That’s the theory. That’s how this all works. The Democrats always need a group that is supposedly oppressed and being tyrannized by the Republicans. And you throw my name in there when I engage in my “behavior.” What is my behavior? All I do is convert liberals to conservatism. That’s what I do, and that’s why they don’t like me. Tolerate Limbaugh, they look the other way. So then they asked Ana Navarro, the Republican strategerist, what she thought about what this guy just said.
NAVARRO: I agree with you. Republicans have to come out strongly against it.
RUSH: I mean, she was agreeing with Zimmerman that they’ve gotta stop putting up with me and Trump and Coulter and Hannity and all the others. In other words, what the Republicans have to do, and even a Republican strategist agreed with this, Ana Navarro. She agreed what they’re really suggesting here is that every voice of opposition be silenced. That’s what they’re all talking about, no dissent, no opposition whatsoever. Anybody opposing us or Obama, you have got to denounce them. You have to shut them up. She was McCain’s Latino advisor. I know who she is. I know who Ana Navarro is.