RUSH: I got called on the carpet by the former Bush speechwriter, Michael Gerson, now a columnist for the Washington Post. He said I’m way over the top in referring to the Obama administration as the regime. It’s over the top. And to say that we’re in the midst of a coup d’etat, that’s going too far. It’s just going too far, that it’s unpatriotic, and it’s not conservative. I’m not conservative and I’m certainly not patriotic because I’m portraying myself and all conservatives as anti-government. And we love government, we conservatives, we love government, and we understand that government has to be shaped and melded and molded, but I’m coming across as unpatriotic and whatever else.
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Well, I don’t think he does. Mr. Gerson, I think his role model might be David Brooks. But I was. I was called on the carpet. And Levin was called on the carpet. Who else in this article? I don’t have it in front of me. Wait a minute. I do have it. You printed it out, didn’t you, H.R.? Let’s see if I can find it here. You know, I might have pitched it because — he-he — I had no intention of talking about it.
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I didn’t hear all of what you said, but I’m what? Oh. Oh. Oh. Alleging conspiracies. No, I’m not alleging conspiracies. There’s nothing conspiratorial about this in the sense we don’t know what’s going on. We know exactly what’s going on. Yeah. I’m alleging conspiracies. He didn’t say kook, but he means I’m kook fringe, this kind of stuff. I threw it away, H.R. I’ve gone through your stack here — well, no, no, no, I’ve got it, I’ve got it in the trash here to the left. The folks watching Dittocam, this is the trash. I don’t know what I did with it. Anyway, he didn’t like that I call it the regime and didn’t like that I call it a coup d’etat. Right. All I’m doing is trying to find unique ways of describing what I think is going on.
By the way, this coup d’etat thing, Mr. Gerson, I mentioned this, too, but people didn’t hear this, I guess. I first was alerted to the powers of that description by Herbert Meyer. Herbert Meyer is the former national security official of the Reagan administration, and Herbert Meyer runs around, he makes speeches, he does corporate appearances, he does seminars for CEOs and so forth, and in a recent presentation — and, by the way, he wrote a column about this, and I cited it. It could have, had a lot of people seen it, it could have really incited a lot of controversy.
You’ve heard me mention this, so this gonna be redundant for you, but he described Hitler and Nazism, and he made the claim, ’cause his column focused on people hoping there’s a smoking gun linking Obama to all of these scandals. And Herbert Meyer said there isn’t gonna be a smoking gun. There is no memo. Obama doesn’t have to write a memo of instructions or desires ’cause everybody working for him already knows what he wants. Everybody working for him is a miniature Obama, or a full-fledged Obama. And as an example, Herbert Meyer used Hitler and the Nazis, and he said (paraphrasing), “Despite the fact that everybody knows that Adolf Hitler ran the Holocaust, you will not find one document where Hitler issues orders for the Holocaust to be carried out. If we needed that to prove what Hitler was, we would never be able to prove it because it doesn’t exist.”
He went to great pains to make this point. He was not comparing anything in this country to Hitler or Nazis. He was using that as a teaching device for people looking for a smoking gun to link Obama. Obama’s barely linkable to his administration. Limbaugh Theorem. You can barely — in fact, most people do not even link Obama to anything happening in this country. He is escaping attachment to any and all of his policies, be it on the economy, be it on health care, even though his health care is named after him. The American people simply do not, when they express total disagreement with the agenda, total disagreement with the direction the country is going, they do not blame Obama for any of it. It’s a phenomena explained by the Limbaugh Theorem.
Well, by the same token, Herbert Meyer’s point was, you’re not gonna find a memo from Obama to Lois Lerner saying go out there and target the Tea Party. Lois Lerner doesn’t need that memo. And Herbert Meyer made the point that what we have here is a peaceful coup d’etat. Most people think of coup d’etat, you think of rebels in a jungle with little beat-up Jeeps driving around firing machine guns at everybody and killing the pigs. He said that’s not what’s happening here. We have a peaceful coup d’etat where this administration is totally taking over this government and transforming it into something it was not founded to be and not intended to be, and it was Herb Meyer’s formulation coup d’etat.
I liked it. The first time I mentioned it to you, I credited Herb Meyer with it. Of course now it sticks to me. But I think it works extremely well as an aid, as a teaching aid, as a way of persuading. Now, let’s see. Here’s Gerson’s piece. And I’ve met Gerson in the White House sitting at a big, long conference table in the West Wing. I went in to see Karl Rove and Pete Wehner, and this is toward the end of the Bush administration, before Gerson had left, he was still there. He was very nice. I think he knew who I was. Anyway, he writes in his Washington Post column yesterday.
“A number of libertarians and conservative populists have found data collection by the National Security Agency(NSA) to be the final confirmation of their worst fears about Barack Obama and modern government. It is an attempt, according to Ron Paul, to ‘deliberately destroy the Constitution.’ To radio talk show host Mark Levin, it reveals ‘the elements of a police state.’ To Rush Limbaugh, it is part of a ‘coup dÂ’etat’ by the Obama ‘regime.’
“Some on the right believe, as they say in the intel business, that they have connected the dots. All the scandals are really part of one big scandal. For Levin, it encompasses abuses by the Internal Revenue Service, the collection of DNA by policemen, ObamacareÂ’s centralization of medical records and the use of domestic drones. … Limbaugh presents a similar list, demonstrating what he calls ‘the totalitarian nature or the authoritarian nature of this administration,’ and homes in on the NSA revelations: ‘The main question is, why is such a gigantic surveillance operation even necessary? What is really going on here? Who is the enemy? The tea party, we know, is an enemy of the administration. We know that conservative Republicans — and I could give you names — are enemies of this administration.'”
And Gerson agrees with that, by the way, and says it’s rotten. It’s really, really bad what the IRS is doing to the Tea Party, but that’s as far as Gerson’s willing to go. He doesn’t want to extrapolate it might mean anything. But to me it does. I don’t know what he thinks about it. I think he thinks all governments engage in excesses, and some governments have individuals who go outside the boundaries and this is par for the course. I don’t know. I’m wild guessing here. But he does admit in his piece that the IRS thing — he doesn’t say this, but he essentially says I’m right and I have a point about that. But where I go off the rails is then attaching the IRS scandal to anything else that’s happening and suggesting that it has meaning and suggesting that it is a way of defining the regime.
If there’s one flaw in my coup analogy — and it’s a minor flaw, and I’m willing to admit my flaws — but if there’s one flaw in my coup analogy, it’s that regimes don’t do coups against themselves. But that just goes to show the Limbaugh Theorem. Obama could do a coup on himself and not get blamed for it. He’s been elected, but the coup is transforming the country while nobody cares, pays attention, or is even aware of it.
Here’s Gerson. “But asserting that US intelligence agencies are part of a conspiracy that somehow includes a national gun registry, drone surveillance and Lois Lerner crosses a line. It is one thing to oppose the policies of the administration; it is another to call for resistance against a ‘regime’ and a ‘police state.'”
Who did that? He means armed resistance. That’s what he’s not saying. Nobody’s doing that. You know, these people that are not in this business have no idea about it. For example, there’s this thing going on in Washington right now. Some conservative for the future, some such thing going on right now, and Jeb Bush is there, and Jeb Bush says Republicans are too reactionary, or too many Republicans are reactionary. You know what he means? Talk radio, too reactionary.
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RUSH: Reactionary. Jeb Bush said that too many Republicans are reactionary. Now, you know as well as I do that reactionary is a code word. You know what it means? What does reactionary mean, Snerdley, when anybody uses it against me or anybody that’s conservative, what do they mean? Exactly right. It’s a code word used by people who aren’t conservative to taint us as extremists. Just a bunch of reactionaries. Extremists. Nonconformists. People always arguing. Never, ever agreeing. Never bipartisan. Bunch of extremist wackos. Reactionary.
No, they’ve never said it about Obama and they don’t say it about any of the people on MSNBC and they don’t say it about anybody in the liberal media. It’s only us, Snerdley, who are reactionary. But guess what? Who are the real reactionaries? Mainstream freaking Republicans. Democrats say, “We need amnesty.” “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we do! Uh, well, maybe a smarter way, but, yeah, yeah.” The Republicans are the ones who are always reacting. Whatever the Democrats say, Republicans react and just snap to. Karl Marx came up with the word.
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RUSH: Here’s Jeb Bush. This was the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference. I didn’t even know it was going on. I think that Ralph Reed put it together. I saw a report on Fox this morning that whatever else this thing was, it was a place for potential Republican presidential candidates to show up and take the temperature of people, or people take the temperature of them, one of these, “Hey, I’m thinking of running for president. What do you think of that?” And gauging reaction to it, and one of the speakers was Jeb Bush, and one of the things he said was this.
JEB: Let me just say that we got beat because our brand is perceived to be tarnished, to be reactionary, to be too negative rather than hopeful and positive. Increasing numbers of Americans are defaulting to a false choice of economic security through government because we haven’t offered, really, a compelling alternative based on economic opportunity.
RUSH: There’s so much here, and that’s just a 22 second bite. “We got beat because our brand is perceived to be tarnished, to be reactionary, to be too negative rather than hopeful and positive.” You people that listen to this program every day, this program is optimistic, upbeat, hopeful, can-do, can-be, what we want to happen. Reactionary? I know that’s a hit on talk radio, and again, this whole notion, reactionary, folks, is simply a code word used by people to taint mainstream conservatives as extremists. It is a word that Karl Marx came up with. He coined it to contrast with the word “revolutionary.” Revolutionary, that’s a positive word. That’s a good word. The Cuban revolution is still going on, by the way. The one from 1959. They still call it the revolution. They don’t call it the reaction. The reaction to the revolution, that’s said to be the problem. The revolution was the good thing.
So reactionary means, what? The Democrats say something, and we react to it and refuse to accept it, and we create the impression that we’re not agreeable people and that we’re not bipartisan and so forth. But we didn’t lose because the brand is perceived to be tarnished because it’s reactionary. We lost precisely because the party is considered wishy-washy and mushy and doesn’t stand for conservatism anymore. That’s why the Republican Party loses presidential raises. “Increasing numbers of Americans are defaulting to a false choice of economic security through government because we haven’t offered, really, a compelling alternative based on economic opportunity.” Well we have here, that’s all we do on this program.
I can’t speak for the party. But what this is all about, folks, is blaming conservatism and conservatives for the defeats that the Republican Party is experiencing. It’s a one-off. It’s blame those people on talk radio, blame conservatives, blame these kooks, blame these pro-lifers, blame these gun nuts. You reactionaries. That’s the attempt here. We all know why we lost the 2012 election, especially in hindsight when we look at the demographics and the turnout, we know why, which we’ve been through over and over again. Back to Michael Gerson and his piece. He said, “Questioning the legitimacy of our government,” which is what he’s accusing me of doing in his piece yesterday in the Washington Post. “Questioning the legitimacy of our government is the poisoning of patriotism.” Questioning the legitimacy of government is the poisoning of patriotism. I want to take you back to April 28th, 2003 in Hartford, Connecticut.
HILLARY: I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. And we should stand up and say, “We are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.”
RUSH: Okay. Okay. I know, I know, I know, but still, it makes the point. The left is allowed to do this all day long. Michael Gerson was writing speeches for George W. Bush when people were lying about Bush and ripping Bush and everybody in his administration to shreds. They weren’t intimating Bush was illegitimate. They were claiming it ever since the Florida recount. I don’t remember Gerson writing a piece taking any Democrats to task for their poisoning of patriotism. He saves those salvos for talk radio. It’s amazing how the Republican Party is scared to death of it. The Democrats are scared of it, Obama is obsessed with it, Clinton was obsessed with it, the Republican Party seems to be afraid of it. A bunch of people on the radio.
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RUSH: I’m holding here, folks, in my trusty nicotine-stained fingers my iPhone, and in the iPhone I’ve got an e-mail, and the e-mail is all about how NBC just loved Jeb Bush’s speech today at the Faith and Freedom Coalition. That’s right. “Distractions Aside, Jeb Bush Speech Stood Out As Sober, Serious.” Among the things that Jeb said was, “I won’t be pointing out the failures of the Obama administration,” Bush said to silence. “They’re clear, for those that want to see them.” So he’s gonna leave it to the reactionaries, but he’s not going to point out the failures of the Obama administration.
But somehow those of us who question the people attacking the legitimacy of the Constitution, we will be pointed out. We will be pointed to. We, who are defending the Constitution, we are questioning those who attack the legitimacy of the Constitution. Somehow, for some reason, we are targeted for criticism. But Jeb wasn’t finished. After saying to silence that he wasn’t gonna criticize the Obama administration, ’cause it’s plain to see for anybody who wants to, he then said this.
JEB: Immigrants create far more businesses than native born Americans over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.
RUSH: Did you know that? Did you know that immigrants are more fertile than native born Americans? Did you know that immigrants create far more businesses than native born Americans? Did you know that? Did you know that they love their families and they have more intact families than native born Americans? And they bring a younger population and an engine of economic prosperity. I don’t know. I’m looking at the economic engine that they brought to California. I’m looking at the economic prosperity that’s, I mean, barely containable out in California. I’m looking at it, I don’t really see it, but I’m looking at it.
I’m trying not to be reactionary, this is the point, I’m trying desperately not to be reactionary. Immigrants are more fertile.
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RUSH: So Jeb Bush, who we really like here, said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition today, that he wasn’t gonna be critical of the Obama administration. That really worked out for Romney, didn’t it? And it really worked out for McCain before him, didn’t it? So we have 2008, we’re not gonna criticize Obama. No, no, no. “We’ll attack his policy, Rush, but we’re not gonna go after him.” You didn’t even do that. And then in 2012, we left Benghazi alone. Obama’s a great guy, family guy, what a great, great, great guy, just, you know, sorta in over his head. That’s as far as it would go. It really worked out, didn’t it?