RUSH: Audio sound bites, starting here at number nine. I mentioned this earlier. This is a panel on CNBC’s Squawk Box. Joe Kernen and they’re talking with Becky Quick out there, and their guest is The Politico chief economic correspondent Ben White, and they’re frustrated trying to figure out where I am in all of this.
KERNEN: You saw, like, Limbaugh, he was talking about Ted Cruz saying that this guy, it was like a treatise in constitutional conservative thinking. But then with Trump he said that the upside for a Trump presidency far outweighs the downside that all of his critics are talking about.
QUICK: He’s been fairly supportive of Trump over the last couple of months.
KERNEN: If you had —
QUICK: He keeps saying this is not an endorsement when he says it, but he says some pretty positive things about him.
KERNEN: It’s coming down to Cruz and Trump?
WHITE: Yeah. That’s the establishment’s worst nightmare.
RUSH: And Limbaugh will not pick one. Limbaugh will not get off either one of them, the establishment’s worst nightmare. I gave the answer to this on Fox News Sunday. It isn’t a mystery. They so desperately want me to endorse somebody so that they can go to town on that. But I never do endorse. It’s not an unheard of thing here. This is not anything that’s unprecedented.
What I said on Fox News Sunday, ’cause Chris Wallace asked me one question I was not anticipating. You know, they do these shows, and they give you, at least Chris does, he gives me the general topic areas. I don’t want the specific questions, actually. I do some of my best thinking on the fly rather than if I just sit down and brainstorm things I want to say. I have gotten so accustomed to working this way, that’s when I do my best, so I just want general areas.
He asked me one question that I did not even conceive as a possibility. It wasn’t a trick. He asked me, “How do you think this is gonna end?” And of course it’s a good question ’cause it calls for, if fail to do this right, it calls for me to name somebody I think’s gonna win. So my brain went into such fast action, I could barely keep up with myself. And I told Chris Wallace, when this thing is all over, we’re gonna have a nominee because this always happens, these heightened battles and seemingly irresolvable arguments during a primary, people say the party cannot possibly unify after this and we always do.
And I said we’re all gonna realize at the end of this process at some point that the real objective is to stop the most destructive force in this country, and that’s the Democrat Party and Hillary Clinton. And at the end of all this, that will be the objective. It must be the objective. And it is what I most care about. I’m not into endorsements to see what kind of power I have, see if the guy I endorse can win. I’m not interested in basking in the light of whoever’s hot at the moment.
My objective — and I’ve not hidden this — the Democrat Party has got to lose. We have got to beat them. We can’t work with them, we can’t cross the aisle, we can’t do any of that. The Democrat Party has to be defeated. They are the most destructive force operating in this country today. They are single-handedly more responsible for the messes in this country than anybody else, and they’ve got to be defeated. Whoever can do that is gonna have my vote.
“What about conservatism, Rush?”
It goes hand in hand. If we don’t have articulate, good conservatism, we’re not gonna beat them. We can’t beat them being Democrat-lite. We can’t beat them crossing the aisle and meeting them halfway and showing them we mean them no harm. To me the two go hand in hand. And, by the way, that’s not a unique position. I have always, in campaigns past, in years past, my objective has always been beat the Democrats, not nominate my favorite guy. I can’t control that anyway.
And I don’t endorse people because I don’t control them, and I have no idea what they’re gonna do after I endorse them. The last thing I’m gonna do is endorse somebody that goes off the rails, jumps off the cliff, some oddball thing that people call here, demand I defend, and I can’t. The primaries a losing cause doing that. You know, talk to anybody who has and get ’em to be honest with you and they’ll tell you they’d rather have it back.