You care about the country, you care about the future, and you watch this, you turn these people on and you listen to the world that they project, you listen to the country they reflect.  You listen to the dystopian, negative, cataclysmic set of circumstances they want everybody to think they’re living in.  I mean, it would be different if they got 20, 30% of the vote, but they win sometimes.  It’s tortuous watching this stuff when you realize that it has a good chance of winning, that there are enough people out there moved by this.  That’s scary to me.  It’s tortuous watching this.

As I said at the beginning of the program, I watch these things now entirely differently.  I remember back, this program actually began August 1st, 1988, and it was right in the middle of the George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis campaign.  And you talk about fun.  I mean, there was Dukakis running around in a tank looking like Beetle Bailey wearing his army helmet.  It was obviously lunacy. It was insane.  Remember, this was the Reagan third term, this was 1988 and Bush was campaigning that way. And even though when this program started Dukakis was way up in the polls, nobody thought it was gonna hold up and it didn’t.

But back in 1988, there was a confidence, there was a decent expectation that the left, as embodied by Dukakis, was gonna be vanquished.  And then 1992 came, well, before we got to ’92, we had some serious policy malfunctions before that, like the “Read my lips:  No new taxes” backtrack and the Clinton campaign came along and even then we had all kinds of opportunity for jocularity and mimicking and mocking and so forth that we did, all the way through ’96 and 2000.  In 2000 and the Florida recount aftermath is when I track the seminal change, and that’s now 16 years ago, and it just seems like yesterday.

The Democrats have never been the same since that recount.  They’ve always been liberal, but the radicals have taken over that party.  The protestor generation of the sixties has come of age, taken over that party, 100 percent.  There aren’t any mainstream, moderate Democrats left.  You might have some of them try to act that way.  And that Florida recount, that aftermath, when they lost the Electoral College, legitimately, but they think the whole thing was stolen from ’em at the Supreme Court.  There was no way, based on what had happened and the vote outcome that they were going to win.  But yet they won the popular vote.  And that created a sense of rage and anger that has not abated.  It has only intensified.

It came to its ugliest fruition during the George W. Bush administration.  And they have been nothing but hate-filled and angry and pessimistic.  They’ve always ripped America.  They’ve never thought America was the solution.  Michelle Obama last night, I have to tell you, listening to her praise the founders, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t buying that.  I don’t think Michelle and Barack Obama really think much of the founders.

There’s a popular statement that they’re using now, which I think betrays something, actually, or portrays something, whichever it is.  Obama has begun saying it a lot, and last night she said it.  No matter, no matter when or what the occasion, they can’t stop talking about slavery.  And largely, in a context of, “Hey, you know what?  It isn’t settled yet.  Hey, you know what?  We haven’t fixed it yet.”  I mean, that’s their starting point.  And I think that’s a no-win situation for us.  Because we’ve made great strides.

This country has made phenomenal strides since then, undeniable.  And we’re one of the only countries on earth that has, Great Britain being the other.  This country has done more for and was organized for minorities more than any other nation on earth.  I gave a guy an analogy here on the program.  We had a guy call and wanted to know what I thought was so bad about grievance politics.  And I made an analogy for him.  I said, “Sir, are you married?”  He said, “Yeah.”

I said imagine that your wife has an affair, and it causes all kinds of acrimony. You almost lose your marriage, it’s really a rocky period of time.  But you and your wife get together, and you decide that you’re gonna forgive her, you’re gonna look past it for the sake of the marriage and your kids, and you move forward.  He said, “Okay.”

Now, imagine, sir, every argument you have, you continue to remind her that she’s to blame for everything because she’s the one that had the affair.  I said your relationship doesn’t have a prayer if you can’t let it go.  If all you can do is continue to remind her what you’ve already forgiven her for, then the days of your relationship are over.  And the grievance industry does that. They don’t want solutions.  They want to be able to do just that.  No matter what progress, no matter what agreements, no matter what, they don’t want to acknowledge that anything has been done.  And that’s how I hear the Obamas.

They love to wax eloquent about the early days of the country and how they were three-fifths of a person, even though they never have been three-fifths of a person.  He doesn’t even have any slave blood.  She does, but he doesn’t.  But they will admit they’re never gonna let it go.  They’re never gonna let it go.  So whenever we as a nation have an argument, they’re always gonna be circling back to that or the way women were treated, things that have been dealt with, things that have been addressed, maybe not fixed forever, but addressed very significantly.  But they won’t let it go.

So we’re not making any progress here, by design.  So when a speech is heralded and contains all of these references to America’s reprobate, dishonest, putrid, racist-pig past, and then the rest of the speech makes it look like there has been some progress like “Now I wake up in a house built by slaves.”  I mean, what is what is the point of that?  I get it on one level.  If it were really uttered as an acknowledgment of the profound progress, then it would be great, but I don’t sense it, ’cause I don’t see it any other time.

So when Michelle starts praising the Founding Fathers — where has that been the last seven and a half years?  Have you ever heard her talk in those terms?  It’s like they think there are certain things they have to say. In fact, liberals know they have to campaign as conservatives to win, but then to hell with it.  Republicans think the same thing.  Have to campaign as conservatives. You certainly can’t campaign as your radical leftist, you know, moon walk fruitcake and get elected to anything.  Even after a convention like this, they’re gonna come out and say it’s all about trying to portray Hillary as moderate.

And that’s the real reason Bernie was allowed to keep going ’cause he’s wacko leftist, he’s there for two purposes: Make it look like she can overcome a fight. Make sure we can win a battle when it was a coronation to begin with, and he was also there to position her as a centrist, when she is as radical as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or Saul Alinsky or any other leftist you want to name.  So it’s torture watching this stuff.  I mean, all kinds of opportunity for great jokes and bits and funny lines present, but at the end of the day half the country, or close to it, this is gospel to ’em.  And that is depressing.  That is scary to me.

And that’s why they’ve gotta be defeated.  And in the process of defeating them, these people that are voting for ’em are gonna have to be educated and informed.  Their lives could be so much better if they would let go of the notion that they are powerless.  But when these guys start talking last night about how there’s no future in individualism, rugged or otherwise, that the only thing that matters is standing together, it’s so cliched.  Of course people stand together.  People come from families.

I saw a story about some Democrat describing how they are going to really ultimately ban guns, and they’re going to do it with language.  Some delegate at the convention admitted to a member of the media.  “Oh, yeah, it’s the way we talk about it.  We can’t ever go out as a party and say, ‘We want to get rid of the Second Amendment. We want you to have to give up of your gun.’  We’re instead gonna talk about common sense gun law.  And then after we use the phrase ‘common sense gun law,’ then we’re gonna bring out parents of people who’ve been killed by gun violence. We’re gonna portray the gun and having a gun as the opposite of common sense.”

And that’s the way they do it.  Everything is common sense.  Health care reform, common sense. Tax reform, common sense.  Whenever you hear common sense (fill in the blank) you know they’re lying to you.  When you hear liberal Democrats talk about common sense anything, you know they are gaming you.  They have admitted it.  I knew it before she admitted it, this delegate.  (interruption) No, no, no, no.  I’m not complaining about anything here.  I’m just telling you that I can sit here and watch this stuff and not be affected by, but I am.

I think we’re all affected by this.  This is our country these people are ruining.  This is our country these people don’t like.  This is our country these people are trying to transform and make it something it was never intended to be.  I find it difficult to forget that when I’m watching these people go through the motions here at their convention.

It bugs me to sit through their lies and their prevarications and their misrepresentations and their slander and their libel and their all-out allegations against decent people in their effort to destroy people that don’t agree with them.  It’s like this leak of what was on their servers.  They don’t deny any of it’s authentic; they can’t.  Like they cannot debate us about ideas — and their convention is not about ideas.  Their convention is about destroying opposing people who have different ideas, and then a bunch of Santa Claus-type mush.

So I’m just… It’s a long way of telling you that, yeah, I watch this stuff, but from a far different perspective, ’cause 28 years ago… Honestly, folks, 28 years ago I’d watch one of these conventions like the conventions of 1988, even the conventions of 1992, and the liberal Democrats would be doing what they’re doing and I would think, “I don’t have a thing to worry about because the majority of people are not buying this.”

Even when the Democrats were winning elections, I was saying, “They’re not buying this. They’re succumbing to something else, like Santa Claus or class envy.”  But now we have to deal with the fact that they have succeeded in creating — among way too many people — a genuine dislike and disrespect for this country.  So when I hear Michelle talk about how it’s a great country and don’t let anybody tell you different, keep in mind the perspective and the context.

Yeah, in 2008 she said for the first time in her life she was proud, and that was only because her husband was running.  Okay, so it’s eight years later. She can’t run around and keep trashing the country, not after this guy has been transforming it for eight years.  She has to go out and talk about its greatness now.  And who knows? They may actually think that what Obama’s doing to this country in this so-called transformation is making it great.

But then you listen to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or any of the other 61 speakers last night, and I don’t hear anybody happy about anything. The wealth gap is bigger than ever, the poor are getting bigger, the middle class is being wiped out, climate change is destroying the planet, college loans are crippling. So who’s running all these things?  When I hear ’em complain about student loans, yeah, I laugh. But I get really ticked off:  Who’s running that program?  Who is it that refuses to reduce college tuition costs because that’s where their buddies work?

The left!

I hear these people whine and moan about how difficult it is, and it’s unfair for graduates to have such punishing student debt. Who the hell is doing it to them?  Who the hell has made the college education an albatross around their necks?  These people have!  So, yeah.  And I try to laugh at it.  But it still makes me mad as I can be, ’cause these people are destroying things. They’re destructive, and they’re succeeding at it, and they’re doing it with the high hope it’s unwitting assistance of low-information voters who have a stupefying idea of what’s going on.