When Did Christianity Become a Get Out of Jail Card?
RUSH: First, I got a note from somebody. I have to share this with you. “Hey, Rush, when did becoming a Christian become a get-out-of-jail card?” And I said, “What do you mean?” “Well, look at Donna Brazile. Donna Brazile said (imitating Brazile), ‘I’m a Christian woman, I know what it is to be persecuted. I’m not gonna answer the question, Kelly, screw you, Kelly! Coming out here in the middle of night with stuff that’s been stolen. I’m a Christian woman, and I know what it is to be persecuted.'”
So she invoked Christianity as a get-out-of-jail card. You can’t ask me this. You can’t demand that I answer this. You can’t force me on this, because I am a Christian woman.
How does that work out for Christian bakeries? How did that work out for Christian photography shops? Playing the Christian card got Donna Brazile out of jail, but it doesn’t help anybody else. I thought that was an interesting point to make, and I wanted to throw out that before I forgot anything else.
Tight Races in Battleground States, But They Still Say Hillary Is winning in a Landslide
RUSH: Trump and Clinton tight race Ohio. Trump and Clinton tight race Florida. Trump and Clinton tight race Pennsylvania. Trump and Clinton tight race Colorado. Trump and Clinton tight race Georgia. Polls: Hillary wins in a landslide by 15. What doesn’t work here? The news today is how battleground states are tight.
Salena Zito on What Trump’s Candidacy Represents
RUSH: There’s a great piece today, Salena Zito is back, and she has a piece in the New York Post: “Why Trump’s Fall Will Hit Hard — Populism isn’t ideology; it’s energy. It is entitled and noble, naive and skeptical, good-willed, dangerous and not going away anytime soon, all at the same time. Both the Democrats and Republicans experienced it in the primaries. But Republicans actually nominated a populist candidate, in part because their party leadership was seen as insufficiently concerned about the kitchen-table and cultural issues driving a large segment of the party’s grass roots.
“Yet, if folks think this current variant of populism is just based on economic resentment or racism, they’re vastly oversimplifying it. Instead, they should be spending the time to understand all the forces at work here. Why are many people, particularly white working-class men, attracted to Trump? Is it economics? Racism? Or something deeper? There’s an important social and cultural element to this populism that’s often misidentified as simple racism. It is more what one might call ‘patriotic chauvinism,’ reflected in Trump’s ‘America First’ rhetoric.”
See, they’re trying to impugn Trump supporters by saying they’re just a bunch of white racists who are fed up with the fact that people of color are becoming a demographic majority. That’s what the Democrat Party’s putting out there. That’s what Hillary, her campaign, the whole Democrat apparatus in the media, in trying to explain Trump, they say his supporters are a bunch racists, they’re a bunch of old, toothless, white hayseeds worried that colored people, brown people, red people, black people, are taking over the country. They’re racist. That’s what they’re saying.
That is how they characterize the Trump voter. And Salena Zito is saying they’re missing it as badly as it can be missed. It’s not about race. It’s about what kind of country we’re going to have. It’s about what they are doing to this country. It is about how we define America in the early twenty-first century. It goes on to describe who Obama really is, a community organizer, graduated from elite universities, spent a lot of his youth growing up overseas, abroad, first president to begin his term by going to Europe and declaring himself a proud citizen of the U.S. and a fellow citizen of the world.
She writes that: “Today’s populist backlash began in 2009 with the rise of the Tea Party movement, whose own attempt to ‘make America great again’ focused on constitutional restoration. Much of the media sneered at that movement, using the sexual innuendo of ‘tea baggers’ and dismissing critiques of Obama’s Affordable Care Act as na�ve. The Tea Party movement arose spontaneously, without any centralized structure.” And because of this it scared the hell out of people and it seemed to be dissolving on its own.
There’s no leader whose fortunes we can track, so the Tea Party seems to have dissolved on its own. But the anger and the sense that some things are not right has not gone away. It’s still out there effervescing and soon to break through the surface if it hasn’t already. Then here’s the meat of this. She says, “A Trump defeat will be incredibly difficult for his supporters to accept. Not that all of them admire him as a person.” It isn’t going to be that they are personally devastated if Trump loses. Because — and as I have pointed out continually on this program — it never really has been about Trump.
Trump is the vessel for what this is really about, and that’s why they are not going to succeed, the left, in stripping Trump’s supporters away from him, ’cause it isn’t about him. It’s about what his candidacy presents as an opportunity, and they’re not gonna let the left dispatch it and toss it aside like they’re able to toss every other Republican candidacy aside. Therefore, because Trump’s campaign is much more about what he represents than it is about him, “pushing back against what those supporters see as nothing less than the end of the United States as they know it.”
And that’s why if Trump loses, it’s going to be profoundly tragic. It’s gonna hit hard these people. They’re not gonna be sad Trump personally loss. They’re going to be devastated that this candidacy represented nothing less than the last chance to preserve the country as they know it. I think she’s right about this as regards many people who are supporting and planning on voting for Trump. And I will guarantee you that the elite in the Democrat and Republican Party, this is foreign language to them.
The idea that what kind of country we’re gonna have is at stake here? They laugh at that. It’s absurd, they believe. Last chance to preserve the country as we know it? They think that’s insane. They don’t think there’s any kind of crisis at all, particularly like that. That’s why they’ve never really extended a lot of effort to stopping Obama. They don’t think there’s a crisis. And for them there isn’t. I mean, they’re gonna have their exalted membership in the establishment no matter who wins.
Even if they, on our side, will be the Washington Generals, they will still be in the club, and they will still have their connections, and their kids’ futures will be okay. So for them, the idea that this campaign is about the future of the country and preserving it as we’ve known, they laugh at that. It’s just another reason why the whole Trump persona and campaign totally escapes them.