RUSH: I saw Liz Cheney this morning on TV, and she was joining the president. Republicans had a press conference, Democrats had a press conference, and Liz Cheney was (I think) doing a great job of explaining what all this is all about.

So here’s the first of the two bites…

CHENEY: Our socialist colleagues on the other side of the aisle are wrong when they advocate abortion up until the moment of birth — including partial-birth abortion, late-term abortions — and when they refuse to mandate care for babies who are born alive. Our colleagues are wrong when they say that we should open America’s borders, abolish ICE, and abolish DHS. They’re wrong when they advocate policies that would eliminate all private health insurance in this country, destroy Medicare, and force the American people to pay for free health care for illegal immigrants.

RUSH: So this is an attempt… You know, people are reacting to the president like Lindsey Graham. “Don’t make it personal. Keep it on policy.” So Liz Cheney is responding in that way. She is spelling out what socialist policy is, Democrat Party policy is, and that that is what we oppose and that that’s what we object to. She’s not distancing herself from Trump. She’s adding to it, and she’s reacting to the demands that others have made that this be restricted or focused on policy. Here’s the next bite…

CHENEY: Our opposition to our colleagues’ beliefs has absolutely nothing to do with race or gender or religion. We oppose them and their policies because their policies are dangerous and wrong and would destroy America. The issue here is the content of their policies, and we will continue to stand up and fight against what we know is wrong for this nation.

RUSH: So that was great. She was responding, and then a number of other Republicans went to the microphone following her.

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RUSH: Okay. So Liz Cheney went out earlier today, and a bunch of Republicans in the House too. Look, it was a valiant effort. But with the Drive-By Media, it’s utterly futile. F-u-t-i-l-e. Futile. She went out to basically remind everybody (summarized), “None of this criticism of any of these members of The Squad of the Democrats is rooted in racism. Trump didn’t even say race. Our opposition to them is the substance of their policies,” and she listed them off, from immigration to abortion to sanctuary cities to any of the number of outrageous, extreme things that they believe. Now, the media is not gonna report it other ways.

Well, they will, but they will say, “Liz Cheney, in a valiant effort to defend Trump, failed miserably — and it blew up and only amplified the problem.” Now the Senate Republicans are out doing the same thing. The Turtle is out there and he’s saying (summarized), “Look, the Democrats have got so much anti-Semitism rolling through that party, I don’t even know how to keep track of it.” John Thune has just moved to the microphone. So the Democrats in the House and the Senate, I guarantee you they’re trying to limit the damage they think is done by the media, because it’s the media claiming Trump is a…

Well, it’s the Democrats leveling the charge and the media echoing that these tweets were racist and sexist and bigoted. The Democrats are jumping all over that, and now the Republicans out there are trying to point out, “Nope, it was none of that at all.” The Turtle said, “Look, everybody, we need to turn down the temperature here a little bit. We need to lower the temperature on all of this.” There isn’t gonna… The temperature isn’t gonna get lowered! This thing is gonna have a life span of three or four days and something else is gonna happen to replace it.

And we’re gonna be on this emotional roller coaster of up and down — mad, angry, and then relieved — thinking, “Okay, that’s over, moving on,” and something else is gonna happen. It’s gonna be manufactured. Even the response to something has to be manufactured. But this is what I find humorous. Everybody in Washington laments the partisanship and laments the stress and worries about how fever-pitched everything is. “We need to tone it down! We need to start showing people that Washington can work. We need to be able to cross the aisle.”

Of course, it’s just a never-ending repeating cycle that features no change or solution, and the reason is because this is not about compromise or getting along. This is a cutthroat battle for the kind of country this is going to end up being going forward. That’s what this battle is. These are high stakes, and it’s a fight to the death over what this country’s gonna be. We are up against people who are relentlessly trying to unravel and transform this country into being something it was never intended to be, was not founded to be.

So it makes every bit of sense in the world that this would be a fever-pitched battle. The stakes are too high. The stakes are the future of the United States, not the future of the Democrat Party, future of the Republican Party. The stakes here are the future of the country. That’s why the intensity is what it is. It ought to be this intense. It ought to be! This is a battle to the death here, when you get right down to it. Within the arena of politics, but it still is. The primary reason it’s happening is because the left is not used to opposition like this.

The left is not used to being stymied like this. The left, the Democrats are not used to impotence like this. I know I say this over and over. I’m gonna say it again, because it’s so crucial. You can’t understand. Unless you have studied these people as I have my whole life, you can’t understand their frustration at Trump surviving this coup. You cannot understand their frustration at Trump winning in 2016. And then they launch everything they’ve got aimed at destroying him and taking him out.

Not only does he survive it, he triumphs. His policies are implemented. His policies are causing vast, empirical, salient improvements in many aspects of life in this country. That’s just unacceptable, and the Democrats are so accustomed to being able to bully and intimidate opposition Republicans into giving up, into caving, and certainly not responding to any of the slander or libel. Trump does all of that and more. He beats them at their own game, and they’re literally beside themselves.

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RUSH: And here’s the Turtle, Mitch McConnell, moments ago in Washington, little miniature press conference with some of his Senate compadres in the leadership trying to lower the temperature on things in general in Washington.

MCCONNELL: We’ve heard facilities on the U.S. border called concentration camps. We’ve seen the far left throw accusations of racism at everyone, anyone who disagrees with them on anything, including the Speaker of the House. We’ve seen a freshman Democratic congresswoman use anti-Semitic tropes and imply people only supported Israel because of campaign contributions. The most vile accusations and insults against our nation have become incredibly routine. From the president to the Speaker to freshman members of the House, all of us have a responsibility to elevate the public discourse. Our words do matter. We all know politics is a contact sport, but it’s about time we lowered the temperature all across the board.

RUSH: Right. Good luck with that. Nice to have it all on the record as wanting to get it done, but ain’t gonna happen simply by asking for it to happen. You know, this actually is a dual-edged sword. They have to be defeated, folks, there’s no question, in a political sense the left has to be defeated. Now, what do they do when they are defeated? They go batty. They literally go insane. That’s when they become violent.

I mean, all of this that we’re going through today is because they lost in 2016, amplified by the fact that they tried to correct that by getting rid of Trump, running a silent coup, you know the whole deal with the collusion with Russia and all that. That’s what happens when they lose. But they’re gonna have to continue to lose.

There’s a part of me that worries some of our people in elective politics are not going to think it’s worth it to win because this is what happens when we do. We are not loved, we’re not accepted, we’re not applauded, we’re not heralded and so forth. It’s an ongoing challenge.

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RUSH: Donald Trump says that the Democrat Party is too petrified to confront the “anti-USA, pro-terrorist” Squad. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. And AOC said, “This country belongs to you; it belongs to everyone.” Does it? No, seriously. Does this country belong to everyone? That’s an interesting take, interesting question.