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RUSH: You know, I’ve been under the impression for the last four or five years, maybe even six, that George W. Bush ruined our international image. George W. Bush ruined our international reputation. But if you look at the new president of France, you gotta wonder what reputation of ours is so bad, when the new president of France wants to be our best buddy. Greetings, my friends, welcome back. Great to have you. We got broadcast excellence for you, three hours of it straight ahead today on the EIB Network. I’m the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling Maha Rushie, and you can talk to me on this program by calling 800-282-2882, the e-mail address, Rush@eibnet.com.

Remember, now, this is not Friday, so we’re only going to talk about things I care about, and if you’re not going to talk about things I’m interested in, you’re not going to get on the air. That’s how it works Monday through Thursday. Sometimes Snerdley slips one in just because he likes to jab me a little bit, but for the most part Monday through Thursday is when I act as benevolent dictator and in total control of what happens on this program. Again the number is 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address, Rush@eibnet.com.

This election in France is not good news for Mrs. Clinton. They’ve done sort of a preliminary analysis of the votes over there: 48% of Frenchwomen voted against the female candidate. 48%. Now, the Mrs. Bill Clinton camp, Clinton, Inc., cannot be looking at this and smiling. But here’s another thing about this, folks. George W. Bush has said for the longest time that we, the United States of America, could spread democracy around the world. Of course everybody on the left mocked him. ‘Democracy? Freedom? Why, that’s not for everybody! That’s not what our mission is.’ The Drive-By Media mocked President Bush. The tenured academics mocked President Bush. But who’s laughing now?

There was the most ridiculous story in the New York Times over the weekend about the state dinner at the White House tonight, 134 people going to be in there, and it’s white tie and tails. The New York Times does this story basically implying that Bush doesn’t know what white tie and tails are, hates ’em, and that the White House doesn’t know how to host one of these white tie dinners and they’re having to run around and get all these tips on how to do it because they’re just a bunch of idiot Neanderthals. I’ve told you countless times, that is a town dominated by the social circuit as much as the political and news circuit. People I don’t think realize the full import of what I’m saying here, but this New York Times story sort of illustrates it. ‘What a doofus. What a dunce.’ I just saw videotape of the president and the Queen at a previous state dinner. There he is in white tie, and they’re acting like this is so foreign to everybody in the White House, they’re having to go out and call Miss Manners, Emily Post or whatever to find out what to do. Of course, that’s the action line. We have an idiot in the White House, we have a hayseed, partier, frat boy and this sort of thing, who just somehow manages to outsmart these people all the time.

But nevertheless, among the things he said was that we could spread democracy around the world. Who’s laughing now? All these people said it’s not possible. Liberty, freedom, individuality, and democracy took big steps forward yesterday. It’s not quite the Middle East here, yet. France is on its way to maybe becoming the Middle East, or it was, anyway. But if the tyranny of socialism can be voted down in France, can the tyranny of socialism be defeated in the United States in a year and a half? Well, it’s an interesting question. If socialism can be voted down in France, can America be far behind? We are the cradle of democracy. France was the cradle of socialism. So now where do these actors threaten to go? Where is Streisand going to go when Republicans win the next election? Where’s Alec Baldwin going to go? They always threaten to go to France. Maybe it’s time to go to Syria. Well, they’re going to have a big Labor Party guy take over for Tony Blair, but that’s no party change. Labor is the libs in the UK. But where are they going to go now? Johnny Depp actually lived there in France. I wonder if this is a crisis.

The socialists lost in France, and not only have they lost, there’s a story here about how they have imploded, and here it is. This is from the Australian: ‘French Left Implodes After Defeat — The French Left began imploding as soon as the official results showing Segolene Royal’s resounding defeat were released yesterday. The Socialists sank into an abyss of bitter public recriminations and soul-searching about their failure to modernise and unite France.’ This 85% turnout. I wonder if part of that is because they vote on weekends over there. It probably is. But this cannot be a good day for Jean-François Kerry, who served in Vietnam. It cannot be a good day for Henri Reid. It cannot be a good day for Nicole Pelosi, and especially for Madam Clinton. They might be able to put her in the wax museum as a human being today and have everybody think it’s wax. (interruption) She didn’t predict them, she was calling for them. She was calling for riots. Well, she predicted ’em, but she was calling for riots. Some of these little socialists over there, duty-bound, followed through. It wasn’t a whole lot, but they still did.

Let me give you what the Drive-By Media template is going to be. ‘Does a woman’s defeat in France spell a woman’s defeat in America?’ Or — and this is the more likely of the two — ‘A Woman’s Defeat in France has nothing to do with a woman’s electability in the United States. No, no, no! None whatsoever. You can’t draw those inferences, Americans. You can’t draw those conclusions. There’s not much comparison between Ms. Royal and Mrs. Clinton. There’s no way that Ségolène…’ That’s her first name, ‘She can’t be as smart as Mrs. Clinton. Who is?’ So they got a lot of things they can fall back on. Did you know she wanted to meet with Mrs. Clinton during the campaign? She wanted to come over here and have a photo-op session with Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Clinton refused. Mrs. Clinton refused to have a photo-op meet and greet, tea, whatever they do, probably because she knew this would not be a good comparison. By the way, Ségolène Royal, you have to understand, only played the female card late in the game. She was running full-fledged policy, socialism and so forth.

It was only when the late polls showed that she was in big doo-doo that she threw the female card on the table. (interruption) Well, yeah, I think the message did get out, H.R., when 85% of the voters show up. I think the message got out that the country is falling apart socially. They got a 35 hour work week. This guy, this new president, Sarkozy, said, ‘We’re going to reestablish the relationship with America. America is going to be one of our best friends.’ Of course socialists are having a fit over there, and I tell you, let me give you a little interesting side-bar here because the socialists are imploding there. There was a story over the weekend — I think it was yesterday morning in the New York Times — MoveOn.org and a number of other groups are so livid at the Democrats in the House and Senate for backing off on this troop withdrawal date. It’s like MoveOn.org and these anti-war groups on the Internet have a leash around the Democrat leadership and they start tugging on the leash yesterday and made it clear, and these people are responding to them. So you’ve got similar patterns of behavior. The socialists in France and the libs here in this country behaving in the same way, in terms of trying to intimidate their own leadership.

At any rate, I gotta take a quick time-out here, folks. By the way, one thing you need to know about this: this Sarkozy guy is the first mainstream French politician to openly identify himself as a candidate of the right in a long time. Now, they had this Le Pen guy, but he wasn’t mainstream. This is the first conservative, mainstream conservative who so identified himself. ‘Since the seventies French presidents have tried to mobilize the center, but Sarkozy did it by mobilizing the right, and has made no bones about why he thinks that he won by courting that group of people. Here’s the story on women voters shun Royal. She played what she hoped was her trump card in the last hours of the battle for the French presidency: her femininity. It emerged that Royal was being let down at the ballot box not by centrists, Socialists or any other political bloc but by the one sector of the electorate that might have been expected to rally to her cause in droves: women. She may have been misled by an Elle magazine opinion poll…’ Whoa, misled by a poll! Hubba hubba. Misled by a poll. Says here, ‘She may have been misled by an Elle magazine opinion poll in January that suggested France was a haven of sisterly solidarity and put her comfortably ahead among women. This seemed to vindicate her approach of appealing for votes not as a woman but as the best-qualified candidate to replace President Jacques Chirac.’ But later on when that wasn’t working out last month she changed tack, ‘launching direct appeals to women voters, but by then it was too late: in the first round of voting on April 22, more women voted for him (32%) than for her (28%). So much for what the pundits had been calling the ‘gender effect.” This is classic. It’s a great display of exactly how conventional wisdom, Drive-By Media conventional wisdom and so forth, just sometimes goes down the tubes, and more often than not you can count on it to go down the tubes.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Drive-By Media is shocked and dismayed by the French election. Forty-eight percent of the female vote went for Ségolène Royal; 52% of the female vote went against her. It’s a stunner, and the Drive-Bys are shocked and dismayed. We have a montage here of ABC News’ David Wright, who was over in Paris covering the elections. This is from Good Morning America today. Chris Cuomo was talking to him and said, ‘France has elected a new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, pledging to be good friend to the United States. That said, not everybody in France is happy about it.’

WRIGHT: The voters spoke, the rioters responded. Shortly after conservative Nicolas Sarkozy was declared the winner, angry protesters took to the streets. Young protesters hurled rocks at the riot cops, who shot back with tear gas. Nationwide, nearly 400 cars went up in flames. The conservative Sarkozy wants to clear out the welfare rolls and put France back to work. His socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, called those policies brutal, warning that if Sarkozy won, protesters would take to the streets. Last night, across the country, they did, a portent of what may be to come. Sarkozy is the most pro-American French politician to come along in a good many years, so much so that his opponents tried to call him an American with a French passport. In his victory speech he took the time-out to say that America could count on his friendship.

RUSH: You guys in the Drive-Bys can say whatever you want, but the guy won, and he won handily with 85% of the vote turnout. Now, the Drive-Bys, every time this happens, when socialists lose — is it not, by the way, instructive to note how Democrats and liberals react when socialists lose or when communists are tossed out of power, is that not enough — I wonder all the time, is that not enough to tell the American people who these people are? American Democrats and liberals — how about this. Can you imagine this being controversial? I mean it is in France, or was, but you can say — you know, conservatism, if articulated properly, will win in most free societies every time it’s tried. This line got me. ‘The conservative Sarkozy wants to clear out the welfare rolls and put France back to work. His socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, called those policies brutal.’ Work, clearing out welfare rolls? There’s a 35-hour work week. You can’t fire anybody in that country. They’re paralyzed. They’ve got an immigration problem. They’re losing some of their native culture. There has been a lot of unrest in this country about the direction the country is going long before this election came, it’s just that nobody heard about it because the Drive-Bys don’t report it. It’s not as though the place were a model of socialism for the left, but as long as they had a president that hated Bush and didn’t want to get involved in the Iraq war, didn’t want to get involved in the war on terror, well, they were great, they were fabulous.

Meanwhile, the people of that country are really suffering, and this guy wins on this platform of relaxing this 35-day work week. Let’s talk productivity here. He knows what’s happening, and you have to marvel here at why was this a surprise to anybody? It’s a surprise because of what is reported day in and day out not by the Drive-Bys in this country, not just by them, but by the international Drive-By Media. If there were honest polling going on over there, and if there were honest reporting about the state of the culture and society, this would not have been a surprise. But it’s a surprise and it’s a disappointment.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Todd in Greenfield, Ohio, I’m glad you called, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Thank you very much. How are you today?

RUSH: Fine and dandy. Never better, actually.

CALLER: Great. Hey, I’ve got a question about the whole French election, American election thing. I really don’t see the connection. After all that they’ve done to us while we were in Iraq and the things that led up to that, why would we care, why would any woman in America care whether or not a woman got elected in France?

RUSH: Well, it may not have any impact, and it’s going to be hard to say until our election happens, but there are lessons to learn from it, and there are clear indications to learn from it. We have been told, and the thing, Todd, that you gotta keep in mind always — folks, I’m going to keep drilling this until it becomes automatic with you. You must keep the context of this in mind. Now, if on any normal day the elections in France probably wouldn’t mean all that much, although the elections of Margaret Thatcher did, but the reason that it’s interesting to me, anyway, is because we have been told — and Todd, you’re among us, the ‘we’ who have been told that the French hate our guts and that all of Europe hates our guts and that Bush has ruined our international image and reputation and we need to elect Democrats here, France’s version of socialists, in order to repair our image. And, lo and behold, here comes this election, and everybody is stunned. The first thing this guy says is he wants people to know that France is going to be America’s friend again. Now, this guy won big with 85% of the vote turnout. So what it tells me is that what we’ve been told about the French is largely incorrect. When you put that in the context of everybody else we get from the Drive-By Media these days be largely incorrect, that I think there are things to learn from this.

I’ve always said, as a theory, that conservatism, properly explained, and inspirationally delivered, will win every time it’s tried in national type elections in this country. Of course, there are hotbeds and pockets of liberalism where it doesn’t have a prayer, but in a national election — and there’s evidence for this. There’s Ronald Reagan. You have senatorial raises. You could even say that Bush’s first term election was that because he had everybody convinced that he was Reaganesque and conservative, and look at what these Republican nominees are doing now. They’re all trying to say I’m the new Reagan. None of them are, including Fred Thompson, but they’re all trying to say so. Now, as I have said, you know, I’ve always recommended that the Republicans, the GOP, not start pandering and tailoring to moderates and the left in order to build a majority, but go ahead and run as conservatives, do it proudly, do it forcefully, run with the power of conservative ideas, draw people to the Republican Party. That seems what Sarkozy did, to me. And we thought it wasn’t possible. I’ll guarantee you, in this country right now, there are a lot of people who think it’s not possible Republicans can win.

As far as the media is concerned, the race here is on the Democrat side. The primary is it. That’s the only race and after that it’s just a foregone conclusion, the Democrat, whoever wins the nomination, is going to be the next president. I’m sure that’s the way it was reported in France, too, until the election happened and everything went haywire and the runoff then came. But what we’ve got now happens too often in this country as far as I’m concerned is Republicans tend to go off the reservation, go off the conservative reservation and start trying to sound like moderates here and liberals here with this social issue or that social issue. They try to peel off some of the Democrats and some of the liberals in this country — and that’s not the way to do it. Conservatism can win by itself. Most people live their lives in a conservative fashion, some of them that do so may not vote that way, but it’s how people live their lives. You don’t get your paycheck and walk through the neighborhood giving it away, but you elect people who do it for you. That’s what I mean, you don’t live, you don’t vote that way, and you certainly don’t sit around and do a number of other things that government, liberal government will do for you, even though you might vote, because it makes you feel good, you think you’re helping other people and this sort of thing.

This Sarkozy guy got the same treatment Republicans here get. He’s mean-spirited, he’s cruel, his ideas are cruel, just like the Drive-By report from Good Morning America today. Putting France back to work and cleaning up the welfare rolls was considered cruel, and then Ségolène Royal said we need riots for that. And yet he wins. So there are some instructive things here for Republican candidates to learn, as far as campaigning is concerned.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Lona in Fort Myers, Florida. You’re next. Great to have you with us.

CALLER: First of all, it’s an auspicious beginning of the week to talk to you on a Monday, Rush.

RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.

CALLER: And I see somewhat of a problem with the earlier caller, Todd, in his education concerning mathematics and analysis regarding the French election.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: Because everything that we’ve heard over the past few years has come from French elected officials who obviously do not represent the majority of the people. I don’t know what the percentage of voters has been in the last few elections, but I would say that 85% of the French — and that means a vast number of people in the countryside who are decent, everyday people — I lived in northern France for four years — they’re decent people. They are hard working. They don’t want to be taken over by a completely totalitarian government and religion. That 85% came out in a very loud voice, and they’re reinforcing their friendship with America.

RUSH: Yeah, what Lona is talking about, we talked about the French election in the first half hour of the program today, and I pointed out here that here’s their first female candidate for president down the tubes, 52% of women voted against her, Ségolène Royal, a guy who is a proclaimed conservative. Now, I don’t know what that really means. Have to wait and find out. This guy is a global warming nut, after all, but he did say he wants to reestablish good relations with the United States, he wants to clear up the welfare rolls. He wants to change the 35-hour work week, wants more productivity out of there, and that’s when Ségolène Royal said that’s going to spawn riots, which she got. But this wasn’t supposed to happen, this was a socialist country that’s supposed to stay socialist. This is a country supposedly we had so offended that Bush has ruined our reputation, yet look at what happens. So much reporting about what’s going on in France has been wrong and all that. We got a call from Todd from somewhere who trying to tell me that it’s interesting what happened, but there’s no correlation between what happened in the French election and what’s going to happen in our election in ’08. I said, ‘Well, maybe not, but, I’ll tell you what, Republican candidates have a lot to learn from this candidate. You win with conservatism. You don’t win by going out and trying to peel off a liberal vote here, a moderate vote there or whatever. You don’t build your coalition of conservatism by going out and stealing liberals. Not in national elections. You might be able to do it in states, you might be able to do it in local elections and that sort of thing, and that’s what Lona here is responding to. You lived in France for four years, you say?

CALLER: Yes, I did. My father was in the Air Force.

RUSH: So you weren’t surprised by this outcome?

CALLER: No, I’m not, because we lived out in the country. We lived out in the country about 35 miles away from the base where my father was stationed, and we got to know those people in the village so well and in other villages, and they’re decent people. I did have another issue that I called about today that I wanted to call about for absolutely months. Your nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize —

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: — is a wonderful thing because you attempt — and I think you make a very good effort — at educating voters, and that’s what a democracy demands. People must be educated. I’m amazed, I never cease to be amazed after the election, various people will come to me and ask, ‘What do you think about the election or the results?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, what do you think? Did you vote?’ And if they sigh, ‘Well, no, I didn’t vote, I didn’t think it was worthwhile,’ I don’t even talk about it, because it’s the responsibility of every one of us to be diligent and discerning and finding out everything we can.

RUSH: Well, there’s no question about that. That’s the mission of this program, to create an army of informed voters to go out in the arena of ideas on Election Day and express themselves, and it’s happened. As far as the other people, after every effort has been made to educate people and those who refuse, I’m happy they don’t vote. Doesn’t bother me. I’ve always found the vote turnout argument a little bit of a problem.

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