RUSH: The editors at the Wall Street Journal have a little blurb here today about what Harry Reid’s trying to do. They’re calling it: ‘Harry Reid’s Holiday Jam — What the Senate wants to pass while 
you’re not paying attention. In the famous formulation often attributed to George Washington, the U.S. Senate is the saucer designed to cool the drink before it becomes law,’ let all the heat get out of the legislation so that reason and discourse can take place, so that the rash of emotions doesn’t dictate legislation that’s passed.
In Dingy Harry’s ‘rush to beat the looming expiration of the 111th Congress, the Senate has become the express lane to jam through changes in military rules, a giant spending bill and even an arms treaty — and all with virtually no deliberation,’ and then they ask the question of the year, the two years. Hell, they ask the question I’ve been asking — we’ve all been asking — for 20 years: ‘Why are Republicans putting up with it?’ People have been asking me: ‘Why don’t the Republicans do X?’ or ‘Why are the Republicans not doing Y?’ I don’t have the answer. I wish I did. All we can do is guess.
At this point I’m not sure the Republicans are putting up with it. What they are doing right now is expressing the predictable outrage over the whole thing. ‘Why are Republicans putting up with it?’ The only answer I could give you is based on years of conversations with people who happen to be in leadership in Republican positions — and it is fear. It’s fear of being criticized for opposing. It’s fear of Obama’s race, although in this case Obama really has nothing to do with what Reid’s doing, directly. It’s fear of the media. It’s fear of being criticized. It’s fear of being called obstructionists. It’s total fear about what somebody is gonna say about ’em. Nothing irritates me more than to have behavior guided by that kind of fear.
‘Why are Republicans putting up with it?’ Fear is the only thing I can tell you, based on the conversations I’ve had with them over the years. Fear what’s gonna be said about them. Fear of the criticism. Fear that they’re gonna be called heartless to the poor, indifferent to the old. The stuff that has been said about them for 30 years, they’re fearful that it will be said again. Here’s what Harry Reid is trying to ram through here before they leave: ‘the bipartisan tax deal, the New Start arms treaty with Russia, the immigration Dream Act,’ which basically legalizes illegals who go to college, ”a ‘lands bill,’ and a bill to let gays serve openly in the military. Oh, and yesterday he also dropped on his colleagues a 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2011 that no one but a few Appropriators have read, if even they have.’
So, ‘Why are Republicans putting up with it?’ We’ve been asking this question for who knows how long.
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RUSH: Robert, Fort Worth, Texas, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Thank you very much, Rush. What I wanted to say is: Stop picking on Harry Reid — and Pelosi, for that matter. We should be celebrating them. I wish we had a Republican that would fight like that, for what we believe in.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I don’t think we’ve had one in my lifetime.
RUSH: Yeah, you have. How old are you?
CALLER: I’m — goodness — 49 years old.
RUSH: Yeah, you have. You’ve had Ronald Reagan.
CALLER: Not in the Congress, though.
RUSH: In the Congress, in the Congress. (muttering)
CALLER: If a mind like yours would take that long…
RUSH: Yeah. You may have a point there, comes to Congress. I don’t want to uniformly agree with you. In fact I am… (interruption) Well, I know. I was thinking Newt. He was for the longest time. It was after he became speaker, about six years after, five-years after, that kind of priorities changed, but —
CALLER: I would give Newt credit. But Dennis Hastert? I don’t think he ever fought for anything, and I’m worried about this next guy.
RUSH: Boehner?
CALLER: Yeees, I am.
RUSH: Why? Why are you worried about Boehner?
CALLER: I don’t think he’s… I don’t think he’s gonna push a true, say, conservative or constitutional agenda.
RUSH: Why? What have you seen to make you think that?
CALLER: I haven’t seen anything outta him in the past, and I’m not seeing anything out of him now.
RUSH: Well, let me give you a name of somebody who would but they won’t let her: Michele Bachmann.
CALLER: Oh, I like her.
RUSH: Yeah. See?
CALLER: You know what we really need?
RUSH: What do we really need?
CALLER: We need — we can call it a Republican or conservative or a constitutional person in the government on our side that’s tough as LBJ, that has his strong hand, long fingers, and sharp fingernails.
RUSH: Well, I think… In analyzing what you’re saying, I understand. ‘I sure wish we had somebody like Reid.’ We really don’t want somebody like Reid. I know what you’re saying, but we don’t want people that are unethical and cheats. You know, we don’t want to have to defend that kinda stuff, but what is Reid and what is Pelosi? They are full thoroughbred liberals, and they fight for that. We don’t really have a whole lot of thoroughbred conservatives in our leadership. We have a lot of ’em them up there, but they are sequestered, segmented, and the effort is made to keep them out of significant leadership positions.
We have conservatives up there, but we don’t have ideologues. These people are true believers. That’s really what you’re saying. They are true believers. We have people who are concerned about the country. Pelosi and Reid couldn’t care a whit about the country. Do you really want somebody like that? They don’t care about it. They care about themselves and their own power and the country be damned, and that’s one of the problems that we have in coming up with counterweights to ’em. Some people say, ‘You need fire to fight fire.’ They don’t care a whit about the country. They care about their party, and they care about their power and they care about their buddies and all, but they don’t care about the country. The Constitution’s an obstacle to them.
They don’t want any part of it. So it’s like, ‘Do we want an Al Capone?’ (laughing) Oh, do we want an Al Capone. (laughing) Some people might say, ‘Yeah. Right now we’d take an Al Capone. That’s what we’re up against.’ You know, do we want an Al Capone? Do we want…? You know, pick your favorite gangster. That’s what we’re really up against. We’re up against a Mafia here. They don’t care about ethics, they don’t care about morality. We got a bunch of J. R. Ewings up there: ‘Once you get past the ethics the rest is easy.’ We don’t have people like that, there’s no question. I know some people say that we need one. (sigh)We don’t want people who are gonna put party before principle or country before principle but that’s what we’re up against.
The question is how do you do you stop people like that? And I don’t even know that the objective on our part is to stop ’em. It could well be, ladies and gentlemen, that we’re fighting the wrong enemy in the Middle East. Maybe the real terrorists that we face are on Capitol Hill. I mean, really, who’s doing as good a job to undermine what this country stands for as the terrorists? Dingy Harry, Nancy Pelosi. I mean, look, if they call us ‘hostage takers’ and ‘gangsters,’ then why can’t we call them what they are? They are terrorists. Is he certainly seemly suicidal. Look at what they’re doing. Look at what they did. They knew they were gonna get shellacked in this election — and they did it!
They knew they are gonna lose, and they want to take us with ’em. So I know exactly what you’re saying, ‘I wish we had a Harry Reid. You gotta stop dumpin’ on him. I wish we had a Nancy Pelosi.’ I don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever gonna… You know, the quirks, the characteristics, the traits of a Harry Reid and a Pelosi just don’t ever merge with ours. Where’s the compromise between people with ethics and without them? (interruption) Well, I know, people that don’t care what they say about ’em. That would help. I know. That’s one of the single largest obstacles for any person, much less group of people, to overcome. I think it may be one of the hardest things for individuals, the way they live their lives — I don’t care what they do — to overcome, and that is to hell with what people think of you. Most people’s lives are governed by what people think of ’em. What they say is based on what people are gonna think. What they do is based on what people are gonna think of ’em. Do you think Reid and Pelosi give a rat’s rear end about that?
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RUSH: There’s a theory that says the Democrats will always win because they understand a basic fact of American human nature, that Americans are lazy and would much rather have something for nothing and that there are enough of those people every four years to win elections.
Think about that.
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RUSH: You know that caller we had a moment ago who wanted to know, ‘Where is our Reid? Where is our Pelosi?’ You know what he really meant was, ‘Where are our strategic thinkers? Where are people who think forward? Where are people who make plans? Where are people who have their ideology, have their grand design, and work daily to implement it with long-range plans anticipating obstacles as they go?’ We don’t have that. Real fighters, people who have confidence, who are strategic, don’t have to be unethical. That’s what he meant, and the guy is right.
Now, let’s look at this lame duck. You don’t for a minute think that any of this lame duck stuff just popped up, do you? Do you think the Democrats just decided a couple of days ago to try all this stuff in their lame duck session? No. This has been planned even before election because they knew they were gonna lose. So they’ve had a strategy, they have had a blueprint, if you will, for still implementing, before the new Congress is sworn into law, their agenda. The Democrat leadership planned to do things this way to achieve maximum confusion and maximum accomplishment. They knew that it would be a hell of a lot easier to slip in all their pork with everything being in chaos. They knew it would be easier to get all this done with nobody paying attention, it’s holidays, everybody wanting to get away from this stuff, people tired of politics, don’t want to hear about it anymore, Santa Claus is coming, the football season, playoffs, can’t we just forget all this stuff? That’s what they’re counting on. They do all this stuff knowing the Republican attitude’s gonna be, ‘Come on, let’s get outta town. We won. We can’t wait to get back here in January, that’s when we want to come back. We won.’ So they drop all this stuff on us when nobody is expecting it.
The problem is — well, one of the problems, many problems can be codified into this one. Politicians of both parties, but the Democrats really know this, they really only care what we think of them one day a year and that’s Election Day. Every other day of the year they are concerned about what the media says about them, and so they position themselves for maximum media support, media attention, media approval, what have you. So the media gets their attention 364 days a year. We get it basically one. How else could the Democrats pull out a nearly 2,000-page omnibus spending bill out of thin air in a matter of days? Well, they didn’t. They’ve been writing this thing for months in case they did lose. This is the kind of thinking they have and it is oriented around the fact that they desperately care about what they believe in, they desperately care about having what they believe in become law, however they have to make it happen. They don’t care what we think of them now. They couldn’t care less. They won’t care about that until two Novembers from now. From now until then everything will be about getting done what they really believe in.
Now, our guys will be concerned about what the media says about ’em every day, and they might be more concerned about that than what we think about them. This 1,924 pages of the continuing resolution, whatever it is, the tax bill doesn’t even have any of the earmarks. They’re laid out elsewhere. The earmarks for HUD run to 90 pages; for Health and Human Services, 98 pages. There are dozens of these separate categories. This stuff just didn’t get written yesterday. These people have been planning this, and this is, whether he knew it or not, this is what our caller was talking about. Where are our people on our side who do this kind of a dance, strategic thinking, who care more about accomplishing their agenda than anything else, and really don’t even care about the process. The process is, you know, you deal with that on a day-to-day basis, you manage it in advance the best you can but you handle the process on a day-to-day basis. Other people get bogged down in the process every day, follow the rules, do this or that. These guys, they couldn’t care less about the process, other than skewing it to their favor.
Let me put it this way. Let’s say that the Democrats throughout this past year had tried — they didn’t do a budget, strategically. Why? They knew that their defeat would be even bigger if they tried to get all this done in the standard budget process, which takes six months. If all of this that’s in this omnibus spending bill was up for debate over six months, none of it would see the light of day, especially given the climate of the people earlier this year, they want no part of this. Okay, so they shelve it, and they say we’re not even gonna do a budget, we’re just gonna shove it aside, and they know nobody’s gonna say anything. And even if somebody does say something, so what are you going to do about it? They’re gonna lose anyway. So after they lose, they plan on a lame duck, they know it’s gonna happen, nobody’s gonna stop the lame duck, not fair, who would do that, dump it all on the lame duck, try to get it all done or as much as they can in two weeks, anybody that stands in the way is an obstructionist, is wasting the time of the people, what have you, this is too important not to deal with, all of this stuff.
Now, they have the added advantage of knowing they’re gonna have media cheerleaders every step of the way, and that’s something our side is never going to have. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have this kind of strategic thinking going on. What the Democrats knew was very simple, that after the election we’re gonna spend a lot of time patting ourselves on the back and thinking, ‘Hey, man, we showed them. Tea Party, rah, rah, we won big time, hubba hubba.’ Meanwhile, they’re down in the labyrinth of their dungeon, and they’re putting together all of these plans and they’re waiting to spring it on everybody, and Dingy Harry does this yesterday, on December 14th, with Congress slated to leave town Friday. On a Tuesday he dumps this stuff when everybody thinks they’re getting outta town on Friday. Now nobody thinks they’re getting outta town on Friday. No, we gotta stay in town to stop Reid, and stopping Reid and Pelosi means stopping to debate all this stuff. That gets the media involved in it. And all this is going on, and they are convinced that the people don’t even want to hear about it, for crying out loud, we just had the election. Can’t you guys put it aside? We got other things going on. We’ve got our lives to live. Half of us can’t find jobs.
So they go, ‘Okay, we’ll make sure you think we’re working on that, so we’re gonna do the Obama tax cut extension and we’re gonna extend your unemployment benefits. So don’t worry, we got your job search handled.’ Oh, okay, fine, don’t have to worry about that? Cool. People forget about it, Reid dumps his omnibus and here we go.