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RUSH: Vinny in Brooklyn. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.

CALLER: The great one, so good to listen to you again.

RUSH: Thank you, Vinny.

CALLER: You know, I’m a bit despondent over what’s going on. But I can’t help but think, just like tigers eat their own, eat their young, we of the GOP are exactly the same. And we’ve given the Democrats, in my opinion, license to run with these kind of Akin stories over and over and over again because, I mean, we’ve beat down the door to throw our own under the bus. I know you said this a few days ago, and I tried to get through then to, you know, applaud your sentiment, but I am so despondent over what this man in Missouri — you know, the stance he’s taken now and how the Democrats are just gonna run with this all the way to November 6th over and over. You know Sandra Fluke, I believe, is speaking at the DNC now, at their convention, if I’m not mistaken.

RUSH: No, no, no, no, that can’t be. She is just a college student. They only have Democrat operatives speak at the convention.

CALLER: (laughing) Well, you know, Rush, and I’ll say one more thing. I was talking with Bo about this. I really believe our biggest enemy is not Barack Obama. Our biggest enemy is the mainstream media. And Romney and the GOP must learn to speak above and beyond the media like Ronald Reagan did so successfully. Otherwise, Barack Obama could never get away with what he’s getting away with, and they could never get away with the things that they get away with on a daily basis. We must learn to overcome the media bias because that is what will undo us in the end, not Barack Obama. And I really feel strongly about that.

RUSH: A lot of people do. A lot of people agree with you, and nobody has the answer for it. The only answer anybody has is what you said, Reagan. And how often do you get people like that?

CALLER: Well, we have you, and Lord knows you do it every day, but I guess what I’m saying is we need our candidate to come out. Again, this is a big point of contention with some people. I really think Romney should come out and literally condemn certain people by name. I mean, I’ve never seen that, basically —

RUSH: I got ten seconds. Condemn who?

CALLER: Well, when you have CNN that’s just running the Todd Akin story day after day after day —

RUSH: Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on. Don’t go away.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, we’re back with Vinny in Brooklyn now. Vinny, you’re either all over the board because of your despondency or I am depressed and miserable and therefore unable to understand what you’re talking about. You started out by saying that you’re ticked off that we eat our own. Then you sound like you want Akin to be thrown to the wolves. Now you want Romney to condemn people by name. Who? This is after you were properly pointing out how the media is an obstacle. By the way, that’s not gonna change. The media isn’t gonna change, and there has only been one Reagan in my lifetime who has the skill to go above and beyond them. So who do you want Romney to condemn?

CALLER: You know, excuse me for sounding so frustrated, but that’s what I am. I’m just frustrated. I mean, I just notice how the Democrats, you know, en masse move to condemn whoever they’re out to condemn as an entire party. Meanwhile, you know, maybe we ought to do that. Maybe when someone like Chuck Todd misreports about something and paints a conservative into a monster that he’s not, you know, maybe it’s time for, not just Romney, but the leadership to speak up and say, “Wait a minute, we’re just not gonna grant interviews to someone like Chuck Todd if he’s not gonna report things honestly,” and I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.

RUSH: Okay. So you want Romney to condemn Chuck Todd. You want Romney and Ryan to say, “To hell with your debates. We’re not showing up with a stacked deck.”

CALLER: No, no. No. No, no. I’m just using Chuck Todd as an example. I’m just trying to say we don’t effectually fight back. You know, I agree with everything you said the other day. I felt just like you did. I didn’t necessarily feel it was my place to throw Akin to the wolves, but, at the same time he should have done the right thing and stepped down to the bigger picture. Are we together on this?

RUSH: Yep. So far.

CALLER: Okay. All I was trying to comment on is what you echoed. Okay, nothing’s different, all right? We are so quick to throw our own to the wolves, and the Democrats see that, and, you know, they pounce on it because they know —

RUSH: Okay, let’s examine. Hold it a minute. Let’s take that one and let’s talk about it. I want to ask your opinion, your theory. Let’s use the Akin example. Akin comes out and says, “You know what? In the case of ‘legitimate rape,’ yeah, but ‘illegitimate rape,’ a woman’s body shuts down and pregnancy infrequently occurs,” and everybody has a cow, and everybody on the Republican side gets in a race to the cameras and a race to the microphones to denounce the guy, throw him overboard, “Get the hell out of the party. Who do you think you are, you dumb idiot.” Why do you think they do that, Vinny? What is it that drives them to do it?

CALLER: I think they’re afraid of the media.

RUSH: All right. You’re exactly right. It’s a combination of a desire to be politically correct and afraid of the media. I think in this case there was also an element of genuine truth in it. “Oh, no, this guy’s gotta go.” There was no question, but at the same time what bothers me… see, you were gonna talk about how you’re despondent. Can I tell you what bothers me more than anything in the world?

CALLER: Sure. I know I’m gonna get it here, but go ahead. (laughing)


RUSH: No. No. It’s not about you. What bothers me, I have to be so careful saying this, too. But when you make every decision in your life or when you allow your happiness, your self-worth to be determined by what you think other people think of you, you’re finished, you are dead. You don’t have the guts to be who you are. You are granting people all kinds of power, and I think that that’s one of the reasons why there was a mad dash for these massive calls for Akin to go on our side because, in Washington, ’cause I think the liberals so dominate that place that the conservatives who live there want their respect. They want to get along. They don’t want to be thought of as extreme, wacko conservatives. So this guy pipes up and sends chills down their spine, “Oh, my God, this guy just confirmed what they think we’re all like.” So they run to the microphones and their primary objective was to tell everybody, particularly the liberal media, “Hey, I don’t agree with this guy. Don’t confuse me with this guy.”

There was also, as I say, there was also an element of genuine “this guy’s gotta go,” I think there are a lot of factors here that deserve some weight in terms of explaining what people do. But over all, don’t use the Akin thing. It still happens. We still have people in our media, in our party, who are obsessed that the liberals not think of them as they think of all conservatives. It grates on me. It bothers me. I know it’s hard, ’cause everybody wants to be loved and everybody wants to be respected and everybody wants to be highly thought of. So any time a massive bunch of criticism hits, most people wilt ’cause they don’t know how to deal with it, don’t want to deal with it. They don’t care to understand why it’s happening, and don’t want it to happen anymore.

CALLER: Can I say one more thing to you?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Okay. Just one more thing to you. We need to think of an effective way to answer our critics, because no matter what we do, who we throw to the wolves, we’re not gonna be liked. We’re never gonna be liked. Okay, and we just sit there and we keep saying, “But, look, but, look.” We’re doomed.

RUSH: Vinny, I’m gonna stop you. You stepped in it again. You stepped in it again, as far as I’m concerned. When you said we have to find an effective way to answer our critics. Let me ask you, what —

CALLER: Fight, I mean fight. Fight. When I say answer, I mean fight. Fight back.

RUSH: Okay, what is your objective in answering the critics? Now really think about this. Take it as far out as you can think. Go beyond the knee-jerk and visceral here. What do you want to happen as a result of fighting back or answering the critics?

CALLER: I just want people to be judged evenly. This double standard is so prevalent and it’s so obvious. I mean, it’s so frustrating day in and day out. I mean you brought up all those great examples. What’s-his-name from Florida in 2006, thrown to the wolves right away. The member from the House, from Florida. I’m having a mental block on his name.

RUSH: Mark Foley.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Now, when you bring that up, are you saying that you would have preferred the Republicans circle the wagons around the guy and not let —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: — the Democrats get away with —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: — smearing him and the party?

CALLER: In that instance, yeah, because it didn’t do us any good anyway. And we threw another one of our own under the bus. Where does it get us? It gets us nowhere. It doesn’t get us liked in Washington, and you know as well as I do we’re never going to be liked or accepted in the Beltway because it is a liberal town, and that’s that. We’re hated there, and we’re really not of it. And for those of us on our side, part of the establishment, well, we’re trying to get rid of them, too. They’re the first ones that did run for the microphones.

RUSH: Let me answer this personally. I’m gonna answer the question I asked you. I’ll use my own personal examples in trying to explain this. When this program started in 1988, everybody who knew me thought that I was okay. Nobody hated me (that I knew of) and the people who knew me certainly did not think that I “hated” people. The ways that I was being described starting in 1988 simply because I was a conservative — racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe — all of those things, nobody who knew me knew any of that to be true. It wasn’t true. But yet here it came.

Now, I can sit here and tell you some things after 24 years of this. I started radio in 1967. I was 16. I’ve always wanted to be a guy on the radio. Now look. With 30% of the people in this country, my reputation is mud, it’s dirt forever, simply because of what you just said: the media. Simply because of lies, distortions, untruths that have been said about me. My reputation’s destroyed, and not through anything that I did. It’s just the reality. So in the ensuing four years, in ’88, when this character assassination started, I was totally unprepared for it.

Nothing like it had happened in my success track in Sacramento, so I didn’t know how to deal with it. And there was nobody I was with that knew how to deal with it. Nobody to give me advice. I had every bit of advice you can imagine, which I’ve mentioned before. Some said, “You can’t let that go. You gotta respond to that. You gotta fight back. You gotta react to your critics.” Others said, “Don’t dare do it. If you react they’re just gonna think they upset you, which is what they want to do and they’re gonna keep going.” Then a guy said, “You gotta understand, they’re only doing this because you’re a threat, you’re effective.” So then I had to learn — and this is tough; I defy anybody to go out and do this. I had to learn to take being hated as a sign of success.

Now, who grows up wanting that? Who in the world is raised to be hated (other than maybe, you know, these despots that have lived). I don’t think anybody is raised or wants to grow up to be hated, and certainly not to have that be defined as part of your success.

But let me tell you when my real awakening occurred, and this cuts to the nub of it. This is the question I was asking you. Take this out. When I said, “What do you hope to achieve with whatever you want Romney to do (or Ryan to do or anybody else to do) whenever this criticism comes? This unfair, lying, sack-of-you-know-what criticism — all of this stuff that’s told about us that’s not true — what do you want to happen?” The truthful answer is that you want it to stop.

The truthful answer is you want the media to stop! You want somebody to come along and make ’em stop it. You want a teacher, you want a principal, you want a referee. You want somebody to come along and make it stop. And then the awakening occurs when you realize you can’t stop it. There is not a thing you can do to stop it. There’s not a thing you can do to change it. Other than join them. Other than totally cave. Other than totally sell out. That’s the only way you can stop it, is to join them.

Now, if you don’t choose that option, then you’re stuck with it. There’s nothing you can do. It’s the way it is. It’s the lay of the land. You can’t change it. You can’t stop it. The media isn’t going to change. There’s not a one of us alive — there’s not a single person alive — that can make them stop it and be fair. There’s not a single person alive who can make them change. So then what becomes the objective? The only thing left to do is beat them, which we can do, by being who we are; and by being unafraid to be who we are.

But if we’re gonna constantly be, at the end of everything, afraid of who we are? Or if we’re gonna end up being afraid of what they say we are? If we’re gonna be afraid and defensive as to how they talk about us and what they accuse us of being? Then they’re forever going to win, because our objective is forever going to be flawed. It is going to be to try to change them. Here’s one of the best pieces of advice I ever got.

I’ve been doing interviews starting in 1988. And I honestly thought that, when I was being asked on the Today Show or wherever, that a journalist was seriously interested in what I thought. And I thought, “Okay, I got a chance to really square them away. I got a chance to show them where they’re wrong.” That’s not what they’re interested in! You can’t correct them. I could spend ten years with Chuck Todd and not change his worldview.

It isn’t going to happen. So you learn that you do these interviews for an expressly different purpose. You get your message out no matter what they say. The fact of the matter is there are just certain realities that you have to accept, and being despondent over “unfairness” is something we’re gonna have to get over here. It’s been 25 years, and I still hear people upset about it. I’ll continue with this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, all of that having been said, back to Akin for just a second. Akin, that situation’s a huge problem. Now, you can be upset at members of the Republican Party or the conservative movement who joined in unison to denounce Akin and to suggest (or ask or demand, whatever they did) that he get out of the race. But by the same token, we have no obligation to support people who don’t deserve it!

And you don’t deserve support just ’cause you say you’re conservative. You don’t deserve support just because you got an (R) beside your name. And you people know that. We support people who are also fighting the good fight. You talk about, “What do you want to happen?” You sit around and you cite the unfairness or the lack of balance or what have you in the media. (That seems to be a lot of people’s focal point.) What we really want to happen — and, of course, by the way, it differs from person to person.

Some people are totally obsessed with being liked, and so they will say — and I’m talking about on our side, in the media, wherever. They want to be liked, and so they’ll say whatever they think they have to say to be liked. They’ll criticize whoever they think they have to be critical of in order to be liked. Others of us want to win! Others of us want to try to persuade as many people as possible: “It doesn’t matter whether you like me or not, but if you love this country the way we do, you have got to see it our way.”

And that’s our objective.

Our objective is to sway and mobilize public opinion in our favor.

We’re in the arena of ideas. We’re competing with an unfair, stacked deck. It’s the way it is, and we can’t change it. Not individually. All we can do is defeat it. And it can be done. We do it quite frequently, actually. Now, I learned long ago to give up on this notion of being loved. I’ve become accustomed to being hated. I had to! It’s a sign of success. I’ve had to define it that way. But with Akin, we do not have to support people who are not fighting the good fight like we are and who put themselves above it.

You can’t generalize.

This is a specific case.

What we’re after is persuading as many people as possible in the arena of ideas to agree with us so that we advance our objectives — which are honorable, forthright, and worth it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Julie, Osage Beach, Missouri, hi, and great to have you here.

CALLER: Thank you. I’ve been waiting an hour-and-a-half.

RUSH: Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate you waited so long.

CALLER: Well, let me tell you why, because in 1988, which you brought up earlier, I was an 11-year-old girl. My mother pulled me out of school, and I started listening to your program, called the Rush Limbaugh Show. And I gained those ideals. Thank you very much. And I get it.

RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you so much for yourself. I appreciate that.


CALLER: I’ve also seen your brother at a Worldview Weekend conference, so I’ve also met David. But, anyways, the reason I’m calling, I really think the Republicans bombed it here with Todd Akin. You know, they blew an entire opportunity here to slam Claire McCaskill and bring up her dirt. She’s got so much dirt and so much baggage. I don’t know why they keep talking about him. It’s ridiculous. All we needed to do was change the talking points. Simple, simple solution, change the talking points. What did he say? That maybe a woman’s body shuts down under stress. Big deal. A man can’t say that in our country now? We don’t have freedom of speech of that? I mean, we throw him under the bus?

Look at all the amazing things that he’s done in our government, amazing things. Not only that, but he did the dirty work that a lot of Republicans weren’t gonna do, like clean up a bunch of women who were gonna claim rape. It’s too bad that we just didn’t change the talking points. It’s real simple. I just said it. So he speculates that maybe a woman’s body shuts down. That doesn’t even have anything to do with whether or not she’s conceived or not. He hates abortion. The Democrats are already offended by that. Women who are pro-choice are already offended by that. And we know he’s very pro-life. So I don’t quite get why they didn’t just quickly use the media for good. You talked about winning the game. We coulda won the game. They blew it up. They blew it up. Big time. I agreed with Vinny on that. There was no reason for that. They’re already offended.

RUSH: Well, but you understand, there’s this naturally defensive posture that conservatives, and particularly in Washington, conservatives and Republicans have. They don’t control the media. There’s no way they can get their talking points on the media. No matter what they did, the media was not gonna start talking about Claire McCaskill, no matter what they said. So the calculation then became —

CALLER: Ann Coulter could have talked about Claire McCaskill. Sarah Palin could have talked about Claire McCaskill. Plenty of those people. Sean Hannity could have talked about Claire McCaskill. I mean it’s ridiculous. Yeah, what about the airplane? Let’s talk about the airplane. She’s hiding hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, that she owes the government. I mean there’s so much stuff there. I’m just saying, you know, he’s just a pro-lifer. Big deal. He’s just very pro-life. But they turn this into something it wasn’t, gave the feminists more reasons to hate men, you know, when all they needed to say was it’s okay for men to actually talk about a woman’s egg and not make a big deal about it. They can do that, you know, and we just feed right into the whole political correctness, you know, that you even speculate or take an angle —

RUSH: Well, there’s a piece today, let me see if I can find this. I’m not sure I printed this out, but you would appreciate this. It’s by George Neumayr, who used to be the editor at the American Spectator, and he might have written this piece there. It sounds like word-for-word what you just said. Neumayr is saying this incident illustrates the fatal problem that the Republican Party has, and that is a desire to please its critics, please its enemies, knee-jerk defensiveness and all. No, I didn’t print it out. I don’t have it here. I thought I did.

CALLER: There’s this, “Oh, we need to be afraid of the left ’cause somehow they’re right.” No, they’re not. We’re right. Why are we cowing?

RUSH: No.

CALLER: Why are we cowing?

RUSH: No, wait a minute. It’s not that they’re right. It’s that there’s a battle for the hearts and minds of voters, for the American people. The great fear here was that — see, the Democrats have these caricatures of us. Julie, you’re well aware of ’em: racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, anti-women, so Akin came along and he said something — it’s indefensible what he said in terms of fact. It’s simply indefensible. And so the fear was, “Oh, my God, this guy is helping the media confirm a bunch of lies about us.” And that’s what they —

CALLER: We don’t need to be afraid. We don’t need to be afraid of the left and we’re acting afraid by saying that. We just simply change the talking point, explain it differently. That’s what they do. They sit around and make explanations for Joe Biden and President Obama —

RUSH: I agree we shouldn’t let them have that power over us and some of us don’t let them have that power, but —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: — it’s very few that act that way. You know, being on defense becomes a habit, and in some cases it just doesn’t change. But I hear you. Some of the piling on of Todd Akin was a little gratuitous. He’s not a pig. He’s not any of this kind of stuff. I cringe sometimes at some of the criticism, but at the same time he’s now gone and made himself bigger than the cause and bigger than the purpose here, and he’s making it very difficult to support him. We can’t change the talking points. I wish we could. Some people decided, even if it was reflexively, that this was not the place to plant the flag, that there will be other places. Anyway, Julie, your mom pulled you out of school at age 11 to listen to this program, and listen to how she turned out. You hear that passion? You mothers out there should do more of that. Pull your kids out of school at age 11, let ’em listen to this program and they’ll be that much ahead.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I found the George Neumayr piece. It is in the American Spectator. Let me just give you some pull-quotes from this thing: “A party less cowed by political correctness and less in thrall to conventional wisdom wouldn’t have cannibalized its own so quickly. … [L]et’s not forget that Barack Obama hired as one of his top Department of Education officials a gay-rights activist named Kevin Jennings, who once glibly counseled a ’15-year-old’ student thought to have been statutorily raped by an older man: ‘I hope you knew to use a condom.’

“Jennings is also known for having been ‘inspired’ by Harry Hay, a supporter of the North American Man/Boy Love Association.” NAMBLA! Nobody complains about this, and the Democrats aren’t even embarrassed. “In a culture that panders to pro-abortion feminists like Sandra Fluke, thought crimes always rank higher than real ones. Words, not deeds, drive pols from public life. So Akin has to go. He simply harbors the wrong thoughts …” Neumayr is not happy with what happened.

“An authentically conservative party would find Romney’s unprincipled position far more chilling than Akin’s gaffe. If unborn children gain or lose their right to life depending upon the circumstances of their conception, then the party has already conceded that that right doesn’t exist. Ronald Reagan understood the implications of that concession and never wavered in his defense of the right to life of all unborn children, not just some of them.” Folks, I’m here to tell you: I know exactly what Akin was trying to say.

I know exactly.

He believes that the baby is the essence of innocence and there is no exception. It’s never the baby’s fault. And all he believes is that if you’re going to allow abortion in the case of rape, then you’re really not pro-life. That’s all he was trying to say. He just didn’t know how to say it. So in order to be pervasive, he came up with this biological lesson’s not true. And he got a fact wrong. Neumayr here is saying: “His stupid remark was thereby turned into a supposedly wicked one and treated as a great crisis for the party.

“A party less cowed by political correctness and less in thrall to conventional wisdom wouldn’t have cannibalized its own so quickly.” So Neumayr believes that the Republicans just panicked because they are prisoners to convention wisdom, political correctness, and wanting to be liked, or not criticized.


Look, there’s a guy… This guy… What’s his name? The Twisted Sister guy. Dee Snider, Twisted Sister. Apparently Paul Ryan at his events is using a song by this guy. And so this guy’s out there saying (paraphrased), “I’m not letting Ryan use my song! Who the hell do they think they are?” So Dee Snider has told Ryan, “You can’t use my song,” and the media loves this. Why? Because here’s a pop culture guy, Twisted Sister, and it’s a perfect vehicle for showing that Republicans aren’t cool, that Republicans aren’t hip, that Republicans aren’t likable.

That’s why they like it.

That’s why these musicians come out and do it.

And that’s the kind of stuff that ticks you off. I know it does, ’cause you know exactly what the objective of this is. Ryan’s not a threat to anybody. So he likes this guy’s tune. This guy comes out and says, “You can’t do that,” and the media jumps all over it. Because when you boil it all down, people have a problem with the media. I think you can boil it down to a real simple essence. You’re fed up with media determining who’s “likable” and who isn’t, who’s “cool” and who isn’t, who’s “hip” and who isn’t.

I totally understand it, but you can’t change it.

And Ryan using the guy’s song doesn’t make him “hip,” you notice?

Ryan using the guy’s song doesn’t make him “likable.”

It doesn’t work, see? You can’t change it.

So if I were Ryan I’d say, “The hell with it! You can’t tell me when I can’t use your song. I’m using it. Come make me stop! I happen to like your stupid song.”

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