RUSH: Here’s Cody in Spring, Texas, as we go back to the phones. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. I just wanted to remind you that this is not the first time that this type of IRS scandal has surrounded Barack Obama. If you remember all the way back to 2008 with Joe the Plumber, he was simply playing a game in his front yard with his son. He asked Obama a question and made him look bad. Next thing you know, all of his financial information was released to the press. The next day, everybody knew about the tax leans on his house. Everybody knew about his licensing as a plumber and all that stuff.

RUSH: You know, that’s an excellent point. That’s great memory. There was a person in the secretary of state’s office in Ohio —

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: — who apparently either took it upon herself, which I think was the case, or somebody whispered to her to release all that stuff about Joe the Plumber.

CALLER: Yep. It shows how automatic it really is in the liberal mind-set. They know once they get in power. They don’t need to be told what to do. They just know how to use the machine, the government machine.

RUSH: Right. It was a low-level worker who didn’t have to be instructed, who didn’t have to get any orders, that just knew exactly what to do. Here’s Joe the Plumber out there embarrassing Obama, making Obama “look bad” — and by looking bad, it means he made Obama reveal a lot of truth about himself. So some low-level worker in Ohio said, “All right! Well, we know what to do with this,” and they started leaking all this stuff about Joe the Plumber had a lot loans. He had a lean on his house. They created a picture of an irresponsible reprobate.

CALLER: Yep. It’s just the standard template, and they know when and how to apply it, and it’s a script really is what it is.

RUSH: Excellent point. That is exactly right. Joe the Plumber is just an average, ordinary American guy. He represented a huge… It wasn’t so much that he represented a threat, although it was in the campaign. He did make Obama slip up. “Well, you know, we want to spread the wealth around.” Obama was trying to campaign on things. He was trying to hide the fact that he was a big redistributionist, and he had let the cat out of the bag when Joe the Plumber challenged him on it.

And without even needing to be told, a fellow traveler activist in the bowels of the Ohio government knew exactly what to do. Now, one more thing on this Tea Party business, because when this was happening, when the Tea Party was coming to life, I studied it. I looked at all the media people who tried to make it look like the Tea Party was their idea, all the media people who were trying to position themselves in such ways that people thought the Tea Party was the result of their leadership on air or whatever.

There were politicians doing it, too.

What I always thought was the great thing about the Tea Party, and the thing today that makes it so powerful, is that it doesn’t have a leader. Even now there’s not one single person that speaks for the Tea Party. They’ve got a number of different groups, factions, organizations. They all have their different spokespeople, and they’re all on television. They’re just, folks, the essence of Civics 101. When you’re first taught about politics…

Not even taught about politics. When you’re taught about government in junior high, you get the sanitized version of it, as you do of everything when you first learn about it at a young age. What you end up believing is that politics is made up of a contest of ideas, and people campaign on their ideas, and the best ideas win. The best candidate — the most honest, the most straightforward, the person who has the best ideas for the most people — wins. You grow up thinking that, and then you learn it’s not at all about that.

It’s about money, it’s about marketing, it’s about packaging, it’s about lying creativity, it’s about character assassination, all these things. It turns people off, because it’s so counter to what they thought it was when they first were taught about it. The affairs of the country, the best ideas, keeping the country on the right path? People think it’s a lofty, very pure pursuit. As they learn more about it, they discover there’s nothing pure about it. It’s just like everything else.

It is drag-out, competitive fight. Anything you can get away with goes, and then some. Some people get soured. Well, the Tea Party was made up of people who were not naive, but they were basically getting involved with the same inspiration and motivation they had when they first learned about it. “Okay, this is out of hand. We’ve got some people taking this country in the wrong direction, spending the country into irretrievable debt. We’re ruining the future for our kids and grandkids.

“There’s not gonna be a private sector left for anybody to prosper in.”

It scared them!

Every generation wants their kids to live better than they did. That’s always been true in work; it’s always been part of the American dream, the promise. So this collection of citizens from all over the country started going to town hall meetings to protest this, and primarily they were attending Democrat town hall meetings, and then all hell broke loose. Union allies of Democrats were brought in to beat up Tea Party people and to intimidate ’em, and then stories in the media started appearing about these people.

They were just the grandmother next-door, the homemaker down the street, getting involved for the first time in many ways. Here they were being given the treatment — the usual racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, gun nut, whatever, treatment. But they kept at it. What this IRS scandal is really all about is that we have now learned that the IRS was essentially denying these people the opportunity to participate in the American political process. They were intimidating them. They were stifling them, essentially.

These people were trying to form organizations where they could raise money and do it within the confines of the law. They’re tax-exempt organizations. We’ve learned that the IRS, as an agency of the Obama administration, was simply denying them. It was mean. It was unfair. So now we’re left with looking at the 2012 election results, and we’re looking at the all of the ways that people were kept out of the electoral process by the sitting president and his administration.