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RUSH: I am getting the sense that there is an effervescing rage in the country over what is happening. If you’re watching these hearings today, if you are listening to the media, I hate to say, “I told you so,” but the media is circling the wagons around the regime. It was just yesterday and the day before that people eagerly called here and were sending me e-mails, thinking this was it. “The media is finally going to turn on Obama!” I said, “It’s never going to happen, not for real,” and they are already circling the wagons.

One of the big memes, themes in the media today is, “Will the Republicans overplay handling the scandals? Will the Republicans overdo it,” and how could the Republicans overdo it? “Well, they could overdo it by focusing on Obama, because the public loves Obama. The people that voted for Obama love Obama. They don’t think Obama’s done anything wrong! So if the Republicans start focusing on Obama, then Obama will be stronger!” This is what the Drive-Bys are saying.

There may be, by the way, something to that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s becoming more and more clear, more and more obvious that President Obama is using the full weight — has used, in fact, the full weight — and resources of the federal government to literally block the political participation of millions of American citizens. Every day we are treated to new discoveries, new evidence. The latest is: Conservative Hispanic groups were targeted by the IRS, groups that wanted to found tax-exempt organizations.


We have also learned that the woman who was in charge of this has been promoted. She received a total of $103,000 in bonuses. She is now running the Obamacare division of the IRS. The woman in charge of denying conservative groups tax-exempt status! This is a fear that many people had. In fact, it is Obamacare, ladies and gentlemen… If you want to really go back to the origins of this, it’s Obamacare that gave birth to the Tea Party. Not the passage, but Obama’s first expression of desire, and then the two years of debate.

People in this country realized what that would mean if the government took over health care and nationalized one-sixth of the US economy. In addition to everything else Obama was doing, people realized what it would mean to the future, what it would mean for their kids’ and their grandkids’ future, what it would mean to the shrinking private sector, the shrinking opportunity to earn prosperity in the private sector. And it mobilized people.

It gave birth to the Tea Party. The Tea Party became educated and informed. Here’s how they compete. They learned what it was necessary to do to compete and raise money. They learned that 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s are tax-exempt charitable organizations just like the Democrats have. We now learn that the IRS tried to deny as many of those applications as possible, and the woman in charge of that was promoted and has now been placed over the Obamacare division of the IRS.

People, since the first days of discussion of Obamacare, have asked what turn out now to be very intelligent questions. “What if I didn’t vote for Obama? What if I’m not a Democrat? What’s that gonna mean for me when I get in line for health care when the government runs it?” Well, here’s a pretty good indication of what it could mean. You might be moved to the back of the line, while Democrat voters, Obama donors get moved to the front of the line.

The government will be running health care. Essentially, the government will be your gateway to access. They can grant it or deny it. This is what happens when liberals end up in charge of government: Big government, out-of-control government, tyrannical government, if you want to say that. But it just expands, and the government ends up populated with people who are there to use the power and the full force of government against citizens. This is what has happened and what will get worse.

It’s become clear now, more and more clear, that Obama used the full weight and resources of the federal government to block the political participation of millions of Americans. There is no media outrage over this. Again, the media is focused on, “Gee, can Obama survive this? Gee, how will the Republicans screw up investigating this?” This is the kind of stuff that happens in banana republics and totalitarian regimes. You know, Americans have always said, “It can’t happen here.”

A member of Congress during the hearings of these IRS people this morning even asked, “Is this still America?” It’s not some bitter clinger, desperately trying to hold onto his guns while he goes to church. It’s not some bitter clinger asking, “Is this still America?” It’s a Republican member of Congress. During the hearings said to an IRS employee and to the audience watching, “Is this still America?” It is happening here.

Everywhere you look in the Drive-By Media, you see the media doing everything they can to downplay the scandal. CNN, for instance, has covered everything under the sun. They have been dragged kicking and screaming to the IRS scandal. They’ve covered it some but they’re not wall-to-wall with it. They’re doing it as an afterthought. The news media have become the information launderers for Obama, which is exactly what the media’s role is when it is in bed with leaders of the regime.

They launder news and information so that nothing harmful to the regime gets out. Where were the whistleblowers? Is the culture of corruption so pervasive at the IRS that so many people felt they could get away with these illegal activities? Do you realize how easy it must have been for these IRS employees to go to work each and every day? They never worried about what they were doing. They just lowered the hammer on all these conservative groups and they never once worried that anybody would rat ’em out.

“NBC’s Lisa Myers reported this morning that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election.” Duh! So inside the IRS, nobody was worried about whistleblowers. There was nobody in there doing this nefarious activity that was worried about anybody blowing the whistle on them. There weren’t any whistleblowers.

Was the oppressive work being done at the IRS so encouraged that no one had the guts to come forward to report what was going on? Or were the people at the IRS threatened and coerced to keep silent just like the whistleblowers at the State Department were told in the case of Benghazi? About that, Bob Woodward is saying, “Hey, don’t call Benghazi a scandal. It’s worse than a scandal!”

Bob Woodward is saying it’s like Watergate. What he means is, when they had tapes of Nixon in the Oval Office. You could hear Nixon say, “No, we’re not gonna report that. Delete that. No, we’re not gonna publish that part of the transcript. Take that out.” He said that’s exactly what happened with the Benghazi transcripts, these Benghazi e-mails. He said the regime has taken two days and pretended nothing happened. There’s no e-mails in those two days, and what they have released is sanitized.

Even after 94 e-mails, not a word about the video. Not a single word about what the regime said was the primary reason Benghazi happened. There’s not a word in the e-mails back and forth among any of the principles in Benghazi. But back to the IRS. You had one or two people in the Cincinnati office putting the brakes on all the conservative, tax-exempt applications being directed out of Washington. There was nobody apparently worried that they would have the whistle blown on them for doing this.

I made the point yesterday: You don’t need to hire people and give them instruction. You hire people because they already know what to do. You hire fellow travelers. You hire hacks, you hire activists, you hire true believers. You hire people who rejoice in the opportunity to get a job in the bureaucracy because what that means is it’s an opportunity to wage war on your political enemies.

I have a story in the Stack here about the government, ladies and gentlemen. “Homeland Security Guidelines Advise Deference to pro-Shariah Muslim Supremacists.” This is the Daily Caller. Now, I think this is an important point to make. “The Department of Homeland Security, which under Secretary Janet Napolitano has shown a keen interest in monitoring and warning about outspoken conservatives, takes a very different approach in monitoring political Islamists, according to a 2011 memo on protecting the free speech rights of pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists.”

The Obama regime, the federal government, has more tolerance, more deference, more respect for Islamic extremist Muslims than they do for their own citizens who happen to be conservative or Christian. This administration considers conservative Americans and Christians and pro-lifers and people who care about the social issues, to be greater enemies of the state and not worthy of respect or deference. However, militant Islamists and extremist Muslims are accorded all of that.

“The Homeland Security document also seems to discount evidence unearthed by the Justice Department about the aims of some mainstream Muslim organizations..” Instead, Big Sis sends out memos warning everybody at DHS: Make sure you do not infringe upon the free speech rights — the constitutional free-association right, whatever — of pro-Sharia Muslim supremacists. But when it comes to American conservatives and American Christians, this administration is willing to trample all over their constitutional rights and continue denying them — and then warn everybody that it is they, these conservatives and these Christians, who pose the real threat to America.

And, folks, they mean it.

They really mean it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to play a sound bite from Mike Lee, who is a senator from Utah, a Republican. He was on Greta Van Susteren last night. This guy is right after my own heart, folks. She said, “You’ve written an article. You said it’s not about character or competence. It is about big government. That’s where you lay all the blame for all this, in big government, right?”

LEE: This isn’t about one particular person. It’s not necessarily even just about one particular party. Although one party is in control of government right now, and it’s certainly to blame for what happened here. This is bigger than that. When our federal government gets to be something that spends $4 trillion a year, it’s unmanageable. This is one of the few moments where I find myself agreeing with something David Axelrod has said. He said yesterday that the federal government’s just too vast for any one person, including the president of the United States, to be able to control. That means it’s time to ramp it down. That means it’s time to simplify. That means that what we have is too dangerous to be trusted.

RUSH: Nah, he doesn’t go far enough as far as I’m concerned. He’s on the right track. He’s agreeing with Axelrod. But don’t forget, Axelrod said all this. “It’s too big! I mean, for crying out loud, government is too vast! Obama couldn’t possibly control it!” He’s not saying the government’s too big. He’s saying, “Obama couldn’t possibly be responsible for any of this. It’s too big.”

He’s just trying to excuse Obama, but he’s not criticizing big government. Axelrod isn’t. Now, Mike Lee is right, but you can tie a political party to big government more so than any other party. But his point is this is a result of what happens when you have people populating big government who have a particular ideology about government’s use. That’s why we’re where we are. It’s not just Obama. It doesn’t even have to be Obama.

It’s all the people Obama has hired.

There are miniature Obamas all over this government doing his bidding for him.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s the next Mike Lee sound bite. He was on with Greta Van Susteren last night. He’s the Republican senator from Utah, and he’s mostly right in what he’s saying. Van Susteren’s question: “What do you make of this IRS scandal and the targeting of the Tea Party? I mean, why do you think it happened? Do you think it’s just a couple rogue people at the bottom — or do you think it’s part of the culture, part of the big government — or even something more sinister?”

LEE: What sparked a lot of this was Obamacare. A few years ago, some groups started putting themselves together as a result of the fact that they were afraid about the fact that the federal government was about to get a lot bigger and a lot more expensive as a result of Obamacare. They started speaking their minds, and all of a sudden the ruling class in Washington got scared, and it started retaliating before this movement could gain too much momentum. And that’s why this happened. And it’s no coincidence, Greta, that the IRS — which is about to become a lot more powerful as a result of Obamacare — was threatened by these groups that were trying to undermine Obamacare.

RUSH: Now, he’s far more right than he’s wrong. What Mike Lee’s trying to do here is win the argument. What he’s trying to do is persuade as many Obama voters, low-information voters as he can. He’s not trying to give you what you want. He knows you’re already there. He’s trying to find ways to reach the outliers, and he believes that he’s gotta leave Obama out of that equation if we’re gonna succeed. I, by the way, folks, agree with that in this sense: This is much bigger than Obama.

Although it is Republicans versus Democrats right now, it’s much bigger than that. It’s all of us versus Washington. This is the ruling class of Washington attempting to have its way with all of us, the peons, the hoi polloi, the bourgeoisie. Now, I understand. I’m into persuasion, too, and I would love to have a bunch of Obama voters call here and tell me, “You know what? I laughed at you, and I hated you, and I cussed you for the last five years. But you know what? You’re right.”

I would love for that to happen. But, you know what, folks? It isn’t going to. Even if these people end up thinking that way, they’re never going to give you or me the satisfaction of calling and saying, “You know what? You’re right.” It’s never gonna happen. So don’t set yourself up to define success that way. The reason this is bigger than Obama — and the reason it needs to be talked about/attacked as something much greater than Obama — is that he’s gonna leave.

But if the Democrat Party remains in power, the same stuff’s gonna keep happening. They’re gonna use the IRS against people. They’re going to do same kind of things. They’re corrupt! The Democrat Party is liberalism. Liberalism is the problem here. Liberalism, socialism, big government-ism, whatever you want to call it. Everywhere you look, the media’s doing everything it can — and they think they’re helping him. “He didn’t know. He didn’t know. He didn’t know that, because it’s too big. He couldn’t possibly have known.”

They’re trying to excuse Obama from having any personal role in any of this. The point is, he doesn’t need to have a personal role in this to be responsible for it. Obama is a charismatic figure. Obama is the leader of the Democrat Party, and he is a radical, and he motivates and inspires other radicals to want to get involved helping him — and they do. He doesn’t have to ever meet them. He doesn’t even have to know them.

They could show up and apply for a gig at the IRS. They can be an Obama donor. They get the job based on whether they know what to do. They’re in there trying to please him. They’ve never met him. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to issue anybody any instructions. Liberals are a certain kind of people. For 25 years, I’ve gone at it I don’t know how many ways. I’ve tried to convince people that the battle in this country is ideological.

Most people aren’t ideological and they don’t want to be ideological, which is frustrating to me because it’s the simplest and fastest way for people to understand what they face. But given that most people don’t want to go there, okay, so what do we do? Well, the thing we don’t do is we don’t make it about Obama, because really that’s missing the point. If we focus on Obama as the bad guy, we’re leaving out all the other guilty parties.

And, believe me, they’re there in the hundreds of thousands.

There are countless thousands of little Obama’s all over this government, and before him there were thousands of little JFKs and little Teddy Kennedys. Take your favorite radical. Do you think Nancy Pelosi needed Obama to be who she is? Do you think Harry Reid needs Obama to be who he is? These people are who they are because of who they are. They’re gonna be who they are regardless, and they are going to use the power of government whether Obama’s the president or whether it was Ted Kennedy or whether it was Bill Clinton.

Or whether it’s George W. Bush, they’re gonna be who they are! The thing for the American people to understand is that this is Washington governing against the will of the American people. Now, the challenge we face is that there are a lot of Americans who simply love it when these conservative groups take it on the chin. There are a lot of Americans who love it when the IRS is dumping all over conservatives.

There are a lot of Americans who are applauding the IRS today because the radicals on the left have spent 50 years ginning up hatred for us. They have impugned our character. They’ve lied about the things we believe. They’ve lied about our racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia. All that stuff has found its way into the mainstream. So there are people here who are applauding all of this. But the thing that’s wrong here, the reason why that there’s massive corruption, is that liberals are in charge of everything.

Now, I know some of you were saying, “But, Rush, didn’t George Bush grow the government, too?” Yeah. “Didn’t George Bush spend money, and didn’t Republicans in Congress go along? Didn’t they spend money?” Yeah, yep. I can’t deny that. “Well, then, Rush, what’s the difference?” Oh, there’s a big difference. The Republicans are spending money trying to buy love! The Republicans are coming up with Medicare Part B because they believe (because their consultants tell ’em) that the country hates ’em because they’re mean-spirited extremists.

So Republicans come up with this “compassionate conservatism” stuff and say, “Hey, we’ll buy your vote, too! We love you. We’ll give you an entitlement,” thinking that’s the answer. You know, Medicare Part B is no different than trying to sign on to immigration, grant amnesty and get credit for it. The Republicans are not growing the government to use it as a jackbooted thug on people.

They’re using it to buy people’s affections, and that doesn’t work and isn’t working because the Democrats own that already! The Democrats are growing government to use it on people. The Democrats are growing government and want to be in charge of it precisely to do things like this IRS scandal, precisely to do things like Fast and Furious, precisely to be able to screw up totally in something like Benghazi and get away with it.

The Democrats want big government to excuse and provide a buffer for their mistakes, for their incompetence, or what have you. Republican big-government guys are kind of pathetic, if you ask me. (chuckles) Even the Republican establishment. You know, these guys… The ruling class of Washington is what it is. It’s a clique, and to be in it, you’ve gotta be a devout believer in big government. You’ve gotta be a devout believer in Washington. You’ve gotta be for gun control, and you’ve gotta think the abortion people are nuts, and you’ve gotta think conservatives are a bunch of kook extremists.

If you think all that and you’re Republican, you can be in the club.

The purpose of big government from the Republican standpoint is simply, they’re so desperate to be loved by the people that aren’t voting for ’em. They’re jealous. I actually think… (sigh) Can I give you an illustration? Ba ba ba ba ba. Obama goes… Eh, I’m not gonna go there. I was gonna use a Hollywood example. I’ll just stick with the fact that the Republicans that support a new entitlement or growing the government, they’re doing it to try to counter what they think people think of them.

The Republicans don’t have any desire to freeze people out of politics. The Republicans don’t use the IRS to penalize liberal groups. When has that ever happened? It has never happened. It never would. Republicans don’t think that way. Republicans are too busy trying to buy the love of those people! “Oh, you want to set up a tax-exempt foundation? Fine! I’ll rubber stamp it. Here it is. Don’t call me a racist tomorrow.” Republicans aren’t trying to get in charge of big government and wield corrupt power over people.

But the liberals are, and I’m not just saying so; the evidence is right in front of your face. It’s been happening for five years. It’s just now surfacing. There’s a huge difference in the parties, and this is where I take exception with people who say this is not Republicans versus Democrats. It is, but it is also bigger than that. It is the Washington ruling class against everybody else. The Democrats happen to run the Washington ruling class, by the way. The Republican members are tagalongs.

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