RUSH: There’s one other major, major, major thing that happened last night which nobody in the establishment is gonna want to admit to, nor are they going to talk about it, and that is, bye-bye ethanol. Sayonara ethanol. You don’t think so, Snerdley? Okay. Okay, well, yeah, it’s an anomaly for one campaign, but look what happened. You had the governor urging everybody in the state not to vote for Ted Cruz because Cruz wants to end the ethanol subsidy.
What happened? Cruz wins.
Everybody else came out for the ethanol subsidy, including Trump, which, that was another puzzling thing to me given what Trump is trying to do positioning himself. And look at what ended up happening. I mean, this is huge. This is not people in Washington defeating ethanol; this is Iowans in a record Republican turnout choosing a guy who made a singular, major point out of ending the ethanol subsidy. In terms of conservatism, this is the kind of thing the establishment won’t go anywhere near. Reducing government, as you get cutting down subsidies, crony capitalism, whatever you want to call this, crony socialism, nobody would touch it.
Cruz was the only one that had the guts to touch it, and he wins. It is huge, I think. Because what it is, is instructive. It means you can go after these things and not only survive it and live another day, you can win. You can win attacking Big Government socialism. You can win if you do it the right way, if you do it in the way Cruz did, that is explains how this is actually going to expand freedom and economic opportunity and lower prices. Coupled with all this nonsense about global warming. Did you see the latest poll on global warming?
Ninety-one percent of the American people don’t believe it. It came out yesterday during the program and I made an executive decision it wasn’t really big enough news in terms of what we were talking about yesterday. Ninety-one percent, latest poll, global warming global shwarming, (raspberry). Just a couple days after, three days after Algore’s “In 10 years we’re all dead” clock expires and we’re still alive and there’s still no flooding and sea levels are still where they’re supposed to be.
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RUSH: Okay. Okay. Okay. I may have overstated it. Maybe ethanol is not dead. I’m just telling you that what happened last night and yesterday in Iowa, nobody’s ever done this. Nobody has gone into Iowa and talked about ending the ethanol subsidy and lived the next political day to talk about it, and Cruz did. That’s all I’m saying. The important thing is what has been demonstrated to be possible. This is… The great thing about this, is all of these things everybody says you can’t do.
“Rush, come on! We’re never really gonna be able to talk about small government. Too many people get benefits from the government! Too many people live off of it. They’re never gonna give it up.” Even many in the Republican establishment now. A lot of the so-called neocons for years have been saying, “You know, we’ve lost the argument over small government, Limbaugh! You’d better realize it. What the people want,” they tell me, these establishment types, “is they want a smart, energetic, engaged executive,” meaning president.
That is how they talk. “They want him administering and directing a large government and in a very, very intelligent, smart way.” I’ve always reacted, “Well, then don’t call yourself conservative. Conservatives don’t believe in acknowledging the existence of big government as the new normal and that’s it.” And Cruz goes in there, has the governor of Iowa running around telling everybody to vote against him, and he wins, and he’s the only candidate in the state who went out and proposed the end of the ethanol subsidy and wins the thing.
Nobody has ever done that before. Now, I know it was an overstatement to say ethanol’s dead. It’s just a demonstration of what’s possible here. And that, if I may circle back, to me has always been the value of Trump, is to demonstrate that the conventional wisdom of how we have to go about attacking the Democrats or not attacking them and not being critical. Trump has blown that to smithereens in a whole host of ways.