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RUSH: This is Shannon in Summerton, South Carolina. It’s great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Rush, mega dittos. This is a real honor to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: I am the wife of a recently retired United States Marine Corps officer, 21 years served, and I am seeing things in this in this country that are absolutely shaking me to the core. I’m in the middle of raising two girls — who, by the way, do not throw like our current commander-in-chief.

RUSH: All right!

CALLER: (giggling)

RUSH: Right on, right on, right on, right on.

CALLER: But I’m seeing more and more that the days of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill being able to come to a compromise in the Oval Office are over. There’s a line that’s being drawn that needs to be drawn in this country. Republicans need to quit being afraid of being called racist, of being called bigots, of being called small-minded for standing up for what is right. And then this line… I see two sides now where you’re either going to stand on the side of everything that made this country great, or you are going to stand on the side of what is going to be the fall of this country and everything ever fought for and worked hard for.

RUSH: You know, that is profound. We are at that point where it’s time to choose sides. You’re either going to stand aside and let this country be remade in ways our Founders would not recognize —

CALLER: Ever.

RUSH: — that will end the days of prosperity or you’re going to stand up for the country. Standing mute is not an option right now.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: So what are you reacting to? It’s a great point, but what are you reacting to? The Republican —

CALLER: No, I just see — whether it’s in the House; the Senate; these hearings; the White House using our Bill of Rights, the Constitution pretty much as a hand towel to wipe their hands with — I mean, it’s all over the place. The media is in the back pocket. You know, people are afraid to be… You know, Senators don’t want to be aligned with you because they’re afraid they’ll be seen as small-minded or in the minority. And it’s the minority that they’re thinking about and that they need to be fighting for, because that is the backbone of this country. It always has been and it always will be, and we’ve gotta start standing up straight and be heard.

RUSH: Forgive me here, but my ego is my ego —

CALLER: (giggling)

RUSH: — and it sounds to me like what you are saying is that these senators who it is said are timid because they are afraid of being compared to me or they are pandering, what you’re saying is they should be in my back pocket, not running away from me, right?

CALLER: Absolutely. My neighbor is afraid to be called, you know, right-wing conservative Republican.

RUSH: We know all about it. Look, there’s genuine fear the left has made this happen. There is genuine fear in this country over speaking out. Great call. Thanks much.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, remember the week before last, I had a somewhat lengthy monologue on how fruitless and ridiculous it is to predict the future of the economy until we see every program the Democrats are going to pass and sign into law. For example, until we know that cap and trade is actually going to be passed and signed into law, we can’t tell anybody — we can’t predict — what kind of economic growth there’s going to be, what the employment numbers are going to be. And we can’t do it because if cap and trade happens, it’s gonna devastate the US economy. And if health care happens on top of that it’s going to double devastate the US economy.

So all these predictions that you’re hearing from Obama, ‘Yeah, well, we’re gonna start to have a jobless recovery. It’s gonna start turning around. We’re in the end of the recession here, economic growth,’ doesn’t mean diddly-squat. Even if in the next quarter it shows growth — and if it does, then they’re gonna be all kinds of celebration, ‘The stimulus worked!’ and so forth — but then they passed these two things? If they do, bye-bye growth forever, folks. That’s how bad all of this is. Bye-bye, sayonara growth for a generation or two — and I’ll tell you something about health care. People ask me, ‘Rush, you keep saying once they get that, we can’t roll it back. How is that? Why can’t we just…?

‘If they pass a law, they nationalize health care and it goes back, why can’t a future president and Congress simply pass new law saying, ‘No, we’re not going to do it anymore’?’ Here’s one of the reasons why, and this is just one of the reasons. Where is Obama going to get these promised cuts in health care? He’s going to doctors, the AMA, hospitals. He has announced that he’s going to squeeze insurance companies and doctors, meaning they’re gonna earn less. Now, if you are an enterprising person, you have the aptitude, the education, or the intelligence to go to medical school, graduate, either be a GP or a specialist. Why are you gonna bother? Why you gonna bother, if you’re not going to make any money?

After all, it’s going to cost you to go to med school. You want to go for altruistic reasons to a point but it’s also a living, and if it’s not going to provide you the living because you’re going to be squeezed in order for government health care to so-called be affordable. So with fewer doctors in the picture, you just can’t say, ‘Okay, we’re getting rid of this,’ ’cause where will the doctors be? We will not have a supply of doctors to pick up the demand once you go back. With tax cuts, but if they raise taxes say to 90% — you could roll back tax rates, tax increases you could say roll them back — but with the intricacies of health care and all of the interdependence of thousands of government agencies and doctors and Medicare… And, by the way, it’s being modeled after an abject failure, Medicare. So rolling it back is not going to be easy, and it’s not something that can be done on a dime, stopped on a dime like lowering tax rates can.

Now, when you talk about predicting the future of the economy, you can’t, as I said, until you know what of this agenda is going to pass. If any of this madness gets crammed down our throats, every economic prediction you’re hearing today is worthless. This is such an opportunity for the Republicans right now, given Sonia Sotomayor illustrates it. The idea is a contrast like our last caller said: This is it. You stand up, take a side, choose. There are two sides now. We don’t have time to pander to moderates. We don’t have time to pander to people that don’t have the courage of their own convictions. We don’t have time to pander to people that don’t know what they think until they figure out what the majority thinks and then agree with them.

The two choices are: Are we going to remake America and destroy the elements that made it great and have permanent poverty and lack of opportunity disguised and called fairness, or are we going to maintain this country as it was founded: as a beacon of freedom and liberty around the world to people everywhere who wish to come here, that offers unbridled economic opportunity, depending on how much you want to put into it? Those days will be over if the Obama agenda succeeds. There won’t be enough capital. There won’t be enough money in the private sector. It’s all going to be taken over by government. The car companies are an example, the mortgage industry. Health care, that’s one-sixth — one-sixth! — of the US economy, one-sixth of our GDP. You take that out of the private sector. That means the private sector has shrunk by one-sixth. That means there’s less capital for people to compete for and earn, and there’s less opportunity for that remaining five-sixths (and it’s going to be less than that because all this other stuff’s going to take even more of the private sector) to grow. So it’s time to choose sides.

It really is. And for the Republicans, this is not the time to start debating the future of the Republican Party and, ‘Do we need to get rid of the social issues? Do we need to get rid of the conservative Christians? Do we need to become more moderate and seek out the Hispanic vote? Do we have to go out to the black vote? Do we have to go out to the female vote? Do we have to go out to the Asian vote?’ We don’t have the luxury of playing those kinds of political games because the future of the country is at stake, and there is only one choice in opposition to Obama. We cannot say that as a party to survive, ‘We must recognize that the American people want big government. They like government doing things for them and we must find a way to reach them and the people in the middle class, and we must find a way to get there and tell them that we can do it better for them.’ This is not a time to compromise on the belief that limited government, personal freedom, is the definition of greatness of this country. It’s time for the Republican Party to put aside its primary calculation of, ‘How can we win elections?’ and instead focus on, ‘How can we save America?’ and in the process, they will win elections if they are oriented toward saving the country, ’cause those are the two choices. The lady was right.

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