RUSH: I haven’t shared with you my thoughts on this Herman Cain situation, the latest. (sigh) Well, this is a frustrating thing. In fact the entire circus that is now… Well, it’s now becoming a circus. This whole Republican race, it doesn’t matter where you go — I don’t care what website you go to, I don’t care what network you tune in — all we’re hearing is all the shortcomings of all of these people. I don’t care if it’s Herman Cain or Bachmann or Romney or Newt, all we’re hearing is their shortcomings. The headlines are, you know, “Newt’s health problems! Romney’s foot flops.” For crying out loud, what are we looking for, perfection?
On the other side what are we dealing with? Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers and all this stuff that never got vetted and is not gonna get vetted now? Yet even as I look at websites, networks, places I would consider to be on our team are nitpicking all this stuff? It’s a little maddening because there’s no such thing as perfect. The Founders were not perfect. The whole Constitution was created on the basis that human beings are fallible. The Constitution’s premise is that human beings with too much power will abuse it and imprison and tyrannize people. The whole point of it was based on the imperfection of people, and yet here we are apparently looking for the perfect — and I’m not running, so it’s not gonna be findable.
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RUSH: Somebody just told me that Obama referred to the British embassy in Iran as the English embassy. NewsBusters chronicled this. He called the British embassy the English embassy. Meanwhile, we’re told that Rick Perry is an idiot or that George W. Bush is an idiot or whatever. The English embassy? The guy, 57 states, Barack Obama.
Folks, I don’t know about you. Are you tired of hearing things like, “If the Republicans nominate (fill in the blank) then Obama wins”? Are you tired of hearing about (fill in the blank) is not electable? They’re all electable. Half of this country — I got a story in my stack — half of the country is afraid to buy Christmas presents because of the economy. Half of the country is feeling bad because the holiday season’s coming up and they may not be able to go out and participate in it. And we’re being told that our candidates are unelectable. It’s all BS. If anybody, by all rights, by what’s decent, should be unelectable, it’s Barack Obama, the architect of all of this. Which is not accidental.
This can get extremely frustrating as this quest, this demand for perfection — I don’t know where this comes from. I don’t know who starts this. I don’t know where this catches on, that somebody must be perfect, when there’s no such thing. The Founders were not perfect. There is no human being who is perfect. There’s no perfect plan. Just like there’s no utopia. Yet these standards somehow end up being applied to us, our candidates, conservatives, where does this come from, where does this start? You take a program like “No Child Left Behind,” the liberals will say, “There was a child left behind, that program’s gotta be scrapped.” Really? How about the war on poverty? How about scrapping the whole liberal agenda on the grounds that it’s imperfect? It’s not only imperfect, it’s been a disaster. “But, no, Mr. Limbaugh, we can’t because the intentions were very good. The intentions, the good-heartedness, the desires to help people, the war on poverty.”
Oh, save it, Mr. New Castrati. Your good intentions have destroyed a great country. You know, American Airlines, I have a sentimental attachment to American Airlines. I flew American Airlines home from Dallas in 1967. (interruption) What? What are you laughing at? This is not a commercial. American Airlines isn’t a sponsor. They don’t have any money. (interruption) I haven’t flown commercial since 1990 but what’s that got to do with anything? I have a sentimental attachment to American Airlines. I flew them any time I could. I flew home in 1967 after I had passed the test and got my First Class FCC broadcast license, which you had to have back then, it was a big deal. I was 16 years old, and the flight attendant offered me some champagne when I told her what I was flying home for. I was flying home to St. Louis.
I met one of the great CEOs in CEO history, used to run the airline, Bob Crandall. I didn’t meet him, but I had a couple of e-mails back and forth with him. They’re one of the more innovative airlines we’ve had. They invented Sabre, which is the computer reservation system. American Airlines came up with frequent flier miles. They invented the whole program, American did, and now they’ve filed for Chapter 11, and it’s just systematic. It’s almost axiomatic that this is all starting to happen. And here in this country, of course, you saw what happened in Wisconsin and then in Ohio, people who are living off the public, people who are feeding at the public trough refuse to do with any less. And, meanwhile, the people who pay them are losing their jobs and losing their homes, but the president of the United States comes up with stimulus plans and lies to the American people and tells ’em the money is gonna be spent on creating jobs, and all that’s done is cement and sustain a financial lifeline from public employees to the Democrat Party via union dues. And that can only happen if they keep their jobs.
I hear that our candidate, candidate X, isn’t electable, or that if we nominate this guy, Obama wins, and so forth. And who says? There hasn’t even been a vote cast yet. Everybody’s going off polling data. The Hawkeye Cauci are in January, the New Hampshire primary — this is still up for grabs. Just last week, or the week before, Romney was up 30 in New Hampshire. Now that number is dwindling. Newt’s picking up steam. There hasn’t been a vote cast yet. This is nowhere near over because it hasn’t even begun. And the people out there pronouncing it over are those who want it to be over in both parties, by the way. You have the Republican establishment who wants this whole early nominee to be done with and have it cast in stone so there’s nothing else left to do. The Democrats and the media want to pick our candidate for us.
In the meantime, polling data at this point are about as accurate as the computer models for the climate ten years from now. They don’t mean anything. None of these polls mean jack-you-know-what right now. Not in terms of the outcome. Now, they matter in terms of energy, enthusiasm, fundraising, and this kind of thing. Leadership is a curious thing. You try to spot it in advance. Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes it’s really not known how somebody’s gonna behave until after they’re elected and get into office. That’s why it’s important to have some kind of a track record of people involved so you can maybe make some kind of a judgment. That’s all anybody’s doing right now. All everybody is doing is trying to assess these people, honestly and forthrightly.
This is serious. There are people in our country who think that this election will determine, in the long run, whether we remain a free people or not. And by free people, we’re not talking about dungeons and political prisoners in cells and this kind of stuff like you find in Cuba. That’s not what people mean. That doesn’t have to happen in order for you to lose your freedom. Your freedom can be taken away from you with an increased tax rate. Your freedom can be taken away from you with your private property rights being infringed upon. You own something but you can’t do anything with it, you can’t do what you want with it, you can’t even own it. There’s any number of ways that we can lose our liberty and freedom without being thrown in jail and without a police state per se.
So a lot of people really do think that America, as a nation of free people, is at stake here and that this election is about that. But it’s not just this election. One election is not going to be a magic elixir. It’s just the first step of many that’s going to have to take place. We have arrived where we are slowly and steadily over 50 years, if not more. The left did not wave a magic wand and get us to this point. Now, they’ve been building to it and building to it, but look how quickly they were able to get us to the tipping point with their right candidate being elected president of the United States. A total sham candidate who ran on a series of lies and hoaxes and frauds.
But people fell for it. It doesn’t take much. All you gotta do is run around and say, “You know what? I’m gonna lower the sea levels and I’m gonna raise the sunshine, and I’m gonna give you health care. You’re gonna get the best health care you ever had and it’s not gonna cost you anything. I’m gonna get rid of all of insurance premiums. I’m gonna get rid of all screening. I’m gonna get rid of all preexisting conditions. You want health care, you’re gonna get it, and the millionaire down the street is gonna pay for it. Who would say no to that? Especially when you have a population that has been educated to think that that’s just.
We actually have a president of the United States… Folks, I made a big point of this Monday. I made a big point of it last night. We have a president of the United States who announced, essentially announced on the op-ed pages of the New York Times on Monday that his reelection effort will not include “white working families.” They are jettisoned. They are not a factor. The Obama campaign says (paraphrased): “We’re not gonna even try to get their votes. Who are we gonna go for? We’re gonna go for the losers in life. We’re gonna go to the people who don’t think they should work. We’re gonna go for the people that we have conditioned to hate this country because they’ve failed, the other people have succeeded and they’ve stolen from them, and it’s time that the other people give it back.
“We’re gonna go for those people, and then we’re gonna get the elites in academia and the artistes and the songwriters and the actors and the actresses and all this, and that’s gonna be our coalition. But with white working families? Sorry, we’re not interested in their votes.” What does that tell you? Forget color. It’s not racial, folks. I’m only throwing “white working families” in there because that was in the op-ed in the New York Times by Thomas Edsall. This is not a racial thing. It sounds like it. The “white working families” are the old Reagan Democrats of the eighties. But the bottom line is they are working. Now, in common Democrat Party parlance, “working people,” “working families” has always meant union. They don’t mean that in this iteration.
They’re not talking about union people. Union people fall into the elite category that they described. They’re artists, they’re people in academia. They know that they’ve got the union leadership wrapped up, wrapped around their little finger. Hell, the union leadership is probably more left than Obama is, if that’s possible. Now, here’s a guy, he’s president of the whole country. We’ve always heard, “Presidents represent everybody. You are president of the United States of America,” and one of the great seductions of 2008 — remember, the world hated America because of George W. Bush; and so Barack Obama was gonna make the world love America again!
We were gonna be loved and respected — and everybody wants to be loved, right? And we were going to be appreciated. And America was going to love itself once again, and America was gonna understand its place in the world, and all was gonna be right. And we were gonna be unified like we had never been unified before, because we’ve got a candidate unlike any we’ve ever seen in American history, right? All of that. He even said he was gonna lower the sea levels! And now not even three years later this same messiah has it proudly written about his campaign in the New York Times on Monday that his campaign can’t win with “white working families;” and again, don’t focus on the racial part of this. They don’t mean that, either. Just focus on the working. They’re the ones defining the terms here. When they say ” white working families,” they have a specific group of people in mind that they’re not interested in.
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RUSH: You don’t need prisons to lose your freedom. Look at political correctness. People stifle themselves. People will refuse to exercise their own First Amendment rights out of fear for what might be heard. Somebody might be offended, somebody might be upset. So people willingly, willfully give up freedom every day of the week. Political correctness has resulted in self-policing of your thoughts. I have a story here in the New York Times about how hard and patient and long liberals will be committed to something. Do you know when the school lunch program began? 1946. The school lunch program began in 1946, and now we are at a tipping point. In many states, more than 50% of kids now qualify for a free or subsidized school meal, and there’s a New York Times story today.
And here’s the headline: “Line Grows Long for Free Meals at US Schools — Millions of American school children are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their…” The New York Times is happy! Obama’s happy! This kind of news makes ’em happy. Mission accomplished! Obama is still managing to make more and more people dependent on the government. But notice in this story how high family income can be to qualify for free or subsidized meals. Are you ready? Your family income can be 130% of the already high poverty level and qualify for free or subsidized meals.
Families making over $40,000 can qualify, and the New York Times admits here at the bottom of this story that it’s “not just because of the economy, but because of the new way of certifying students as qualified put in effect in 2004” because the whole point here is to create as many people as possible dependent on government for — not wants, not desires, but needs. We all need to eat. You cement the notion that your daily sustenance comes from your Democrat politician, your local congressman, your president or whatever; that is a bond that becomes very, very tough to break, very tough to vote against. “You want me to vote against the guy feeding my kids?” This is insidious. It is destroying the foundation of self-reliance and rugged individualism that has led to the greatest country in the history of humanity, and it’s all being done on purpose by people.
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RUSH: Obama’s job approval numbers are below those of Jimmy Carter’s, eight points below Jimmy Carter’s, and they tell us that our candidates are unelectable? Don’t buy it, folks.