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RUSH: Okay, I’ve got a better version here of Steny Hoyer at his town meeting, a more complete version. This was Tuesday in New York. He was up there with Representative Michael Arcuri and they held a press conference to talk about funding for high-speed rail. And during the press conference Hoyer and a protestor named Don Jeror have this exchange about health care reform.

JEROR: You’re lying to me! I don’t have sophisticated language. I recognize a liar when I see one. It was 53% this morning now it’s addin’ up the nukes!

HOYER: I didn’t say it wasn’t w-w-what you’re saying.

JEROR: You said it was the Bush administration. No, it wasn’t.

HOYER: I said it hadn’t changed.

JEROR: Listen, I’m a registered Democrat, okay?

HOYER: Me, too.

JEROR: Why would you guys try to stuff a health care bill down our throat in three to four weeks when the president takes six months to pick what he wanted for a dog for his kids?

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: That’s called slice and dice. Slice and dice.

All right, this is Ellen in Holbrook, Arizona. Hi, Ellen, great to have you with us.

CALLER: Hello.

RUSH: Oh, hi.

CALLER: Hello.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I just went to a meeting and she didn’t want to call it a town hall meeting. She didn’t want to answer questions.

RUSH: Wait, you went where?

CALLER: Her name is Ann Kirkpatrick. She was newly elected in November.

Rush: So you went to Ann Kirkpatrick’s town hall meeting. Now, start at the beginning again.

CALLER: She went to several communities here. She’s been going to several communities. She’s headed to Winslow next. She was here 45 minutes ago and was supposed to be here 15 minutes longer, but she walked out. She wanted to have us in small —

RUSH: One-on-ones, right?

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: This is what they’re trying. The Democrats, this happened in Florida yesterday. I think some down in Miami. Or maybe it’s… There are so many of them running, I get it confused. But these Democrats are trying to have one-on-ones in private, and the crowds are saying, ‘There ain’t no way.’

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Ain’t no way.

CALLER: Yes. And a couple of guys said, ‘We want to ask questions! You work for us! We want to hear the answers,’ and we couldn’t hear a thing.

RUSH: Eh, you guys sound like an unruly mob and nazis.

CALLER: Oh, it was bad. We had swastikas all over the place.

RUSH: Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine.

CALLER: (laughing) Anyway, after the second person in her cue spoke out loud and said, ‘I want to ask this question: If we enact this health care bill, are the members of Congress going to be a part of it?’ And she hemmed and hawed and really didn’t want to answer.

RUSH: She doesn’t know!

CALLER: Well, I think she knows perfectly well that they don’t want to be part of it. But finally she just got up and left. She didn’t want to stick around for any more.

RUSH: Well, that’s not going to be happening from now on. Let me share this with you. This is from my buddy Erick Erickson at RedState.com: ‘Trying to avoid middle class workers opposed to Obamacare, Congresswoman Kathy Castor (D-FL) has scheduled a last minute townhall for tonight.’ She wasn’t going to have one. ‘She’ll be surrounded by union goons from the [Service Employees International Union] to feed middle class voters to alligators if they dare criticize Obamacare.’ This is what’s happening. Obama has mobilized union thugs to go out and also attend these town meetings to intimidate the genuine citizens out there who are upset about this.

CALLER: Well, this was no town hall meeting. She didn’t want that.

RUSH: Those are paid activists. Paid activists are going to be showing up and so the Democrats are going to get brave now. So they are going to have, uhhh, ‘protection.’ Uh, the mob’s showing up. The real genuine mob is showing up to protect these Democrats from the unruly Nazis that are showing up to protest the health care bill. John in Mansfield, Texas. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hi. Megadittos from the retired Navy man.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Okay. First thing… Well, I wanted to ask about two things, but I’ll start with the first one. In line with what you’ve been saying all day today, you know, we’ve got a bunch of sleaze bags up there that are going to pass this whether we like it or not. Once they do that, what can we do to fix it?

RUSH: You throw them out of office. That’s the first thing that will happen if this happens. The Blue Dog Democrats will be the first casualties. They will go, and some other Democrats are going to go as well.

CALLER: But what I’m getting at is —

RUSH: Look…

CALLER: Let’s say we put in the Republicans —

RUSH: We’ve been talking about this every day. Let me say it once and for all. The question is, ‘What can we do about it after they pass it?’ In the first place I’m not conceding it’s going to get passed. I’m not giving up. I’m not conceding defeat on this, not with what’s going on out there. Not with the White House unraveling. But if it gets passed, whether it gets passed or not, what are we going to do? We need to revitalize the Republican Party and make it conservative once again. We need a conservative candidate who loves conservatism, can articulate it, can defend it, can explain it and can cherry-pick what’s wrong with liberalism; is optimistic, understands the greatness of this country and where it comes from. That’s what we do! And then once we do that and start winning elections, then we start unraveling it.

But if we’re going to sit around here and think, there’s nothing we can do, that this is all inevitable, then let me know and I’m out of here. I’ve got plenty of golf courses I can go to before they go out of business in this economy. The intricacy of this bill — and we don’t know what’s in it. If it does pass, we really don’t know what version of it is going to pass. There’s too much. They could end up passing something very simple that just raises taxes on people, insures a few people. All Obama wants here — well, not all. What he will settle for at the end of all this is to be able to say he reformed health care. He’s building a monument to himself. That’s why I’ve made the point all day, he doesn’t announce his plan. He doesn’t have a plan. We’re talking about one plan and that’s the House of Representatives plan which he hasn’t read. He’s not going to get specific. But I don’t concede that this is a lock. I don’t concede that it’s a fete de complete. Look, these people have changed the argument. They aren’t even talking about health care anymore. They are talking about Nazis and swastikas and party run by talk show hosts and so forth. If you change the argument, it means you’re losing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, pursuant to the point that I was making about conservatism and it revitalizing and taking over the GOP, how many times in the last two years have we heard that conservatism is dead, that the era of Reagan is over? That conservative principles are dead, that the movement has to reinvent itself, that the movement has to adopt more of the approaches of the left, et cetera, et cetera? How many times have we heard this? And how many times have real conservatives like me said, ‘No, we don’t have to reinvent ourselves, we don’t have to change who we are. What we need to start doing is exposing the left for what it is.’ We have to explain who we are. We have to contrast ourselves with them. It is hard work, but it can be done and it must be done.

My friends, you have to work at liberty. The history of the world is tyranny and dungeons and torture and poverty. That’s what’s so exceptional about the United States. You have to work at liberty. You have to defend it. You have to explain it. You have to promote it or it will be lost. We have to engage these people. We have to stand up to them. We have to challenge them, and that’s exactly what’s being done here in these town hall meetings. It’s happening at the office. You name it. People are standing up for their liberty. That’s what’s going on at the town hall meetings. People are standing up for their freedom. They are saying, ‘You are not taking any more liberty and freedom from us.’ The moderates in our party and the left see nothing but permanent decline. They see decline and prosperity and living standards, economic opportunity, they see that as inevitable. We do not. We see America as a pie that never, ever needs to stop growing. We don’t need to reinvent ourselves. We need a party that will expose the left, not get so introspective and say, ‘What’s wrong with us?’ There’s nothing wrong with conservatism.

There’s another series of lies — I think they’re lies — that the Democrats are using out there to change the argument, hype up this business on the town halls. ‘Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) will not be hosting any town hall events this August — instead, he’s making himself available for one-on-one constituent meetings.’ One of the reasons is ‘his offices have received threatening phone calls, including at least one direct threat against his life.’ I frankly don’t believe this. I don’t believe these guys’ lives are being threatened. ‘Freshman Democratic lawmaker ‘physically assaulted at a local event’ by activists.’ This is from Thinkprogress.org, a website that we know lies and makes things up. Mary Katharine Ham exposed them last night and today in a blog piece at the Weekly Standard. I don’t believe it. There’s a pattern developing here, a pattern. These precious, these wonderful, these imperialist members of Congress working so hard to make our lives better, why, they’re being threatened, their lives are being threatened, they’re being assaulted by these unruly mobs. It’s all BS.


Lloyd Doggett, Texas, last night on MSNBC urging his fellow Democrats not to do what he did and flee protestors. He was asked the question: ‘Congressman Doggett, you had one of these famous events where you were basically kind of chased into your car and out of there by these protestors?’

DOGGETT: Well, Lawrence, that’s really the right-wing spin on it. They dribbled out a little videotape. What it doesn’t show is that I spent an hour discussing and debating this bill and listening to all the taunts and the pictures of the tombstones with my name on it and they show some video at the end when their noise got so loud, it just wasn’t productive to stay any longer. Democrats shouldn’t flee. We need to stand and fight these people.

RUSH: Thank you, Congressman Doggett. We need to stand and fight the American people. We Democrats need to stand and fight the American people. So the host says, ‘So now you are telling me something I didn’t know based on this imagery that you feel you had a productive meeting.’

DOGGETT: No, I wouldn’t say it was productive. I stood my ground and debated with them this bill, listened to all their laughable objections to the bill, explained why a public plan, a public option is essential. And then what they did after their views were expressed and responded to, they shouted down their neighbors because they didn’t want to hear the views of other people.

RUSH: They didn’t want to hear lies. They didn’t want to hear lies. This is a quick bite, five seconds in Little Rock, Children’s Hospital. Mike Ross, Vic Snyder held a town meeting on health care reform and a participant stood up and expressed his views.

VOICE: You need to get the government the hell out of our way.

(applause)

RUSH: Now this is interesting, too. During a radio interview yesterday, Chuck Grassley in Iowa City said this about health care reform.


GRASSLEY: In countries that have government-run health care, just give you an example. I’ve been told that the brain tumor that Senator Kennedy has, because he’s 77 years old, would not be treated the way it’s treated in the United States. In other words, he would not get the care that he gets here because of his age. In other words they’d say, ‘Well, he doesn’t have long to live,’ even if he lived another four or five years. They would say, ‘Well, we’ve got to spend the money on people that can contribute more to the economy.’ It’s a little bit like people saying when somebody gets to be 85 their life is worth less than when you’re 35 and pull the tubes on them.

RUSH: And give a pain pill. Now Chuck Grassley is a moderate. Let me tell you what’s happening here. I think all of you people out there have to realize that your actions are leading Republicans, they’re growing some onions. Some of these moderate Republicans are actually having to spread their legs a little bit to make room. You think a guy like Chuck Grassley would say this about Ted Kennedy if he didn’t feel like he was on solid ground with his voters? There is no way he would say anything like this. So you are emboldening these people out there in your own party. I think it’s fabulous.

Here’s Lou Ann, Mount Vernon, Ohio. Welcome to the EIB Network.


CALLER: Hi, Rush. I am so upset. I have got a story, speaking of liars, to tell you. I called my Congressman’s office and asked them — this was August 4th, Tuesday. I called his staffers and asked them when he was going to be returning to our district here in Ohio and having hometown meetings to which I was told, ‘We’re not sure yet, but we are sure he will be back and have meetings; they will be posted on his website. Hang onto your hat.’ At the very same time I was asking about when this liar was going to return to Ohio, he was having a closed door meeting with the newspaper people in this town. He was already here! He was already here, and his staffers told me, ‘We don’t know when he’s coming back, but we know he will be having town hall meetings.’ And as of last night they still weren’t posted on his website and he used all of Pelosi’s talking points and we had a great big front page article called ‘Clearing Up the Misconceptions on the Bill.’ Do you understand? They lied to me. They lied to me. He was in the town, in our hometown here when they told —

RUSH: Even worse than that, they lied to you while he’s at the newspaper working on a joint propaganda plan.


CALLER: Yes. And can I give his name?

RUSH: Yeah. I was going to ask you the liar’s name. What’s his name?


CALLER: Zack Space. And this is in Ohio.

RUSH: Zack Space?


CALLER: Yes. And let me say this, too. Calling him a blue dog. There is no such thing as blue dog. You determined it right. They are lap dogs.

RUSH: They are lap dogs and they are Democrats.


CALLER: And he’s a liar, they lied. His staffer’s lied to me. They said they didn’t know where he was.

RUSH: Wait a second. They could have thought he was with a girl and they were just protecting him. You never know.


CALLER: Well, that’s true because after what happened with Sanford, we all know that could be the case.

RUSH: I’m not saying he was. I’m not saying he was. We’ve got experience here that guides us in these things with — (laughing)


CALLER: Thank you. Because I tell you, I’m close to tears over this, and you have given me the first chuckle I’ve had over this lying bag of crap all day.

RUSH: Man, you are worked up.


CALLER: I don’t like to be lied to. I can tell you I can take just about anything, but do not lie to me. I don’t like to be lied to. And I want to tell these people something. The reason we’re fired up and we’re going to these town hall meetings is not because we’re some bunch of riffraff or troublemakers. And the reason people are exploding like this is because we’re tired of being lied to.

RUSH: Amen, sister. You are tired of being lied to, plus you have read the bill. You know what’s in it.


CALLER: Yes, I have. I’m an RN, honey. I read it. And my husband’s a radiographer. We’ve read it. We’ve read it. We know it. We live it.

RUSH: Let me tell you. Thanks, Lou Ann, for calling. If any of you Blue Dog Democrats are listening to this, this is what you are going to face. If you think people are going to forget this by November 2010, do not make that mistake. They are not going to forget this, especially if this thing passes. There will be a price to pay that you cannot imagine.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Lansing, Michigan. Tom, hi, sir. Nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.


CALLER: Well, hello, Rush, now I’m in Jackson. One of the perks of driving a truck. Eventually I’ll make my way back home to Detroit.

RUSH: Okay, good.

CALLER: One quick thing. What these people have to realize, Pelosi and all these people, there’s a lot of me out there. There’s a lot of disenfranchised Democrats, Democrats in exile that are frustrated because they’ve trusted these people for so many years and now we’re trying to retrain our brain and we’re finding the other side of the story and we’re really disappointed in them.

RUSH: Well —


CALLER: Come 2010 they will not get my vote and thousands of others.

RUSH: See, I said this yesterday. I said that the core of the Democrat Party is not this ultra-radical leftist. The core Democrat voter is not like these people running the Democrat Party right now. Now, I’ve also heard my entire 21-year career here on this show, conservative blacks call and say, ‘Hey, it’s over. The lock that the Democrats have on the black vote is over,’ and it has never changed. So I know you are speaking for yourself and it’s anecdotal data, but this is the most radical regime that this country has ever had leading it. And we’ve been asking for a long time, ‘Do all the Democrats in this country really want this?’ and I’ve always thought, ‘No. No, they don’t.’ We’ll find out. We’ll find out the next election.

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