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RUSH: Well, I’m sorry, but wouldn’t you be? If you were the White House, wouldn’t you be gloating over how you took the Republicans to the backyard on this Homeland Security thing? Right there,

Politico: “White House Gloats Over GOP’s DHS Flop.”

And everybody said, “It’s rather unseemly to gloat.” It is, but that’s who they are. I’m not surprised that they’re gloating. These people got shellacked. The Democrats got shellacked in November. They can’t believe they’re winning anything, much less prevailing the way they are and it is fascinating.

There’s a — somebody sent me today a piece — by the way, hi, folks. As you can tell, revved and ready to get going here. Rush Limbaugh behind the Golden EIB Microphone, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. The telephone number, 800-282-2882.

There’s a lengthy peace by Victor Davis Hanson in National Review — I think it’s National Review Online. Pretty sure it is. It is one of many such stories written by Victor Davis Hanson. This is PJ Media. I’m sorry. He writes both places, PJ Media, National Review Online, so forth. “Obama and Liberalism’s Descent Into Travesty, the Liberal Circus.”


Victor Davis Hanson has been writing for six years chronicling and demonstrating the robust failures, one after another of liberalism, of the Obama administration, and he’s about reached his wits’ end because he thought the failures of all of these policies alone would provide the corrective measures, that people would realize. And he’s like a lot of people, he’s shocked that nobody cares. He’s shocked that nobody even recognizes these things as failures.

Now, they’re not failures from Obama’s standpoint. They’re failures if you expect improvement in the country, but Obama cannot be said to have failed. Everything he set out to do is working as he intended, but it’s not in the best interests of the country. I read a lot of blogs, as you well know, and one thing I’ve noticed — and I’m gonna have a tough time explaining this. It may take me two or three attempts to explain this right. But over the six years, six-plus years now of the Obama administration, a number of — and who they are is not important. This is not to name names and all that. It’s just an observation of the way people think on our side.

Victor Davis Hanson, a number of others, have written chronicling all these failures, assuming that it is 20, 30 years ago when demonstrable failure is unaccepted and change and fix are required simply on the basis of the failure alone. I’ve read so many different bloggers and so many different conservative media times who have just expected this to happen because it always did. Nixon fails big time, gets thrown out of office, as one example. And it’s not the case anymore. It’s not happening anymore.

There’s an obvious reason why, folks. I hadn’t even intended to get into this yet, but it’s gonna be a good setup. He chronicles all of these things that we have talked about since day one of the Obama administration. Let me give you some pull quotes just to give you an idea of the piece.


“Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock US carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel?” And we are. We are showing more respect to the leaders of Iran and their effort to get a nuclear weapon than we are to our alley, Israel, in their effort to prevent that from happening.

The debate over illegal immigration has gone from arguments over closing the border to Social Security cash rebates to illegals and presidential threats to punish border patrol officers who enforce existing law. Yep, that’s true, too. And just last week we had the news, two things. Illegal aliens who had been sent home, been deported, we’re gonna call ’em back. The thousand or 2,000, we’re gonna call ’em back and ask them to come back and reapply. We’re gonna admit they shouldn’t have been kicked out in the first place, come on back in.

We are also preparing to essentially make a welfare payment of 35 to $40,000 to every illegal alien who’s granted amnesty. How we gonna do that? We’re simply going to say had they been granted amnesty four years ago, they would be have been paying taxes and maybe they have paid taxes and they should have qualified for the earned income tax credit and a number of other things. And since we intended to do this for four years we’re just gonna make four years’ worth of benefits available to them retroactively. And so each illegal who is granted amnesty is gonna get 35, 40 grand in benefits. People write about this and they can’t believe it. “Where’s the outrage?” they’re asking. “Where are people standing up and saying, ‘Enough’?” And stand by. I’ll come to that.

Here’s another pull quote. Why this descent into travesty — by the way, this headline reminds me. I have concluded all 13 episodes of House of Cards. Have you seen, have you guys in there… (interruption) Season three, yeah, it came out Friday. I binged it. It’s just 13 episodes, just 13 hours. Big whoop. It’s show prep, man. I finished it, and — well, I’m not gonna discuss it yet. I don’t want to do spoiler alerts until a number of people have seen it. But I had a number of people write to me and say it’s the best season yet. And I think the fact that people think this is the best — well, here I go, spoiler alert.


The fact that people think this is the best season yet is evidence and proof positive to me of the descent into depravity of our country. And if you want I’ll give you a couple examples later on. But I don’t want to do spoiler alerts for everybody. The end of episode four — how many of you have gotten there yet, the end of the episode four? (interruption) Have you started even yet, Snerdley? You haven’t gotten to episode four yet? Okay. Well, I should have known. You’d have known what I’m talking about. You’ve been there. Dawn, Brian, have you guys started watching this yet?

Why this descent into travesty? “The liberal left got what it wanted in 2009 with a supermajority in the Senate and large majority in the House, a subservient mainstream media, the good will of the American people, and the most liberal president in American history. It only took that the liberal hierarchy six years to erode the Democratic Party to levels that we have not seen since the 1920s. Almost every policy initiative we have seen — whether climate change, foreign policy, health care, or race relations — has imploded.”

Every policy initiative we have seen, climate change, Obamacare, foreign policy, you name it, race relations, has imploded. That’s why there’s so much misery. It’s just everything has gone wrong from the standard perspective of judgment. You look at it through Obama’s eyes it’s not gone wrong at all.

Now, many liberals are very distressed because they believed in all this stuff leading to a utopia, and we are further from a utopia than we’ve ever been after six years of a utopian president. So they’re understandably miffed, but when they get mad, when they get angry, they don’t think corrective, because this is the next observation Victor Davis Hanson.

“The answer to these failures has not been introspection, humility, or reevaluation why the liberal agenda proved unpopular and unworkable, but in paranoid fashion to double-down on it, convinced that its exalted aims must allow any means necessary — however farcical — to achieve them. The logical result is the present circus.”


Now, what that means is — and it’s the key to the frustration on the part of Mr. Hanson and a lot of people. When you’ve had massive failures like we’ve had here, normally reasonable people try to examine, “Okay, what went wrong,” and correct what went wrong and implement corrective measures, fix the problems. And instead, that’s not what’s happening. There has been no examination of failure because there’s been no admission that it is failure. The economy’s roaring. We got the best economy we’ve had since Reagan, right? That’s what Obama says.

John Kerry says we’re safer than we’ve ever been. The biggest problem in the Middle East now is Israel. They don’t even think this stuff is failure, which is what I think a lot of people need to understand. Nevertheless, in the midst of all this failure, there isn’t any examination, no introspection, no reevaluation of why it’s not working and why it’s unpopular. Nope. What there is is anger, paranoia, and a demand that we double down on it. And this is where I think people get confused, that these kinds of abject failures, not too long ago, would have led to massive public outcry, number one, to fix it. And then there would have been a response to the massive outcry to fix it and there would have been efforts to fix it and this would have been one of the final nails in the coffin of liberalism.

So why hasn’t that happened? Would you like to hear my theorem? A lot of people have been assuming that liberalism would implode of its own immorality, much like Ronald Reagan thought communism would. Reagan always believed that the Soviet Union would implode eventually whether we fired a shot or not simply because it could not sustain itself in any number of ways, economic, spiritual, you name it. It was doomed, communism was, because of its own immorality. And I think a lot of people mistakenly assume that the actual failure of all these things would be self-evident to a population, an enlightened population and thus be corrected for. And that’s also missing.

Yeah, to many of us this boondoggle is self-evident. To many of us what is happening to the country is outrageous and demands, first, an immediate stoppage, and then a fix. But many people in this country, and it’s not a majority, but it’s clearly enough, it is not self-evident that we’re in the midst a bunch of failure. Well, not entirely true. Let me expand on that.

I think what people need to understand in trying to understand why, for the first time in a long time, the abject, in-our-face, right-in-front-of-us, overwhelming, dismal failure of liberalism, why that hasn’t meant its end, why that hasn’t meant that it is over and we’re going to stop it and correct it, is because while the left has been in the process of implementing all of these failures, they’ve also been doing something else, and that is destroying the brand of the opposition to all this.


There has to be an opposition to this. Observing it failing is simply not enough. Recognizing that something isn’t working is simply not enough. Corrective measures are not automatic anymore. And the Republican brand had been destroyed by the willing accomplices of the Democrat Party. The importance of that is any alternative to these failures, any alternative to the status quo is seen as automatically unworkable or worse, maybe even seen as immoral and unjust.

So while you might have a lot of people think, “Oh, my gosh, this is horrible,” they don’t see the Republicans as a viable option. They do not see the opposition as an alternative because that alternative has already been destroyed. People laugh at the GOP, they mock it, they make fun of it, they certainly don’t take it seriously, and therefore what should be the repository of alternative policies is seen as a national joke. The left has been so successful that it has convinced millions of Americans — in fact, it gets even better, I think.

The left has been so successful that it has convinced millions of Americans that all of these failures that we are experiencing are actually the fault of the Republicans. Reaganism, racism, sexism, all of the things that the left has used to mischaracterize, to character assassinate, to destroy Republicans and conservatives, are the very things that have been blamed. It’s the Limbaugh Theorem. Obama’s got nothing to do with any of this. He’s still trying to fix it. He inherited all of these problems. These evil Republicans for all of those years, trickle-down, you know the drill, the Republicans caused all these problems, and poor Obama just tried to fix them. Oh my god, and we’re failing miserably in the process, but at least he’s trying.

The left has been so successful, it has convinced millions of Americans that the very failures of liberalism today are in fact the fault of Republicans. That’s because the left, while they’ve been advancing their own agenda, has also, via revisionism, destroyed the substance of all alternatives to liberalism and socialism. Capitalism, what do you think young people think of capitalism based on what’s being taught to them in college? The alternative to this, free markets, freedom, liberty, capitalism. These failures just keep adding up and building on themselves.

This is why Millennials have lost faith in the country and not Obama. Millennials, everybody that has a desire for this stuff to get fixed, is at their wits’ end. They think the country’s letting them down. They think the country’s better days are behind it. They think the country is not worth all this hope anymore. There is no alternative. The alternative, Republicans, are you kidding me? Those nerds? Oh, give me a break. I hear what’s said about him on The Daily Show.

The only alternative is to let Obama keep trying, ’cause gosh, he’s got such great potential, and these failures just keep mounting up. So when I see the White House gloating over the GOP’s flop in stopping the implementation of executive amnesty, I totally understand them laughing about it and gloating.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I mean, how else do you explain the administration and Drive-By Media and all of the other supporters of the Regime all citing the Republican (chuckles) flop? And that’s what it is. They had every opportunity to defund a small portion of Department of Homeland Security so that Obama could not have the money to do his executive amnesty. They promised they would do it. After the election they said they were gonna do it!

They didn’t even get close, and now the administration’s running around gloating over the Republicans’ flop here. In addition to that, you know what they’re doing? They’re saying that this is evidence of the Republican Party’s inability and failure to govern. While they gloat, they throw that in. Never mind that Harry Reid and the Democrats are the reason… Well, the partial reason. (sigh) It would be easy to blame Harry Reid.

Harry Reid’s just doing what his party wants. Harry Reid took every precaution, took every step at his disposal to stop the Republicans from doing this, and the Republicans did not use every weapon in their arsenal. The Democrats did. The Republicans, I am convinced, are scared. They’re just in fear of the usual things and maybe some things that we don’t even know about.

So the Republicans win big in November and won’t even take the steps necessary to stop the partial lack of funding for Department of Homeland Security. And when the Democrats run around and say, “See, this is evidence the Republicans can’t govern,” that’s the last thing people hear. It just further tarnishes the GOP brand, and then the GOP as an alternative to this failure is not even considered an option. Except it was.

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