RUSH: I must tell you: I’m a little queasy about doing this. A couple of years ago during CPAC, I had some people call and say, “Why don’t you play some excerpts of your great speech?” In fact, I’ve had people say, “Rush, why do they even do CPAC anymore? I mean, what’s left to be said after your speech?” I can understand that. But the kids still need a place to party. In Washington in March, what else are you gonna do?
So I’ve always felt queasy because people accuse me of trying to upstage the speakers. We even had calls from people, “What are you doing? I mean, you just have to get in. Even though you’re not there, you just have to pretend you’re there. You just have to act like you’re headlining it.” No, no, no. I was requested. Well, in this instance, this year, CNN did it. CNN went back to their archives and played sound bites of my CPAC speech four years ago. It was their infobabe Brooke Baldwin actually late yesterday afternoon, and this is how she introduced it…
BALDWIN: Here’s an image you may remember. This takes you back a couple of years. This was CPAC 2009, Rush Limbaugh. Remember this speech? He fired them up. What you get at CPAC, is you get a lot of talk about conservative principles, lower taxes, faith to the Constitution, never bending to the winds of change.
RUSH: See? “Never bending to the winds of change,” which is a crock. But that’s the agenda. So let’s go back. In all honesty, I did not pick these excerpts of my CPAC speech. Cookie did it. I got the sound bite roster and they were there. Let me see how many there are. One, two, three, four. Okay, they’re two and a half, four and a half, four and a half, five, six. It’s just seven-and-a-half minutes. That’s nothing. The whole speech is a lot longer. It was an hour I was scheduled to finish, and it was going so well, the guy on stage came up and asked, “Can you keep going for a while?” They had another half hour to fill. I said, “Sure, no problem.”
So this is only seven-and-a-half minutes out of what was 90 minutes. I know what she chose. I have the transcripts in front of me. Here we go. It’s the first of four…
BEGIN CPAC CLIP
RUSH: Let me tell you who we conservatives are: We love people.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims. We don’t see people we want to exploit. What we see — what we see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work. We do not see that person with contempt. We don’t think that person doesn’t have what it takes. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes, regulations and too much government.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: Liberty, Freedom.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: And the pursuit of happiness.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: Those of you watching at home may wonder why this is being applauded. We conservatives think all three are under assault.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
END CPAC CLIP
RUSH: Well, I see that Cookie has not edited the applause here. I’ll tell you a little truth. As is the case in all of my speeches, I had barely thought about it. That’s why I don’t like speeches. I don’t plan them, I don’t write them, and I live in perpetual fear that when it’s time I’m gonna have a brain freeze. But I can’t write a speech. My mind doesn’t work that way. It’s not nearly as fluid, fluent, when I do. So I have to ad-lib these things. So we land at Dulles Airport, and we’re driving in. It’s about an hour/hour and a half before I’m supposed to go on.
Kathryn said something to me, I forget what it was, and a little light exploded. I said, “You know what? I’m going to treat this as my first ever address to the nation,” as though I’m doing a State of the Union speech or whatever. That’s where I got the idea to approach it this way. I had no idea what I was going to say. I really didn’t. I really don’t at any one of these speeches. I think about it day in and day out, but I never commit to anything. I wait until I hit the stage or right before it.
I maybe jot some notes of things that are in my mind as an outline and then go for it. That’s why I live in perpetual fear of doing speeches, ’cause I’m scared to death that when the light goes on I’m gonna have a brain freeze and have nothing to say. It hasn’t ever happened, by the way. Anyway, the next bite. Everybody was all caught up back then with, “I hope he fails.” This is February 28th, and it was six weeks prior that I had said about President Obama, “I hope he fails,” which had caused, you know, a big excrement storm. So I thought that I would address it again.
BEGIN CPAC CLIP
RUSH: For those of you just tuning in on the Fox News Channel or C-SPAN, I’m Rush Limbaugh and I want everyone in this room and every one of you around the country to succeed. I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed. And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching Big Government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element or that person to fail. I want you to succeed.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
RUSH: Also, for those of you in the Drive-By Media watching, I have not needed a teleprompter for anything I’ve said.
AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)
RUSH: And nor do any of us need a teleprompter, because our beliefs are not the result of calculations and contrivances. Our beliefs are not the result of a deranged psychology. Our beliefs are our core. Our beliefs are our hearts. We don’t have to make notes about what we believe. We don’t have to write down, oh, do I believe it, do I believe that we can tell people what we believe off the top of our heads and we can do it with passion and we can do it with clarity, and we can do it persuasively. Some of us just haven’t had the inspiration or motivation to do so in a number of years, but that’s about to change.
AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)
END CPAC CLIP
RUSH: Okay. I gotta go. I gotta take a quick commercial break. There’s two more of these. This is from my CPAC speech in 2009, four years ago.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, one more. I have time for one more bite here, and it’s a continuation of the whole business of failing and success.
BEGIN CPAC CLIP
RUSH: I know what’s going on. I know what’s going on. We’re in the aspects here of an historic presidency. I know that. But let me be honest again. I got over the historical aspects of this in November. President Obama is our president. President Obama stands for certain things. I don’t care, he could be a Martian. He could be from Michigan, I don’t know — just kidding. Doesn’t matter to me what his race is. It doesn’t matter. He’s liberal is what matters to me. And his articulated — his articulated plans scare me. Now, I understand we can’t say we want the President to fail, Mr. Limbaugh. That’s like saying — this is the voice of the New Castrati, by the way, guys who have lost their guts. You can’t say Mr. Limbaugh that you want the President to fail because that’s like saying you want the country to fail. It’s the opposite. I want the country to survive. I want the country to succeed.
AUDIENCE: (wild cheers and applause) USA! USA! USA! USA!
END CPAC CLIP
RUSH: It was the CPAC Olympics. Look, folks, I intended to squeeze some phone calls in here, but I’d forgotten how fascinating I was. Again, I’m not trying to do anything with this year’s CPAC, but I’m really inundated with requests every year to play segments of it. We always wait ’til the last of the show to do it to cause as little offense as we can.