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RUSH: H.R. asking me if the Republican Party was afraid of offending Hispanics back in ’97 by opposing Sotomayor, you have hit a button.

Let me ask a question. When Clarence Thomas was nominated to be an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, did the Democrats worry about angering the black vote when they opposed him? Why not? Do you recall that when Miguel Estrada and Alberto Gonzales were nominated for positions in the Bush administration, they were opposed by Democrats specifically because they were Latino, did that hurt Democrats with the Hispanic vote when Democrats went after Clarence Thomas or Alberto Gonzales or Miguel Estrada? No. So my question is, who evolved this idiotic theory that opposing a judge on the basis of her incompetence, her lack of qualifications, and her judicial philosophy, is gonna harm the Republican Party because she’s female and Hispanic? Who evolved that theory? I’ll tell you who evolved the theory. The media and the Democrats and the wimp RINO moderates buy into it.

I even got an e-mail about this. H.R., you shouldn’t have said this. I was going to try to let this go today. I got an e-mail, it’s from somebody named Nancy, a subscriber to my website. ‘Dear Rush, we have to choose our battles. Opposing Sotomayor will further alienate people and give them more ammunition if we fight the nomination. This nomination was manipulated and staged for votes but it will bite us in the butt if we fight. We have to choose our battles.’ Okay. So what this listener is saying, Obama chose this woman to shut us up and we better shut the hell up. ‘Cause if we don’t shut the hell up, then we’re gonna get bit in the butt. We are bit in the butt with the nomination. The nation has been bit in the butt with the nomination. We’re supposed to shut up. We’re supposed to let their strategy work.

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RUSH: ‘Dear Rush, we have to choose our battles. This will further alienate people and give them more ammunition if we fight the Sotomayor nomination. The nomination was manipulated and staged for votes but it will bite us in the butt if we fight. We have to choose our battles.’ Nancy Hoffman, who is a subscriber at RushLimbaugh.com. Then we have a piece, Mark McKinnon, who ran all the media for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, also was on the McCain campaign. He was the one who vowed to quit if the McCain campaign got critical of Obama. When it did get critical of Obama, McKinnon quit. He has a post at Tina Brown’s website, the Daily Beast. He says, ‘We should be on our knees praising Colin Powell for declaring that he has not, despite the desire of some narrow and vocal forces within the GOP, left the party. Because if he does, we might as well turn the lights out.

So for the good of the party, after applying reasonable due diligence we ought to be prepared to wave a white flag on Sotomayor, give Colin Powell a big bear hug and sincere thanks for sticking it out and moving on. Now, if we take Nancy Hoffman and her ‘don’t go after Sotomayor, we can’t win this, and it’s going to alienate people, Hispanics and women are going to hate us even more,’ and Mark McKinnon just, you know, wave the white flag on this and embrace Colin Powell, what’s the logical conclusion here? If you take this logic all the way out, what both Nancy Hoffman, a listener to the program, and Mark McKinnon are saying is just throw in the towel on everything and give the left the country. Because any time we oppose or object to anything the left does or any person on the left who is a minority, we lose ’cause we make voters mad. So we may as well just throw in the towel on everything now. I mean that’s where this leads.

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RUSH: I have no doubt Sonia Sotomayor is going to be confirmed. None. Zip, zero, nada. She’s in. They want to fast track this at the White House and get it done before the August recess, and I’m sure they will because there is no desire to object to her. A lot of Republicans have bought the notion that criticizing her on legal grounds, not because she’s female — I agree, nobody should be attacked because they’re female or because they’re Hispanic. My opposition to Sonia Sotomayor is not based on those two things. I couldn’t care less. My opposition to Sonia Sotomayor is based on the fact she’s not a good judge. She’s overruled sixty percent of the time at the US Supreme Court. Jonathan Turley is out there yesterday at MSNBC, she doesn’t have any intellectual depth. She’s an angry woman, she’s a bigot. She’s a racist. In her own words, she’s the antithesis of a judge, she is the antithesis of justice, in her own words. She does not deserve to be on the US Supreme Court. But our party, cowering in fear, buys into the notion that opposing her will only alienate potential future voters.

Meanwhile, the meanest, the most extreme, angry, mean-spirited personally attacking party in our nation’s history today, the Democrat Party, never, never, ever seems to worry about alienating voters with their attitudes about people. Now, why is that? How is it that they can utterly destroy Clarence Thomas and not damage themselves with black voters? How is it that George W. Bush can populate his administration with two highly qualified Hispanic legal minds, Miguel Estrada and Alberto Gonzales, and why did that not help us get the Hispanic vote? Why can George W. Bush come out and be the lead figure on amnesty for illegal aliens, why does that not garner us a greater percentage of the Hispanic vote? So we take all these steps, we do everything that leftists proscribe. Bush’s administration was more diverse racially and ethnically than any administration in history. What did it get him? Nothing but abject hatred and derision.

Now, I wanted to know when my party is going to figure out that playing in a game by the rules announced by the media and the Democrats is guaranteed to wipe this party out. When I get an e-mail from a listener who suggests that we don’t even bother fighting this, have to choose our battles, this will further alienate people and give them more ammunition if we fight the nomination, it was manipulated and staged votes, we should shut up. So what we’re saying is let’s just admit that Obama’s got us, he nominated this woman, not because of her qualifications, but to shut up any opposition. So we’ll go along and shut up. Now, what is the advantage to objecting to Sonia Sotomayor? We all know she’s going to be confirmed, we all know that she’s got this compelling, very compelling American story. We had a caller yesterday, by the way, if I make a brief departure here with a brilliant point. He noted that virtually every liberal nominee to a cabinet position or candidate for high office or nominated to the Supreme Court, every liberal Democrat that is nominated to the court system or asked to serve in a presidential cabinet, runs for high office never, ever credits the welfare state for their success.

They don’t cite a government program that made them who they are. They cite traditional American values, hard work, great parents, great home life, a parent or two who understood the values of hard work and stick-to-itiveness and having goals. They praise all the people in their life that inspired them to seek greater things for themselves, and in no instance do liberals cite AFDC, welfare, the GI bill, whatever the favored liberal programs are. They don’t cite Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. They don’t say they got where they are because government’s helping me out with health care. They cite traditional conservative values. And yet, when they get to those positions, they seem to forget all that and assume that nobody else can use the same prescriptions they did because they’re incompetent. So they need government assistance; they need government help; they need racist affirmative action; they need quota systems; they need all the help they can get ’cause they’re incompetent and we’re supposed to wave the white flag over this.

Mark McKinnon, who is brilliant at what he does, running media campaigns for Bush in 2000 and 2004, in his piece at the Daily Beast: ‘Memo to my party: Blasting targets like Sonia Sotomayor and Colin Powell is a surefire strategy to guarantee our extinction.’ So if we oppose the nomination of a woman to be a Supreme Court justice who’s utterly unqualified, who is utterly incompetent, it means our extinction. If we are to not oppose on grounds of competence or a politics or ideology, those that we deem to be harmful to the United States of America, then we already are extinct. I would suggest to you that the Republican Party is already extinct if it’s listening to Mark McKinnon. The Republican Party is extinct if it’s listening to Tom Ridge. The Republican Party is extinct if it’s listening to Colin Powell, because the logical conclusion, the end result of all this is we throw in the towel on Obama. We don’t oppose Obama on anything. We don’t dare. It will just make people mad. It will just make people angry. It will just result in fewer votes for us. The Republican Party is extinct if it has made the decision that the only way it can reclaim power is via identity politics.

So we have to have policies that are friendly to Hispanics and women. Okay. Well. Well, our party led the way, our sitting president and our presidential nominee led the way on amnesty, legalized citizenship for illegal aliens most of whom are Hispanic. Shouldn’t they love us? Shouldn’t they have voted for us in droves? George Bush appoints two highly qualified Hispanics to his cabinet. Shouldn’t Hispanics love us, using this theory? Why did they vote so much for Democrats if we took the charge, took the lead in showing our sensitivity to Hispanics? What happened here? Somebody’s going to have to explain this to me because this philosophy of identity politics and running out and not alienating — in fact, not even not alienating, but actually pandering to didn’t achieve anything.

Now Mark McKinnon says we have got to embrace General Powell, who has yet to state a position on anything Obama is doing, who has yet to state a position on what the Republican Party ought to do other than to be inclusive, Colin Powell who enjoys 70% approval or 60, whatever it is because he doesn’t specify anything on issues where he falls. Well, hell’s bells, I could probably be loved by 70% of the people if I didn’t have an opinion on anything. So we embrace Colin Powell, we embrace Sonia Sotomayor, and this is going to save the Republican Party? Well, how many of these people like the e-mailer Nancy Hoffman or Mark McKinnon and Colin Powell, how many of them want us to embrace Obama? Because if we’re not to object to Sonia Sotomayor because we’re going to alienate women and Hispanics, we certainly can’t oppose Barack Obama because we’re going to alienate liberals and Democrats and blacks.

So don’t you find it interesting that the only party, according to the Democrats and the media, the only party that alienates people and makes them mad is the Republican Party, and further don’t you find it interesting that the only element of the Republican Party that ever makes people mad is the conservative wing of the Republican Party? We’re the only ones that make people mad? The left, the far left, the mainstream Democrat Party is as mean-spirited without compassion, angry and enraged and personal as I have ever seen in my life, and we are led to believe that nobody ever gets mad at them, that they can say whatever they want, they can personally destroy our nominees. Robert Bork, 45 minutes after he’s nominated, Ted Kennedy goes to the floor of the Senate with the famous Robert Bork’s America. I have my own version of that for Sonia Sotomayor coming up. Forty-five minutes. They tried to wipe out Clarence Thomas. I could go on and on and on. They tried to destroy Samuel Alito, and somehow that never makes moderates mad. That never makes moderates mad, but we have to tiptoe through the tulips. We have to balance ourselves on a high wire so that we don’t anger the moderates.

What’s the real reason for opposing Sonia Sotomayor if she’s guaranteed to be confirmed? Because I will stipulate she’s going to make it. She’s going to make it with ease. She’s gonna get 75 or 80 votes. She’s not qualified. She is incompetent. Can I read the oath the Supreme Court justice takes? Here’s the oath: ‘I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as Supreme Court justice under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.’ By virtue of her own statements, she is going to break the oath. She’s going to lie when she takes the oath. By virtue of her own previous statement, she is lying when she takes the oath. We’re supposed to look the other way. If the Republican Party wants to allow itself to get trapped in the premise that it is racist and sexist and must show the world that it’s not, then the Republican Party is extinct.

The reason to oppose Sonia Sotomayor even though she’s guaranteed to be confirmed has one purpose, as I announced yesterday, and that is to educate the American people about who Barack Obama is. The Drive-By Media is failing and has failed spectacularly in its primary constitutional duty. It has become slavish and sycophantish to Barack Obama. There is no suspicion; there is no curiosity about anything he is doing. There is only praise, endless praise. Sonia Sotomayor is a hack who is an anti-constitutionalist, who will do the bidding of Barack Obama on the US Supreme Court. It is imperative the people of this country find out who Obama really is, and, through the opposition of Sonia Sotomayor on the substance of her career as a judge, that’s what would happen.

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RUSH: Folks, I think we ought to stop opposing the environmental movement. It’s gonna alienate people who want to buy Priuses and hybrids. We should stop opposing runaway government spending and deficits. It’s just gonna offend people who will benefit. We’ve gotta make sure that we don’t offend anybody in anything we do, as a party. That’s how we’re going to attract voters, we don’t offend anybody. Now, I’ll tell you something. The big problem with the Republican Party and the reason that it is extinct is because it stands for nothing. Nobody knows what a Republican is anymore. Well, okay, you say, ‘Colin Powell, he’s a Republican.’ Fine. Somebody tell me what he believes on any issue. What does he believe on terrorism? What does he believe on tax cuts? What does he believe on abortion? He voted for Obama. He must believe what Obama believes. But he doesn’t say so. What’s a Republican today? What does a Republican stand for? When you say ‘Republican,’ what does it mean? To a lot of people, it means racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because Republicans have not fought back on that and have accepted the premise, and that’s why because they think they’re viewed as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes they’ve gotta not offend anybody so as to prove that a lie isn’t true. Imagine that. Republicans are trying to prove that the way they’re lied about isn’t true, by not standing for something.

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RUSH: Folks, there is another alternative, in terms of the approach that the extinct Republican Party might try. And again, this is based on a news story from yesterday about how Obama’s supporters know he’s lying, and they like he’s lying, they like it. They know he’s lying to them, and they very much appreciate it. The Republican Party doesn’t really need to stop believing in anything; they just need to lie about what they believe in. So, whereas the Republican Party doesn’t think Sonia Sotomayor is qualified, go out and say they do: oh, she’s qualified. She’s wonderful. Great pick. Lie about it. And let’s see if that gets voters.

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