RUSH: It has happened again, ladies and gentlemen. It’s happened again. In US State-Run Media, a prominent state-run journalist fails to get my line about Mark Sanford: ‘He could have been our JFK.’ 
It happened on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday, the host, John King, is talking with Mary Matalin and some other people, and they have this exchange about my take on Governor Sanford.
KING: Rush Limbaugh lamented after all this played out of what might have been. Let’s listen.
RUSH ARCHIVE: I wonder if Sanford thought that he was going to get away with this. They all do, I guess. He could have been our JFK. Coulda had it all.
MATALIN: Rush is so skinny, isn’t he? Don’t you think he looks great?
KING: Is that sarcasm? Could have been our JFK, coulda had it all, or was he somebody you looked at — if we were having this conversation ten days ago — is he somebody you looked at as a player going forward?
MATALIN: Our JFK has to do some things that JFK, the real one, did, which was he was a supply-sider, he cut taxes, he increased defense spending. They like to claim him but they won’t claim any of his policies today. No, our resurgence is going to be based on those very ideas that he represented.
RUSH: Okay, given that, I’m going to change the sound bite order. We’ll go to 17, 18 and 19 next. But first, Mary Matalin very smart and those aspects of JFK we all like, he did cut taxes, he was a supply-sider, but that’s not what I meant. This little episode illustrates something very important. JFK makes a piker out of Mark Sanford, Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer combined when it comes to adultery while in office. JFK set the record. There is nobody who can even come close to JFK in terms of running around, cheating on his wife, every trip he made. So here’s Sanford with one babe that he loves down in Argentina. He’s a good-looking guy, rumored to be part of the presidential mix of 2012, oh, he could have been our JFK. Nobody gets it because that’s not what they think of when they think of JFK. So successfully has all that been scrubbed from the frontal lobe consciousness of inside-the-Beltway types that they don’t get the joke, and maybe it’s they’re just not smart enough to. I don’t know.
To me it was hilarious; it was quite funny; it was poignant and it was good. To see these people not get it is sort of astounding or maybe they’re purposely not getting it. Now, she was talking about our resurgence is going to be based on the very ideas that Kennedy represented. Let’s go to three sound bites here. Meet the Press Sunday morning, three liberals are discussing the future of conservatism. Two of them are called conservatives. One is David Brooks, the other Mike Murphy. Now, they’re called conservatives on this show, but they’ve actually sort of tilted to the left here. Let’s see, David Gregory says, ‘David Brooks, how does this Republican Party of the future chart a new course? If you look back historically from Nixon to Reagan, to George W. Bush, in each case, it was not only a kind of indictment of the past, but also a charting of a new course in the future of the Republican Party.
BROOKS: They have to learn to talk to people in densely populated parts of the country and to young people and so the answer to those problems are the same, they have to learn to talk the language of community and common endeavor. It’s been too much individual profit tax cuts. It has to be community, what we can do together, including in some cases government.
RUSH: So we have to adopt the language of the left. Too much individual, too much talk about profit, too much talk about tax cuts, we have to start talking about community and what we can all do together, and governing that way. Learn to talk the language of community and common endeavor. The next liberal Republican was Mike Murphy, and Gregory asked him to address what Brooks said.
MURPHY: We have to modernize conservatism. It may take a bit of a meltdown before we come back and I think we should have more social Libertarianism and maybe not a clear unerring defense of perfect capitalism at all times.
RUSH: Okay, so Mike Murphy says, look, we gotta get rid of the social issues. And this is a mantra, by the way, among liberal Republicans, the country club blue bloods. We gotta get rid of social issues, they’re killing us. We gotta get rid of them. We need more socialism, libertarianism. Do what you want, we’re not going to comment on it; we could care less. And we gotta stop talking about perfect capitalism, and we’re not going to have — so we gotta, you know, adopt the language of the left. Do what you want to do, as long as you do it, just have fun at it, and we gotta understand the role of big government and not so much capitalism in the success of the country. E.J. Dionne, Jr., was next, and he, of course, who has Republicans’ best interests at heart — ahem — was asked, ‘E.J., how do you size up the Republicans?’
DIONNE: What you’re talking about is a need for a wholly new conservatism. And to go back to Sanford for a second, what really disturbs me most is what he did in his public life, the notion that you could turn down the stimulus money that was basically designed to help the poorest people in South Carolina. No one paid as much attention to that as they should have, and now we’re doing all this stuff on his personal life.
RUSH: Yeah, there’s E.J. Dionne. Now, E.J. Is really, really looking for conservatives to triumph again. He really wants conservatives to come back. So he said that Sanford’s affair was a distraction from his real crime, which was turning down the stimulus money, and that’s really going to enable Republicans. The Republicans start talking big time on stimulus, oh, yeah, that will launch them back into power. Right. By the way, the stimulus money was not designed to help the poorest in South Carolina, it was to expand the federal government and Sanford knew that this stimulus money would cost him money in the end because all these things that he was going to be mandated to do with the federal money would run out someday, like increased unemployment compensation benefits and so forth, that the state would eventually have to come up with. Sanford was right refusing the stimulus money. This is what I was talking about earlier, the fracture that has occurred within conservatism which makes a comeback an even more arduous task. It can be done, and it will be done.