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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail since Fox News six o’clock show last night Special Report with Bret Baier the Fox All Stars. I was dumped on last night by Mort Kondracke and Charles Krauthammer happened to agree, and I had a lot of people e-mail me about this asking what I was going to do about it. My first instinct was to ignore it, but I’ve rethought that and I do have some comments about it, and I think it’s a classic example of inside-the-Beltway-itis, that somehow — no matter how smart you are, no matter how brilliant you are, no matter how often you are right — there’s something about living, working, and breathing inside the Beltway that makes you have a perspective, or unable to have a perspective identical to people who are living and working outside that place every day in various parts of the country. Here’s Kondracke first. Bret Baier said, ‘The House Speaker and House majority leader wrote an op-ed, Mort, and this is where Steny Hoyer and Pelosi called all of you going to town hall meetings and all of us who oppose their health care plan ‘un-American.”

KONDRACKE: Look, it was bad form for the Code Pink ladies to disrupt congressional hearings and raise a racket against the Iraq war. It is just as much hooliganism to have these right-wingers or whoever they are, uh, barge into these meetings and preventing a reasonable discussion. And I’m amazed at how chicken the Republican leadership is about saying, ‘Look, you guys, calm down. Ask tough, probing questions of these congressmen, embarrass them if you like, but don’t shut the place down.’ I think that the leadership is afraid of Rush Limbaugh, frankly, because Rush Limbaugh is encouraging all this stuff.

RUSH: I am not encouraging ‘all of this,’ and the only incivility that has happened occurred after Obama dispatched the SEIU to places like Mehlville outside St. Louis and other places. So these people get it in their template that I’m causing this and that the Republicans are going to blow it. Here’s Krauthammer essentially agreeing with what Kondracke just said.

KRAUTHAMMER: What is happening is this is causing a backlash. It’s completely unnecessary. It’s shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to demonstrate, you want to shout, you do it outside carrying signs. When you walk inside, you ask, uh, questions. This can have two effects. A public opinion is going to make people, if anything, rather unsympathetic to those who oppose the bills; and secondly, it’s going to give a great excuse for the Democrats when Congress returns to push a partisan bill with no Republican support and say, ‘It’s because the opposition is simply oppositionist without any arguments and is acting in an irresponsible way.’ This is a disaster and it shouldn’t be happening.

RUSH: A disaster? It’s a disaster? It’s the first time in the Obama administration we have a chance of stopping some of this stuff. It is this ivory tower, ‘Let’s be polite. Let’s not make them think that we are what they lie about us being all the time. Let’s be civil and let’s be quiet.’ That’s how we got the stimulus bill, and that’s how we got cap and trade passed or card check, whatever they passed in one of the houses. That’s how Obama’s gotten away with everything he’s gotten, people sitting down, shutting up, not saying a word out of fear. We gotta be ‘civil.’ We gotta pretend here at Oxford and we’re having a debate about this. These people showing up at town hall meetings are scared about losing their liberty and freedom. They ought to be a little up in arms about it!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I wonder if the Specter town hall today was civil enough for Mort Kondracke and Charles Krauthammer. Both those guys still haven’t gotten over the fact that the people stopped amnesty. They were all for it. Folks, this is a great illustration of the disconnect that exists with the Beltway and outside the Beltway. This is not the Oxford Debating Society. We don’t have two propositions and at the end of the day which one wins doesn’t matter. It’s not an academic exercise going on out here. There’s not an effort here to show who’s the smartest, most well behaved person in the room. This is about saving the United States of America as it was founded, standing up and fighting against the most radical leftist leadership this country has ever had.

And there are people in increasing numbers… Despite these town halls, Obama’s numbers continue to fall. I don’t know where this ‘backlash’ is. The backlash is against Obama. The backlash is against Democrats. If there’s ever a time for people to get a passionate arousal about something, it’s this. And you can hear the questions. It’s not the questioners, it’s not the participants at the town hall that are causing the problems. It’s the members of Congress and the Senate who don’t have the answers or who are lying to their constituents. You know, here’s the thing about this. If I had a plan… Let’s say I believed in this health care plan, just as a hypothetical. If I really believed in this, I would want meetings. I would want to talk to people who are dead wrong about it, who have been lied to, who’ve been misled. I’d spend as much time as I had to, to convince them how wrong they are and how wonderful the plan is.

I’d become an expert on it. If I really believed it, if I loved it, if I thought this country needed it, it would be my number one cause — and when I saw this opposition, I’d say, ‘These people are getting bad advice. They’re being advised things that are against their best interests,’ and I’d be out there and I’d be talking six hours per meeting, if I had to, and I’d be listening, calmly telling them, ‘No, you’re being lied to about that. Here’s what’s going to happen.’ And I’d go to page whatever in the bill and say, ‘See, this is great!’ They can’t do any of that. They can’t sell it. They can’t speak passionately about it. They can talk about it in a sort of detached academic way, a philosophy way, but they can’t tell you about the bill. They can’t persuade you. They can’t tell you how good it is, how great it is, because they’re behind the eight ball. They’re behind the curve.

You are more informed than they are, and it’s got ’em bugged. So when inside-the-Beltway people even on our side start worrying about civility and behavior, when there hasn’t been any incivility… There hasn’t been anything other than constituents wanting to know what the hell is in this bill, what the hell members of Congress intend to do. What are you planning for us? Why don’t you just leave us alone? Why do you have to do this? We don’t want this. And they see no response to that. They see that… Well, no sensitivity to that. They see this bill being rammed down their throats regardless. If anything should make ’em mad, this should be it. Like I said, I’m sitting idly by and marveling at the elegance of Barack Obama gave us a worthless, destructive, misrepresented stimulus bill; sitting idly by and being civil and showing that we can act in a more polite way than the other side.

We sat back. We didn’t voice any opposition to it. Well, some of us did, but you get the drift. Now we’re saddled with this worthless, damaging, destructive piece of crap that is the exact opposite of what it said it was going to do! It’s not about creating jobs. Just the opposite. All the bailouts, we sat around, didn’t do anything. We were told we had to do this or the country won’t survive the next 46 hours. ‘Okay, go ahead and do it. We trust you,’ and then here comes cap and trade, and here comes union card check and then next year we’re back they’re going to run amnesty down our throats. They’re not stopping and people are saying, ‘Stop,’ and they’re doing so with passion. And it’s not causing any backlash. It’s caused problems for the Democrats. You’ve got Pelosi out there saying she’s seeing signs of swastikas all over. We have Dingell saying he hasn’t seen anything like this since the KKK.

We have ‘socialist’ is now the N-word. I mean, there is an implosion taking place. There are people in this country who have been working overtime to inform the American people what’s on tap, what’s ahead of them via what’s in this legislation. When people on our side happen to run their hands together and say, ‘Oh, no, this is looking bad! This is going to help Obama.’ Obama can’t help Obama on this! The more he’s out there, the worse it goes, ’cause he doesn’t have a bill.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We go now to El Segundo, California. Ron, you’re up first today. It’s a very important role the first caller of the day plays. I hope you’re up to it.

CALLER: Thank you, sir. Super, mega, America’s ticket, Palin-Limbaugh 2012, CPAC speech dittos from the left-wing (garbled) California (garbled) and happy 21st (garbled) anniversary to you.

RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.

CALLER: And one major asset that this Obama administration has given us is it’s shown the conservatives of the conservative movement who the true conservatives are in our party. Newt Gingrich rejecting your comment that you wanted Obama to fair, saying, ‘Ohhhh, we can’t have our president fail’ and all that stuff, and Colin Powell coming out and rejecting you and all that stuff. This is the true liberal wing of the Republican Party at work. When Krauthammer says, ‘Oh, we can’t be offensive and we can’t protest’ and all that stuff, this is the softy, the Fig Newton wing of the Republican Party. What’s your thought on that?

RUSH: Well, you’re talking about things other than Krauthammer and Mort Kondracke yesterday. When you talk about my comment ‘I hope he fails,’ I wasn’t surprised I was out on a limb by myself on that. I mean, this was within, what, two weeks of his immaculation, and our party and people who want to be leaders in the party — forget the conservative movement. The Republican Party and conservative movement are two different things. People in our party who have future political aspirations, ‘Oh, no, God, don’t say that! Of course we want the president to succeed,’ and they said this out of fear. A historic president, first black president. Hoping the president fails, most people are going to think that means we hope the country fails and we can’t hope the country fails. It’s just fear. It was just cowardice.

I mean, Newt, I’ve heard him say now that he misread just how radical this man is and his agenda. But, look, that’s what being on the cutting edge of societal evolution is all about. It’s what being a pioneer is all about. It’s what being fearless is all about, and I think that all conservatives in this country don’t need any other examples — don’t need any new examples — of how our moderate liberal Republicans are.

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