RUSH: Paul in Blue Island, Illinois, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Rush how you doing?
RUSH: Fine.
CALLER: Listen, I just want to challenge your assertion on, you know, politicians — I hear you say once in a while how smart and educated and informed American people are. I really don’t think they are. I think that some people are just not wired to understand politics. Obviously 60 something million wouldn’t have voted for Obama.
RUSH: Well, you know, this comes up periodically and has over the course of my 21 star-studded years here, and the cycle is, ‘Rush, you always say you’re going to put your faith in the American people to do the right thing at the end of the day.’
CALLER: Well, that’s a hard thing to do.
RUSH: I know, I know because people call: ‘Rush, most of the American people are stupid, they’re just ignorant, they’re stupid.’
CALLER: Well, listen, I’m a political junkie. I have conversations with people all the time. The Democrats and liberals I have conversations with seem to repeat something they heard somebody say or the talking points or they see a caption on the bottom of a picture, and then that’s their opinion.
RUSH: Well, I know. But you have to understand, liberalism is not an intellectual pursuit, it’s an emotional pursuit.
CALLER: Oh, I understand that. I understand that.
RUSH: Conservatism is an intellectual pursuit. I have to tell you I’m heartened by all of the polling data that shows Obama losing on every important agenda item he’s trying to push.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I understand not everybody is a junkie —
CALLER: It’s very frustrating, the conversations that I have with liberals, they always end up, when you throw facts and figures in their face, they always end up storming out of the room. I’m constantly having people walking out on me.
RUSH: Well, I know.
CALLER: You can’t dispute the facts.
RUSH: I know, I know, facts get in the way.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: They live in an emotional cocoon that they’ve constructed for a safe worldview, plus you couple it with the fact that they think they are the smartest people in the room. All they are is arrogant and condescending.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: It is frustrating. I have some liberal friends I love to tease and provoke and toy with. But I don’t really ever expect to persuade a bunch of them. They’re not a majority of the country. You think they are because of the election returns, but they’re not. They’re not a majority of the country, not yet. If they were — now, listen to me on this, Paul, I’m being dead serious. If liberalism were a majority of the country Obama wouldn’t have to start sounding like a moderate; he wouldn’t have to lie about what his agenda item is; liberals would not have to call themselves progressives or moderates or whatever, they could be openly honest about what they want to do. And they can’t afford to do it. One thing that’s happening now is that the congressional libs, the Barney Franks and the Pelosis are telling us and people don’t want it. They don’t like it.
I’m always going to have faith in a majority of the American people. I have to, because I’m speaking to them. If I thought I was just flapping my gums here for no reason, then I would, like I said yesterday, I’d hang it up, I’d let whoever wants to take over the show take over and I’d set out on spending all my money and making sure my last check was to the IRS and that it bounced. But I’m not doing that. There’s too much to fight for and hold onto. It’s under assault like it never has been internally, and to me it just revs and ramps me up even further. Look at how off the wall they’re getting. Here’s Patrick Kennedy. This is last Saturday in Providence, Rhode Island. He spoke about the need for health care reform at the AARP and the state nurse’s associations perspectives on health care reform. I read about this. I think there were 75 people in the audience. Here’s what he said, the first of two bites here.
KENNEDY: The protests that occurred a couple weeks ago on the mall is that they bordered on the really violent rhetoric. You know, it was, ‘Bury Obamacare with Kennedy’ and that is kind of ugly, ugly violent rhetoric. And that doesn’t serve our country. We’ve had it, and my family’s seen it up close too much with assassinations and violence in political life.
RUSH: Now, this, I mean even for this dud, this is a bit beneath the pale. Invoking the Kennedy assassinations and linking them to opponents of socialized health care reform? Bury Obamacare with Kennedy? That’s uncivil? I’m sorry, Kennedy had died, he was going to be buried. It was his signature issue. It’s a bad plan. It’s a bad policy. See, they will tell us what we’re doing that’s working. I know it was just one sign. One sign out of millions, but they’ll still tell us what’s working. This is my whole point. Too many people look at it and say, ‘Oh, no, oh, look at that sign, it’s destroying our cause, they’re focusing on that.’ They’re focusing on it for a reason. It scares ’em! It’s effective! The sign was effective. How many words is it? Four words and this guy is doing a town hall meeting about it, four words. Brevity is the soul of wit. The fewer number of words required to make a point the more powerful the point. He wasn’t through. He said the debate here is dangerous to the fabric of our country. So, no debate. The debate is dangerous. We’re supposed to just shut up, sit down, get out of the way so these Marxists can have their way with no opposition and do whatever they want to do. And it doesn’t work that way, Congressman Kennedy.
KENNEDY: It’s a terrible thing when people think that in order to get their point across they have to go to the edge of violent rhetoric and attack people personally and attack their motivations without attacking just the issue. When they go and stoop to the level of a coarse kind of vitriolic rhetoric that we’ve seen this debate turn up, it’s very, I think, dangerous to the fabric of our country.
RUSH: It’s all we need to hear. He’s just described his own side: ‘Go to the edge of violent rhetoric and attack people personally and attack their motivations without attacking just the issue.’ We are attacking the issue. We’re not attacking any of you people personally. That’s what you do. Simple case of projection.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I wanted to mention something to you, Patrick Kennedy talking about how that one sign out there, that he’s now worried about violence. ‘Bury Obamacare with Kennedy,’ that sign was from the American Life League. Somebody at the American Life League did that sign. They’re an anti-abortion group and in every picture of that sign you see the name of the group covered, in every picture of the sign that they put out there to try to besmirch it. But here’s their mission statement: ‘American Life League exists to serve God by helping to build a society that respects and protects individual innocent human beings from creation to natural death — without compromise, without exception, without apology.’ These are the people that did the sign. So it’s an anti-abortion group and it was all based on the fact that federal funds for abortion will be used in the health care plan that Senator Kennedy himself was the author of.