RUSH: Now, I want to remind you people of something. As you know, I very rarely talk about myself, and when people want to talk about me, I discourage it. But this is February the 10th. I’d like to take you back one year and remind you what was going on in this country one year ago. One year ago and probably starting 13 months ago, it was January 16th when I said I hope Obama fails. 
That started it basically a year ago. Everybody, everybody was gunning for me. Obama and his minions in the White House had targeted me as the leader of the Republican Party. And, by the way, I made the CPAC speech as well. I don’t know if it happened yet, CPAC’s coming up this weekend, I believe, CPAC speech combined with ‘I hope he fails’ and so forth, and they were coming after me, they were blaming me for everything, urging Republicans not to listen to me. James Carville came out and they were running polls that I’m the leader of the Republican Party. They were doing everything they could as they’ve done for 20 years to destroy me. And it was me. The Republicans were nowhere to be seen, they were scared to death, they were not criticizing Obama, they didn’t want to be called racist and, you know, they were having meetings with him and they didn’t understand what radicals we faced in Obama. It was just one year ago.
Now, I know this sounds like an ego thing, it’s not. I’m trying to make a point here. Imagine if I had gone with the flow and said, ‘Okay, he’s a new president, deserves a honeymoon, we gotta give him a chance,’ that was the Republican call to arms, that was the conservative intellectual call to arms. We’ve gotta give him a chance. He’s a centrist, he’s well spoken, we gotta give this guy’s ideas a chance. I was the most public opponent to all this. What if I had gone along? If I had gone along, I don’t know where we would be. Would we have gotten health care in August? Well, that’s arguable, Snerdley. I don’t know that we would have. We might have had cap and trade. Would there have been a Scott Brown? The grassroots from which came the tea party, they were out there, too. They weren’t buying any of this. They weren’t going to give Obama a pass and look where we are now. I consider myself a grassroots person.
I’m not a political aficionado in some media capital. I’m a guy on the radio who has closer ties with the people who make this country work than I have with politicos, politicians, intellectuals and effete snobs in Washington and New York. And it’s this bunch of people that stopped this. It’s not any leadership people. They’ve gotten on board, they got on board late in the game, but I mention this because it’s never appropriate to give up your principles. It is never appropriate to silence yourself, if that means silencing your principles. A year ago the era of Reagan was over. A year ago there was one person, ‘The era of Reagan is over? No.’ Yesterday I said the era of McCain is over with that letter the Republicans sent to Obama. All of those things, it was just a year ago, and what if we had all caved? What if we had all just gone silent because a new president and he’s a centrist and can’t get any worse, Rush. Oh, I heard that, too, from Democrats. Can’t get any worse than Bush. Well, here we are. It is so much worse that the country as we know it is hanging in the balance.