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.
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.