RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, there’s another thing that flyover country learned today, and this one is being totally missed inside the Beltway. It is being missed by everybody — I mean, practically everybody — and especially it’s being missed by Republicans. But this isn’t new, folks. Way back in the late fifties, early sixties (I forget the exact date), William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review. He wrote then of his conservative buddies who were the purebreds, the thoroughbreds, versus the (as he called them) “well-fed Republicans.”
We call ’em the Republican establishment. “Well-fed” is exactly right. He talked about how the well-fed Republicans referred to Buckley and the gang at National Review as extremists and they were dangerous and they were gonna destroy the party. I think this may be a shock to some of you to think that this battle in the Republican Party establishment versus conservative has been going on this long.
It has been, and it really is not just the Republican Party.
It is the Washington establishment. I think that word’s getting over done, overused, including by me. But Washington is its own fiefdom, and for the longest time has existed as odds with the American people, other than at election time. At election time everybody in Washington goes out and makes the people think that they’re number one and what they want is what’s gonna happen. “Vote for me, and that’s what’s gonna happen! Vote for me and that’s what you’re gonna get!
“Vote for me, and what I’m gonna campaign on, I’m gonna implement! I’m gonna govern this way,” and it never happens. You get to Washington, the culture takes over, the establishment takes over — and for the longest time it’s been the Washington establishment versus people. It’s a natural outgrowth of power. Inside the Beltway is the seat of power. It’s where all the money is, and there’s all kinds of hands trying to grab the money — and it’s a lot of money. It’s trillions.
It’s trillions, produced by you. It’s trillions of dollars produced by you every year that these people are trying to get their hands on. Many of them don’t work. They run think tanks, they run nonprofits, whatever. They have grants. Everybody’s trying to get their hands on the money, and people outside the Beltway resent that. We send the money to Washington for efficient use in running the government. “Don’t waste it. Don’t make people dependent. Don’t create a bunch of serfs,” and the exact opposite has happened.
So those inside the Beltway miss a lot that they don’t have any idea they miss it. One of the things that we learned out here in flyover country, and actually something we already knew, is that one guy with some supporters, one guy standing up can change everything. We learned that one guy standing up can stop the status quo in its tracks. Can you imagine in this last five years, if we would’ve had five or ten Ted Cruzes?
Can you imagine the difference? Can you imagine? If we had five or ten Ted Cruzes, we’d win a lot of debates. If we had 45 Ted Cruzes in the Senate, we’d come close to winning every vote — and that’s what everybody outside the Beltway sees — and I’m telling you, particularly the Republicans insides the Beltway do not. They look at Cruz, and they’re embarrassed, and they hope nobody thinks that they like Cruz — and I’m talking about the inside-the-Beltway, conservative media types.
It’s almost like Palin. “Oh, God, don’t know associate me with her! Don’t think I like Palin. No, no. I agree with you. Palin’s an absolute ditz! I agree with you. Cruz is a lunatic. I agree with you. Cruz is insane. I agree with you. Cruz is the downfall of America.” This is what they all say to each other, and they believe it. But what do we see? We see something totally different. The Republican establishment tells us that they don’t go to the media and make their case because the media won’t cover them.
Common excuse that I hear. “Well, Rush, we could call press conference every day. They’re not gonna cover it — or if they do, they’re just gonna distort it, misrepresent it, and lie about it.” Well, I’ve always said, “Reagan was able to get past ’em,” and so was Ted Cruz — and Ted Cruz, by the way, got covered by the way, media. Now, I imagine if I said this to an inside-the-Beltway conservative, “Yeah, he got covered by being a kook! Yeah, he got covered because the media saw an opportunity to destroy the Republican Party brand with him.
“Of course Cruz can get covered, but we smart people can’t. We substantive people can’t. But, sure, the media will cover every Republican kook that comes along.” That’s not how we see it. We see it entirely differently. We see how one guy — unflappable, courageous — standing up against that machine can in fact stop it. We also learned it’s gonna take more than one. We can’t do it all with one.
That’s why I say, “Imagine if there were five or ten of ’em, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee. Imagine 45 of ’em,” and that, of course, is the objective outside the Beltway. That’s the objective with attempt people who are not giving up and not going to away and not slinking away and cowering in the corner. They’re not. They’re energized. People involved in this know that you never win forever, and you don’t lose forever, either. It’s just that some people get depressed that they have to continue to fight every day.
I understand that. It’s easy to slip away. I always said, after eight years of Reagan, “Why in the world do the American people not realize it works?” I mean, it was a booming economy, people were going back to work, the country was no doubt the world’s lone superpower, brought down the Soviet Union. How in the world did people forget that and start voting Democrat again? The answer is very simple.
The minute Reagan was gone — actually while he was there, but the minute he was gone — even the Republican Party started revising the history of the eighties, and it became a depression, a recession, a decade of greed, decade of selfishness, racism, bigotry! “Reagan hated, gay people; that’s why they got AIDS!” I mean, it was a full-court press, because the left cannot permit the people to see on their own how liberalism fails. They must not allow that.
When liberalism is defeated, whoever engineers that defeat (i.e., whoever wins) must be destroyed. That’s why it’s an ongoing battle. It never ends. You never win it forever. Now, you can win it for a long time, as the Democrats have shown, something that we haven’t perfected.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Edie in Raleigh, North Carolina, as we go back to the phones. Hi, Edie. Great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for having me.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: A little background myself. I’m 48, female. I got active in politics for the first time along side the Tea Party, and I personally got to know the candidates that were running as a precinct chair of one of the largest voting precincts in North Carolina, and I want to tell you that myself along with many other conservatives feel betrayed by the establishment Republicans right now, and we feel that if it wasn’t for our hard work, that they would have never had 2010. They would be obsolete now, and that we gave it to ’em and we can take it away.
RUSH: Yeah, that kinda talk really irritates ’em because it says that you have power, and they don’t like that about you. The establishment doesn’t want you Tea Party types to have power, and they don’t want you to think you do. So when you say, “Okay, we gave 2010 to you, and we can take it away,” that just steels them in their resistance even more, and they say, “Okay, go ahead and try! Go ahead and try.” But you’re right about 2010.
Folks, that was the Tea Party.
The Republican Party had nothing to do with it, and I remain to this day bamboozled why the Republican Party, seeing what happened, did not make a beeline for that group of people and try to connect with ’em and bring ’em into the fold, and the same with Obamacare. You have a majority of the American people opposing that. It’s a made-to-order connection I was waiting for the Republicans to make, and they didn’t do it.
Don’t ask me why.
We’ve been through that.
I’ve given you every possibility. Edie, thanks for the call.