RUSH: I need to illustrate a point. Yesterday there was really profound, great news out of the state of Wisconsin. In my mind, earth-shattering news. In my mind, it’s the kind of news that should have caused a political earthquake, and probably did. It’s just that nobody reacted to it. Here you have one of the bluest of blue states. You have a Republican governor, a conservative Reaganesque governor who was targeted twice for removal. They did everything they could to gin up hate, anger, tried to destroy his reputation, his career, and his life.
He hung in there. The state of Wisconsin instituted his policy reforms, deemphasizing the role of unions in the state, and the upshot of it is that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is rapidly falling, so new jobs are being created there. Wisconsin’s budget is now in surplus $912 million. There is a $1 billion government surplus in the state of Wisconsin. And Governor Scott Walker is going to rebate the money in the form of tax cuts to the people who he said own the money. He’s going to cut income taxes and property taxes, and he made the point that it’s not just a gimmick of budgeting or accounting. It’s the result of serious, significant policy changes.
Now, folks, what I just told you was not reported once anywhere in what you would consider mainstream media. It was not reported on one cable network, much less all of them. It was not reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the LA Times. It was reported in Wisconsin. There was an AP story on it, maybe some local papers picked it up, but just as a filler. On all the opinion shows on the Fox News Channel, there was not a syllable of this story discussed. And to me, for us as conservatives, Wisconsin and Governor Walker, I mean, everything that we want to happen, happened there.
We want people to stand up and defend themselves and what they believe, and when they do, we join them and help. We want somebody who believes in conservatism and can articulate it, who gets elected on that basis and then implements it. Everything that we are demanding as voters, everything that you as Tea Party members are demanding, Scott Walker did. The vast majority of everything you want, it’s happening in Wisconsin. A light has been turned on. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, if you will. The path has been illustrated here. Not one mention of this anywhere, that I saw, not one!
No, instead we got Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama ripping the Tea Party, defending Big Government, attacking me, attacking Fox News. And we’ve got other Republicans going on television in one degree or another agreeing with Chuck Schumer.
I think what Governor Walker has done in Wisconsin is a huge story. It’s a huge story for the Tea Party. It’s a huge story for conservatism. It is the way out. It shows what we can do nationally. Scott Walker’s not the governor of a Republican state. He’s the governor of a huge Democrat state. This is not supposed to be possible, what’s happened there. And it didn’t take that long, by the way, to generate a $1 billion surplus. And it didn’t take him long to call for a tax cut and return the money to the people who earned it. And he used that language.
The Tea Party is a huge story in American politics. It’s being ignored and tamped down and impugned and criticized because the Democrats are so afraid of it. That’s why they call them tea baggers. They laugh at them, make fun, but they’re scared to death of ’em. Precisely because they can’t control it, and precisely because the people in the Tea Party, the people who call themselves Tea Partiers, are independent thinkers. They are not the product of mind control or propaganda. They believe what they believe because they’re engaged. They understand it, they’re critical thinkers, and they can’t be talked out of it.
Now, they can be talked into staying home if the people they expect to represent them fall short, as happened in the presidential race in 2012, when four million of them didn’t vote. ‘Cause they were not happy with whoever it was, the Republicans nominate Romney, and everything else that emanated. The Drive-Bys are not reporting on Wisconsin. The mainstream media is not reporting on it. The GOP, you would think the Republican Party would be singing the praises of one of their own. Instead they’re all focused on Christie. They’re all focused on trying to save Chris Christie.