RUSH: Norm in Cleveland. Norm, thank you. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Yeah, thanks, Rush. Real quick I gotta ask you this question. It’s been bugging me forever, since the time the commander-in-chief’s been in office. Is Obama brilliant or lucky? Which is it, sir? Well, which is it?

RUSH: By that you mean what? Do you mean he happens to become president at a time the American people have been so dumbed down they don’t know anything enough to stop him?

CALLER: That’s part of it, because the right —

RUSH: Or is he so brilliant that he’s able to talk them into being so stupid?

CALLER: Well, it’s a combination of both, from my perspective, because the right fights like Sonny Liston against Cassius Clay. You know, even with everything that you articulate every day in America, the people — and you call ’em low-information voters —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — are lower than… I can’t say the word on the air, but my God! Is he brilliant or lucky or is it a combination of both?

RUSH: Here’s the thing.

CALLER: We got two more years, Rush!

RUSH: Norm, what you have to understand… (chuckles) I know it’s frustrating. It is for me, too.

CALLER: Well, I care, man! I want to wake up and do assisted suicide myself.

RUSH: Wake up and…? No! No, no, no, no, no. Norm!

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: You don’t mean that. You don’t mean that.

CALLER: We’re doing it to America. Look, we’re all gonna die. For those of us that know, we die in alphabetical order under the Affordable Care Act. I mean, this guy could harvest body parts right now.

RUSH: I know.

CALLER: (unintelligible)

RUSH: Look. Norm, I get it. You’re wondering, “How in the world has this amount of destruction happened in six years with no push-back? How in the world has this happened?” So you’re asking, “Have the American people just been on this trajectory for total stupidity and he happened to get elected when they got there, or did he make ’em stupid?” Norm, no low-information voter realizes he is low-information. That’s number one. The stupid don’t know that they’re stupid. They have to be told.

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RUSH: They don’t. They don’t. The low-information people do not know that they’re low-information. The stupid do not know, do not realize they’re stupid, most of ’em. You have to tell ’em. And they will argue with you about that. So that doesn’t even sometimes accomplish it.

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RUSH: We had a caller in the last hour who basically, I think, expressed the frustrations of many of you. When did this nation get so stupid, was the crux of his question. Has it been trending this way and nobody saw it and it just happened coincidentally to peak at the same time Obama was elected, or has Obama sponsored the stupidity, promoted it, spread it and is taking advantage of it? And there are others who are asking is Obama just himself stupid, or I think the question has been asked, is he evil? I’m not comfortable using that word. ‘Cause it’s not gonna persuade anybody. He doesn’t come across as an evil guy, so using that word is not gonna accomplish anything.

But another way of saying it is, is he just incompetent. Is he really in over his head? Or is he really, really smart and conniving and manipulative and knows exactly what he’s doing? And does it matter why what is happening is happening? Does the why it is happening mitigate in any way that it’s happening? Let’s say Obama is stupid. Does that make this any easier to take? Not to me. If it’s by design, does it make it harder to take? Only in the sense that people don’t see that if that’s the case. But more and more people are starting to ask the question, including Democrats. And it’s not a comfortable place for Obama supporters to be, to have to defend one of these two premises. He’s either dumb, stupid, or he’s really intending to do all of this.

You notice the left is not happy either. They never are, no matter how much of what they want they get, they’re never thrilled. I mean, they’re just constantly agitated, constantly offended, constantly irritated, and if they’re not, they have to act like they are in order to feel like they’re normal. Because that is their normal state. So on both sides what you end up with is an extended misery felt by a lot of people.

Obama is a politician, comes and goes, hopefully. But it’s the people who elected the guy that really posed the problem. There has been an effort to dumb down the population of this country. It’s undeniable. It’s been part of the policy playbook of the left. It’s right out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. You know, make them dumb, make them stupid, make them dependent, and you own them. I can give you an example of how this manifests itself.

You remember early on in Obama’s first term there was something going on in Detroit where they were passing out vouchers for free rental properties or some such thing. It was a voucher to get you into a rental property free for a period of time, and there were very few of these vouchers available. And the tens of thousands that showed up vastly outnumbered the number of vouchers that were going to be distributed. A radio reporter at our affiliate in Detroit, WJR, went out and talked to the people about why they were there and then how they thought what was being made available to them was being made available.

(paraphrasing) “Well, where are we getting the money here for you to have a voucher to live rent free in some building here?”

“Oh, I don’t know. From Obama.”

“Well, where did he get it?”

“Well, I don’t know. Obama’s stash.”

I mean, it was clear there was no citizenship on display. It was depressing. Now, had I been president (and I said this at the time) had I been president and I’d seen this, I would have been mortified. I would have been embarrassed that I am presiding and leading a country populated by such stupid people. Obama revels in it, takes advantage of it and exploits it. All the leftists do. All the Democrats do. They have a perpetual view of average Americans that holds them in contempt. By design, by definition, a Democrat has to think the average person is incompetent and incapable. Has to. Somebody self-reliant, self-sufficient poses a threat to your average, ordinary Democrat.

So they’re not at all troubled. They’re not at all troubled with a constant influx of lowly educated, poor, hopeless, helpless refugees. They need a permanent underclass of dependent supporters. But to you and I, we see this as an all-out assault on the fabric and the foundation of the country. And we rightly ask ourselves, how long can the country survive with that increasing degree of detachment, ignorance and stupidity undergirding it. And then you ask, “Well, wait a minute, is this really anything abnormal or has this always been the case? Has this always been the percentage of the population that’s this way?”

And people are concluding no, that this is something different and unique. And I think they’re right. We’ve been through circumstances like this before. And there’s no desire whatsoever apparently anywhere in Washington to fix any of this. Washington simply sees what is and finds ways to exploit it for its own growth and its own perpetuation rather than roll up the sleeves and be offended or frightened or shocked or insulted or whatever by it all and demand to fix it and reverse it. And you begin to think, does anybody care whether we have a great country or not? Anybody leading it, do they care whether we have a great country or not? And the current crop of people leading it never have thought it’s great, have always believed that we’ve been pretenders to the superpower throne.

So our first caller, I think, just typifies the fear and the opinions of many of us ’cause I’ll throw myself in with you on this. The way I look at it, what I ask myself, okay, we elected George W. Bush twice. How did that happen? How did the same electorate in a matter of years lose half of its IQ? And then being honest, gotta go back and say, “Well, in 2000 we really didn’t win the popular vote. It was the Electoral College and the Florida aftermath.” And then in 2004 you gotta throw the fact in that Lurch just did not fire up a whole lot of people and the left had not succeeded, the media by that time, 2004, had not yet succeeded in totally poisoning everybody’s attitude toward Bush.

I know Bush was no Reagan conservative, but George W. Bush was in no way, shape, manner, or form of the same frame of mind as Obama and his minions. It just seems like such a stark contrast. It seems like we should have had three or four elections between Bush before we got to Obama, if we’re headed in that direction. But it just seemed to happen overnight, and I think people have been scratching their heads since 2008 about this, frankly.