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Oct. 17, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
October 17, 2005, Monday, Hour #2
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I I cannot believe this.
I'm getting emails from people out there who disagree with me.
Disagree with me about this business that what would happen if we'd pull a troops out of Iraq and just come home.
Frankly, I'm surprised when anybody disagrees with me, but especially over this one.
That's even worse than I thought out there, the perceptions that people have.
Anyway, greetings and welcome back, folks.
Ditto Cam is on.
It'll be on for the remainder of the program.
We are at the EIB Southern Command today.
The telephone number is 800 28282, and the email address is rush at EIBNet.com.
If you are just uh joining us, uh a little object lesson here in the previous uh half hour of the program.
I just asked a question what is the left define as winning the war?
And that basically, and a lot of people do that.
Hey, let's just pull a troops.
Come on, just pull a troops out.
Let's just come home and and and admit that we can't do what we want to do in Iraq and save these lives and come on home.
And the danger is that there are people running for president or want to be president on the Democratic side who'll do just that.
And if that were to happen, the terrorist attacks would increase, the terrorists would become emboldened, uh the they would they would have can you imagine the worldwide PR of slaying the world's superpower?
First in Somalia, then in Sudan, then in Iraq, and then watch what would happen to Afghanistan.
The Taliban would move back in and nobody to stop them, they'd move back in and take over that country.
But let me take it another step further, folks.
If we pull out of Iraq, bring the troops home, try to go back to the pre-9-11 mindset and lifestyle.
The message to the rest of the world is this.
The terrorists will be able to hold hostage any nation that is our ally.
If you trade with the U.S., if you help the U.S. in any way, we're gonna bomb you too.
They've already taken Spain out of the equation.
They the terrorists, they own Spain.
Can we call a spade a spade?
And they're close to owning France.
You know, thank thank goodness for Tony Blair and the Brits not putting up with what's going on in that country.
But this I mean, the terrorists said you you don't get out of Iraq with the supporting the Americans gonna blow you up, and they did, and so the Spaniards elect somebody to get them out of Iraq, and now they're they're they're they're they're basically owned locked stock and barrel by the terrorists because the terrorists know they can threaten them with anything.
And the terrorists know that Spain will not take an effort make an effort to stop them.
Now, if you think it's gonna be easy to be a disgraced superpower in the world and have you personally not affected by it, you have got some serious thinking to do.
And this is why the people on the left are not doing serious thinking about this at all.
They don't even like the fact that we're a superpower.
They probably would love it if we were knocked down a notch or two.
But that's because they're so obsessed and with with hatred for Bush that they can't get beyond that.
And I know that some of them, some of the some of the far out left really don't like us being a superpower, and I think the world would be a lot safer if there wasn't a lone superpower because our loan superpower status is what makes us the target.
And that is simply untrue.
We're not the target because we're a superpower, we're a target because of our way of life.
And we are despised, and they want us dead.
They don't just want us mollified and not bothering them.
They want us dead.
And until a lot of people don't want to face that, that's chilling to face.
A lot of people don't want to get up every day.
There are people that want to wipe us out.
There are people that that instead will wake up and say, you know, maybe we can change their attitude about us if we just show them that that we don't present a threat to them anymore.
I.e.
appeasement, the same way the left.
I mean, I'll tell you what, if if uh if John Kerry and the rest of the Democrats had had their way, there'd still be a Soviet Union, there'd still be a Cold War going on, and we'd still be prisoners to that thing.
Uh this is these are huge stakes, uh, folks that are going on now in Iraq, which is the war on terror.
Now you can get caught up in saying, well, should we have gone or should we not have gone as Bush lie where there were no weapons amassed as that's all that's irrelevant now, other than to people who try to want us want to try to score political points to regain their power and do whatever damage to the country they can do, either knowingly or unknowingly.
All that's irrelevant.
I was at um last December, almost a year ago, was down in charity golf tournament in uh Puerto Rico, a bunch of libs down there.
I don't know why it is, but I always end up surrounded by libs when I go places.
And I was surrounded by these libs, and I was outnumbered, but I was not intimidated.
I was I was feeling no fear.
Uh and it only takes about five seconds or ten of conversation to show the libs that they have no facts, all they've got's emotion, and they're facing somebody with facts, and that they they they got quiet all of a sudden.
But the big question I got was well, don't you admit, won't you admit that perhaps we went in there for the wrong reason and there were no weapons of mass destruction?
And I say, you know what?
For the sake of discussion, I will admit to you.
That's what you want to know.
That's that's what you want to hear.
That's what you think we can base policy.
Okay, yeah, there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, we went in there for the wrong reason.
Now what are we going to do?
And just the the the silence was was overwhelming.
Okay, so they think that they can win by simply getting people who, yeah, we win an if I didn't really believe it.
I'm just granting them their point to illustrate, okay, once they have their point, what do they have next?
They've got nothing.
Other than, well, since it was an unjust war and since we went in there on the basis of lies, we should get out.
All right, what are the consequences of that?
But to them, we are always on the wrong side.
We are the unjust, we are the ignoble, we are the immoral.
And in some of these warped people's minds, we deserve defeat.
We deserve these kinds of things because we need to be taught a lesson.
So it is a scary thought to ponder the left's version of victory, which is defeat, and their seeming ignorance about what the fallout from that will be when you've got twenty, over twenty years of terrorism history uh uh engaged against this country with literally no provocation whatsoever.
Now the left will say, What do you mean no provocation?
We support Israel.
Oh, fine, we'll support an ally.
We support a democracy, we're supposed to abandon him too.
Is that what you want to do?
Give in to every enemy demand, give in to every terrorist demand.
You think you'll feel safer and be safer after we do that?
Folks, I'm saying these people just they cannot be trusted with the national security of this country right now.
They just can't.
Unless some of them speak up and say, We got a plan and we want to deal with this seriously, and I haven't heard it from any of them.
I I it is too risky to trust them with any of this.
I mean, this is big stuff.
The stakes here are huge.
I mean, the truth is that this battle should have been joined 20 years ago or 10 or 15 or 5 or what have you.
Well, it has been five.
But we sat around and didn't do anything about it for so long, and finally we had no choice to do something about it, and even then, we have critics in this country who think it's all our fault in the first place, and that you know, we're we're botching it and we deserve to lose.
And I just think that the as people fail to ponder the results.
You know, they they think everything's a finite game, a zero-sum game.
The pie is never bigger or never littler, never smaller, and the enemy is can be appeased by simply us you know demonstrating, okay, we we'll admit we made a mistake, and we'll uh we'll pull out of there now.
I'd say uh when an aggressor sets the rules, that's the single biggest mistake that uh you can make.
I don't know how many of you watched the baseball games yesterday.
I'm gonna give you an analogy.
Last night, the uh in the early baseball game, St. Louis Cardinals against the Houston Astros, the Cardinals came unglued.
Now, as a Cardinals fan, I had a little sympathy for them.
The umpiring calls against the Cardinals in that game yesterday, the balls and the strikes were simply outrageous.
What was a strike against the Cardinals was called a ball against the Astros.
And there have been some other questionable calls.
Well, late in the game, Tony LaRussa, in an effort to fire up his team, uh, went out and argued and got thrown out of the game.
He's trying to do anything to get his team fired up.
Because it's one thing to sit there on the bench frustrated, it's another thing to get motivated.
So he went out, he got himself thrown out.
Jim Edmonds, who I happen to love, uh had a strike called him and nearly hit him in the head and the um called at a strike.
Edmonds gets thrown out with a three-two count on him in the eighth inning of a playoff game, unheard of.
Had to send in a pinch hitter with a three and two count to take Edmund's place.
Now, did you see any sympathy from the Houston Astros for the Cardinals over there?
How unfair the umpiring was to the Cardinals.
Did you see the Astros try to do anything to level the playing field?
You know, we feel bad for the Cardinals.
We want to win this game fair and square.
And now we see what the umpires are doing.
Did you see it the Astros moved in for the kill?
And so did the White Sox last night against the Angels.
Showed no quarter.
Teams falling apart.
Opposing teams falling apart, losing its cool.
Take every advantage you can.
Umpires screw up in your behalf, get more of it, ram it down their throats.
But how many of you were sitting, I wish the I wish the Astros were.
Well, that's the way the left is looking at the war on terror.
Except we're the umps, we're the bad guys.
And the terrorists are the good guys, and they're getting shafted by us because we're Mr. Big Superpower.
And we're being mean.
It's about time the field was leveled so that they had a fair shot at us.
Is absolutely when in fact it's the other guys that attacked us.
We haven't done diddly school.
We said for 20 years, folks, and bent over and grabbed the ankle, said, Hear it, hit the USS coal, hit our barracks and at Cobar Towers, hit our embassies, hit the World Trade Center, do whatever you want.
As long as you don't kill too many of us, we'll pretend it's not happening.
Then they kill 3,000 of us in a one day.
We can't bend over anymore, have to do something about it.
And even at that point, shortly after that, a bunch of liberals convene seminars.
Why do they hate us?
Does it matter why at this stage?
We can figure that out a couple years from now, after we've taken care of the problem.
As though figuring out why they hate us is gonna solve the problem, only if you're honest about the answer.
Why do they hate us?
They hate us because we're alive.
They hate us because we're alive, pure and simple.
These are nuts, folks.
These are absolute 14th century wackos.
Let them get hold of some nuclear weapons down the road, working with their friends in China or North Korea or Iran.
And then let's talk about appeasement.
Let's talk about surrender then.
This is serious, deadly serious stuff.
So we've got this move in Iraq on Saturday with the constitutional process unfolding, taking place.
Another sign moving forward, another bit of evidence of success, and damned if the left doesn't try to have to portray this as a big failure.
Because the next election, that's what really counts.
That's what really got to.
And they're worried and they're hoping at the same time for civil war.
So it's a little frustrating to sit here all these years and wonder why it is, either by accident or by design, that so many Americans on the left, knowingly or unknowingly, end up on the side of our enemies.
But as long as we have a vote, and as long as we can keep these people from the power positions of this country so that they aren't able to enact and implement some of their devastatingly perverted attitudes about all this.
We'll have to do it because the country's future's at stake.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back after this.
Don't go away.
You know, the left keeps changing the definition of success.
In Iraq and the war on terror, the Constitution passed, but the Constitution's now a problem.
Sovereignty occurred, but that's gonna be a problem.
The first elections happened, but that's gonna lead to a problem.
It's gonna lead to civil war.
You would think you would think that this is the first time in Iraq that the three factions, the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Kurds have ever disagreed with one another.
It's it's been historic the disagreement they've had.
That's why this constitution is so important.
Do you know there are three, at least I can think of three Islamic democracies, Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
And these guys call here and say, Well, you want to live under their constitution, huh?
Would you accept that?
Hey, we're not forcing our way of life on them, which is what we've always said we're not gonna do.
And of course, popular sovereignty, like we had this caller here talking about the mobocracy in Washington.
That's just because the left can't win elections.
When the left loses elections, popular elections, it's a mobocracy.
So we got a mobocracy going on over in Iraq as well.
They feel so destined to run things that when the natural order of things is upset, there must be something either criminal going on, i.e., Tom Delay, George Bush, Carl Grove, Scooter, Libby, Dick, Cheney, Halliburton.
Or there's mobocracy.
The people have lost control of their government or something.
Uh no, I'd visit France.
I wouldn't want to live there, don't speak the language, H.R., but I could probably learn.
France is one of those splits.
France is almost gone too.
France is under the gun.
I'm I'm telling you if you start thinking about this, you know, let these people threaten any of these nations that plan to help us or assist us in any way after if we pull out of here too soon.
Nobody's gonna have the guts to do it.
We'll truly be a loan power in that circumstance.
All right, let me um been debating all day whether or not to share this op-ed that I wrote with I guess I should.
I read another number of other people's op-eds.
Why not read mine to you in case you haven't read it here?
Because I do have the media is talking about it today.
Ron Brownstein on CNN and uh Nora O'Donnell uh on MSNBC and other places are talking about it, so I'll try to get it in here before we go to the break.
I may not have a chance to finish at all.
Uh what yeah, that's what that's what the audio sound bites are.
That's the audio sound bites.
Brownstein and O'Donnell talking about it.
Uh starts out there, and they asked me to do this last week after they heard a monologue on the program, so I did it and it ran today, and they didn't chop one word out of it.
I love being a conservative.
We conservatives are proud of our philosophy.
Unlike our liberal friends who are constantly looking for new words to conceal their true beliefs, and are in a perpetual state of reinvention, we conservatives are unapologetic about our ideals.
We're confident in our principles and energetic about openly advancing them.
We believe in individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, rule of law, faith, a colorblind society, and national security.
We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech, homeowner rights, and the war on terrorism.
And at our core, we embrace and celebrate the most magnificent governing document ever ratified by any nation, the U.S. Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes our God-given natural right to be free.
The Constitution's the foundation on which our government is built and has enabled us to flourish as a people.
We conservatives are never stronger than we are when we are advancing our principles.
And that's the nature of our current debate over the nomination of Harriet Myers.
Will she respect the Constitution?
Will she be an originalist who will accept the limited role of the judiciary to interpret and uphold the Constitution and leave the elected branches, we the people, to set public policy.
Given the extraordinary power the Supreme Court has seized from the representative parts of our government, this is no small matter.
Roe versus Wade is a primary example of judicial activism.
Regardless one's position on abortion, seven unelected and unaccountable justices simply didn't have the constitutional authority to impose their pro-abortion views on the nation.
The Constitution empowers the people, through their elected representatives in Congress or the state legislatures, to make this decision.
Abortion is only one of countless areas in which a mere nine lawyers in robes have imposed their personal policy preferences on the rest of us.
The court has conferred due process rights on terrorists, detained at Guantanamo Bay, and benefits on illegal immigrants.
It's rule that animated cyberspace child porn is protected speech.
Yet certain broadcast ads aired before elections are illegal.
It is held that the Ten Commandments cannot be displayed in a public building, but they can be displayed outside a public building.
And the court has invented rationales to skirt the Constitution, such as using foreign law to strike down juvenile death penalty statutes in over a dozen states.
For decades, conservatives have considered judicial abuse a direct threat to our Constitution and our form of government.
The framers did not create a judicial oligarchy.
They created a representative republic.
Our opposition to judicial activism runs deep.
We've witnessed way too many occasions where Republican presidents have nominated the wrong candidates to the court, and we want more assurances this time.
We want some proof.
Now let me stop there because I've got this ear splitting tones signaling a profit center break coming up, but I will conclude this and then share.
Oh, I'm a minute early.
I'm sorry, I was misreading the clock.
I should turn at a wrong angle.
So let me continue.
The left, on the other hand, sees the courts as the only way to advance their big government agenda.
They can't win national elections if they're open about their agenda, so they seek to impose their policies by judicial fiat.
It's time to call them on it.
And that's what many of us had hoped and expected when the president made his judicial nomination.
Some liberal commentators mistakenly view the passionate debate among conservatives over the Myers nomination as a crack up on the right.
They're giddy about splits in the conservative base of the GOP.
They're predicting doom for the rest of the president's term and gloom for Republican electoral chances in 2006.
As usual, liberals don't understand conservatives, and they never will.
The Myers nomination shows the strength of the conservative movement.
It's a crack down.
And now I will continue after the ear splitting tone and the EIB obscene profit break.
You're listening to Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence in Podcasting Network.
I just, you know, I laugh every time I see this.
Fox just replayed it.
The video from the Today Show last Friday, where they have their reporter out there in a canoe paddling around in the flooded rivers because it's so deep.
And right in the middle of her report about how bad things are, these two schlubs walk by, barely calf deep in uh in in water.
Uh her canoe's probably scraping the bottom of wherever she is as she's paddling right along.
And with this this comes in the context of, of course, the media accusing Bush of staging the uh conversation with the troops.
And yet, for every one of those allegations against Bush, we can come up with five allegations of the media, five bits of evidence of the media having actually staged things.
But it's just hilarious to see this.
Here's this brain dead reporter just out there waxing on the house right now.
How harmful.
Oh, it's really, really bad out here, Matt.
Yes, I'm having to panel around because it's flooding and filmed.
Here go these two guys is walking right in front of her.
Anyway, back to my brilliant op-ed.
Let me say, uh, folks, I know that to you, none of this is new.
You're well, Rush, what's the big deal about this?
That's the point.
The left's reaction to this, some of the media reaction to this I've been told about.
They're hearing about this point of view for the first time.
They really they that they're acting like this is stunning.
Why, it's fascinating.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who've wanted to interview me today over this.
And want me to expand on this.
And I'm like I always say, I've been here 18 years almost, a little over 17 years.
I have a website.
All of this that I say every day is plainly findable if anybody wants to.
Uh yet here I put it in the form of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and lights go on.
Whoa, whoa.
And by the way, I should remind you, one of the reactions was it was so reasonable.
It wasn't it wasn't knee jerk.
It wasn't any it wasn't extreme or mean spirited.
It was it was so reasonable.
So anyway, let me let me finish this.
The Myers nomination shows the strength of the conservative movement.
This is no crack up, it's a crack down.
We conservatives are unified in our objectives and we are organized to advance them.
The purpose of the Myers debate is to ensure that we are doing the very best we can to move the nation in the right direction.
And when all is said and done, we'll be even stronger and more focused on our agenda and defeating those who obstruct it just in time for 2006 and 2008.
Now, lest anyone forget, for now you have to understand when the mainstream press reads this, they've already got the House taken back by the Democrats in 2006.
Hillary is already the presumptive electee, presumptive president in 2008.
So here comes this op-ed, and they say, and they read that I say, sorry, we're just going to continue to grow our majorities in 2006-2008, and it causes a dead stop.
The worldview here is that a big chink has been thrown in the armor.
They don't quite get it.
Wow, I never thought of that.
Lest anyone forget, for several years before the 1980 election, we had knocked down battles within the GOP.
The result, Ronald Reagan won two massive landslides.
Real crack-up has already occurred on the left.
The Democratic Party's been hijacked by 1960s retreads like Howard Dean, billionaire eccentrics like George Soros, and left-wing computer geeks like Moveon.org.
It nominated John Kerry, a notorious Vietnam era anti-war activist as its presidential standard bearer.
Its major spokesman are old extremists like Ted Kennedy and new propagandist like Michael Moore.
Its great presidential hope is one of the most divisive figures in U.S. politics, Hillary Clinton.
And its favorite son is an impeached, disbarred, held in contempt ex-president Bill Clinton.
The Democratic Party today is split over the war and a host of cultural issues, such as same-sex marriage and partial birth abortion.
It wants to raise taxes but dares not say so.
It can't decide what message to convey to the American people or how to convey it.
And even its once reliable allies in the big media are not as influential in promoting the party and its agenda as they were in the past.
The new media, talk radio, the internet, cable TV, not only have a growing following, but have helped expose the bias and falsehoods of the big media.
For example, Dan Rather, CBS News, and the forged National Guard documents henched, or hence circulation and audiences down and dropping.
The American left is stuck trying to repeat the history of its presumed glory years.
They hope people will see Iraq as Vietnam, the entirety of the Bush administration as Watergate, and Hurricane Katrina is the Great Depression.
Beyond looking to the past for their salvation, the problem is that they continue to deceive even themselves.
None of their comparisons are true.
Meanwhile, we conservatives will continue to focus on making history by looking forward.
So we had a couple comments in the mainstream press about this today.
First on CNN during their American morning segment, Solod O'Brien talking to uh uh Ron Brownstein of the LA Times, also a CNN uh contributor.
And uh Soledad says, you know, uh Rush Limbaugh has an article he's written in a Wall Street Journal.
He says the Myers nomination shows the strength of the conservative movement.
This is no crack up, it's a crackdown.
We conservatives are unified in our objectives, and we are organized to advance them.
He's basically saying all this bickering among conservatives isn't a bad thing.
It's a good thing.
Shows how tough and strong we are.
It certainly shows how tough the conservative movement is.
I what was really interesting to me about reading that paragraph in particular, and I'm glad you cited that one, is you know, the implicit uh uh sentiment in the in the word crackdown is that President Bush is the one who has to be cracked down upon.
In in the in the way that Rush Limbaugh's phrasing in that article, he's sort of putting President Bush outside of the conservative movement and basically say it's the conservative movement's job to bring him back to heel.
This is a president who by and large, through his first term, rarely was at odds with them, pursued very many uh policy um uh initiatives both at home and abroad that were that were very attractive to conservatives, even at the price of polarizing the electorate and alienating Democrats.
And I think the Limbaugh article uh underscores the extent to which he has now gotten crosswise with it, and he is in a difficult position where he has to repair his standing both with his base and with the middle at the same time.
That's not easy to do.
Anybody want to tell me what's wrong with this?
You'll take a stab at what's uh there's one glaring thing wrong with this.
He's got some of it right.
The one glaring thing wrong about this is that they cannot get it through their heads that George Bush isn't on the ballot in 2008.
And so, whatever we're trying to do here vis-a-vis the crackdown, it's not oriented toward making George W. Bush more conservative.
And that's where they don't understand conservatives and where they never will.
We're already looking at 06 and 08, and we're looking at other candidates, folks.
They're looking at Bush as still the guy they have to run against, and they think that we're running against Bush, that we're positioning ourselves against Bush, and that's not the case.
We know Bush is in his second term.
We know Bush is going to do what he's going to do.
Bush is a known commodity, he's a known quantity.
He has a lot of love and respect among all of us on the right.
We have followed this man through thick and thin.
The war on terror is one of the primary reasons why it is crucial.
He has uh he has been the standard bearer on this.
Uh there have been some things that have not uh been quintessentially conservative.
But we know you don't get everything you want all the time.
It's why you keep battling for it.
But they can continue to focus on Bush at uh 08, 06 and so forth, but they miss the point about what we're doing and who we're looking at and where and why, and what the objective is.
I mean, the objective is to keep winning elections, and since Bush isn't on the ballot in 2008, uh, bringing him to heel is not what this is about.
But they think it is.
They still, even despite this, they still look at this as a huge rift.
Uh-oh, Limbaugh has thrown a dagger into the heart of George W. Bush and said, Shape up, buddy, or we're shipping out.
And that's not at all what the piece says.
And for this we should be grateful, in a sense, because we are we're going to continue to be, as conservatives, uh, have the ability to operate in the stealth-like fashion, because even when they watch us out in the open, they don't see what we're doing.
They don't see what we're about, they don't see what motivates us.
Stunning.
Let's go to Nora O'Donnell.
She was on MSNBC this morning, and this is uh little bit of her piece talking about uh what I had written regarding the nomination of Harriet Myers.
What's interesting is that when we heard so many conservatives uh talk about how disappointed they were with Harriet Myers and saddened by this nomination, and it shows how weak the president is.
Well, there's been somewhat of a turnaround, if you will.
We already see Rush Limbaugh today uh writing a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying, listen, this doesn't show a big crack up in the Republican Party.
This debate that we're having, in fact, shows that there's a crackdown and that we can, in fact, um have a strength in cons the conservative movement.
Uh Limbaugh writing there is no crack up, it's a crackdown.
We conservatives are unified in our objectives, and we are organized to advance them.
Uh Limba making the case essentially that the purpose of the Myers debate is to ensure that we are doing the very best we can to move the nation in the right direction.
Uh so you see some of the circling of the wagons.
I'm sorry, folks.
I I I can't explain that one.
All I can tell you is that once again, staring it right in the face, reading it word for word, they still get it wrong.
This was not circling the wagons.
This op-ed piece, nor anything I said last week that uh that that led to this op-ed is not circling the wagons.
Circling the wagons, what you do when you take a defensive position.
And when it when the engines are surrounding you and they're starting to launch into bows and arrows at you, you circle the wagons and so forth.
That's not what's happening here.
The left is circling the wagons.
The left can't figure out who they are.
The left's afraid to tell everybody who they are.
The stuff in this op-ed that should have awakened them, the stuff in this op-ed that should have opened their eyes, the stuff in this op-ed that should have made them go, whoa, wait a minute, he may have a point, has totally escaped them.
All they can see, no matter what they read is conservatives still mad at Bush, Limbaugh firing latest salvo.
Totally missing the point.
But I know you don't.
Quick timeout, we'll be back.
Stay with us.
All right, now I have a couple news stories here to make my point.
Make the point that I made in the op-ed.
First, the Washington Times, it's a piece by Donald Lembro.
Bruised GOP swinging back.
I mean, the upshot of his piece is that it's the Democrats who are in jeopardy.
Inside the Washington Beltway, things do look problematic for Mr. Bush and Republicans.
Your polls are weighed down due to, among other things, Iraq, gas prices, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But things are much different out in the real world, where next month the Democrats could suffer back-to-back gubernatorial defeats in New Jersey and Virginia, that would send a powerful message.
The GOP is very much alive and kicking.
New Jersey is by far the most stunning political development in months.
John Corzon, considered a shoe-in, suddenly in a dead heat with his opponent, Republican Doug Forrester, according to an independent WNBC Marist poll of 600 registered voters.
The latest numbers, along with corroborating internal polling data, have stunned political pros and shaken the Corzine campaign that once seemed to have a lock on the election in this heavily democratic state.
The race is driven by two huge issues Democrat corruption in Trenton and punishing property taxes.
Issues on which Mr. Corzine looks weak and that Mr. Forrester has hammered since day One.
It's corruption, it's property taxes.
Now, inside the beltway, the Democrats' mantra is that we have a climate of corruption going on in the U.S. House and in the Republican Party.
And yet out in the real world where we're about to have an election.
If you look at some polling data, you find that Democrats in New Jersey, people in Dem in New Jersey, period are fed up with high property taxes, which is happening throughout the Northeast.
I would love to get personal with you about this at some point.
Maybe I will someday.
About why I go to New York so rarely.
But that's for another day.
Bottom line is that a lot of people are fed up with it.
And if they could get out, they would, but most can't, so they can do only one thing, and that's try to change their leadership.
High property taxes, corruption in Trenton.
Then we move on to the Washington Post, where the headline, House GOP leaders set to cut spending.
House Republican leaders have moved from balking at big cuts in Medicaid and other programs to embracing them, driven by pent-up anger from fiscal conservatives concerned about runaway spending and the leadership's own weakening hold on power.
Now, I talked to Mike Pence, who's leading the House Republican efforts to cut spending for another uh an interview in the upcoming issue of the Limbaugh.
And he told me last week exactly what this story says.
That he's got more and more House Republicans joining his team after they go home on break and they listen to their constituents and they come back to me, you know, maybe you got something going here.
I want to get on your team.
So the number of Republicans in the House that want to get their arms around this runaway spending is increasing.
The uh Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee launched a public crusade for spending cuts last month, with its leaders using news conferences, TV appearances, and media interviews to all but accuse the uh GOP leadership of profligacy.
House leaders at first tried to crush the RSC or at least push its efforts back behind uh closed doors, but that didn't work.
So the efforts to uh neuter these House Republicans didn't work.
They're coming back and coming on strong.
And then from the San Francisco Chronicle, story written by their Bureau chief Mark Sandelau.
Listen to Democrats, and it's easy to say what they are not.
Let me, the headline says it all here.
As Republicans stumble, Democrats bumble.
Strategists say Dem's having trouble finding identity, offering compellitive, uh compelling alternative.
And that's because we've defined them.
They they cannot define themselves, folks.
They don't dare.
They do not dare.
So while the mainstream press looking at my op-ed wants to focus only on what it says about Harriet Myers, they miss the real point of the whole thing, which is that it's the Democrats that are cracking up, it's the Democrats that are in trouble, it's the mainstream press that's lost its influence, and we conservatives in the middle of a debate are doing nothing more than advancing our ideas honestly and openly and with optimism, passion, and courage.
And we're afraid of nobody about anything.
We're not afraid to tell people what we think, and we're not afraid of persuade them.
The Democrats can't even be honest with people about who they are and what they believe.
Grab a quick call.
David in Elkton, Maryland.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the program.
Mega diddos, Rush, and hello to my seven other brothers.
Thank you, sir.
That op-ed piece succinctly described all that I believe is conservative.
Everywhere you see the word in the print media, conservative uses an adjective.
There should be a link to that op-ed piece.
And Rush, I'm telling you, you need to put it along with it.
That's going to rank up there with the 35 undeniable truth.
Thanks for nailing it.
Thank you, sir.
I appreciate that.
I have been overwhelmed with the uh response to it today.
Uh uh probably more response to this op-ed than any I have written over the years.
Uh and well, I know why.
I mean, I I'm uh at first I was stunned because the people that have read this who listen to this program, this is nothing new.
They they hear this each and every day.
But they don't see it concisely in a thousand words.
They don't have and this is a format they can print and pass out and give to their college professors or lib buddies and uh and do a number of things.
So I just thank all of you who have uh taken time to share your thoughts on it with me.
Brief time out here.
The Rush Limbaugh program continues shortly.
By the way, did you hear that uh 30 people showed up, 30 anti-war protesters staged a demonstration Saturday outside uh a um California fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.
Did you hear that?
Of course you didn't hear that.
All you get these stories about how, oh, Hollywood left was excited, and Mrs. Clinton came to town.
Whoa, mama!
It was huge, it was big.
30 anti war members of the base of the Democrat Party showed up to protest Mrs. Clinton's fundraiser in 2005.
We shall continue.
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