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March 20, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:38
March 20, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Well, we got a barn burner going today, folks.
You're in the middle of it, Rush Limbaugh in the barn while the barn's burning, trying to escape with no flames.
Under assault lately for not hitting back at Arnold Schwarzenegger hard enough when he called me irrelevant today on the Today Show.
Let's grab that soundbite again.
For those of you just joining us, Arnold Schwarzenegger interviewed today by Campbell Brown on the Today Show.
And I got to preview this by telling you that the last four or five times he's been on this show, they throw my name at him.
And up until today, he's been diplomatic.
He's not said anything.
He's answered it without referencing me in his answer and responding to the questions.
But today, I just think it sort of boiled over.
Here's the exchange.
Rush Limbaugh is saying that you're not really a Republican.
You're a Democrat pretending to be a Republican.
Rush Limbaugh is irrelevant.
I'm not his servant.
I'm the people's servant of California.
What they call me if it's a Democrat or a Republican or an Ascender or a change to this or that.
That's not my bottom line.
This is for them to talk about.
Yeah, you know, I got a little grief from an old friend, Susan, in Alamo, California, just mere moments ago, claiming that I was too nice, that I didn't hit back.
I'm being too gentlemanly here.
And the reasons he said that is because my initial reaction to this is he's just fed up with having my name thrown at him every time he's on this program.
He knows I'm not irrelevant.
How can I be irrelevant when my name comes up on this program all the time?
And he knows it.
I think what he was saying here, I don't care what Limbaugh said.
Limbaugh's irrelevant to the way I run California.
I'm not Limbaugh's servant.
I serve the people of California, and so forth and so on.
Anyway, the whole transcript of my response is up now at our new website, www.rushlimbaugh.com.
And make no mistake, as you read the whole transcript, I call him a sellout.
This is Reagan Ford.
It's exactly what happened to the Republican Party after Watergate.
Reagan came along and was trying to tell the party, look, Gerald Ford and that wing of the party is not the future.
And Arnold's wing of the Republican Party is not the future, folks.
It just isn't, and he can, you know, look at these.
He ran as a conservative or tried to make people think he was.
He was doing a number of things out there.
He's going to bring in new business, new investment.
He wasn't going to borrow any money.
All that's out the window now.
Calls tax increases loans because it's for health care?
That's as crazy as Clinton calling tax increases investments.
Nevertheless, that's that, and that's being discussed.
Also this, the Senate voted overwhelmingly today to end the Bush administration's ability to unilaterally fill U.S. attorney vacancies as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez's firing of eight U.S. attorneys.
Hey, anybody ever heard of separation of powers?
Who is it that's taking power?
What branch is taking power from what branch now?
All we've heard during the Bush administration is how they're trying to usurp all this power from the judiciary, usurp all this power from the legislative branch.
And what the Senate did today by 92 to 4 was pass a bill that canceled a Justice Department-authored provision in the Patriot Act that had allowed the Attorney General to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation.
Democrats say the Bush administration abused that authority when it fired the eight prosecutors and proposed replacing them with White House loyalists.
Folks, this is a serious transgression of the separation of powers.
White House loyalists?
You think this is unique that presidents put like-minded people in these jobs as U.S. attorneys?
This is all the result of Gonzalez not resigning, by the way.
This is all the result of Bush calling Gonzalez today and saying, we support you, buddy.
Hang in there.
And the White House started firing back, mounted a counterattack on all of this.
So the Senate, 92 to 4, that's enough to override any kind of a presidential veto.
All right, got a little global warming news.
There was a big hearing yesterday before a Henry Waxman committee.
A number of scientists showed up, but the drive-by media reports on this are, as they are on everything, totally one-sided.
The crazy world of Arthur Brown and the wicked witch of wherever melting.
And one of our three global warming update themes.
First, the Los Angeles Times today scientist accuses White House of Nazi tactics.
A government scientist under sharp questioning by a federal panel for his outspoken views on global warming today stood by this from yesterday, stood by his view that the Bush administration's information policy smacked of Nazi Germany.
We're talking here about James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA.
He took particular issue with the administration's rule that a government information officer listen in on his interviews with reporters and its refusal to allow him to be interviewed by national public radio.
This is U.S., Hansen told the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.
We do have freedom of speech here.
Daryl Issa, Republican, Vista, California, said it was reasonable for Hansen's employer to ask him not to state views publicly that contradicted administration policy.
Hansen said the Bush administration was not the first in U.S. history to practice information management over government scientists, but it's been the most vigorous.
He said he deplored the politicization of science, which is exactly what Hansen has done.
When I testify to you as a government scientist, why does my testimony have to be reviewed, edited, and changed by a bureaucrat in the White House?
Sitting beside him is one of those bureaucrats.
Hansen was talking about Philip Cooney, chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality from 2001 to 2005.
Cooney is an official now with the American Petroleum Institute before going to the White House.
He was an official of the API before going to the White House, acknowledged having reviewed some of Hansen's testimony as part of a long-standing practice designed to result in consistency.
Now, I have here Congressman Issa's opening statement, which is barely, barely touched upon in this L.A. Times story.
These are excerpts, and I want to read to you.
This is what Darrell Issa said to James Hansen.
You are known for embracing alarmist viewpoints, and you have embraced the idea that exaggeration is okay to get the public's attention.
But two climate researchers from the Royal Meteorological Society from the U.K. just this week said that this catastrophism and Hollywoodization of weather and climate create the real confusion in the public's minds.
You seem to forget that when you speak, regardless of your disclaimers, you are speaking for NASA.
And you have also not shied away from the political realm.
You publicly endorsed Senator Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.
Three years earlier, you received a quarter million dollar unrestricted cash prize from Teresa Hines-Kerry on behalf of the Heinz Foundation.
You've spent the better part of this decade consistently and publicly criticizing the Bush administration's climate change policies.
But at the same time, you're an advocate for campaign finance reform.
You make a point of condemning other scientists' affiliation with special interests while you're taking a quarter million dollars from Teresa Hines-Kerry.
I guess I'm a little confused.
Are you a scientist or are you a politician?
Because when I put together your political advocacy, and I hate to say it, but the partisanship of that advocacy, I'm inclined to think that you, Mr. Hansen, are the one who's politicizing science.
Darrell Issa is right.
It's unfortunate the majority, the Democrats, have decided to place Dr. Roy Spencer at the tail end of this hearing and without any company, which they did.
Four hours into the hearing, Roy Spencer testified, as you know, he called this program to discuss all this global warming stuff.
He's a skeptic.
He is from University of Alabama at Birmingham.
And I have his opening statement here.
Not one story that I've found mentions Roy Spencer's testimony.
And Roy Spencer said that it was good, and he enjoyed it.
And it was effective.
But it didn't make the drive-bys because their deadline was come and gone.
And the committee purposely waited till the very end, four hours after the whole hearing started, to get to Roy Spencer.
I'll give you some excerpts of what he said when we come back.
Opening statement now from Royce Spencer, testimony from yesterday before the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, James Hansen from NASA was first.
Now, remember, Hansen started out by saying the Bush administration is a bunch of Nazis trying to control what he says, denying him free speech.
Roy Spencer, I've been performing NASA-sponsored research for the last 22 years.
Prior to my current position as a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama Huntsville, I was senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and was an employee of NASA from 1987 to 2001.
Now, keep in mind it'll run through the Clinton years.
During the period of my government employment, NASA had a rule that any interaction between its scientists and the press was to be coordinated through NASA management and public affairs.
Understandably, NASA managers do not appreciate first learning of their scientist findings and opinions in the morning newspapers.
It was no secret within NASA that I was skeptical of the size of human influence on global climate.
My views were diametrically opposed to those of Vice President Gore, and I believe that they were considered to be a possible hindrance to NASA getting full congressional funding for mission to planet Earth.
So while Dr. Hansen was freely sounding the alarm over what he believed to be dangerous levels of human influence on the climate, I tried to follow the rules.
On many occasions, I avoided answering questions from the media on the subject and instead directed reporters to John Christie, my co-worker and a university employee.
Throughout the management chain, I was politely told that I was allowed to say what I was allowed to say in congressional testimony.
In fact, my dodging of committee questions regarding my personal opinions on the subject of global warming was considered to be quite humorous by one committee in exchange, which is now part of the congressional record.
I want to make it very clear, I'm not complaining.
I'm only relating these things because I was asked to.
I was and still am totally supportive of NASA's Earth satellite missions, but I understood that my position as a NASA employee was a privilege, not a right, and that there were rules that I was expected to abide by.
Partly because of those limits on what I could and couldn't say to the press in Congress, I voluntarily resigned from NASA in the fall of 2001.
Even though my research responsibilities to NASA have not changed since resigning, being a university employee gives me much more freedom than government employees have to express opinions.
So he's saying, look, I disagreed with everything the Gore people were saying pretty much on global warming, but I shut up.
I followed the chain of command.
I'm not a James Hanson who's out there taking all this money from Theresa Keinstein's Carey's Foundation, getting involved in presidential candidacies and campaigns And violating the rules and the chain of command over what can be said.
So while you might think the political influence on our climate research program started with the Bush administration, that simply isn't true.
It has always existed.
You just never heard about it because NASA's climate science program is aligned with Vice President Gore's desire to get rid of fossil fuels.
The bias started when the U.S. climate research program was first initiated.
The emphasis on studying the problem of global warming, of course, presumes that a problem exists.
As a result, the funding has always favored the finding of evidence for climate catastrophe rather than finding evidence for climate stability.
This biased approach to the funding of science serves several goals which favor a specific political ideology.
One, it grows government science, environmental, and policy programs, which depend upon global warming, remaining as much a threat as possible.
Two, it favors climate researchers who quite naturally have vested interests in careers, pet theories, and personal incomes.
Three, and it provides justification for environmental lobbying groups whose very existence depends upon sustaining public fears of environmental disasters.
I'm not claiming that a global warming science program isn't needed.
It is.
We do need to find out how much of our current warmth is human-induced and how much we might expect in the future.
I'm just pointing out that the political interference flows both ways, but not everyone has felt compelled to complain about it.
Roy Spencer, in his opening statement yesterday, testimony on global warming before the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, and I only mention this to you because you will not read a word about what Roy Spencer said because the Democrats kept him all the way to the end of the hearings after four hours, long after Drive-By media members had left, having gotten what they wanted from James Hansen, who was up earlier in the hearing.
Another LA Times story, congressional hearing heats up over changes to climate reports.
And I go through the whole story here, but it doesn't mention Roy Spencer at all.
He's simply not mentioned in any of the Drive-By media accounts that I have.
Now, there is one exception to that, and that is, what is this?
This is why didn't you get print page?
Does it not?
This is either the New York Sun or the Washington Examiner.
And I'm not sure.
Well, may not even.
Oh, it's an Alabama newspaper.
I'm sorry, it's an Alabama AL.com.
Scientists cites pressure during Clinton years.
And this story does mention what I just told you about Roy Spencer, but it's a local paper covering their local guy.
None of the drive-by media dared mention Roy Spencer, who, oh, full disclosure, has appeared on this program.
He called to buttress a point that I was making about all this global warming panic and so forth.
His expertise, as he described to us, was measuring precipitation.
And the one thing that he says is never factor is the role precipitation plays in global warming, cooling, and all these things.
Not much in the models because you can't predict it.
And you can't measure it.
He said, we don't know how much it rains or snows any day of the year.
We don't have the ability to measure it all over the globe.
And it's a factor.
And since we don't know how to measure it, how much there is, it's something that's relevant that's absent from all these models.
And that's what he called to tell us.
All right, back to the phones.
John in Columbus, Ohio.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello.
Hey, I just had heard a while back when you were talking about these 4 billion people that have this $5 trillion to spend.
I don't really understand what the big hullabloo is about that, because that average is about $3 a day per person.
I don't know how much.
Well, that's one time.
The point of the story was what he's calling about.
There was a story early on in the program that the 4.5 million people in poverty in the world today represent a $5 trillion untapped spending market.
And I said, yeah, well, how can it, if they don't have the $5 trillion, who's going to give it to them?
Where are they going to get it?
They're clearly not able to produce it themselves because they live in tyrannies.
They live under dictatorships and live in socialism.
Or they live where there is no government, just out there in the wild.
And you're calling to say, well, it wouldn't be much to give them $5 trillion, just $3 a day from every human being on the planet.
No, That's not what I'm saying.
What are you saying?
I'm just saying is big numbers sound impressive, but what's the relevance of it?
Because $5 trillion sounds like a lot of money until you divide that by the number of people involved.
And it's not going to be a heck of a market for anybody.
Because I'm assuming that's based on an.
Oh, I see.
I see.
You're saying that to give $5 trillion to 4 billion people would only result in them having $3 a day.
Right.
Or $1,200 a year.
Right.
And, of course, what are they going to spend that on?
And how's that going to be?
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Okay.
It's not going to buy a lot of cars or even blue jeans.
Right, Yeah, okay.
I got it.
I got it.
You're right.
Well, that's an interesting way to look at it.
The more fascinating news is what I followed up with.
It'll be on the website, by the way, as will the entire transcript of Dr. Spencer's testimony before the committee yesterday.
I wanted to mention that to you, the whole thing in total.
But the notion of giving 4.5 million people $5 trillion, we've probably done it.
You know, the dirty little secret is over the years, but we've done the equivalent of it, and where has it led?
It hasn't relieved anything, has it?
It never will, will it?
I wonder why giving people money will not solve their problems.
Anybody got any ideas about that?
Ha, welcome back, El Rushbook, Cutting Edge Societal Evolution.
Now, before we get back to the phones, one more thing about James Hanson.
If you are a regular listener, we have been chronicling this guy.
This guy has been a malcontent on global warming while working at NASA.
He has been out under protected status granted by the Drive-By Media as the world's foremost authority in government attacking the Bush administration while still in the government.
And I will tell you this, as a citizen and as a taxpayer, a big taxpayer, I am tired of James Hansen acting as if he speaks on my behalf.
And I am tired of James Hansen using his position to advance phony science.
Who died and named him the boss?
And I'll tell you who died and named him boss.
The Drive-By Media named him boss.
He is the largest administration official, the most prominent, outspoken critic, and he's no different than these scabs in the Justice Department or the scabs at the Pentagon or the scabs at the State Department, the scabs at the CIA trying to destroy this administration.
Remember the name, James Hansen, because he's no different than any of these other people who are trying to sabotage the work of this administration while being a member of this administration.
He pretends to be a victim when we all know that because he is loved by the liberals and the Democrats, he is untouchable.
Just as Fitzgerald is untouchable, just as whoever it is in the state, Armitage is untouchable because Armitage is opposed to the Bush foreign policy.
But the fact of the matter is that James Hansen is still living off taxpayer dollars and whatever money he can grub from Teresa Hines-Kerry and her foundation and any others like it.
And you would expect there to be some accountability for his actions.
If he wants to be a private citizen, he can say and do whatever he wants.
And that's what Roy Spencer did.
Roy Spencer resigned from NASA, went to the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and that's why he speaks out now.
He shut up when he was a member of the administration, and NASA during the Clinton administration had views diametrically opposed to the vice perpetrator, Al Gore.
All right, here's Marcia in Syracuse, New York.
Marcia, I'm glad you waited.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hi, Rush.
Thank you.
How are you?
Fine.
Very well.
Thank you.
Well, I was calling in response to your discussion earlier about the report about illiteracy in the District of Columbia.
Yeah, it's terrible, isn't it?
One-third of the residents of the district are functionally illiterate.
Yes, they are.
And it is a terrible shame that adults in the nation's capital have such incredibly low literacy skills.
Well, it's one in five the countrywide.
It's a shame nationwide.
Yes, it is a shame.
Out of the total population of 30 million adults estimated to have barely marginal literacy skills, the system of adult literacy and instruction in the United States, both publicly and privately funded, is only serving about 3 million of those adults, so only about 10%.
We have a real disconnect between the Department of Education's own numbers on the estimate of this problem and the number of people who can be served.
By the way, for those of you in Rita Linda, literacy means you can't read.
Yeah, in the United States, some of these adults do have some very limited literacy skills.
It may not be that they cannot read or write altogether, which would be the definition that you would see in, for example, developing countries.
But here in the U.S., most adults do have some rudimentary literacy skills, but they don't have the skills they need to be fully effective in society as workers, as family members, to be able to take care of their health care concerns and so forth.
I can see where that'd be.
I mean, if you can't read a label on a bottle of cleaning fluid, you don't know whether it's dangerous or not.
Exactly.
If you can't read the nutrition labels on food, you don't know if you're violating your diet or what have you.
I know it's a problem.
I'll tell you something, Marcia.
You sound like you have some officialdom in this, like it's a cause for you.
Is that right?
That's right.
I work for ProLiteracy Worldwide, which is an international organization, nonprofit organization that helps adults to become literate.
Where do you get your funding?
Our funding is entirely philanthropic.
We do not receive any federal funding at all, although many local literacy programs do get some funding through the Workforce Investment Act.
What about state funding?
Do you have access to that?
You do.
We do not at ProLiteracy, but again, local literacy programs do get some of their funding through states, which appropriate additional funds over and above what the feds appropriate.
But as I said earlier, even taking all of that into account, including donations from people and corporations and foundations, we're still only able to provide instruction to a very small percentage of the people who need it and want it.
All of our programs report significant waiting lists.
You headquartered in Syracuse?
We are, yes.
All right.
Now, here's the, you know, the way this impacts me, I'm an American, and I have full knowledge of the greatness of this country and the wealth, the opportunity, the prosperity that's been achieved in this country that exceeds every other civilized society in history.
And when you read that a third of the adult population of the nation's capital can't read and one-fifth of the nation's population can't read, and then you couple it with all the money spent on public education.
Yes.
I have to quit, you know, you want to get to the root problem in order to solve it.
And it seems to me that we've heard the horror stories of graduating seniors in high schools around the country can't read their diplomas.
That's right.
How does this, how can this happen?
Well, you have a number of things going on here.
For one thing, in the adult population, you have immigrants who have come into the country with a variety of literacy skills in their native language.
So they may come to the U.S. with no literacy at all, or they may come with highly advanced degrees but still be functionally illiterate in English.
But for those who are born— Wait, wait, wait.
But that's not the majority of who we're talking about, is it?
It's a significant percentage, not the majority.
Roughly half of all literacy enrollments in the U.S. are actually speakers of other languages.
But if they're still graduating from American high schools, how in the world are they passing tests in order to go from grade to grade to grade?
Right.
Well, and in fact, one of the problems is that our schools have so many issues.
The teachers are dealing with so many issues in their classrooms that when children who are in that system struggle to learn to read, maybe through learning disabilities or because of issues going on at home like poverty, they may be living in abusive situations.
They may have health care problems.
The teachers are not equipped to give them the kind of individualized attention that they would need to overcome those issues.
Wait, why, with all due respect, what possible impact could poverty or health care problems have on somebody's ability to learn to read in a school where we all learn to read in the first grade?
It starts there.
What does poverty at home have to do with this?
Poverty at home has everything to do with this.
When a child comes to school who hasn't had a good meal in several days, school lunch programs, school breakfast programs all over the place.
We have stories from all over the country from teachers who will tell you that the last hot lunch the students in his or her classroom got was last Friday.
Children who come in with clothing that is not appropriate for the weather, lacking boots in cold communities, and the list goes on and on.
All those issues do impact a child's ability to learn to read.
And to write, a child living with that kind of conditions at home or with trauma doesn't come to school prepared or but how do they advance then?
If the charge of any school is to teach them to read, which is then, and it isn't happening, and yet they still get promoted to the next grade, the next grade, the next grade.
Which I think with the No Child Left Behind reform that is happening now, less and less of that is happening.
But we still have all of these adults who went through the system, didn't acquire those skills, and who now are adults who don't have the skills that they need to be effective in their lives.
Also, what we're seeing a great deal of now is kids, teenagers, being either dropping out officially from school or being pushed out because they're not able to meet the requirements for graduation.
And all of those kids are going into the population of adults who don't have skills equipped to work and to take care of their families.
There's a common denominator here, in my opinion.
And a common denominator is that the public schools in way too many communities around the country are just hopeless.
Well, you said that.
I did.
Well, no, no, no.
I'm offering you my opinion.
The public school system today is full of bureaucrats.
They are top-heavy, is where way too much of the money allocated for education goes.
The public schools are full of teachers who have tenure and can't be removed.
We spend hundreds of billions of dollars, and it only gets worse.
And the common denominator here is government, and government cannot run things.
You don't hear of people moving from grade to grade to grade in private schools unable to read.
You just don't hear about it.
Well, that's true, but on the other hand, the resources available for those kids in those private schools are quite a bit greater than they are in many of our schools.
Well, imagine that, and their parents are paying for it.
How about that?
Well, that's true.
But the kids who are growing up in, and particularly in urban communities that are very poor, where the per capita income rates are very low, as is the case in the District of Columbia.
But there's another factor.
There's another factor there, though, too.
And there's something cultural in those urban schools where doing well in school is not cool racially.
You've heard it.
You've heard this, Marcia.
It's too white to be able to learn, read, write, and speak a language.
There's no question that what's going on in those schools is very complicated, complicated on every level for those kids.
But we're very concerned about the number of adults currently in the country who don't have the skills they need and the number of highly motivated adults who do come to adult literacy programs looking for assistance, wanting to acquire these skills.
And we can't serve them all because, frankly, there just isn't enough money to go around.
Well, I'll tell you what, try removing the sex education class.
Try remove all this diversity stuff.
Try to take conflict resolution out of the curriculum.
Try to all these crazy things that prevent doing the basics.
You know, get rid of all these esoteric, bureaucratic, liberal things and start getting back to the basics.
We're talking about now having to add a school day from 3 to p.m. to 5 p.m., 8 to 5.
Clearly, history shows that's not necessary.
And plus, now you've got people trying to eliminate homework because it isn't fair.
Some people don't have a nice environment to do homework, whereas others do.
But the focus is all wrong.
We're teaching a bunch of sociology and liberal social mores rather than basic education, good old read and write and arithmetic.
Well, I would certainly agree with you that getting back to the basics, there is a lot of research about what effective reading instruction looks like.
And it's available out there to the K-12 system as well as to everybody else.
And I would certainly agree with you that focusing on that research and incorporating it into the classroom would take us a long way towards solving this problem.
Well, you know what?
I'll tell you something here, Marcia.
The reason this irritates the American people, you go to New York and New Jersey, $17,000 per student in the classroom.
Washington, D.C., $10,000.
And for this, we're getting a third of the students who are illiterate, and in New York, half of them dropping out.
Yeah, it's a terrible situation.
And I think in D.C., we should all be ashamed that people who live in the nation's capital live in such poor conditions and have such limited literacy skills.
Yeah.
Well, I know that a lot of people should be ashamed, but not the people paying for it.
The people paying for it ought to be angry.
They're not getting any bang for their books.
People should be ashamed of the ones running the education system.
I'm really glad you called.
I wish I had more time here, but I'm up against it on the official program format clock.
So hope we speak again.
Thanks again so much.
We'll be right back.
Stay with us.
Hey, folks, look, no mystery here.
The liberals run the school system.
They are the employees.
They are the employers.
They raise countless gazillions of dollars through property taxes that millions of Americans struggle to pay, and this is what we get.
And we have, did you hear, Marsha?
Well, literacy problems are related to health care and inappropriate clothing in the wintertime and hunger when they come to school.
Do you know how many programs we have to deal with this?
We've got school lunch.
We've got school breakfast.
We've got summertime go to school and get fed.
There are program after program after program designed to deal with these unfortunate inequities.
And they've all been designed by the left.
I mean, the public school system is the best mass illustration there is that government cannot fix problems.
It just can't.
It just makes more of them.
Of course, we're not supposed to examine these results.
Oh, no, Mithril.
You're supposed to examine our good intentions.
We only want to help people, unlike you conservatives, who want people to die and free to death.
Whatever untimely death that they think we desire for people.
Argyle, Texas.
John, welcome to the EIB Network.
Nice to have you with us.
Thank you, Rush.
Back to the Arnold.
For years, we've told everybody that the Republican Party is a big tent, that we want a lot of diversity in it.
The conservative wing is just one part of that big tent.
Either we're going to be part of an incredibly shrinking party if we hold a litmus test for everybody before they become a Republican.
It's bad enough that the mainstream media does away with ethnicity.
If you're a black American and become a Republican, your blackness disappears.
You are now a Republican.
And if we're going to do that to all of them, then are we going to hold our nose and vote for a Republican that we may not agree with?
Are we going to vote for a liberal Democrat or a conservative Democrat?
Wait a second.
Let me understand.
Are you accusing me of pushing Arnold Schwarzenegger out of the Republican Party?
Rush, you were the one that said he was a Democrat.
Well, he is.
He's become a sellout.
He calls himself a Republican, but look at what he proposes.
Look at what he suggests.
You can't say that any of it is Republican, much less conservative.
Are we supposed to sit around and let anybody who wants to call themselves a Republican say they are when there's very little of what they believe that is actually Republican or conservative?
Could a true Republican get elected in the state of California?
He did.
Can he rule that way or is he going to be overridden by a congressional party out there?
He got elected the first time in the recall election by clearly convincing a whole lot of Californians he was conservative.
That state was in big trouble, and he was making no bones about it.
He's done a 180 since getting into office and setting himself up for his reelection, which he did win.
But, you know, if Arnold Schwarzenegger's not a Republican, I had nothing to do with it.
He did.
He's the one that walked out of the party.
He's the one that's selling out.
I mean, look at, yeah, we've got a big tent, but it doesn't include Democrats who call themselves Republicans.
It will include Democrats who call themselves conservatives and vote for us.
Okay.
I agree with that.
All right.
I mean, I don't know how many Republicans are going to win by proposing health care for every child in the country, including those of illegal immigrants.
I don't know too many Republicans are going to win Republican votes by promising to raise taxes while calling them loans.
I don't know too many Republicans are going to win nationwide on the Schwarzenegger agenda.
Thanks for the call out there, John.
Appreciate it.
We'll be right back and wrap it up.
Let me ask you a question.
When was the last time liberal Republicans argued we had to elect conservatives in order to ensure we had a big trend?
The liberal Republicans want to force conservatives out of the party.
I'm tired of these people telling me we got to have a big tent to include liberals in our party.
No way.
Not in my walk.
See you tomorrow.
Adios.
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