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Aug. 30, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
August 30, 2010, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 Podcast.
These are really extraordinary times in our country.
As long as I've been around, and certainly as long as I've been involved in either commenting on the news or covering the news, I have never seen conservatives organize, go to rallies, even have any kind of a real movement other than to vote.
This has always been the thing of the left.
They're the ones that hold the marches.
They're the ones that hold the rallies.
They're the ones that show up at the government public hearings saying, give us more money for this, that, or the other thing.
They've got a permanent infrastructure to do this.
All these social service organizations that have these huge staffs all backed by government grants, those people can get all of their constituencies to show up at the meetings, they show up at the meetings themselves, they put together the for the frameworks for all this stuff.
You've got the unions who can tap into a ready-made constituency.
You've got union leaders who sit around with nothing better to do than apply pressure.
The rally has always been the weapon and the tactic of the left.
Sometimes for good, usually for bad.
The civil rights movement, which started at least as liberal movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, and then the movement for everything else.
There are some conservative groups who individually on their own issue are good at this.
The pro-lifers, very organized, have always had the ability to have people show up publicly and stand up for their beliefs.
The people who support the second amendment, same thing.
The NRA very good at organization, but there has never ever really been a large conservative movement that went out and did things, that showed up, that rallied, that marched, that spoke out.
It's never happened before.
On my radio show in Milwaukee, I quote the old Buffalo Springfield song with the line, There's something happening here what it is ain't exactly clear.
And I've been trying to figure it out myself.
And it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on, but something is going on.
Glenn Beck held his rally in Washington on Saturday.
The conservative estimates are 300,000 people are there.
It may have been more.
This is brand new stuff.
There is something happening here.
This event that Glenn held was not an isolated event.
It occurs after more than a year of tea parties all over the country.
It occurs after election results that have been coming in throughout through 2010 that show a true backlash against the perceived establishment.
You've got people who are doing things that have never done them before.
I mentioned my radio program in Milwaukee.
Whenever I bring up a topic like this, I get caller after caller after caller saying, Mark, I've never considered myself politically active.
I voted, I had my opinions, that was it.
But you know what?
I went to a tea party.
Or I went to this meeting, or I called up a candidate and said I wanted to volunteer for his campaign, I distributed literature.
People are doing things they've never done before.
You've got to understand, these people at Glenn's rally came from all over the country for a political rally.
When's the last time there was anything that could be associated with conservatism that people took that kind of time out of their lives?
And there's a reason for it.
Conservatives are generally people who have lives and families and jobs.
If you're going to do something and go out and watch a baseball game or put something on television or go do something with your kids or go out with some friends, plus you've got to work the next day, it's lefties that have the time to do all this activism stuff.
It's the stuff that they get off on.
The ones that are in the 50s and 60s still dream back, misty-eyed about how much they love the protests of the 60s and the 70s.
It's the thing that gives gave their lives meaning.
Conservatives generally have more going on than to show up at a rally and clap for a speaker.
Yet it's happening now.
Why?
There is, in this country, a major and legitimate backlash to what President Obama and the Pelosi-Reed Congress are trying to do to our country.
And it taps into more than just public policy.
It's this notion that we as a country are being told that the beliefs that we have aren't legitimate.
Why, you have no right to think that.
That's not the way we think in America anymore.
We've moved on, you right wingers, you're left behind.
It's time for you to come along and conform.
And I think people are saying no.
We're not going to conform to this.
We have beliefs.
We're part of a country that has nothing to do with where you want to take us.
There's a gray column today in the Washington Post by Charles Crowdhammer, syndicated in a lot of other newspapers.
I want to quote from it here.
He writes Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed.
Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people.
But the people have proved so disappointing.
Their recalcitrance has, in only nineteen months, turned the predicted forty year liberal ascendancy into a full retreat.
Ah, the people, the little people, the small town people, the bitter people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging to guns a religion, or this part is less remembered, antipathy toward people who aren't like them.
That's a polite way of saying clinging to bigotry.
Our and promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking, resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement, why it's racist resentment toward a black president.
Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration as crystallized in the Arizona law?
Nativism.
Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history as expressed in Proposition eight in California, homophobia.
Opposition to an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become ungovernable, last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance.
Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues.
In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion.
Majorities, often lopsided majorities, oppose President Obama's social democratic agenda, stimulus, Obamacare.
They support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage, and reject a ground zero mosque.
So what's a liberal to do?
Pull out the bigotry charge, the Trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.
The most venerable of these Trumps is, of course, the race card.
When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous leaderless and perfectly natural reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat casted as a mob of angry white Yahoos, disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
Then came Arizona and Senate Bill ten seventy.
It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that a illegal immigration should be illegal.
The federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, see every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.
As for California's proposition eight, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of seven million voters is an affront to democracy?
And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays, particularly since the opposite gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago, and now the ground zero mosque.
The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims.
This smug attribution of bigotry to two thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam.
A proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than violent extremists of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief.
Those who reject this as ridiculous and politically correct are therefore declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem de jour.
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence, that finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race baiting.
Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork wielding mobs brimming with antipathy toward people who aren't like them?
Blacks, Hispanic, gays, and Muslims.
A nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, just downright mean.
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November.
Not just because the economy is ailing, and not just because Obama overread his mandate and governing too far left, but because a comeuppance is due, the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
Charles Kronhammer, today's Washington Post.
I thought it was very eloquent.
I agree with him.
I think the one thing that unites the tea parties, and they've been held all over the country in different states, from people with completely different backgrounds, many of whom don't agree on a lot of policy issues.
Go to a tea party.
There are people who disagree about immigration.
There are people who disagree about economic policy.
There are people who certainly disagree about trade.
There are union members there, there are non-union members.
Russia's program.
Millions and millions and millions listening.
Not everyone agrees on everything.
Other talk show hosts who are finding audiences.
We don't all agree on everything.
There's one thing that unifies all of this.
Even Glenn's rally over the weekend, which was actually rather apolitical rather than political.
I think people are fed up with being told that their views aren't legitimate.
That a decent person doesn't think the way you think.
Why, if you're against the mosque, you're a bigot.
If you're against gay marriage, you're a bigot.
If you oppose nationalized health care and expanding the annual budget deficit to 1.3 trillion, it's because you're a racist who isn't giving a black president a ch a chance.
We're lectured this right and left by people who will not argue the policy.
They will not defend any of the stuff they want to do.
You can't get them to talk about anything that's actually in Obamacare.
You can't get them focused on any of it.
It's just, well, you obviously think that because you're a racist and you don't support a president who happens to be black.
You just say that about the mosque because you don't like Muslims.
You just say this about this because you say that about immigration because you don't like Hispanics.
You're threatened by Hispanics in our country.
They dismiss all of this stuff and they claim that our arguments aren't worthy of being debated because they're so miserably racist and hateful.
I think that's where the backlash comes from.
The people now realize that a lot of other people hold these points of view.
And they're not racist, they're not hateful people, they're normal people just like them.
And they are getting ratification for their beliefs.
They believe in a country that is not the one that we are lectured that we have to become.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling, the Mark from Milwaukee.
We have a lot of marks who fill in here.
Uh, got to tell you about Russ Russia's Facebook giveaway of the iPads.
In fact, I have a script that they've prepared for me.
Uh, the winner of the EIB iPad giveaway on Facebook is Gloria S. of Westland, Michigan.
Gloria wins a 64 gigabyte 3G iPad.
This is no ordinary iPad.
It's custom engraved on the back with Russia's signature and the EIB logo.
Uh, One more is going to be given away, which means you can still enter the contest right now.
You need to go to Russia's Facebook Facebook site, which is Facebook.com/slash Rush Limbaugh.
Look for the sweepstakes tab on the top of the wall page, click it, follow the directions, and uh the winner will be unveiled on tomorrow's program.
Shouldn't guest host be given one of these iPads?
That'd be a great parting gift for those of us who are guest hosts.
I don't have I Yeah, that's what I'm going to.
I'm not first in line.
Others have begged for this.
Hey, I'm just trying to fit into the times President Obama is giving us beg, ask for something from the government.
Stimulus check it.
We've been talking about the backlash building in America toward not just the Obama presidency, not just the Pelosi Reed Congress, but to this notion that we all have to think a certain way and we don't have a right to object.
Well, you do have a right to object.
It's the reason shows like this exist.
It's the whole point of having a country that isn't a dictatorship.
So we do things like the following.
Here's the phone number at EIB.
1800-28282.
Let's go to Huntington Beach, California and Ralph.
Ralph, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Good morning, Mark.
Thank you for taking my call.
Um I just want to say that uh the first two minutes of your monologue got me my got my blood boiling.
Uh the reason being that I think the nation as a whole, the conservatives as a whole have been waiting for something like this for years and years and years.
And I think that it's time that people, other commentators such as yourself, Rush, Sean, get out there and make it a political rally.
If people in Washington think that this was a big turnout, uh you can only they'd be so surprised if you had guys had something like this and called it a political rally, you'd get two to three million people down there.
Then that would really show them.
Well, Glenn specifically said his rally wasn't political.
But but the Tea Parties clearly have a political connotation of them.
And the election results are following this.
When you see even Republican incumbents, entrenched Republican United States Senators being thrown out of office by candidates who were open to the so-called Tea Party movement in that name.
I don't even know what the Tea Party movement really means anymore.
I consider myself to be part of the Tea Party movement, yet I haven't been to a single Tea Party myself.
It's become an attitude or a way of thinking that we're going to object and we're going to fight back.
The thing that's so unusual about it is people are actually showing up at these rallies.
For everybody who's showing up, there's another 25 people who agree who aren't going.
It isn't normally in the nature of people who are conservative to get in the car and go to a rally or go fly on a plane to Washington and go to go to a rally.
It's not the way it's normally done.
While all of these events are separate, Lens rally and the Tea Party rallies and people who are embracing certain political candidates, those are all separate events.
I think they fall under the same giant large umbrella, which is we are going to fight back for the values that we believe in.
We are not racist.
We are Americans.
These are the things that we think, and we are sick and tired of being told we don't have a right to these points of view.
We don't believe that health care should be socialized.
We don't think that government should be running a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit.
We don't think carpet bombing a trillion dollars on the country, calling it stimulus, adding to the debt, and not creating a single job is a good thing.
These meetings and these rallies are merely the vehicle for people to express their objections.
You just said, all I'm saying is we have not had the opportunity to show it the way it was shown this weekend.
Yeah, you're right about that, and that's why people are surprised.
I'm surprised.
I'm constantly surprised at the size of these events.
I've been doing a talk show now.
My talk show in Milwaukee is twenty-one years old.
I know how it works.
I can talk and I can bring up issues that my audience is interested in.
And a lot of times they'll call elected officials and they'll ex they'll express their anger.
But what you can't do is get them to show up at a public hearing.
What you can do is say, okay, let's have 400 of us show up downtown at this statue and saying let's oppose this.
That's never worked.
It's not in the nature of conservatives to do that.
But now all of a sudden, that's happening.
Something clearly is changing.
And I think for everybody who's showing up at these things, there is a, as I said, about 25 people who agree with them.
There's a real backlash going on because I think people understand the stakes of what's going on with this government.
And I think you're right.
You could have another event in a few weeks somewhere else hosted by somebody other than Glenn Beck, and you'd have a similar crowd show up.
This is very, very different stuff.
People want to ascribe all of this to the talk show hosts themselves.
This isn't about Rush.
It's not about Glenn Beck.
It's not about Sean Hannity.
It's not about myself.
We're merely expressing views that lots of other people hold.
We don't even all agree ourselves.
But there's an umbrella out there in which people sense that we are speaking to them, whether it's showing up at tea parties or calling programs like this, people are now willing to say, I don't agree with what we're doing.
I think all of this stuff is good and bad.
The bad part is people are reacting to terrible problems that we have.
Obamacare passed.
The stimulus money was appropriated.
The deficit is one point three trillion this fiscal year and set according to the CBO to expand.
They're packing the courts, federal judgeships all over the country with lefties.
All of these things are happening.
They're producing a reaction and a backlash.
That's the good part.
But it's in response to the fact that this stuff is actually occurring.
I think a good thirty percent of this country has no idea what it was doing two years ago.
A lot of you knew what you were doing.
A lot of you knew rather what the rest of the country was doing.
You knew what Obama was all about.
But I think a lot of people had no idea that the Democratic Party had gotten this liberal.
They were voting against Bush, they were tired of the war on Iraq, they didn't like the fact that we had the bailouts, they didn't like the fact that the credit markets were imploding, and they didn't like the fact that we were in a recession.
So they're gonna change things.
This guy gets up there and he talks about hope and change and going beyond politics, and we're not a red country of red states and blue states, we're a country of United States.
That all sounded good.
And we ignored the fact that the president has spent his entire adult life hanging out with fellow radicals.
We ignored the fact that he's never done anything other than talk.
We ignored the fact that his agenda was very leftist.
We ignored the fact that he may have the most liberal voting record of any Democrat in the United States Senate.
All of that stuff was ignored.
Then he gets in with the pretext of dealing with the fact that health care costs a lot in this country, and instead radicalizes everything, screws up everybody's health insurance, forces business to put people on the health insurance doll or pay a major fine.
He tries to deal with unemployment by throwing all sorts of money to all of his political pals.
We've got a deficit that's scaring people.
I think people did not know that's what they were going to get.
A lot of you knew that.
I knew it, but even I am a little surprised that he's been this far to the left.
This is what's provoking this reaction, and it shows up in a lot of different forms.
Political, non-political.
The way we are being countered is that we are being told that we are bigots every time we speak out on anything at all.
And that just makes the commitment of opposition greater.
Let's go to Minneapolis and Nancy.
Nancy, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Um, I was at the eight twenty-eight rally, and um I just wanted to say as someone who was there and was listening for political or negative speech, um, there were three possible statements that could possibly have been called political.
Can I tell you what they are?
Sure.
One, Sarah Palin said, and this has been reported, that we do not need to fundamentally transform our country.
This country needs a fundamental restoration to honor.
Okay, that's number one, how terrible that is.
Two, Alveda King made a couple references to the injustice of abortion, or One reference to that.
And then she also mentioned in a positive way the traditional marriage.
Those were the three most political statements that were made at that rally.
This rally, while most of us, I guarantee, are of the same general under the umbrella that you're talking about in terms of conservatism.
It was all about one restoring honor, recognizing honor with the troops, and looking to ourselves to become more honorable so that we can make a difference in our our daily lives.
Your point is that this wasn't a political message, and I agree with you.
It was rather apolitical.
The point that I'm making is if you take all of these things – You take the tea parties, you talk about what's happening in some of these elections, you talk about people who are volunteering for Republican candidates.
You talk about the fact that the polls have turned against Obama on virtually every issue.
I'm taking all of this stuff and throwing it together and saying that there is a common denominator there.
Now you mentioned honor.
A big part of the message that was offered at this rally over the weekend was more spiritual, I think, than anything else, the notion that you ought to do what God wants you to do.
These are all things that the left doesn't know how to respond to.
That's why they end up saying that you're a racist or a bigot or a homophobe.
It's why a number of black leaders, how dare you hold this rally on the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther King gave his famous speech as if nobody is therefore allowed to talk on that day ever.
How dare you try to co-opt all of this?
They don't have any arguments in opposition anymore.
All they can do is claim that you're a bigot.
They've finally got their hands on power.
They did what they wanted to do, and they are horrified that some of us are objecting.
Thank you for the call to uh oh Shillick Chillicothe, Ohio.
Uh Tom, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, megadetto's mark how they do on the pronunciation there.
Uh I the uh the Crowhammer uh column is just right on.
I read it this morning, I'm glad you repeated it.
And you know, of all this criticism of Glenn Beck uh uh and the fact that there were a lot of white people at this rally, um, I suggest to these so-called civil rights leaders that they judge these folks by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
Well, that's another way they try to deal with you people are all white.
And then when they find a black person at one of these rallies, they stick a camera in and say, What are you doing here?
You're black.
What uh why wh why would you be at a rally like this?
Why would you listen to that?
Everything about all the coverage of all of this stuff is an attempt to say that it's not legitimate.
Why, this must be a bunch of racists, they're primarily white.
This has got to be a bunch of bigots because they don't ascribe to this view or that view.
They try to delegitimize all of this stuff because they can't stand back and argue.
What's going to happen over the next several months with health care is that people are going to be getting their group health plans from their bosses and they're going to find that their coverage is going to be far worse.
And that the amount that they pay for it is going to go up.
They're going to see some employers that are dropping health coverage altogether.
And people are going to turn against Obamacare even more.
And the retort to all of that is, well, you obviously are willing to give this a chance because you're a bigot.
They'll take a look at every rally that's out there and they'll find something wrong with it on the basis of skin color or gender or sexual preference.
There will always be a problem with it.
They're going to try to do everything they can to say that anybody who objects to what they want to do isn't legitimate.
And that's why I think Crowdhammer is right on on this.
I don't care what the issue is.
Find a current position that conservatives and, for that matter, a majority of Americans hold, that is not in accordance with the liberal view, and they'll come up with some sort of racist or sexist or homophobic excuse for it.
That's their way of debunking everything.
They can't win any of these arguments anymore.
Ironically, Mark, but the Martin Luther King encouraged us to do just this complain to the government, complain to the bureaucrat.
Well, this is what being an American is all about.
We're not supposed to be a nation in which a savior president comes in, turns us into a completely different nation than we were before, and have to shut up about it.
We're supposed to be able to talk.
The great, great irony of all of this is that it's the left that preached this to us for 40 years.
what did Nixon call conservatives, the silent majority, and the left was out there on the street, they were speaking out, they were agitating, they were demanding that they be that their voices be heard.
Now that they grabbed all the power, they've got the presidency, the House, the Senate, I think they still control more than half the governorships.
Now that they have all the power, now that they control the means of communication with the mainstream media, they suddenly say anybody else that speaks out is a bigot.
Why, what are you doing?
What's the reason that they're here?
All this stuff about Glennbeck's Rally.
Well, what's his purpose?
What's the ulterior motive here?
What are they up to?
They don't get any of this stuff.
Thank you for the call, Tom.
They don't get any of it at all.
You know where the Tea Party started?
A guy on CNBC said something while he was, is it the Board of Trade or the Mercantile Exchange, Rick Santelli, talked about tea parties.
The next thing you know, there were tea parties.
All over the country, people put together their groups.
People started showing up.
And it's followed through.
They said this was going to die down.
It has not.
Whether it's a talk show host, a guy on CNBC, even a political candidate, all we're doing is telling you where to show up.
This is out there and it's been brewing for some time.
We're merely scheduling the meeting.
This isn't about any talk show host.
It's about people who realize that millions of other Americans like them are as bothered by the direction the country is going in.
And whether the message is spiritual, which is primarily the message I heard over the weekend, political, whether it's specific to health care, whether it's worried about the larger picture of bankrupting the nation with debt.
When you tell people right now, hey, you show up here, you can say something about this.
People are showing up.
Well, what do you think about all the people who aren't showing up but agree with them?
There's a huge backlash going on right now.
And it doesn't have anything to do with fear of Muslims or fear of gays or hatred of blacks.
It doesn't have anything to do with any of that.
It's merely people acting on their own beliefs about the kind of country they want to live in.
My name is Mark Elling, and I'm the guest host for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
There's an old joke about the football fan drunk, falls out of the upper deck and lands in the end zone, hits his head and thinks he scored a touchdown.
The Democrats won the last election and thought that their socialism became popular.
They thought the American people were embracing all of this.
See, the lefties are always good at the bumper sticker stuff, and the Obama campaign of 2008 was all bumper stickers.
Hope and change, unity, moving forward rather than back.
It's when they actually started doing stuff that we saw what it means.
Hugh Hewitt's got a piece out today.
Talks about how we're a 70% nation and the 70% disagree with almost everything the president is doing.
The 70% disagree with spending money like crazy and not finding a single job to sh to show forth.
The 70% disagree with Obamacare.
The 70% don't think federal judges should simply be striking down measures that the overwhelming majority of a state support.
The 70% think we should have an actual border in this country and we should enforce it.
The 70% actually think it's fine to believe in God.
The 70% think that Iran is dangerous and we shouldn't just let them have nukes.
The 70% think that the federal government is not the solution to anything and doesn't create jobs.
Well, the 30% is what's governing this country right now.
We are seeing what liberalism has become, and it's creating a backlash.
And that backlash is being greeted by fulminating from the left.
I mentioned the Crowdhammer column earlier in the program.
The counter to Charles Crowdhammer is the prominent New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
He's a raving lunatic, but he's become one of the most influential speakers on the left.
This is today, the same day that that piece came out from Crowdhammer in which he talks, oh, I guess gonna say everything is bigotry.
Under the headline It's witch hunt season, Krugman goes on.
The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents, political figures on the right accused Biller and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder.
And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment.
Now it's happening again, except that this time it's even worse.
Let's turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh.
Imam Hussein Obama, he recently declared, is probably the best anti-American president we've ever had.
To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he's an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party.
Bear in mind, too, that unless something changes in the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one House of Congress.
This is going to be here we go.
Very, very ugly.
So where is this rage coming from?
Why is it flourishing?
What will it do to America?
He should have just called me, I'd tell him.
Um, anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness.
What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don't consider government by liberals even very moderate.
I'm not making this up.
I told you he's a raving lunatic.
Even very moderate liberals, legitimate.
Mr. Obama's election would have enraged those people even if he were white.
Of course, the fact that he isn't and has an alien sounding name adds to the rage.
By the way, I'm not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed.
Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich.
Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance.
Powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage.
The right wing media are replaying their greatest hits.
In the 1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology.
Now, as we've just seen, he's doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.
Again, though, there's an extra level of craziness this time around.
Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.
And where in all of this are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far.
Nowhere to be found.
To take a prime example, the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan.
Almost makes one long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred.
So what will happen if as expected Republicans win control of the House?
We already know part of the example.
We answer we can expect the GOP to play chicken over the federal budget.
I'd even put odds on a 1995 type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.
It will be an ugly scene and it will be dangerous.
The nineties were a time of peace and prosperity.
This is a time of neither.
In particular, we're still suffering the after effects of the worst economic crisis since the 30s, and we can't afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern.
But that's what we're likely to get.
If I were President Obama, I'd be doing all I could to head off this pri head off this prospect, offering some major and initiatives on the economic front in particular.
That's right, give us another stimulus.
Nationalize something else.
If only to shake up the political dynamic.
But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe all the way into catastrophe.
Hear that from the lefty?
That's what's coming.
Catastrophe.
It's going to be ugly.
Why these dangerous people may now actually get some power.
It's exactly what Crowdhammer referred to.
Not once in there at all did he confront a single argument that our side is making.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Elling, sitting in for Rush.
Let's go to Omaha and Allen.
Alan, it's your turn on EIB.
Go ahead, Alan.
Thank you, Alan.
I appreciate that.
That was outstanding.
I will summarize what I'm told he was going to say because he was going to make, I've assured a very, very good point.
Alan's point was is that we are told that we are intolerant.
We conservatives.
Who's really intolerant?
Is it conservatives?
Some of whom actually voted for President Obama.
You don't get to where he was without at least a handful of conservatives voting for him.
Or are the intolerant people the ones who presume that every single position ever taken by anyone who calls himself conservative or strays away from liberal orthodoxy is somehow a bigot or there's something wrong with that point of view.
They are the ones that are intolerant.
You can see it in the comments that they make, they get caught on.
Was it John Kerry who is making fun of the people who went into the military?
Well, obviously it's because you couldn't go to a good university.
That's their point of view.
Look at the way they portray every single comment Rush ever makes.
Look at the way they portray other talk show hosts.
Look at what they say about people who are at tea parties.
They're the ones that don't have any tolerance.
They're the ones that can't engage in an actual debate.
What they want to do is remake this country in a way that they approve of, and they don't want any of the rest of us to say, we don't agree with you.
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