Rush Limbaugh: “If Conservatism Is Your Priority, There Is No Choice Other Than Ted Cruz”
This is the closest in our lifetimes we have ever been to Ronald Reagan.
RUSH: Jacksonville, Florida. Hello, Scott. Great to have you back on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Good, good, good. Thank you.
CALLER: You know, a couple hours ago you mentioned that Bernie Sanders and Reverend Al had coffee together, and I’ve gotta wonder: Did Bernie Sanders ask Reverend Al to pay up that $4.5 million in back taxes?
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: Have you thought of that? Two questions I have for you. Number one: I was watching Hillary’s acceptance speech last night — even though she lost — and she compared her own life of service to the service of police, teachers, firefighters, and nurses. I fell out of my chair.
RUSH: It’s part of the illusion. Mrs. Clinton has to obscure and distract people away from what is being reported about her vast speech income, much of it from banks, $115 million. So this is how she’s going about trying to portray herself as a woman of the peoples.
CALLER: And the second question I want to ask you is, listen, I’ve been with you since the first Gulf War. I love you. I buy Two If By Tea. The thing is, when you were mentioning the other day — and I’m paraphrasing — you know, this thing with Marco Rubio and repeating himself, ah, maybe that was not such a big deal. Rush, I was on a couch watching it, and I support Trump. My wife supports Marco, and my wife just started looking at her feet like, “Oh, my gosh.” I really think that performance really hurt him.
RUSH: He has said so. The point that I was trying to make… I was not trying to salvage Rubio. I am trying to salvage the notion that what he said was right. I admitted that it looked bad. I’m not… I didn’t make any excuses for that. But I’m just telling you. In fact, this is starting to be made fun of now. I’ve seen — I can’t remember who, a couple columnists — say, “Oh, it’s important what Rubio is saying, that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing? What? Well, give us some news.”
Well, I’m sorry, it is news, because it isn’t that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. It ought to be… It should have been one of the motivating and orienting factors of the entire Republican opposition. And the fact that there are some Republicans the field who can’t say it because they’ve gotten too close to Obama is important. You know me; I believe having people understand liberalism is crucial in defeating it and understanding that Obama intends to do all this, and Bernie Sanders and Hillary gonna add to it.
I think it’s important.
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RUSH: Brian in Oceanside, California. Hi. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you doing?
RUSH: Pretty good. Pretty good. Thank you.
CALLER: Rush, I guess I kind of have to change my question or my statement, because since I’ve listened to you today, I think I’m understanding what you’re trying to do. I’m a little disturbed. It seems like Cruz won Iowa, and it just seems like nobody made a big deal out of that. But Trump wins, and it seems like the whole election cycle is all Trump, Trump, Trump. Okay, that’s fine. Believe me, if he wins or if Kasich wins — who to me is the worst candidate — he’s gonna get my vote. Because the alternative, in my opinion, is suicide.
I’m not gonna do that. But at first, I thought you were kind of doing that, and then I realized, well, you speak of what’s in the news. And it’s… I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but Cruz doesn’t seem to need the help. He’s so competent on his own. It almost seems like maybe really what’s happening is you don’t need to do anything for him. He stands on his own. You know what he stands for. We have video.
You go to YouTube and listen to him speak. Though there’s a few things he did that I disagreed with, that I don’t consider conservative — a few decisions he made — in the end, you know, he’s the closest to Reagan I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anybody like him before, you know, in our time. It seems like everybody else is like McCain. I mean, in the last two cycles I had to vote… I had to hold my nose when I voted.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And I feel a little bit that way about Trump, because I think Trump… I’m not saying he doesn’t believe in everything he says. But when I hear “deal,” you mentioned him making a deal on his terms, and I’ll agree: That’s what he means. He doesn’t mean he’s just gonna, you know, fold. But do you honestly believe, say, Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid is gonna move one iota on taxes, abortion? Or, say, the military, or national security?
RUSH: Well, now, wait. Take abortion out because that’s a Supreme Court thing. We got rid of abortion as a legislative, democratic issue back in ’73. So all abortion is, is a talking point. There won’t be any deals on abortion. Maybe partial birth legislation, but throw that out. I still get your point. Is Trump so good that Harry Reid or Pelosi, whoever it is, is gonna give up and give in and let Trump have what he wants?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: If you’re supporting Trump, that’s what you have to believe is gonna happen. Trump is running a campaign. One of the reasons Trump’s making news and he can’t avoid it is he’s so unorthodox. Nobody’s ever run a campaign like this. Nobody’s gotten away with saying things he says, and nobody has ever won without ground game. Nobody has ever. He’s spending the least amount of money anybody out there, except for Ted Cruz. In New Hampshire, anyway.
He’s just turning the whole system upside down. And, believe me, the people that run this business hate this. They don’t understand it. It would be no different than if somebody who’s never watched a baseball game became president of a baseball team or won the World Series in the first year. They would hate the guy. They wouldn’t want to imitate him. They wouldn’t want to copycat. They’d want to throw him out of the league and make sure nobody ever heard from him again.
You can’t imagine “in and win the World Series” if you have never worked in baseball. And that’s the way they’re looking at Trump. Now, about Cruz and his being self-sufficient. There’s no question about that. Here, let me just say something right off the bat. And I’ve said this before. I opened the program with it yesterday. When I saw what Jeb and Kasich were doing in New Hampshire at the last minute in order to get votes…
They were going left as fast as Deion Sanders can backpedal. They were moving left faster than anybody I’ve ever seen go left. And I opened the program yesterday saying, “You will never, ever have to worry about that with Ted Cruz.” And then I expanded on it.
And let me say one thing: If conservatism is your bag, if conservatism is the dominating factor in how you vote, there is no other choice for you in this campaign than Ted Cruz, because you are exactly right: This is the closest in our lifetimes we have ever been to Ronald Reagan.
In terms of doctrinaire, understandable, articulated, implementable conservatism, there’s nobody closer. But I think the electorate at this point in time… We don’t know, Brian. If you look at Trump’s coalition, there’s a lot of assumptions being made about it, because he’s running as a Republican and in the Republican primary, and it’s assumed the Republican base is who’s voting here. Therefore, it’s assumed the majority of Trump’s coalition’s conservatives. And there are a lot.
But he’s broad. He’s all over the spectrum. Look, I’m sounding like a broken record. But it’s important to point out. Trump has put together — whether by accident or by design, he’s put together — the coalition, group of people, demographics, ethnics, however you want to divide it and add it up. He’s put together a group of people the Republican Party has been claiming for years that they have to get in order to win — and they don’t want to any part of it. So it obviously isn’t about that. This is a club. This is about self-preservation.
This is the ruling class trying to hold on. This is the ruling class practicing their exclusionary policies of not letting outsiders in. That’s appealing to a lot of people about Trump. But if you wanna talk conservatism, let me mention something that happened in the last debate. Rubio was asked a question, “Can you define conservatism, what is it?” And he defined it and — (interruption) What are you frowning at? I’m not gonna kill anybody. I’m gonna repeat what happened and I’m gonna kill people? Well, they’re all saying, “Don’t do it, don’t do it.” See, the pressure I am under on this program, you people would never know. Do you realize everybody who knows me can get to me, tells me what to do or not to do or what I should have said or shouldn’t have said? It’s amazing I have a backbone of steel, otherwise I would have been in the funny farm 27 years ago.
Now, here’s the thing. Rubio got the question, and he gave a superb answer when asked to explain or define conservatism. Cruz did not get the question. They didn’t let the question last long enough for all of the candidates to get it, but Trump did. And Trump’s definition of conservatism was not an ideological definition of conservatism. My point all along, one of my theories was demonstrated. Trump is not an ideological candidate.
He’s not the only one. I mean, most people are not ideological in the way they look at things. This has been one of my major complaints, actually, in politics. I think it’d help if more people did understand liberalism and did understand what that means and were able to understand why it is liberalism that explains all this misery now. But in Trump’s world it’s not liberalism, although it is. In Trump’s world, it’s they’re just a bunch of incompetent failures. They’re a bunch of time-wasting lumps of humanity that have no business doing what they’re doing because they’re losers. They’re kitty cats, whatever they are, whether they’re conservative or liberal or what have you.
Most people live their lives that way. Most people do not run around and go to church and look over in the pews, “Yeah, yeah, there’s the so-and-so family, a bunch of commie bastard liberals,” they don’t say that. Now, it could be that the same people will go to church and see the so-and-so family, “Yeah, those people are so right wing,” and that’s a branding thing, which we’ve also discussed here on this program, things that conservatism, i.e., Republican Party needs to overcome, problems.
They’ve allowed to have other people brand them, so forth. This is not a criticism of Trump. But for those of you that conservatism’s the answer and conservatism is the way, you have no choice here. Ted Cruz has got to be your guy. There’s nobody even close. Nobody. The closest — no, I’m not even gonna go there. You know, we’re about to get through this three hours relatively unscathed. I’ll just leave it there.
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RUSH: Now, look, Rubio people don’t get mad at me. He’s a conservative. I said it earlier. I’m not taking it back. I was thinking in going forward, Massachusetts results. If Rubio had done well, the establishment’s gonna try to glom on and claim credit and get behind Rubio, it’s gonna be a problem for some conservatives, and Cruz does not have the baggage of having the establishment behind him. That’s all I meant by that.
Now, one other thing about conservatives and the problems that we face. The reason why many conservatives think it’s got to be Ted Cruz and we’ve got to be conservative, is because liberalism is the reason we’re in this mess. We’re not in this mess because of incompetence. We’re in this mess because of liberalism, and there is an antidote to liberalism, there is a cure, there is a vaccine. It’s called conservatism.
Conservatism is what’s gonna have to be implemented here to reverse the direction we’re headed. That’s why people who are supporting Cruz are supporting Cruz. That’s why conservatives get worried when other conservatives do not support a conservative, ’cause the problems we have are directly traceable to liberalism, and the antidote, the cure, the vaccine, the nuclear device to wipe it out is conservatism. And if you’re scratching your head, I’ll explain in greater detail tomorrow.
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