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Kook Lamont Win Doesn't Mean What
McGovernized Democrats Think It Does

August 9, 2006

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let's go to the audio sound bites first. Let's just listen to some things. This is last night at Lamont headquarters. You would think that the presidential race had been decided last night, the way the Drive-By Media and the way the Democrats are reacting to all this. It's kind of humorous to watch this, and it's fascinating to me to watch the conventional wisdom analysis develop. The conventional wisdom analysis is, "There's an anti-incumbent mood out there, and that's what this means, and it's throw-the-bums-out time, and that means it's bad for the Republicans." We'll get to all that as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears.

Here's Ned Lamont. Now, you gotta picture this, if you didn't see it. Ned Lamont surrounded by -- and this is really mainstreaming the party. This is going to establish the Democratic Party in the eyes of people as a moderate and independent party that represents all. The Reverend Jackson, Al Sharpton, they didn't even bother to go out and get into Cynthia McKinney's photo. They were there with Ned Lamont! They wormed their way in there somehow. Kim Gandy of the NAGs, the National Association of Gals, Maxine Waters also abandoning her colleague in the House, Cynthia McKinney, and other kooks surrounding Ned Lamont, and this is what Ned Lamont said.

LAMONT: Who's been paying attention? How many lobbyists are there for every single congressman in Washington, DC? Sixty-three lobbyists for every congressman in Washington, DC, 63 lobbyists all fighting for the special interests. (booing) It's time to fix Congress. (cheers and applause) One more number. We have 132,000 of our bravest troops stuck in the middle of a bloody civil war in Iraq, and I'd say it's high time we bring them home to the hero's welcome.

CROWD: Bring them home! Bring them home!

RUSH: Actually what that means is cut-and-run, cut-and-run! You know, it's fascinating to watch this, because the netroots and the kook fringe, the blogosphere, think they have finally prevailed here, ladies and gentlemen. You know a dirty little secret? One of the ways they did this, I am told via exhaustive research late last night and today, is that they moved into Connecticut and they convinced 14,000 independents to register as Democrats so they could vote against old Joe. Now you might say they succeeded in doing that, but they didn't tap into a huge constituency of theirs that's already there. They were able to get these 14,000 people, but it misrepresents the mood that was actually on the ground in Connecticut.

They're also ignoring the momentum shift that was occurring here, when Lieberman was down by 13 or 14 points just a week ago. But I want to focus on one thing Lamont said here, because I've always told you guys that the Democratic Party is actually a party that's made up of disparate constituency groups. They all have their basic single interests, and what unifies them is their quest and desire for power and the liberalism that they all share as an ideology. You've got Big Labor, for example, and they want what they want; the feminists, the NAGs, they want what they want. The teachers union, I mean, there are just all these different constituencies. 

Now, when Lamont said, "Sixty-three lobbyists all fighting for the special interests," and the crowd booed, one of the theories that's going around today is that the traditional way of winning Democrat elections may now be over, that a Democratic candidate had to make sure that he was loyal to each of these constituents. When it came to the NAGs, gotta be pro-abortion. When it came to Big Labor, you had to hate Wal-Mart. Whatever Big Labor's issue was, you had to be for it, and one of the theories evolving here is that the party -- and, by the way, all these people talking about how the Democratic Party is McGovernizing itself... I want everybody to remember I first said that this was what was happening in this party well over a year ago.

They are attempting to relive their "glory days" of shutting down the Vietnam War by being able to mobilize so much anti-war support among the American people -- and that, to them, represented their quest for power, and I've asked all over the place, "Do these kook fringe base members actually care about winning?" I think they have more satisfaction by being able to get noticed. I think they have a tendency here to love the fact that they can cause the party to move and react to them, but in terms of winning, they really haven't won anything, even this race. I'm going to be probably a lone wolf here and suggest that this victory here does not represent what they think it means, which is fine and dandy, as long as they continue to fool themselves, that's fine with me. But they're McGovernizing themselves and what they forget is McGovern lost in a landslide.

We are in a world situation that argues for strength, national security, national defense, and these people are making it plain they want no part of it. They don't consider a threat to be legitimate out there, any of them. And as such, they're making it plain to casual observers -- and this is the key when talking about presidential races, because not everybody pays all the attention to this on a day-to-day basis as you and I do. Casual observers, people that pay attention every four years to vote for the presidency and other things, they've gotta notice that these people can't be trusted, and if they don't notice it, we'll tell 'em. We'll make sure they notice it, that they can't be trusted on matters that are very serious -- and, I'll tell you what, these guys are out there pumping themselves up and they're feeling really good today and they're flexing.

But you know how things can change in the world and you know how things can change in politics. It's a long time 'til November, and it's a long time 'til November of 2008. And what's happening around the world with militant Islamofascism on the rise, North Korea and so forth, this stuff's not going to go away in the next six months, two months, three months. It's not going to go away in the next two years. If anything, it's going to intensify. If something happens of a major nature in favor of the United States, we pull off some grand scheme, some great military maneuver, makes Americans proud to be Americans, these guys are sunk. The history of the Democratic Party since George Bush was elected is to open the door flat smack-dab in the middle of their faces.

Every time they think, and in the past five years every time they've thought, that they've finally crossed the threshold, that they have finally reached the kumbaya land, that they've finally gotten where they can get back in power, reality sets in. These are people living in an alternative reality. These are people that are morally inverted. These are the people that don't see what's actually out there. Too many of them hate, dislike, resent, and don't trust their own country. They're just positioning themselves here, and they just elected some guy in Connecticut or nominated some guy who knows diddly-squat about anything. But he can parrot what the kooks, the new Democrat base want to hear, and this is going to send shock waves up the spines of other Democrats in Washington. 

They're all going to -- if they haven't yet, they will -- abandon Lieberman. They're all going to try to tell him to not do this, get out of there. Chris Dodd has already joined a rally for Lamont today. Lieberman is yesterday's news, he's history. Wait 'til you hear how Chris Matthews was talking about him last night on CNBC or MSNBC, whatever he was on. Mrs. Clinton, a lot of pressure on her now. What does she do? She's been trying to straddle the fence. It may be more difficult for Mrs. Clinton to put anybody's testicles in her lockbox now. She may be feeling the pressure rather than exuding it and forcing it on people. It's going to be fascinating to watch this, folks, because there's going to be an abject fear now.

You can almost say that the... John Podhoretz says today in the New York Post, whether you want to believe it or not, there has been a bipartisan consensus on the war on terror because the Democrats, as I have pointed out recently, despite all this rhetoric and despite all these demands, despite all this criticism, never once voted to defund the war. When it came time to vote on resolutions to pull out of there now, next week, six months from now, the most they could get was nine or 13 votes. They're going to look at this now, and the pressure is going to be on all of them to become kooks, or at least to sound like kooks. They're going to take, as a message, that this is what it takes to win. So, we're sitting here in the fortunate position of actually watching a major political party come to the conclusion, after a primary election, that in order to win -- in fact, its ticket to win is becoming a party of full-fledged, no-kidding-about-it, no-masks, no-camouflage, kooks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I was toying with the idea of opening the program today in abject fear, along the lines of, maybe we've misunderestimated them, folks. Maybe I need to rethink this. Maybe these kooks are indeed more powerful than I ever imagined, and maybe we need to change our tactics. Maybe we need to afford them a proper amount of respect. We've been laughing at them all these years. Look at what they've pulled off. I was toying with the idea of building these people up like they have not been built up before, all for the purposes of goading them into being even more wacko, kooky, and extreme than they already are.

Then I realized they don't need to be goaded. They're going to look at this victory in Connecticut as evidence of their prowess and proof and anything that anybody like me would do to enhance it is not unnecessary. Plus, I think it would have unnerved you. I also don't know how long I could have kept it up without busting out in sheer laughter. So I canned the idea. I'm sitting here in stunned amazement, just as a political analyst, as an expert political analyst, as a guy who can read the stitches on a fast ball. Never in the modern era has a national political party won anything big going to the left and then further to the left and then further to the left, and that is exactly what this party is doing. It's stunning to watch this.

I know why it is. They have no forward vision whatsoever. They have no plan. They have no agenda that they can be honest about. They have to continually live in a mask or in camouflage. Liberalism is not going to win national elections, nationally, honestly advertised and campaigned on liberalism is not going to win the presidency. It may win a Senate seat in some states, may win a congressional seat in some states. It's not going to win the presidency, and they instinctively know this so they mask and camouflage themselves, and in the process they have no vision. They don't have any idea of the future of the country. They have no concept of American exceptionalism. They're mired in this notion that America is at fault, that America is to blame.

What is it about us that makes the rest of the world hate us? And as a consequence of this, they're always looking backwards and they're trying to relive their youth. It's almost like these sixties relics want to go back and relive the sixties, and the seventies relics want to go back and relive the seventies. So we get the war on terror is cast as Vietnam. We get the Bush administration cast as Watergate and Nixon. This allows them to relive, in their own minds, their relevance, their power, and their, indeed, happiness. In the process, they develop nothing new for the future and they keep repeating their mistakes. Bill Clinton is the only Democrat president who served two terms since FDR. (I mean elected genuinely to two terms. You've gotta throw LBJ out because he took over for Kennedy after the assassination.) You have to go back to FDR.

These people do not have a track record, and Clinton never once got even 50% of the vote, and yet they looked to that as their glory days and they looked to Vietnam and they looked to the Watergate era. In each of these instances they were shellacked. They were wiped out. Well, the Watergate was a different circumstance, but they were not able to parlay that into continual control of the White House. They lost it four years later in 1980 because they made a mess of the economy as we all who were alive then remember. They keep repeating the same mistakes. It's like insanity, keep doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting a different result. Now they are just openly, openly...

This election in Connecticut, why, this is going to convince them! Yep, that's the ticket. They're going to take the results of a primary -- and, by the way, somebody, I checked the e-mail here, "Rush, what do you mean they went out and convinced 14,000 or more independents to go to the Democratic Party to stick it to Lieberman? What do you mean by that?" From what I understand, there was a strategery that the Democrats had. They went out, they petitioned independents to cross party lines, to register as Democrats, and 14,000 independents did it. I don't know how many they petitioned. Probably the whole state. Most of the voters in Connecticut are registered independents, by the way. So they went out, 14,000 or so of these independents did in fact register as Democrat in order to be able to vote in the primary yesterday, in order to stick it to Lieberman.

This, in some people's estimation, amounts to stacking the deck. Yeah, may stack the deck, but it got the people to switch and it created more Democrats to vote against Lieberman, but it also allows them to create this image that it was the war and Lieberman's stance on it alone and nothing else that gave Lamont the victory. Lamont did win it, and I'm talking about perceptions here. Yeah, he won it, and Lieberman did have baggage in that regard. But 14,000 had to be enticed. So it's what they tell themselves about this, and they're going to lie to themselves. They're going to tell themselves what they want to hear. They're going to tell themselves what they want to believe to be true, and it is going to misguide them in the future, and the whole party is going to get caught up in this and it's going to be hilarious and fun to watch this.

END TRANSCRIPT

Read the Background Material...

(HC: Lieberman Defiant In Defeat)
(NYPost: Podhoretz: Incumbent Tumble Lets The Nuts In)
(NYDN: Win for the wackadoo wing)
(NYPost: 'Victory' Twist Has Eerie Feel)
(DrudgeReport: Joe Will Rise Again - Dick Morris)
(NRO: Joe Lieberman and the Memory of “Sore Loserman”)
(NRO: Lieberman’s Loss)
(American Spectator: Connecticut's Shame)
(Weekly Standard: How to Speak Liberal. Start by obfuscating)

*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time.

http://www.whitehous...

Q Did you all know that this was going to break today, yesterday, when there was this massive response to the Connecticut primary, discussion of terrorism, al Qaeda?

MR. SNOW: I don't want to get into operational details. This was not -- however, it was not explicit -- let me put it this way, I don't want to encourage that line of thought. I don't think it's fully accurate, but I also don't want -- I know it's frustrating, but we really don't want to get too much into who knew what, where, when...

Q Can I ask you about timing again -- not to keep harping on this, but yesterday when you talked about raising the white -- you know, saying the Democrats might want to raise the white flag --

MR. SNOW: This was not done in anticipation. It was not said with the knowledge that this was coming.

Q So the Vice President, when he did his incredibly rare conference call with reporters, also didn't know about it at the time?

MR. SNOW: I don't think so. You'll have to ask, but I can say from our point of view at that point we didn't.

Here is the link to what Tony Snow said they day before about Joe Lieberman which is talked about above:

http://www.whitehous...

Here is the link to Cheney's interview (which includes comments about Lieberman) that is talked about above:

http://www.whitehous...

If Lieberman had problems with Bush's State of the Union embrace and kiss--this is lights out.  All that Lamont has to do is run a picture of Limbaugh with a background audio clip from Rush's show, cut to Lieberman, finish with the Bush kiss. Lieberman's face morphs into Limbaugh. 

Lieberman's whole re-election case is built on the premise that he is somehow the last "true moderate".  The Limbaugh support obliterates his case.

Look, everything that's happening is Lieberman's fault. He had the ability to tone down his behavior earlier and avoid a primary (or at least win it). Now he has the ability to drop out at any time (as well as stop emulating Cheney in his public statements) and end the problem for Democrats. Blaming Lamont supporters for not giving in to Lieberman's blackmail is ridiculous.

It was interesting that John McCain on "This Week" today specifically refused to endorse Lieberman (despite the inane speculation there's been about a McCain-Lieberman unity ticket for 2008), repeatedly calling him a "liberal Democrat". McCain endorsed Schlesinger instead. Let's hope more Republicans step up and endorse their party's nominee.