Yea, yea, most off you will immediately dismiss this because of the presenter. Please don't. Take a few minutes to listen. It's well said & I believe it says a great deal about why we're divided. It adresses the abyss between right & left. Rush hit many things right on the head with this monologue.
Audio
In case you don't wanna listen, you can read the first several minutes.
Audio
In case you don't wanna listen, you can read the first several minutes.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
Hey, anybody seen the youth vote? MTV? P. Diddy? Who else is out there registering all these yutes? What happened to the youth vote? You know, it's one of the age-old myths. "This year the Democrats are going to get out the youth vote!" This is something they can't get over since the 60s and the anti-war crowd. Oh, and speaking of that, by the way, I'm getting away ahead of myself here. Greetings and welcome back, folks. Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network, and we are here from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. The telephone number. If you want to be on the program, we'll talk to you at 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address is [email protected]. I want to tell you this before the youth vote business, because this reminds me of this. I was talking to a really good liberal friend last night. I do have good liberal friends, and this person was depressed, and this person was really depressed because this person's issues were resoundingly defeated.
Gay marriage matters to this person a lot, and it went down to defeat everywhere it was on the ballot, including Oregon, you know, which is San Francisco north, Seattle south, and it went down to defeat there. But there were a lot of other things, and when this person saw the exit polls showed that the #1 issue on people's minds is morality. That person said to me, "You know, I just don't feel like this is my country. I mean, Bush may have won by all these three million votes, but there are a lot of people that don't believe any of this and just don't think that this is their country. They don't know where to go in the world," and I said, "Well, Larry Flynt says he's going to leave." Larry Flynt, he said yesterday -- I had this in the stack couple days ago -- Flynt said he was going to leave. Let him leave! A lot of people have threatened to leave over the years and haven't. Let 'em. Let 'em.
If there's somewhere better to go, let 'em go, if they're going to threaten to do that. But what I was said was this. I said, "Let me tell you what's happening, here." The baby boom generation is a fascinating generation to study. I'm a member of the baby boom generation, so I feel qualified to talk about this. The baby boom generation is, I think, noted for a couple of unique aspects. One: it's the most self-absorbed generation in the history of the world, and the reason we baby boomers -- and I will say "we," even though I'm not self absorbed as those of you who listen daily know. But the reason we are self-absorbed...(talking to staff) Even Dawn is finally laughing. The reason we are self-absorbed is because we had all the time in the world and all the prosperity in the world to be self-absorbed. It was our parents and grandparents who didn't have time for that. They learned in their teenage years that there were things much larger than themselves. The Great Depression, World War II, Korea, the Cold War.
But we, their children, grew up with prosperity that the world had never known before and it has only increased. We had to invent our stresses. We had to invent our syndromes, because we had time to. We had to invent the things that bother us. We had to invent the hard, tough aspect of our lives. We had to invent them because they really weren't there -- and we've, over the course of our maturation from teenager to adult, we've got ourselves convinced that our lives have been pretty damn bad, pretty damn hard, some of us. It's gotten to the point where, to a lot of baby boomers, George Bush represents the single greatest evil in the world. Now, tell me just how out of literal phase and reality is that, but they believe it.
We also have an element of our generation that grew up believing that America was evil and wrong, and this got started in the Vietnam War. We had a bunch of people who ended up becoming anti-war, anti-America protesters in their youth, and their whole adult lives have been spent validating their youth. Therefore, any war that comes along, America is wrong -- except when one of their party members leads it, like Clinton in Kosovo. There are always exceptions to these rules. But here comes Iraq. Here comes a threat they choose to ignore -- or worse, America caused. If we would just not attack the terrorists, listened to bin Laden, why, we would be safer -- and so Iraq was a big issue to these people only because they put themselves ahead of the country. They put themselves ahead of reality. They didn't want the discomfort of it.
They didn't want the discomfort of going to war but they also saw an opportunity. Here's another war they disagreed with, "America caused it; America is wrong. Our youth was well spent!" It is because of idle time and prosperity that they have the time to devote their self-thoughts to this stuff, and they became obsessed with negativism, and because of all of this, the combination of negative doom and gloom outlook on life, "Oh, woe is us! Oh, how hard is our life!" coupled with the fact that they are so self-absorbed, that they don't understand having to win in the arena of ideas. They think that what they are should automatically be, and so I was telling this person last night: "You've got a lot of problems, not just in the baby boom generation, but liberalism in general. You have the idea in your head that because the country rejected via a popular vote what you believe in, that the country is no longer yours.
"Have you ever thought about fighting for what you believe in? And I don't mean the way you have, but have you ever thought about fighting it in the sense of actually persuading people to try to agree with you? The way you've gone about gay marriage has been guaranteed to defeat it. You have gone and had Supreme Court judges in Massachusetts tell legislators what laws they must pass and by when, laws that the people would not vote for themselves, laws that the people would not approve of. You had a mayor in San Francisco force illegal marriages against the law for a period of time. You think this doesn't have a backlash? This is not how things happen in this country. You think just because you want it -- baby boomers, self-absorbed, selfish generation: Whatever you wanted, you got -- just because you want it, it should be there, and when you don't get it, it's, "Oh, woe is us?'"
I said, "Try being a conservative for 40 years. Try being on the losing end for 40 years. Try being laughed at, impugned, and made fun of for 40 years. You guys have lost your power here in the last 20 and you're panicking. You're panicking because you don't know how to get it back. You want to try to force it on people because you don't think you can persuade people. So I understand why you're depressed and why you're panicked out there, but you're going to have to understand that the way you're going about trying to make this country like you, or look like you, is being totally counterproductive. It's just not working in any way, and it's not just the election yesterday that indicates this. There are all kinds of indicators out there that foretold the election result yesterday. The unwillingness to admit reality, the utter denial of reality that these people are in continues to hold them back and amaze me at the same time and, frankly, has all of us scratching our heads."
We see a good economy. They see soup lines. We see a terror threat. They see a president who's killing Americans for oil. We see a war in Iraq that's not being fought in America, in which Iraq is the central gathering point for terrorists. They see an opportunity for Bush to enrich Halliburton. We see audiotape from Osama bin Laden as the only thing he can do as an October surprise. The only attack he can launch on America is a tape, a videotape! They see that George W. Bush has failed in the war on terror because bin Laden can send us a tape, and we sit here, we scratch our heads and there seems to be this great divide, and I'm telling you that the root of this division is not us, and there's no need for us to be defensive, and we do not have to run around and listen to them tell us what we have to do because it is we who need to be analyzing them as I am now.
