We love the country, we love people, and are in awe of the founding of this country and its blessings by God and the recognition in our founding documents that we were all created with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. We conservatives see all three of those things under assault. We in this audience want the best for every American. We want everyone to succeed. We do not want our country to fail, and we do not want individual citizens to fail. Against that knowledge, understanding, and given, here we have an administration which is implementing policies that are anathema to the founding of the country, in our view, my view. We have an administration implementing policies that are destructive to the way this country was founded, they are destructive to the opportunities for happiness and prosperity that this country has provided for 230 years, and we're alarmed by it. I see that a lot of other people are alarmed by it, too, but they don't have the guts to say so per se because they are afraid of having happen to them what has been happening to me with the White House and the media trying to destroy them or ruin their reputations or what have you.
So they're cowed and they have to say, "Ooh, we love the guy, love the family, ah, it's so wonderful, I voted for the guy. (whispering) His policies are disastrous. But we voted for him." Well, to me, this is not about hero worship, and it's not about anything historical to do with his election. He's all our presidents now. His policies are what matter, doesn't matter anything else as far as I'm concerned, he doesn't get a pass on implementing policies that destroy the nation's past and its founding simply because he's new, historic, a young, smart guy, lovable, and likable. Look past those things because it's the people of the country I'm concerned about. It is the country itself I'm concerned about, not a single individual. Debra Saunders, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, sent me a note during the program yesterday, and I got around to answering it afterwards. She wanted to take up this whole "I want him to fail" business. She asked, "Could you send me the original statement when you first said this?" And I said, "Sure." It was January 16th, it was a Friday, the top of the last hour of the program. I said the same things then that I said now, just said to you. And I said, "Why would I want somebody who is antithetical to the nation's founding, to freedom and so forth, why would I want somebody to succeed in destroying that?" It's perfectly sensible.
I got to thinking about this. The Federalist Papers and the constitutional convention debates are rife with arguments about the separation of powers. Now, stick with me on this, because this is a fundamental point to try to explain, especially to those of you who are new to the program, what it is that guides me. The whole theory of the separation of powers, meaning legislative branch, judicial branch, executive branch, was ingeniously based on human nature. Our Founding Fathers had studied history, and they knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely. So we divide power. We divide power between the states and the federal government. We divide power within the federal government. And we further divide power among three separate branches of government. We give each branch a different set of powers and incentives to protect their own prerogatives so they can keep an eye on each other. These are called checks and balances. And the liberals love talking about checks and balances very much.
The underlying assumption of this whole system is that the country functions better if everyone is of a skeptical bent of mind. That's what keeps the next guy honest. The whole reason that we have divided government instead of a king is that the issue is not about one government official succeeding. This country was not founded on the principle that the president is a king and above all the king must succeed. In fact, the system is designed to ensure that the president fails when he is wrong. That's the whole purpose of checks and balances. The whole purpose of dividing power, is to ensure the president fails when he's wrong. The Framers wanted the country to succeed, just as I do. If they wanted the president to succeed, they would not have saddled him with Congress, they wouldn't have saddled him with the courts, they wouldn't have saddled him with the free press, and they wouldn't have made him face reelection every four years. They would have made him a king who no one could oppose.
If our nation was all about a single individual succeeding simply because that individual must succeed regardless, we wouldn't have the form of government that we do. Now, conflating the president and the country -- and by that I mean, assuming that the president is always the country, assuming that the president always has the country's best interests at heart, such as the founders did, turns a functioning democracy into a robotic cult. I fear that that's what we have right now. We have a cult of fear and celebrity, robotic cult, that is epitomized in Warren Buffett, it's epitomized by Jack Welch, it's epitomized by Barton Biggs and Jim Cramer and anybody else who knows what they see is devastatingly wrong, is horribly wrong, but because there is a fear to oppose because the assumption is that Obama is the country, that Obama equals the best interests of the country simply because he's Obama, that's what gives you a cult. The worst part of it is that many of these people who are making hay over this Limbaugh-wants-Obama-to-fail garbage know full well, ladies and gentlemen, that what I just told you is the case.
This is not an honest debate going on here, as we have demonstrated in the first hour of the program with the Warren Buffett sound bites and the Barton Biggs sound bites and the Jim Cramer sound bites. It's not an honest debate. What's happening here is the most cynical kind of down and dirty politics by people who not only wanted George W. Bush to fail, but worked night and day to ensure that he failed. I say to you again, if the Founders wanted a situation where the government was about one official succeeding, then George Washington would have accepted the role he was he offered as king. But we have separation of powers. We have division of powers. All of this is designed to ensure that a president fails when he is wrong. The Framers wanted the country to succeed. Let me add to this, Byron York today writing at the DCExaminer.com: "'Why The Founding Fathers Would Want Obama's Plans to Fail' -- James Madison was not specifically contemplating Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, when he wrote Federalist No. 63. But reading the document -- one of the seminal arguments in favor of adopting the US Constitution -- it’s clear Madison knew their type. And he knew they would come along again and again in American history, if Americans were lucky enough to have a long history. Obama and Pelosi, along with their most ardent supporters, are the types to see a crisis, like our current economic mess, as a 'great opportunity,' as the president put it last Saturday. They are the types, after a long period out of power, to attempt to use that 'great opportunity' to push through far-reaching changes in national policy that had only a tangential connection, if at all, to the crisis at hand. And they are the types the Founding Fathers wanted to stop.
"In the Federalist Papers, written 221 years ago, Madison addressed the need for a Senate to accompany the more populist House of Representatives. An upper body, he wrote, 'may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.' For the times when a political leader would attempt to capitalize on those errors and delusions, the Founders prescribed the Senate, with its members elected to terms three times the length of those in the House, originally chosen not by the people but by the state legislatures. From Federalist 63: 'There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?'"
Let me translate this for you. There are going to be times demagogues are going to come along, there are going to be times that people who are power hungry, who are going to take advantage of a crisis, to say they've got all the solutions, and they're going to ram all these things through. The solutions have nothing to do with the crisis. They're just selfish desires of the demagogue. The people, because of the crisis, are going to go along with it, even though in rational moments they would reject it all. We need an element to stop this. We need an element to protect the people from the kind of leaders who would abuse them, mislead them, and, ergo, one of those devices was the United States Senate. "Of course the economy is in crisis. But if Obama had his way, everything would be treated as if it were a crisis. Health care is a crisis. The environment is a crisis. Education is a crisis. In truth, those other areas are not crises, and the Senate’s job is to delay action on them until Obama’s power to stir popular passions fades."
I was just talking about this with Mr. Snerdley because we were in his office at the top of the hour, and there's Obama out there making his health care initiative today. Snerdley is getting all worked up about it, "My gosh, every day it's a new initiative, it's health care here, card check there, this and that and the other thing, where's the bill?" I said, "Snerdley, you're missing the point. There need not ever be legislation on this. Don't you understand what's happening here?" Let me tell you people. He goes out and says, (doing Obama impression) "I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity to do health care reform. Health care reform will get you a job, health care reform is one of the reasons the economy is tanking. You need better health care." Who doesn't? "Obama is going to get us health care, Mabel, Obama is going to get us health care! Obama, why, he's going to educate our kids better." So the approval numbers stay up. All the approval numbers need to stay up is the right rhetoric from Obama. He doesn't have to do anything, even though he's going to try to ram a lot of stuff down our throats, he doesn't have to. As long as he keeps the approval number up, then Warren Buffett is going to back down and Jack Welch is going to back down and Barton Biggs is going to back down, and everybody else is going to back down 'cause they're going to be afraid. So we have to remember, folks, we don't have a king. We have separation of powers. We have a system designed to ensure that the president fail when he should.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So you see, ladies and gentlemen, all I want and all we want is success for every American. If there's any worship on this program, it is not of a single man, it is of our Constitution and our other founding documents, and the Founding Fathers who gave them to us. Certainly not of a mortal human being today. I just wanted to go through this to explain it because I know for a fact the tune-in factor -- our cume, which is the total audience (they actually showed it to me yesterday) -- is literally geometric in its increase. As such, the people listening here who haven't heard before who come to the program with all of these erroneous misconceptions that they've been filled with by the critics of this program for all these 20 years.
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