Conservatives are Winning on Policy

RUSH: Now, I understand -- I just know -- that a lot of you are down, depressed, forlorn, hopeless, wondering where the heck do we go now, particularly from this point. You may have seen Obama spiking the ball at his little presser minutes ago -- where, again, I live in his head. He told everybody, "Stop listening to these talking heads on the radio. Stop listening to those people and stop listening to the bloggers and stop listening to the lobbyists," and stop listening to everybody but him.

Now, folks, I have had an ongoing theory for the last two weeks. And I know that many of you have wanted to believe it, but you wondered whether I was just trying to keep you up, whether I was ignoring reality. That ongoing theme and theory was that through all of this, two things were happening: The media was covering this in their standard horse race, "How does this help Obama?" narrative. That's the only thing they care about. The inside-the-Beltway narrative is, "How does this help Obama and how does this destroy Republicans?"

So they go do polls, and they get the polls they want, and they show that the Republicans are supposedly hated and that Obama is supposedly loved, and now everything's right with the world because the government's back up and running. Did you see this tweet from this Jim Acosta guy at CNN? This is hilarious... Oh, another thing. In explaining this theory, which I'm going to detail coming up here. I'm gonna tell you where the media narrative in Washington is wrong. They're missing the big story.

I got a call yesterday or maybe it was two days ago. "Rush, why are you still laughing? How are you so not affected by this or seemingly so?" I don't want you all thinking that I'm coming in here all holly jolly and so forth and not affected by it, but I mentioned to you yesterday, "Life goes on, and this isn't over." The battle for freedom and liberty really never is over, and there are really low points in it, but I'm not giving up, and I'm not gonna engage in phony pep talks, either.

All I do here every day is tell you what I think about things, and I get my own share of grief from it, even from my friends. I've had some of my friends say, "Would you stop it? You know, you're not making this sound bad enough. You gotta make this sound really bad, because that's what it is, and that's what your audience wants to hear." I said, "Well, I don't live that way. I don't. I don't go home and huddle away in the corner, cower in the corner, and worry about how bad things are.

"Because we can always change everything, or at least we can try." This theory that I've had the past two weeks is that when it comes to policy, just like the '95 budget shutdown, the Republicans actually came out of that -- in a substance and policy sense -- very strong, and it's the same thing here. The case can be made, and I'm gonna try to make it. In fact, our old buddy Peter Beinart is a well-known leftist journalist that writes at The Daily Beast and a bunch of other places.

I used to think of Beinart and Fareed Zakaria GPS in the same league. They're a little distant now. They're both leftists, they're both pro-Obama, but Beinart has a piece today in The Daily Beast (which is in the belly of the beast) and it dovetails exactly with the stratagems and the theories that I have been trying to share with you for the past two weeks, and that is that it was the Republicans who were winning here. In fact, there's some stuff in this piece; it's almost word-for-word from what I said.

I'm not charging plagiarism, but he makes the point just as I did two days ago -- and I got grief from some of you in the e-mail. I made the point that Obama's agenda, since he was reelected, has basically stalled. We haven't gotten anywhere on amnesty. (Now, they're trying to gin it pick up.) They haven't done anything on gun control, even though they've tried. That went the other way for 'em in Colorado. In a sense of policy and substance, the Republicans are winning.

The sequester was not given away. The sequester staying in place means that there is a new baseline from which all budgeting will now come and the level of spending is now at 2008 levels in terms of baseline budgeting. It's a victory. The sequester holds. I'm gonna explain all of this in great detail -- well, I don't know about great detail. I'm gonna get into it as the program unfolds today before your very eyes and ears. But at the same time, I'm not in denial.

I don't want anybody thinking that I'm in an artificial place here just trying to keep you up. I'm not artificially laughing. If I sound like I'm enjoying myself, it's not artificial. It's real. I try to do that with life ever since it really hit me once long ago that there's only one of these, and it's really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day. The day-to-day has a lot of depressing things happen. Day-to-day has a lot of downers in 'em. But most people do not employ all the leverage they have over their own lives.

It's just standard, ordinary human nature. I've always tried to just do what I want to do and as I define happiness and contentment, pursue it, and do the best I can within that framework. Especially I try not to get depressed over what people I can't control do, and we really can't control what these people in Washington are doing. We can't really, day to day, control it. We can have an impact on it other ways, and it's engaging in that where optimism can be found, I believe.

I'm just trying to share a little of that with you. I really think intellectually, morally, substantively, there's no question that we occupy the best place. We're not lying to ourselves. We're not destroying anything. We're not engaged in hero worship of anybody. I think our place is not that bad, especially as the future presents itself, coupled with the unknown that the future always contains, and within the unknown are always going to be surprises on the upside, positive, as well as negative.

So don't think that I'm doing anything artificial here. Don't even think of it as a pep talk. I'm just... It's a great thing I have with this show. I turn on this microphone and I can just unload, as I actually am. That's a great liberating thing, not have to act, not have to say what I think you want to hear and do what I think you want to do. I look around, and I find all kinds of things to laugh at in this. For example, Jim Acosta, CNN. He went to work today, and he was so excited!

In his attempts today to delegitimize and devalue information sharers by defining them as "radio talking heads" and "bloggers," this President's ignorance of the proud history of what "freedom of the press" in America really means is glaring!

In the days preceding and following the adoption of the United States Constitution--the document which structures and limits the powers of the Executive Branch and that of every other segment of the federal government--the circulation of ideas was accomplished in numerous ways. There were newspapers, pamphlets, speeches and other forms of oratory, broadsides and "committees of correspondence."

From the Massachusetts Historical Society web site come these paragraphs:

"Ignorance is slavery -
"By the early 1770s, Boston's patriot leaders have had many opportunities to rally townspeople against perceived injustices (usually acts of Parliament or other objectionable activities undertaken by the British government or soldiery). Men like Samuel Adams understand that an informed citizenry is the best weapon against unfavorable government policy. Political ignorance is simply another form of slavery. How do patriots impart political knowledge to such a vast audience? Ministers, newspaper publishers, and even the Massachusetts General Assembly work to educate the public, but in 1771, patriot leaders in Boston experiment with a new form of instruction. They initiate an annual town lecture, which will be held each year on 5 March, an important anniversary for Bostonians. Some colonial leaders are skeptical, and question whether the general public can be educated in the ways of politics through such popular means."

In the fall of 1772, Bostonians address the latest rumors from Parliament: judges of the Superior Court of Judicature will no longer be paid by the colony's General Court. Instead, judges will be paid directly from the royal treasury, using money collected by the American Board of Customs Commissioners. Fearing this new process will "pervert the judgment of men," Bostonians petition their selectmen to act. In the process of debating the matter, Samuel Adams proposes the creation of a corresponding society to gauge the sentiments of other Massachusetts towns. On 2 November 1772, a committee is born when the Boston selectmen vote to establish a twenty-one-member Committee of Correspondence.
The Committee's first assignment is to prepare a series of reports outlining colonists' rights and Parliament's infringements upon those rights. The reports are gathered into a single document that becomes known as the Boston Pamphlet. Copies of the pamphlet are distributed to every town in Massachusetts, and town leaders across the colony debate the wisdom of following in Boston's footsteps.
Many towns do eventually appoint their own committees of correspondence, a development that troubles governor Thomas Hutchinson. As advocates of the committee system boast that Bostonians (and their committee) will prove to be the "saviors of America," Hutchinson and his opponents take every opportunity to disparage the town's Committee of Correspondence.
More positive news arrives from the "patriotic province of Virginia" in the spring of 1773. The House of Burgesses proposes some enhancements to Boston's committee of correspondence idea. In response to Virginia's proposal, Massachusetts creates a colony-level committee of correspondence chaired by Samuel Adams. The rhetoric of freedom, rights, and liberty bandied about by politicians is soon adopted by other colonists struggling with issues of slavery. In one poignant broadside, four slaves petition the Massachusetts General Court, hoping that the "divine spirit of freedom" will extend to the thousands of men and women literally enslaved in the colonies.
By the summer of 1773, the committees of correspondence have yet another issue to debate and discuss. In May, Parliament passes the Tea Act, giving the East India Company a monopoly over the sale of tea in the colonies. Committees are quick to share their thoughts on this "impending evil," but will their vitriol be enough to stop the tea from coming?"

Why is it that now, in the Year 2013, we have a regime in place which fears the formation of groups of citizens who may call themselves "tea partiers," or any other such name who, like their forebears of the 18th and 19th Centuries, call for liberty and freedom from elected and appointed government officials and their oppressive rules, regulations and "taking" of their income?

The free circulation of ideas in America, with all the technology available today, has the potential for restoring the concepts of individual liberty which so-called "progressives" have censored from the nation's textbooks and public discourse. As in the founding period, with current technology and ability to circulate ideas, the time has come to follow John Adams advice and, "Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." - JOHN ADAMS, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

"Let the pulpit resound with the doctrines and sentiments of religious liberty. Let us hear the dangers of thralldom to our consciences from ignorance, extreme poverty, and dependence; in short, from civil and political slavery. Let us see delineated before us the true map of man. Let us hear the dignity of his nature, and the noble rank he holds among the works of God-that consenting to slavery is a sacrilegious breach of trust, as offensive in the sight of God as it is derogatory from our own honor or interest or happiness - and that God Almighty has promulgated from heaven liberty, peace, and goodwill to man!" - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

"Set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests; in short against the gates of earth and hell." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

"They (the Puritans) saw clearly that of all the nonsense and delusion which had ever passed through the mind of man, none had ever been more extravagant than the notions of absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted successions, and the rest of those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law, which had thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity, reverence, and right reverend eminence and holiness around the idea of a priest as no mortal could deserve, and as always must, from the constitution of human nature, be dangerous to society. For this reason they demolished the whole system of diocesan episcopacy, and, deriding, as all reasonable and impartial men must do, the ridiculous fancies of sanctified effluvia from Episcopal fingers, they established sacerdotal ordination on the foundation of the Bible and common sense." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

"They even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God and that was worshipped." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

"But none of the means of information are more sacred, or have been cherished with more tenderness and care by the settlers of America, than the press. Care has been taken that the art of printing should be encouraged, and that it should be easy and cheap and safe for any person to communicate his thoughts to the public. And you, Messieurs printers, whatever the tyrants of the earth may say of your paper, have done important service to your country by your readiness and freedom in publishing the speculations of the curious. The stale, impudent insinuations of slander and sedition with which the gormandizers of power have endeavored to discredit your paper are so much the more to your honor; for the jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." - A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

Here

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." - Thomas Jefferson

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