| "Suicidal" Joe, Depressed Lib College Kid |
| September 16, 2004 |
Listen to Rush… (…talk to Joe, a depressed liberal at UNC Greensboro) BEGIN TRANSCRIPT Joe in Greensboro, North Carolina, I'm glad you waited. Welcome to the program sir. CALLER: Hey I'm the columnist from yesterday (story) that you quoted as saying that there were going to be mass suicides after the election on November 3rd. RUSH: You write for the Carolinian? CALLER: Carolinian. RUSH: I saw a reference to your piece by James Taranto at Best of the Web dot-com. CALLER: Yeah. RUSH: And you really suggested mass suicides would take place among students, people your age, if Bush were to win again? CALLER: Well, I was saying it satirically, but I think certainly there's going to be a huge depression because I remember in the 2000 election, that was my first year at college, and I didn't know -- first of all I didn't know as many people who were my age that were going to vote this year, as I do now, but -- but I also didn't know anybody who's voting for Bush in that election, everybody that I knew voted for Gore, and he wins the popular vote, Bush wins the presidency, we sit through four years of Bush, who becomes further and further right and, you know, then 9/11 happens and Iraq happens, we sit through all of that, and I think that Kerry is going to go down in flames this time and I wonder if it's going to -- you know, sort of break the political spirit of my generation.  RUSH: Actually, I think it's a mistake, honestly I think it's a mistake, to assume that most of the people in your generation share your political view. I think it's the opposite. I think, if anything, it's 50-50 now. It may be tending a little bit more mainstream conservative in your generation than young generations have previously been known be to be. But regardless, you obviously were being humorous when you talked about mass suicides, but you will be profoundly affected, I don't want to say depressed, but this will disappoint you tremendously, right? CALLER: Oh, sure, I mean I'm a Democrat, but I can see that Kerry's campaign is in serious trouble, and I can't see him pulling it out, you know, in the next, what, 50 days? You know, and I just get more and more depressed watching CNN and seeing, you know, sort of the campaign go down in flames. It's driving me nuts. You know, and everybody that I know -- RUSH: So you wonder what's going to become of your party and your generation in general, right? CALLER: Yeah. You know, I said earlier that I don't know what we can do other than maybe repeal the 22nd Amendment and run Clinton again to get the party back on track. RUSH: (Laughing) You don't have to repeal the 22nd Amendment, you could run Hillary in 2008, which is -- CALLER: -- that would be disastrous. |
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| RUSH: I hate to tell you, that's what your party is setting up anyway. I think this party has been fooling everybody making them think they want Kerry to win. I'm sure there's some Democrats that want Kerry to win, but the power structure of your party is oriented toward Hill in '08, make no mistake about it, and they're willing to go through a Bush second term and try to impeach him during the second term. You'll have plenty of stuff to be excited about because they're going to try to impeach him. No really, they're going to try to impeach him over Abu Ghraib. I make that prediction to you. Joe, can you hang on through the break here? CALLER: Sure. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: We're talking with Joe, who is a college student. Where do you go to school? Which Carolina university is it? CALLER: University of North Carolina at Greensboro. RUSH: Yeah, UNC Greensboro. All right, I want to talk to you, if I may, man to man, not conservative to liberal. CALLER: All right. RUSH: I don't want to argue with you about conservative and liberal, because you sound like a very articulate -- and I mean this, by the way -- liberal. Most of the liberals that call me here are, you know, sloganeering and using talking points and they lie about what they want to talk about in order to get on -- CALLER: I don't doubt that. RUSH: I know. And that's why I think I can talk to you. How old are you? You're in your twenties, early twenties. CALLER: I'm 21. RUSH: 21, all right. You're very young, and you're not old enough really to know yet that you're going to have these ups and downs politically. I mean, we conservatives went throughout Watergate and Nixon and thought it was all over, and it was never going to be  again, and when we had eight years of Clinton we felt probably pretty much like you feel now. But Clinton's gone, we got our guy in there, things change, you go up and down. The thing that you have to remember as a human being is that, yeah, it's important, your ideology can define you, and it's great to have your party run the show in Washington and this sort of thing, but that doesn't determine, or shouldn't determine whether or not you enjoy life or whether or not you are successful in life. CALLER: Well, of course not but I feel like it's very difficult to wake up every morning if you're me, or if you're anyone who feels like I feel, and watch the country become something that you don't recognize anymore, something you don't agree with. I have a number of -- well, I mean, we got all this feedback at the Carolinian yesterday after you mentioned the column on your show. We got something 3,800 hits to the sight just a couple hours after your show, and there were all these really angry, nasty letters that we got that were, "What did Bush ever do to you? And why would you feel that Bush is hurting young people?" And from my perspective it's easy to see because I have a father who is a Marine, he was in Desert Storm one, he got from Iraq about a year ago, for the second time, he was in Afghanistan. You know, and he's retired after 20 years, he doesn't want to go over anymore, he's done. And a lot of his friends who have been in for just as long are now done, you know, they were loyal soldiers but they're just not in it anymore. They feel as though as long as Bush is in the White House, and it looks like he's going to be another four years, they're going to keep going to places they don't want to go to for reasons they don't want to go there. You know, on top of that I have a lesbian aunt who helped to raise me who I'm very close to and she can't have her, you know, she can't have her relationships recognized legally and Bush is making all this noise about amendments to the Constitution. |
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| RUSH: All right, if those are the things that are important to you, then you've got some decisions to make. If they're really that important to you, and you really believe in them, then the last thing you want to do is get depressed. You want to get fired up, you want to keep fighting for the things you believe in. We could argue all day long if you're right or wrong about those things, I understand how the left feels about war in general and how the left feels about war in Iraq. You're young enough, I think you could look into what Bush's real plan is and not get trapped into the clichés of believing that it's unjust and it was a lie and this sort of thing. There's a genuine decent vision that's oriented toward national security that belies and is the foundation for this vision. We could only hope that it works. But the alternative, as you know that's being offered by Kerry, is not a solution to the problem that we have, either. It's not a solution. It's not a problem that we caused. It's a problem that was visited to us years before 9/11 and then ultimately on 9/11, forcing us to do something about it, and this is as clear-cut a vision as anybody has seen to deal with it. That's what people on my side think. But the point is, you're only in your early twenties. You've got a lot of years ahead of you to effect the change that you want. You have no business being depressed. You have no business giving up. And you have no business-- CALLER: Well, I don't intend to. RUSH: You're not going to accomplish anything if you have that attitude. CALLER: Right. Well, the paragraph that you read yesterday on the air, the next paragraph, the very next paragraph said, you know, I did not intend to kill myself, but I didn't think anybody else should either, that we should wait until we see the other side ousted so that we can dance in the streets over it. You know, which is a little bit how I assume, you know, the right felt when, you know, George Bush was elected after eight years of Clinton. But I think the point of the column was that there is, I think, going to be this great depression among people who are young and liberal because we feel like, or at least I feel like, our party is on a suicidal jag. RUSH: Okay, well you're right about that. So take it over. I'll tell you, your party is being run by people who sound like you. The problem is your party is being run by people who are panicked, who have these paranoid visions and views of the future in the greatest country in the world. This is the thing that people like me don't understand. I don't understand how  people can grow up in this country and see and experience the opportunity that exists and be depressed. I can understand how issues matter to you. I try to tell my audience all the time, it's not worth getting depressed when you lose; it's just redouble your efforts and fight for it to win, as long as this is done in the arena of ideas. Your job is to go out there and persuade people to agree with you, not to run and commit suicide or to get all depressed and get mad. You've got to give people a reason to agree with you. You can't just sit around and try to make people hate Bush. CALLER: Do you think that Howard Dean would have been a more effective candidate? RUSH: Yes. CALLER: You do? RUSH: I do because he would have inspired some support. He would have had some energy for him. I don't know how widespread it would have been. I think the Republicans would have had an easy job demonizing him and I think he would have stepped in it a number of times and ended up being a laughingstock, but he had demonstrated that he had the ability to make people actually personally connect to him, which Kerry has not been able to do. Kerry just doesn't have this ability to establish a personal connection with anybody. Dean did. I think Dean would have lost as big as Kerry is going to lose, and I think the Clintons would have seen to that, too. There are some realities here you're going to have to understand here. But, remember, you live in the greatest country on earth, as it is, no matter who wins the presidency, and you can have a great life and be extremely happy regardless who's in the presidency, the rest of it is icing on the cake. |