Rush Limbaugh: Fear Liberals, Not God

CALLER: I would like to point out that there are people, like myself in this country who will vote for George Bush but are not comfortable when he draws upon his relationship with God as his inspiration for decisions he makes as leader of the free world. I think he would do much better to invoke the names of men -- you know, Cicero, Aquinas -- as his inspiration to support freedom in the world. People should be skeptical, and it opens him up to ridicule by those who don't share his belief system --

CALLER: We're talking about both, but Bush is president, and I think Kerry is shamelessly pandering -- RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: But I'm not comfortable with either men saying that "I will make my decisions" or that "my belief system in God is an issue for me."

RUSH: I think, you know, and I really mean this. I think there are a lot of people that don't understand people who have faith in God. I think there's been a number of, over the years, confusing and purposely impugning stories about people of faith. It is thought that people of faith do not have their own initiatives, do not have their own thoughts, that they get up and are robots and that God talks to them every day and go do what God says. That's not what Bush is. That's not what Bush is, and that's not who most religious conservative people are, either.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me change the tone here for just a second, because there's something I want to address. We had a call from somebody claiming to vote for Bush, but admits to being upset at Bush's references to God and his claims that God will guide him in the Oval Office, and the caller hoped that Bush would invoke great men rather than Go-o-ddd, Cicero, Plato, Socrates, whoever else.

Go to our founding documents. Go to the Declaration of Independence and find Cicero or Plato or Socrates for me. Go listen to the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, ladies and gentlemen. Abraham Lincoln invoked the name of God all the time and all Abraham Lincoln is credited for is saving the nation! Not only do Lincoln invoke the name of God all the time, so did our Founders, so did our Framers, so does our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

What I'm "not comfortable with" is people who believe they have all the answers and that government has all the answers. All of our great leaders understood that government does not have all the answers, nor did they have all the answers. There are questions human beings are capable of asking, to which we will never get the answers, because we don't know them - -and that is where faith enters into it. Liberals are who you should fear, folks. This fear of God is irrational. Fear of God is irrational. Fear of liberals makes sense.

Liberals consider themselves more powerful than God. Liberals "have all the answers." Only God has all the answers. This business of leaders who profess a belief in God? I say, "Thank God for them." There has been a big misconception throughout my lifetime, and it has been perpetuated by the left and the secularists and the atheists in our society, and that belief is that people of God -- just like all conservatives -- are mind-numbed robots. Just as you in this audience have been characterized by the left as brainless, mind-numbed robots waiting for your marching orders every day from me, so the religious right are said to be brainless.

They get up every day, God talks to them, God tells them what to do, God tells them how to vote, God tells them what to believe -- and that's not the case. It is so far from reality, and to believe that that is the case, you have to be coming from a position of fear. You have to believe that nobody has the concept of self-will, free will, which we all have. We're all free to believe and do whatever we want to believe. Somehow those that profess to believe in God are said to have no minds whatsoever? You believe that and you are coming from a place of utter fear, and you are fearing the wrong thing.

What you need to fear and who you need to fear is a person, or a group of people, who tell you they have all the answers -- particularly for you. They have all the answers for your life, and there's a group of people in this country that does that and they are our good friends the liberals. If you listen to them they have all the answers. They never answer a question with "I don't know," and if a candidate does have an answer that says, "I don't know," they claim he's an idiot and a done so, when in fact the man who admits he doesn't know everything is brilliant, because it isn't possible. It simply is not possible.

People of faith understand that there are certain things they can't prove, that there are certain things that they believe, and it is their faith that sustains them. It is their faith that gives them strength. It is their faith from which they derive their morality. When George Bush says that he is going to take his faith, or he is guided by his faith, he means he's always trying to figure out the right thing to do,! Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't mean he gets on his knees and asks God for direction and God talks back and God says, "Bomb Iraq," and so Bush bombs Iraq.

That's not what happens, but that's what the left wants you to believe that is going to happen any time a religious person gets elected to office -- and only fear can make people believe that. Bush has never said, he has never given any indication whatsoever, that that is how decisions are made. He prays for strength to do the right thing. Somebody tell me what is wrong with that. Only is it wrong in the mind of the liberal who thinks the human being is capable at all times of always doing the right thing without any consultation with something higher.

The simple fact of the matter is that one of the strengths of faith is that it teaches all of us that there are things larger than ourselves. Liberals think that they are all we need. There are many things larger than ourselves, and most people learn this early in life. Most liberals in life have yet to learn it. They have all the answers for everybody else and if anybody is going to be afraid of anything it should be that. Somebody tells you they have all the answers to any problem like Iraq -- John Kerry has an answer for everything? Do you understand? He's got the answer. No matter what it is he's got all the answers and yet he talks about taking his faith into the White House?

You know what John Kerry means when he says he'll "take his faith with him to the White House and it will guide him? What he says is, "Look, religious people. I believe in God, too. You can trust me." He hasn't the foggiest idea what it means. He's simply spinning. He is simply pandering. But this notion that we ought to somehow serve other men, and make our decisions because some other man says so -- like Cicero, or somebody else? It may be intellectually pleasing, it may be less confrontational or controversial, but it is not the basis on which the nation was formed.

People like George Bush do not claim perfect. They don't claim to have all the answers. Liberalism does both. Bush doesn't claim to have the power to make people walk. John Edwards says that John Kerry does! Sorry, folks. Nobody yet has the power to make people in wheelchairs walk. The government does not have the power to make poor people rich. Yet, John Kerry and John Edwards and liberals throughout my time have promised every poor people that they will get richer if simply they vote for Democrats, and yet the people who vote for Democrats all these years still complain about the plight of their lives, because liberals don't have the power to fulfill these grandiose promises that they make.

They claim that sick people will get well. This business when John Edwards is out there saying in essence that Christopher Reeve was in a wheelchair because George Bush is president, and if John Kerry is elected people like Christopher Reeve will get out of their wheelchairs and walk? That's what you ought to fear. That is no different than these snake oil people on television selling stuff that you think are poisoning the minds of the minds of the innocent and duping them.

There's no difference between John Edwards and a phony baloney preacher setting the globe on fire telling us we're near the Last Days unless you send him some money. So old people run to their pocketbooks, send this preacher who sets a globe on fire all their money because that will get them saved. That's liberalism! That's not Christianity. That is not George Bush. That is playing on people's fears. The idea that there needs to be fear of God is simply incomprehensible to me, not in the sense and not in the way that the American left wants you to fear God.

Bush is very traditional in his thinking. He's very traditional in his beliefs. He seeks guidance to help him do the right thing -- and he doesn't think that John Edwards is the place to go for it, and he doesn't think that John Kerry is the place to go for it, and he doesn't think that Ted Kennedy is the place to go for it, and he doesn't think that Kofi Annan is the place to go for it -- and, damn it, I agree with him! Those are not the places to go to get the answer as to what's the right thing to do.

Every human being has questions that are not answerable. We all do -- even you atheists. You've come up with your own answers; Bush comes up with his. The idea that somebody who believes in God is to be feared is a direct result of years and years and years of fear that has been implanted through our society by the American left which doesn't want people to think of God except when they see a liberal walking down the street.

It is creepy. Here is another take on that story.

Two wars, two Kerrys
http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20040229roddycol1.asp
Two wars, two Kerrys

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Thirteen years ago, Walter Carter, of Newton, Mass., wrote to his senator and asked him to support military action to expel Saddam Hussein's troops from Iraq. As a vote neared, Carter faxed his letter to the office of John Kerry and, just to be sure, sent it along by regular mail as well.

A few days later, Kerry wrote back to thank Carter for opposing military action against Iraq and told him he had voted "no" on the resolution to give then-President George H.W. Bush the go-ahead.

"I didn't know what to think," Carter recalls today.

A few days later, Carter got another letter from Kerry. The Senator thanked Carter for supporting Bush on Iraq.

"From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf," Kerry wrote.

"As I recall they said it was a computer glitch," Carter said. "Possibly it's true. Possibly it's not true. I don't know what to believe."

And therein lies one of the mysteries of John Kerry, a man inclined to split irreconcilable differences, leaving voters confused and Republicans ready to pull out the blunt instrument of his own record and beat him with it.

Kerry's innate sense of triangulation is so widely recognized that President Bush, in the opener to his campaign, simply reeled off a list of contradictions.

"The other party's nomination battle is still playing out," Bush said. "The candidates are an interesting group with diverse opinions: for tax cuts and against them; for Nafta and against Nafta; for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act; in favor of liberating Iraq and opposed to it.

"And that's just one senator from Massachusetts."

For Gulf War II, Kerry kept his correspondence in order and voted to authorize armed force, this time layering on so many caveats that, when he changed his mind, he had ample escape tunnels dug. In a debate, he answered a question about whether he felt responsibility for those young men and women dying in Iraq with a statement that veers from one corner to another then finally ascending to midair where it hovers in permanent incoherence.

The candidate who supported the North American Free Trade Agreement now sounds like both senators Smoot and Hawley as he tours industrial states.

"How about some fair trade," he demands.

He helped write the Patriot Act and now explains: "The only thing wrong with the Patriot Act is John Ashcroft." It is as if a man who has written bad law is angry that someone bothers to enforce it.

This betwixt and between existence comes not from innate hypocrisy but from the abundance of caution that transforms honest men into hypocrites. Kerry's heroism in Vietnam, and his later heroism in working to end the war, once spoke to his best side. Absent agreement, he would persuade.

Ted Kennedy, Kerry's senior colleague in the Senate, spoke to me about how Kerry pushed endlessly to normalize relations with the nation whose guerrilla warriors worked so hard to kill him 40 years ago.

"There was no political gain to it," Kennedy said. Kerry pushed to normalize relations with Vietnam because it was the right thing to do.

What happens to men once they have offices to protect -- or, in Kerry's case, an office to gain -- is that they suddenly aim for the great, vast middle where their mistakes can be lost amid the crowd of others. Thus, Kerry was expected to lead Democratic opposition to the latest Iraq war but voted, instead, to approve it. Now he says he only approved it as a last resort.

Kerry's straddle, both now and back then, is likely to make him an easy target for Republican operatives who should not be given such an easy time when their own leader has yet to account for the Iraq mess.

Instead, the Republicans will simply wave Kerry's Senate vote on the current Iraq war every time he criticizes the current mess. He will equivocate so hard the room will shake and votes fall away like loose roof tiles.

How well will it work?

Consider the treatment he was handed when the two contradictory letters to Walter Carter surfaced a decade earlier.

I remember it because it happened at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner of the Allegheny County Republican Party, March 20, 1991, at the William Penn Hotel.

At the time the first George Bush was still flush with victory in the Persian Gulf, and dinnergoers chortled over a videotaped presentation of assorted senate Democrats backpedaling in the wake of a war they'd opposed. Ted Kennedy was shown. News clips were shown. But for Kerry, the speaker simply read the two letters, to everyone's amazement.

"It's like those before-and-after pictures they print in the papers," the speaker said. "If they didn't tell you so themselves, you'd think they were different people."

Kerry has to remember that one. The speaker was Sen. John Heinz. Two weeks later, he would die in a plane crash. Four years after that, Kerry would marry his widow -- a woman who speaks directly and without equivocation and doesn't need two sets of letters to make her mind known.

He might want to ask her for a copy of the speech.

Dennis Roddy is a Post-Gazette columnist (droddy@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1965).

PG Columnists Columnist Archives ----Ruth Ann Dailey ----Samantha Bennett ----Barbara Cloud ----Gene Collier ----Reg Henry ----Tom Hritz ----Diana Nelson Jones ----Sally Kalson ----Peter Leo ----Tony Norman ----Brian O'Neill ----Dennis Roddy ----Marilyn McDevitt Rubin Columnist Bios ----Ruth Ann Dailey ----Samantha Bennett ----Barbara Cloud ----Gene Collier ----Reg Henry ----Tom Hritz ----Diana Nelson Jones ----Sally Kalson ----Peter Leo ----Tony Norman ----Brian O'Neill ----Dennis Roddy ----Marilyn McDevitt Rubin

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