We've been in the midst of an assault on the founding of the American way of life for decades, and most people have lived under the assumption this is just the way the country is. We've got leftists, and we've got us, and there's always going to be a battle with these people. But I don't think anybody ever saw, average Americans didn't see this kind of assault on the basic premise that is the United States of America in their lives. They think they win some, they lose some, we go back and forth with Republican presidents, Democrat presidents and so forth. Be a constant battle. I think what's settled in here is a realization among people who make the country work: there's nothing to stop this. It's totally up to Obama. We've got a sycophant, slavish press, which is praising all of this. Newsweek magazine, "We're All Socialists Now," was the cover two issues ago, happy and giving evidence why. Oh, we're happy, we're socialists now, we're all socialists -- this is an objective that many people have sought, and it's an assault on freedom, it's an assault on liberty, and a lot of people don't see any stopping it.
Let me share with you some excerpts of Thomas Sowell today. "A Fatal Trajectory," is the title of his piece. "An increasing number of recent letters and e-mails from readers strike a note, not only of unhappiness with the way things are going in our society, but of despair. Those of us who are pessimists are only a step away from despair ourselves, so we may not be the ones to offer the best antidote to the view that America has seen its best days and is degenerating toward what may well be its worst. Yet what hope remains is no less precious nor any less worthy of being preserved. First of all, the day-to-day life of most Americans in these times is nowhere near as dire as that of the band of cold, ragged, and hungry men who gathered around George Washington in the winter at Valley Forge, to which they had been driven by defeat after defeat. Only the most reckless gambler would have bet on them to win. Only an optimist would have expected them to survive."
Against the background of those and other desperate times that this country has been through, we cannot whine today because the stocks in our pension plans have gone down or the inflated value that our houses had just a few years ago has now evaporated. In another sense, however, looming ahead of us -- and our children and their children -- are dangers that can utterly destroy American society. Worse yet, there are moral corrosions within ourselves that weaken our ability to face the challenges ahead. One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs. Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone’s paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins? Yet the only serious obstacle to that happening is that the Israelis may disregard the lofty blather coming out of the White House and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities before the Iranian fanatics can destroy Israel.
"If by some miracle we manage to avoid the fatal dangers of a nuclear Iran, there will no doubt be others, including a nuclear North Korea. Although, in some sense, the United States of America is still the strongest nation on earth militarily, that means absolutely nothing if our enemies are willing to die and we are not. It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender -- and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb -- dropped on New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles -- might be enough to get us to surrender. If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender. It doesn’t matter if we retaliate and kill millions of innocent Iranian civilians -- at least it will not matter to the fanatics in charge of Iran or the fanatics in charge of the international terrorist organizations that Iran supplies. Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not. How did we get to this point? It was no single thing.
"The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of 'non-judgmental' affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on. The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair. The only saving grace is that even the trajectory of a bullet can be changed by the wind. We have been saved by miraculous good fortune before in our history. The overwhelming military and naval expedition that Britain sent to New York to annihilate George Washington’s army was totally immobilized by a vast impenetrable fog that allowed the Americans to escape. That is how they ended up in Valley Forge. In the World War II naval battle of Midway, if things had not happened just the way they did, at just the time they did, the American naval force would not only have lost, but could have been wiped out by the far larger Japanese fleet. Over the years, we have had our share of miraculous deliverances. But that our fate today depends on yet another miracle is what can turn pessimism to despair."
That's Thomas Sowell and it sounds like he's turned to despair, sounds like he's admitting that he is in the midst of despair. Now, I am like every one of you. I look around and I see these momentous, never dreamed of changes taking place left and right. I don't know about you, but the thing that frightens or angers or frustrates me more than anything is not that there are people who would try it, because they've always been there, they've always been amongst us; we've always had our totalitarians living amongst us; we've always had our authoritarians, and we've always had them making plays and attempts at control. The thing that we look out and see different today is the complacency among an increasing number of our fellow citizens, and that is what we look at and say, "How the hell do we change that?" We've talked numerous times about how the pop culture has been lost, that it is just assumed now that everything in it is liberal, and that's just normalcy. It's not even ideological. And that people who are not that way are nerds, geeks, kooks, freaks, people to be laughed at and made fun of.
We have a significant number of Americans, young, who really don't care, not aware, life is too good, life is too happy, they're just going through things trying to enjoy the day as best they can, being told they have no morality, no judgmentalism, there is no right and wrong, nobody has the right to say that about anybody else's actions. People have been silenced into acquiescence because they fear being labeled racist or sexist or homophobic or bigoted. Trial lawyers have made entrepreneurism even tougher. They've reduced the number of entrepreneurs because entrepreneurism is by definition risk taking. The trial lawyers, the tort bar is right out there ready to sue anybody that does anything wrong in the process of trying to innovate. And so the fear of being sued, the fear of losing it all, the fear of litigation, the fear of having to hire a lawyer has caused a lot of entrepreneurs just to shut down. So there are serious things, and we've got a president who is the exact opposite of the way he is portrayed. We have a president who has ambitions that are not being reported on. We have a president who was not vetted.
We have a president who was purposely not vetted, a man whose associations, voting record, life, all tell us precisely that none of us should be surprised at anything he says, anything he does, anything he's trying to achieve. Any attempt to be truthful about it is met with, "Oh, come on, don't be paranoid, don't be paranoid." It's a challenging time. And again, I think one of the greatest fears that people have is how to stop it. We've always thought you stop it at the ballot box. We look out across the countryside, and we see too many people who don't want to stop it. They want to get in on it. We don't have any political leadership on our side of significant voice, elected political leadership in Washington. So it's all up to individuals here to do the best they can. People want leaders. People respond to leadership. They're desperately crying for some at the elected level in Washington, DC. So we're left to hope that something out of our control arrests all this, like Obama overreaching or the media suddenly seeing the light and start to criticize Obama, all these things that we really can't make happen, like the fog that stopped the British from wiping out George Washington.
People don't like having to place hope in things that they have no idea if they'll ever happen, much less win. So it's left up to individuals now simple to not participate in this. It's time for entrepreneurs to go ahead and be entrepreneurial. It's time for people to start accessing the opportunities that still do exist in this country. It is the people who have always made this country work, it's the people who will continue to make it work, and it's the people who will eventually turn this tide, and it will be turned, because these people are going to overreach. We have been here before. You think it's bad now, you shoulda seen what Republican conservatism was like in 1965, after Goldwater's defeat. It was bad, and incidentally, back then, at that time, the party's moderates were telling us, the conservatives of that day, the same thing we're hearing, don't be conservative, shut up, we must become a moderate party.
Look at what happened to us with Goldwater. We just got shellacked. "We can't do it." The moderates tried to take over the party back then, history is repeating itself in this party, as I speak. It's all happened before. Look at what happened. From 1965 through 1976, we had conservatives made up of our conservative intelligentsia that I often refer to on this program telling us to nominate candidates like McCain, to try to work with Obama, to go out and get some Democrat votes by being this, to get other Democrat votes by being that, we've gotta broaden our horizons, conservatism alone is not enough, we've gotta moderate, we've gotta be moderates, and they lost every election that mattered. And when we did have a Republican president win like Nixon, we created OSHA, we created the EPA, we had a president trying to please Democrats because he knew they hated him and he wanted to be loved. We had wage and price controls when unemployment was 3.6%, inflation was hardly anything. Then we had Watergate, and it was bad after Watergate. It was bad.
Now, in 1965, we didn't have the home problem, we did have the mortgage crisis, but we did have LBJ taking over everything, we had the Great Society, we had it all, we've been through it, we went through it with the New Deal, it took us decades -- this is what depresses people -- took us decades to recover from Roosevelt, took us decades to recover from Johnson. Will it take us decades this time and will we have the decades?
Folks, the bottom line here is, yes, there's some despair. But we have been here before in history, and it's not time to tune out and give up. You might want to try an Atlas Shrugged, but you're going to have to feed your family. You're going to have to do what you have to do to feed your family, to feed yourself -- and really, at this point, the country (whether they know it or not) is depending on us to make the country work. They may think they're depending on Obama. Obama will not make the country work. Obama is a cog in the wheel. White House people put out a statement today to Jake Tapper that Obama has accomplished more in the first 30 days than any president in recent history.
That's true, but "accomplishments" are not always positive. He has wreaked a lot of havoc. He has sown the seeds of a lot of truly dangerous things lurking down the road. We have always had obstacles place in front of ourselves, and the obstacles we have today are not insurmountable. Thomas Sowell is right: They're not nearly as bad as what George Washington faced. They're not nearly as bad as what the Donner Party faced. They're bad in the sense that all history begins when we were born, and so the things that are happening to us, who cares what happened to other people? They're bad! But it always helps to maintain some perspective, because people who have been through far worse have emerged, and have led the country out of these doldrums. It can happen again because it must. If there is to be a country as we grew up in it, suitable to be inherited by your kids and grandkids, that's totally up to us. We cannot quit.
---Rush Limbaugh Monolouge - 24 February 2009
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