Memo to El Rushbo: A theory on the Pauler Movement

Dear Rush,

On Thursday’s program (12/15/11) you told me and your other listeners: “Now, I talked to some people here during the break. In both New Hampshire and Iowa, Ron Paul’s in second place. Where is his support coming from? That’s what I would like to know. I have my ideas. But, for example, are we to believe that Ron Paul is attracting the precious independents and precious Democrat crossover voters? Is that where he’s getting his support? Or is he getting his support from uninformed down the line Tea Party conservatives who really are not hearing the wacko nut job things he’s saying about foreign policy. All they’re hearing him say is the first thing he’s gonna do is cut a trillion dollars out of the budget, and they’re going, ‘Right on, right on.’ That’s what people want. That’s what the Tea Party wants. The Tea Party wants that government cut down to size and they want it to happen in a big step. And Ron Paul’s giving them meat. But they’re not hearing much about his foreign policy. So his support actually could be widespread throughout Republican primary voters. We don’t know.”

I share your confusion, especially because, as you stated the other day (12/6/11): “I just went to the Gallup poll, dug deep inside the Gallup poll, the one I just told you that shows Gingrich over Romney 37-22. Ron Paul is at 7% among Tea Party supporters. … Now, there’s some Tea Party activists that support Ron Paul, but most don’t, as is evidenced by the Gallup polls at 7%. But Ron Paul’s foreign policy, there’s nobody, no other Republican running on that nomination dais up there in any of these debates that has a foreign policy that’s anywhere near Ron Paul’s. Bachmann, Santorum, Gingrich, Romney, none of them blame the United States for Iran nuking up. None of them blame the United States for 9/11. I love the way these Ron Paul supporters try to tell us who is or who isn’t conservative, when Paul is a Libertarian. Ron Paul’s a Libertarian, used to belong to that party but knows he can’t win as a Libertarian so he comes over and joins the Republican Party. He says he could relate to and understand the Occupiers. The Tea Party doesn’t think that.”

As a foot soldier in the Tea Party movement – one who at 12 years old witnessed 9/11 take the lives of people I grew up with and subsequently had to bear the insult of these fruitcakes blaming America for their death – I would like to offer a theory of what is going on.

Rush, I was at CPAC when you gave your first State of the Union address. You may remember me standing on my chair waving an American flag during the frequent outbursts of applause from your audience.

In your speech you asked “Did the Democrats want the war on Iraq to fail?” The crowd responded “Yes!” and you continued “They certainly did. They not only wanted the war in Iraq to fail, they proclaimed it a failure. There’s Dingy Harry Reid waiving a white flag: [doing Harry Reid impression] “This war is lost. This war is — [Crowd laughs] — They called General Petraeus a liar before he even testified. Mrs. Clinton — [Crowd Booing] — said she had to, willingly suspend disbelief in order to listen to Petraeus. We’re in the process of winning the war. The last thing they wanted was to win.”

We, of course, were, and are, proud of what our troops achieved. We didn’t call them “occupiers”, we didn’t accuse them of “imperialism”, and we sure as hell did not make excuses for our enemy.

Now, when you go there, you get these stupid ACORN-like fruitcakes bussed in as astroturf to run around and tell us that US and Israel are bad, that Al Qaeda and Iran are right (spreading false, Soviet promoted disinformation about the 1953 pro-Shah uprising in Iran that we only played a small/insignificant role in) and that the jihadists do unpleasant things only because “the Great Satan” leaves them with no choice. I’ve even had one of these idiots tell me that the Federal Reserve was responsible for the Holocaust. They flood the CPAC straw poll, producing the predicable result.

Nobody can convince me that the Tea Party believes this crap. When we were there cheering you on, it was not because we were bussed in to uphold someone’s cult of personality and make excuses for the enemy. It was because we believed in the coming Conservative Revolution.

Ron Paul has been the rallying point for nut jobs ranging from Putin’s neo-Stalinist KGB-TV station to Cindy Sheehan (“I admire Dr. Ron Paul’s stance against the occupations of the criminal Bush regime, (Only Barbara Lee D-Ca has been better”). If I had to guess, the nuts are just astroturfing and creating the illusion of Tea Party support.

That does not mean we shouldn’t keep pressure on them. In your book See, I Told You So, you described what happened to the Democrat Party when they gave way to the leader of a freak parade:

[T]his was the man [George McGovern] through whom the Democratic Party’s character was profoundly changed in 1972. Let’s take a brief excursion through recent American political history to ascertain how the Democratic Party was hijacked by extremists

…

Remember 1968? That was the year Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the rest of the gang disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago because the radical left was angry at the way President Lyndon Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam. There were riots in the streets and mayhem on the convention floor. But the result was that a traditional liberal Democrat, then-Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey, was nominated as the presidential candidate, much to the chagrin of the radicals. Humphrey was to be the last of his kind ever to be nominated by the Democratic Party.

What do I mean by that? Humphrey was a liberal, all right. But not as we define that term today. He was anti-communist. He was pro-American. Yes, he, like Johnson, tended to favor big-government solutions to problems in the tradition of Roosevelt. But one could never question Humphrey’s patriotism, nor his support for traditional American values.

After the debacle of the 1968 Democratic convention, the radicals took control of the party apparatus and the rules governing primary elections. They made it not only possible for a fringe candidate to capture the nomination; they very nearly made it impossible for a traditional, mainstream Democrat to win it without catering to a long list of special-interest groups — feminists, Naderites, labor unions, anti-nukers, unilateral disarmers, environmentalist wackos, etc.

We have to prevent an equally nutty type of coalition from taking over the Republican Party as well.

Godspeed, Rush. And keep up the good work. We’ve got Obama on the ropes!

Don’t worry, I’ve got your back here at NYU

UPDATE: In light of Kim Jong Il’s death, consider Ron Paul’s stated policy towards Korea from Dec. 2007:

MR. RUSSERT: How many troops do we have overseas right now?

REP. PAUL: I don’t know the exact number, but more than we need. We don’t need any.

MR. RUSSERT: It’s 572,000. And you’d bring them all home?

REP. PAUL: As quickly as possible. We–they will not serve our interests to be overseas. They get us into trouble. And we can defend this country without troops in Germany, troops in Japan. How do they help our national defense? Doesn’t make any sense to me. Troops in Korea since I’ve been in high school?

MR. RUSSERT: What…

REP. PAUL: You know, it doesn’t make any sense.

MR. RUSSERT: Under President Paul, if North Korea invaded South Korea, would we respond?

REP. PAUL: I don’t–why should we unless the Congress declared war? I mean, why are we there? Could–South Korea, they’re begging and pleading to unify their country, and we get in their way. They want to build bridges and go back and forth. Vietnam, we left under the worst of circumstances. The country is unified. They have become Westernized. We trade with them. Their president comes here. And Korea, we stayed there and look at the mess. I mean, the problem still exists, and it’s drained trillion dollars over these last, you know, 50 years. So stop–we can’t afford it anymore. We’re going bankrupt. All empires end because the countries go bankrupt, and the, and the currency crashes.

So, you know, the problems in Korea are our fault – if only we hand it over to the wonderful “westernized” communists like in Vietnam, everything would be just peachy…