Ryan Articulates Conservatism Naturally

RUSH: I have Paul Ryan with the second most famous CPAC speech ever. Well, I take it back. Paul Ryan with the third most famous CPAC speech ever. The first was Ronald Reagan's, then mine, and then Ryan's, third most famous CPAC speech ever. I want to read to you the opening of his CPAC speech. And, by the way, Cookie, you should get me this 'cause Snerdley, you got me ticked off here. "What about Ryan destroying Medicare?" Yesterday on Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow -- you know who Rachel Maddow is? She's the queen bee of MSNBC. She is said to be the most articulate, the most brilliant spokesman, commentator, analyst that the left has on cable TV. So she was on Meet the Press with Rich Lowry of National Review, who destroyed her on Medicare cuts. She had no answer for the fact that it's Obama who cuts Medicare $710 billion in Obamacare. She had literally nothing. It was a demonstration of how this can go.

Anyway, back to Ryan's CPAC speech. "There are those who say that modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with." And that is being said. That's the whole premise of liberalism. You're incompetent. You can't manage your own life. You're not smart enough. You're not able enough. You're not competent enough to make the right decisions in your life. "There are those who say modern society is too complicated for the average man or woman to deal with. This is a long-standing argument, but we heard it more frequently after the mortgage credit collapse and financial meltdown in 2008. They say we need more experts and technocrats making more of our economic decisions for us. And they argue for less 'political interference' with the enlightened bureaucrats … by which they mean less objection by the people to the overregulation of society.

"If we choose to have a federal government that tries to solve every problem, then as long as society keeps growing more complex, government must keep on growing right along with it. The rule of law by the people must be reduced and the arbitrary discretion of experts expanded..." So you buy into this complexity argument, you are automatically buying into "only government can fix it." And as the complexity increases and it gets tougher and tougher -- do I eat trans fat or not? Now they're saying buttered popcorn, microwave buttered popcorn causes cancer. Well, that's complex, all of these threats that exist to staying alive. We need competent people to make these regulations and decisions, 'cause you can't. And all that means is that government must continue growing right along with the complexity. So therefore the advocates of complexity, this argument, are advocates of bigger government. Now, here's the payoff.

"If the average American can’t handle complexity in his or her own life, and only government experts can … then government must direct the average American about how to live his or her life. Freedom becomes a diminishing good. But there’s a major flaw in this 'progressive' argument, and it’s this. It assumes there must be someone or some few who do have all the knowledge and information. We just have to find, train, and hire them to run the government’s agencies. Friedrich Hayek called this collectivism’s 'fatal conceit.' The idea that a few bureaucrats know what’s best for all of society, or possess more information about human wants and needs than millions of free individuals interacting in a free market is both false and arrogant. It has guided collectivists for two centuries down the road to serfdom -- and the road is littered with their wrecked utopias. The plan always fails!" It always has failed.

And yet there are a lot of Americans (we talk about this a lot): Government comes up with a program and it's a debacle. It's a mess. So what's the fix? Government! Another program. We continue to go back to the architects of failure to fix what they broke in the first place. And Ryan simply argues that we are all capable of living our lives in freedom much more productively, much more capably, than being told how to live by a bunch of people who can't even manage their own lives.

Where are these magicians who know how to live their own lives? Who are they? And how do they magically end up in government? Well, they don't exist, and they aren't in government, and this is the ultimate argument. Small-government conservatism means turning your life back over to you. This then raises the question that we all are asking ourselves: How many Americans want that responsibility anymore?

How many takers are there who'll just as soon punt all the responsibility and accept whatever little things they get and they're happy, versus how many people really want the opportunity to be the best they can be with as few obstacles in their way as possible? Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, was actually one of the first people to articulate this whole point that Ryan made at CPAC. "Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself.

"Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." And again, even Jefferson said there has never been a time in history where a government-run, top-to-down country has prospered. The greatest example of human prosperity is the United States of America, and it was not made up of the way Barack Obama sees it or wants it to be seen or wants it to exist.

This is the challenge that these guys face. It's the challenge that they have. You know, let's face it, folks. One of the reasons that so many conservatives, all during the Republican primary process, were so forlorn, was that there wasn't anybody that could articulate what we believe. (chuckles) They were all on the radio. Where are they in the Republican Party? Admit it! Well, we now have somebody on the ticket who's us. Somebody's on the ticket who can explain all of this, who believes all of this in his heart and in his soul.

His name is Paul Ryan, and he can do it with optimism and a smile on his face and no bitterness and so forth. So I like it because they're tackling this head on. You know, if he'd-a chosen, say, Rubio, the accusation would have been that Romney was pandering to a group. If he'd-a chosen Condi, same accusation: Pandering to a group. This pick told me that Romney is not just serious about winning, but governing. That's what it told me. I could be proven wrong.

But I like the fact that there's somebody who's gonna be on the news every day that can talk like I do. And I don't mean to make this about me. I don't mean to make this about me. That's not the point. We've got somebody who can articulate what we believe. It's in his heart. He doesn't need crib notes. He doesn't need briefings. He doesn't need a consultant to tell him what to think or how to answer a question. He knows it. He's lived it. It's his soul.

RUSH: I said microwaved buttered popcorn causes cancer. It's Alzheimer's. That's one of those times when my mouth couldn't keep up with my brain. Doesn't matter. Cancer, Alzheimer's, now brought on by buttered popcorn. So the complexities of life, not just the DMV, but in food. What do you eat? What should you not eat? "My God, I don't know! Government's gonna have to tell me!" Personal responsibility. It's Obama's and the Democrats' responsibility, not yours.

Government's role is your responsibility. Government will tell you what you're responsible for. Government will tell you what you're not responsible for and what they'll take care of. What Obama and Biden and the Democrats represent are their own ideas, and they have to be met with the competing ideas, and we have the winning ideas. This is a battle of ideas, ideology. Our chances are that much better. Make no mistake.

"Somebody's on the ticket who can explain all of this, who believes all of this in his heart and in his soul." - Rush Limbaugh

Good summary, Rush!!!

Back on January 15, 2012, I posted the following observations about what I perceived to be an essential quality for any potential candidate to oppose Obama's tyrannical ideology and to restore America's foundations in liberty. Permit me, please to repeat it here:

"Who in his/her right mind doubts the President's commitment to accelerate the agenda to which he has devoted the past several years of his life?
Does anyone believe that he came to such a commitment just before, or during, the 2008 campaign?
The American people need to hear from an informed Republican candidate about the real nature of the battle of ideas in which citizens must be engaged, and the design and serious intent of the November 2012 opponents.
Long ago, a Freeper posted the Agenda of a 2002 meeting of so-called "intellectuals" in Chicago.
Note the participants in that conference are the major "players" in the headlines emanating from White House policy makers in 2012.
Romney's cavalier description of the President as "a nice guy" who "just doesn't understand" how the "private sector works" is either shallow and uninformed, misleading, or something else. The "battle of ideas" for the future direction of the Republic is too important to be engaged in on such a level.
American voters, like the citizens of 1776 and 1787 can understand and connect dots--if they are adequately articulated to them now, allowing them time to think about it.
Picture this: a group of people who describe themselves as being "intellectuals," declaring of the conference: "It will be both a celebration of ideas and a rigorous examination of the roles and responsibilities that intellectuals play in society."
Nothing is so pitiful and shameful that, in a country whose document of liberty was authored by a true intellectual, and was said by him to be a mere representation of "the American mind" of 1776--in such a country, in 2002, after over 200 years of basking in the "light of liberty" first shed by that document--we now have a group of people sitting around in Chicago and plotting how their so-called "intellectual" efforts will play a role "in society." Consequences of their "role" are being played out now in the "society."
As Weaver said, "Ideas have consequences."
The ideas of 1776 resulted in more liberty and prosperity for more people over a longer period of time than ever had been experienced in the history of civilization!
The so-called "intellectuals" who occupy positions of excessive coercive power in Washington today may, if unstopped, precipitate another age of darkness in the world, where the ideas of liberty have been censored, and "other ideas" from other sources have been exalted.
Dr. Russell Kirk years ago warned of what T. S. Eliot had labeled a "new provincialism--the provinciality of time, imprisoning people in their own little present moments." Picture the participants of that Chicago conference, and we have a visual of Kirk's words.
The enduring and essential ideas of Creator-endowed individual liberty must be defended against the "redistributionist" ideas which have led to tyranny in every society where they have been implemented.
Where is the Jeffersonian intellect of 2012 who is up to the task? Whose study of the founding ideas can equip him to help American youth discover and preserve the ideas of liberty for their posterity?"
Now, thank you, Mitt Romney for allowing the youth of this nation to hear from a "heart and soul" lover of liberty the unique and singular ideas which can preserve their liberty!!

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