Well, listen, thank you all very, very much. Callista and I are delighted to, once again, have a chance to be with you at a Values Voter Summit. And I'm going to talk about values, and I'm delighted to be able to follow my good friend, Bill Bennett, who I thought, intellectually, laid the case for exactly what we have to worry about as Americans and about our future.
Now, I want to thank Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council and everybody who has, every year, made this one of the great conservative moments in Washington, D.C. And anybody who can create a great conservative moment in Washington, D.C. deserves our thanks as a country. (Applause.)
Now, several friends e-mailed me that, yesterday, Christine O'Donnell was with you and that she quoted me as saying, "There are more of us than there are of them." And I want to talk for a minute about Christine, and then I want to elaborate on that quote.
Let me say, first of all, I read -- the establishment is in such a state of shock -- and let me be clear -- (laughter) -- Senator Jim DeMint and Governor Palin deserve enormous credit because -- (applause) -- each in their own -- (applause) -- I'll let you decide whether this is the DeMint-Palin-inspired movement or the Palin- DeMint-inspired movement.
But her public capacity, through Twitter and Facebook and other devices, and Senator DeMint's organizational ability to raise money and organize things -- there have been seven senatorial contests between the grass roots and the establishment this year, and the grass roots are seven-and-oh over the establishment. (Applause.)
|
"The establishment is in such a state of shock that, yesterday, a columnist wrote the following... 'What's really sad about Delaware is that the most popular politician in Delaware was defeated.'" |
The establishment is in such a state of shock that, yesterday, a columnist wrote the following. I want you to bear with me because the language is really important. This columnist wrote, "What's really sad about Delaware is that the most popular politician in Delaware was defeated." (Laughter.)
Now, do you know how hard it is to write that sentence? (Laughter.) And the person who wrote it, by the way, who I will not name, is very, very smart. And it tells you that they were so stunned that there were some synaptic lapses in their editing process. (Laughter.)
And, you know, it reminded me of a great Yogi Berra line. Yogi once said, "That place used to be very popular, but it's so crowded now that no one goes there." (Laughter and applause.)
I am a great, passionate believer in the wisdom of the American people over time. (Applause.) They occasionally make mistakes. 2008 was an example. (Laughter.) But they gradually correct. They talk to themselves. They have a conversation. They come to grips with things.
And so my dad was a career soldier for 27 years in the infantry, and he served this country believing that he was part of a very small group who were defending us from the Soviet empire. And he did so because he really believed that, you know, politicians come and go and decisions are made and changed but that, over time, this magic system by which each of us is individually sovereign and by which we come together to have a conversation and we collectively, over time, shape things is the most wonderful and most morally appropriate method of self-government ever invented, and it is worthy of defense and worthy of protection. And that's the background I come from. (Applause.)
And I'm going to go out on a limb that nobody in the Washington establishment gets yet. First of all, if Christine O'Donnell got more votes than her opponent, she's probably, on that day, more popular. (Laughter.) Now, it's bold. Well, I'm going to share with you in a minute a bumper sticker you can get from American Solutions which is fairly radical. It says "Two plus two equals four." I mean, it's right out on the edge. (Laughter.)
To the best of my knowledge, there are no staff on Nancy Pelosi's office that understand this equation. (Laughter.) Because they think two plus two equals either 714 or minus six depending on which they need in order to get to their version of a balanced budget.
|
"The person who arouses the most people on the day of the election and, therefore, wins the election on that day is the legitimate nominee of the people who elected them. So I would say that Senator Murkowski is fundamentally cheating." |
But two plus two equals four. So let's start with the idea. The person who arouses the most people on the day of the election and, therefore, wins the election on that day is the legitimate nominee of the people who elected them. So I would say that Senator Murkowski is fundamentally cheating. If she wanted to run as an independent, she should have. (Applause.)
And I would beg Mike Castle to endorse Christine O'Donnell because she won fair and square in a process of representation. (Applause.)
Well, let me go a step further. I'm going to predict right now, Christine O'Donnell is going to win in Delaware. (Applause.)
There are only two sets of things you need to know about her -- Obama, Democrat opponent -- to understand why she's going to win and he's going to lose. The first is his record. In county government, he has raised taxes dramatically, raised spending dramatically and dramatically lowered the bond value of the county so it now pays more for its debt than it did when he was elected. So he's the perfect model of a Pelosi-Reid-Obama left-wing Democrat on fiscal policy.
And I don't think that's what the country wants, and I don't think that's what Delaware wants. So if she'll simply run on less spending, lower taxes, more take-home pay, more jobs and allow him to be the candidate of food stamps while she's the candidate of pay checks, I think people will figure out pretty dramatically which team they want to be on. (Applause.)
But there's a second part to this campaign which I think Senator Harry Reid, bless his heart -- (laughter) -- just put together perfectly the day after the primary. He said of her opponent, "I love him. He is my candidate. He is my pet." (Laughter.)
Now, this will probably be a great shock to Senator Reid, who is in some trouble in Nevada for 14 and a half percent unemployment, the highest level of mortgages under water in the country, the failure to represent the interests of the state of Nevada, and the fact that he's seen by most people out there as the candidate of trial lawyers, not of the state of Nevada. But that's his own problem.
I think if you just go around Delaware and go, "Senator Reid wants to thank you for sending him a pet," -- (laughter) -- and if you think we don't need a senator, we need a pet, you have a candidate. But if you'd like a senator to represent Delaware, then you have to be for Christine O'Donnell because the only alternative is a pet. (Laughter.)
And let me be clear because I don't want anybody at the New York Times or MSNBC to get confused. I love pets. (Laughter.) I'm in favor of pets. I think pets are wonderful. But I do not think they should serve in the United States Senate. (Applause.)
Now, let me go back to Christine's line which actually is not mine. There are more of us than there are of them. Let me say, first of all, that the best single book on this is by my good friend, the head of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks. I recommend it to all of you. It's called "The Battle."
Brooks is the best student in America of Gallup data, and he points out conclusively in this little, thin book two key things. The first is there is a better than 70 percent center-right majority and about a 20 to 25 percent left-wing elite, and that's the actual value division of the United States of America. It's almost 3 to 1 on our side which leads to a real question I'll come to in a second which is, therefore, how come they own the establishment while we are the vast majority.
And I think we have to think about that, and we have to learn from it.
|
"... the key argument for economics is not money. It's freedom. The freedom to work, the freedom to keep the money you earn, the freedom to be a customer and not a client of a bureaucracy, the freedom to create a better future without some politician defining it for you. And we who are conservative need to go back to making the moral case for free enterprise, not the economic case for free enterprise..." |
Second, he makes the case, which Rick Tyler at Renewing American Leadership has been doing a great job on, that the key argument for economics is not money. It's freedom. The freedom to work, the freedom to keep the money you earn, the freedom to be a customer and not a client of a bureaucracy, the freedom to create a better future without some politician defining it for you. And we who are conservative need to go back to making the moral case for free enterprise, not the economic case for free enterprise because the origins of the wealth of nations by Smith were preceded by a theory of moral sentiments which is his great book which explains that humans have to be moral for society to work, which is what every founding father believed. (Applause.)
The actual phrase, "There are more of us than there are of them," came from a movie that Callista and I made called "Nine Days that Changed the World." It's a study of Pope John Paul II going back to Poland in 1979 for nine days in his first pilgrimage. We got to making it because we had earlier made a terrifically good movie called "Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny," which is good, frankly, because if you put Ronald Reagan on the screen for 60 or 70 minutes, he is so amazing. Every time I see the film, I learn something new because he was so articulate, so effective. He had such a shrewd insight about freedom versus communism.
And so while we were making that movie, we went to Europe to film Normandy where he had made his great 1984 speech on the 40th anniversary of D Day, and then we interviewed Lech Walesa, the electrician in Gdansk who became the head of solidarity and the first president of a free Poland, and then we interviewed Vaclav Havel, the poet and playwright who spent three years in jail for liberty and then ended up as the first president of the free Czechoslovakia.
And asked both of them as part of our interview, what was the decisive moment in breaking the Soviet empire. And we were surprised. They said it was actually the nine-day visit of the Pope a year and a half before Reagan was elected.
And so we got involved looking at George Weigel's book, "The Final Revolution," and began to realize that something magic had happened in Poland when the Pope was there. And he arrives, and on his very first day, there are 3 million people in Warsaw for mass. Ask there's this enormous cloud.
Now, this is a country which had be occupied by Nazi Germany, a fifth of all Poles were killed in World War II. It was then immediately occupied by the Soviet Union. They had spent from 1939 to 1979 totally oppressed. And here for the very first time, they came together spontaneously, and we have several people in this movie who look around and they say -- these are Poles -- with great emotion, they say to with us, we looked around, and we suddenly realized there are more of us than there are of them. (Laughter.) Why are we afraid of them?
Now, that led to a 10-year struggle. And in the 10-year struggle, one of their weapons was a sign that would go up. We actually have the sign -- in Polish -- which said, "For Poland to remain Poland, two plus two must always equal four." And that's where this came from.
And the Soviets knew it was subversive. (Laughter.) But how do you go around and say to people, take down that sign; you can't be saying two plus two equals four? (Laughter.)
So we began to dig into this because we were fascinated. And Callista's father's family is from the Cracow region, so she had a real passion about the film we were making.
And I began to see the American parallels. Two literary illusions to two plus two equals four, and you can get this sign if you go to AmericanSolutions.com.
The first is Camus, who writes in his novel, "The Plague," there are times when a man can be killed for saying two plus two equals four because the authorities can't stand the truth.
Now, I'm going to give you two quick examples. When Secretary Sebelius said the other day she would punish insurance companies that told the truth about the cost of "Obama-care," she was behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny -- (applause) -- and if she is going to represent left-wing thought police about "Obama-care," she should be forced to resign by the new Congress -- (applause).
|
"This idea that we the people have to tolerate some bureaucrat being paid with our taxes to dictate free speech to us should end in January by the Republican Congress zeroing out her office and explaining they'll be glad to pay for it when somebody is there who recognizes the rights of the American people." |
This idea that we the people have to tolerate some bureaucrat being paid with our taxes to dictate free speech to us should end in January by the Republican Congress zeroing out her office and explaining they'll be glad to pay for it when somebody is there who recognizes the rights of the American people. (Applause and cheers.)
I'll give you a second example of the thought police in the Obama administration and the thought police in the elite media. Callista and I just released a new movie which is, frankly, our riskiest and most daring movie called "America at Risk." And we're very clear and we're very explicit and we say in the movie what threatens America are radical Islamists. (Applause.)
Now, we do not say -- we do not pick a fight with Islam. We are not Islam-ophobic, but I want to give you just two sets of examples that led to the kind of thought-police reaction.
I came out weeks ago and I said it is fundamentally wrong to build a mosque at Ground Zero, and steps should be taken to stop the mosque from being built because we, as Americans, don't have to tolerate people who are supportive of violence against us building something at the site of the violence. (Applause.)
This was not about religious liberty. If they want to build that mosque in the South Bronx, frankly, they need the jobs. I have no problem with the mosques that exist in New York City that are peaceful and that obey American law. But I am totally opposed to any effort to impose sharia on the United States, and we should have -- (applause) -- a federal law that says, under no circumstance in any jurisdiction in the United States, will sharia be used by any court to apply to any judgment made about American law. (Applause.)
And we should make clear to Justice Breyer and Justice Kagan, who both seem confused on this topic, that no judge will remain in office who tries to use sharia law to interpret the American Constitution. (Applause.)
|
"We are at a great crossroads in American history, and that's part of why I think the insurgency is so helpful and the new energy of the Tea Party movement is so helpful and the toughness and the eagerness to come to Washington to change Washington by the new candidates is so useful because we are at a point where our establishment is sliding into policies of such disastrous impact that they will, in fact, fundamentally challenge the survival of America as we have known it." |
We are at a great crossroads in American history, and that's part of why I think the insurgency is so helpful and the new energy of the Tea Party movement is so helpful and the toughness and the eagerness to come to Washington to change Washington by the new candidates is so useful because we are at a point where our establishment is sliding into policies of such disastrous impact that they will, in fact, fundamentally challenge the survival of America as we have known it.
On the one front, we have a secular, socialist machine led by Obama, Pelosi and Reid. And on the other front, we have radical Islamists who would fundamentally change this country into a system none of us in this room would recognize. (Applause.)
And two plus two equals four is important because our elites don't even want to allow us to talk about it. They don't want to allow us to tell the truth. I used the word "machine." People thought that was too strong.
The Chicago machine is a great way to understand the normal behavior of the Obama White House. They can't get their center for Medicare and Medicaid services person appointed, they give them a temporary appointment. He spends more money than the secretary of Defense. Can't get through a Democrat Senate.
They just now created a brand-new czar -- that's not their title -- but a director of reform for all financial institutions. They gave her a phony appointment because they can't get it through a Democratic Senate. There's something fundamentally wrong when the president of the United States appoints people so radical they can't even be approved by the Senate of his own party and yet they're going to have real power. (Applause.)
Let me go back to this whole issue of telling the truth about radical Islamists. And you have to see this. I mean, this is so truly bizarre that when you link it all together you almost need a Will Rogers or a Mark Twain because humor is the only effective way to deal with preposterous stupidity.
So I'm going to give you three case studies. A banker walks into the American embassy in Nigeria and says to two CIA agents, my son has gone radical; I think he's off at a terrorist training camp; I wouldn't let him come to the U.S. if I were you.
Now, most of you would probably think that was a reasonably clear message. (Laughter.) However, the State Department, in its infinite wisdom led by this White House, were confused. It would be judgmental. It would suggest that there was something wrong with becoming a radical. He hadn't done anything except go learn how to make bombs. (Laughter.)
We had no actual proof. He hadn't been through a court of law. And so he goes to Yemen, spends a couple of weeks learning how to make a bomb for his pants. (Laughter.) Which I had warned about, by the way. In 2002, when we had one shoe bomber, which has led to over 6 billion pairs of shoes being taken off -- (laughter.) I mean, one of the greatest exchanges of activity for result in the history of warfare is one shoe bomb and six billion pairs of shoes taken off. (Laughter.) Okay?
|
"You want to talk about asymmetrical warfare, a topic I used to lecture on? This is a good example of asymmetry. They get one nut cake with a pair of dumb shoes, we get 6 billion innocent citizens wasting their time taking their shoes off to prove that they're not nuts. Okay?" |
You want to talk about asymmetrical warfare, a topic I used to lecture on? This is a good example of asymmetry. They get one nut cake with a pair of dumb shoes, we get 6 billion innocent citizens wasting their time taking their shoes off to prove that they're not nuts. Okay? (Laughter.)
And I -- you can go back and find this. I warned in 2002, if they are clever at al Qaeda, they're going to come with an underwear bomb. (Laughter.) They're going to figure, if this one got the shoes, wait until we start getting the underwear. (Laughter.)
So this guy goes from Nigeria to Yemen, from Yemen to Holland, gets on an airplane, none of our national security apparatus works. None. What's the first time we learned that he has a bomb? When it fails to go off and his pants start to smoke. (Laughter.)
Now, what many of you don't know because I think they suppressed this story is the passengers immediately split into two groups. The liberals began yelling, "You're not allowed to smoke in an airplane." (Laughter.) Could have happened, and you know it. (Laughter.)
The conservatives said, "It's clear you're a terrorist; we're throwing you out at 28,000 feet, but we'll try you when we land." (Laughter and applause.)
And there you have the two core attitudes in the United States today.
So this guys lands. They promptly read him his Miranda rights, which he does not have as a non-citizen. (Applause.) The secretary of Homeland Security, straight from not defending the border in the South announces that the system worked because somebody called her -- (laughter) -- and later has to withdraw the statement, but you have it on video. It is so patently -- we have all this stuff in our movie, "America at Risk."
I mean, you can't make this stuff up. (Laughter.) The White House special assistant, Mr. Brennan who, I think, along with the attorney general, is one of the two most dangerous people in the administration to our national security -- (applause). Brennan goes on television to explain, well, we really didn't have a smoking gun. (Laughter.) Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of warfare.
This is not an American citizen. They do not have the right to be innocent. And, by the way, if you're an American citizen like the imam in Yemen and you're a combatant against the United States, you lose all your legal rights because that's treason. (Applause.)
So second example. An Army major -- and this is all in our movie, "America at Risk." An Army major walks into a facility at Fort Hood, yells "Allahu Akbar," shoots 13 American dead, wounds 33, is carrying a card in his pocket that says, "Soldier of Allah." The Army chief of staff is worried that we will overreact in a way which would be inappropriate to Islam, and the president of the United States goes down to give a speech in which he urges the families of those killed and wounded not to overreact. (Boos.)
Now, this guy, by the way, was in contact with the imam in Yemen. We had more than enough -- again, the whole national security apparatus failed. Nobody knew, nobody had decided, nobody had analyzed -- even though the data was there -- until he killed people. This was an act of terror. This was an enemy combatant. This was not a domestic, civil problem. (Applause.)
Finally, a Pakistani citizen becomes an American citizen, promptly takes his family back to Pakistan, leaves them there, goes to a two-week training course on how to build a car bomb, comes back to the U.S., builds a car bomb which, once again, as in Detroit, luckily for us, did not go off. When the whole American national security apparatus fails, when do we learn there's a car bomb in Times Square designed to killed hundreds and wound thousands? When a T-shirt street vendor walks up to a policeman and says, "That car is smoking." (Laughter.)
Now, if you want an illustration of the passionate desire of the elites to avoid reality -- and we have this in our movie. There's this couple -- these two people on a TV newscast who are going, well, you know, he lost his house a couple years to bankruptcy and maybe that unhinged him.
And then you have Mayor Bloomberg in one of the most bizarre comments by anybody in the War on Terror who says, well, we really don't know exactly what's motivating him, and we shouldn't rush to judgment and, after all, it could just be somebody who was opposed to the Obama health plan. (Laughter.)
|
"Now, this is typical of the bias of the elite left which is that it can't be any of their favorite opponents who would never really be violent despite the entire history of the last 40 years so, therefore, can't it please be somebody on the right, somebody who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Shawn Hannity, and the answer is no, it can't be." |
Now, this is typical of the bias of the elite left which is that it can't be any of their favorite opponents who would never really be violent despite the entire history of the last 40 years so, therefore, can't it please be somebody on the right, somebody who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Shawn Hannity, and the answer is no, it can't be.
There were -- last year, there were 54 car bombings around the world. Forty-seven were by radical Islamists. One was in Colombia by drug dealers. One was in Corsica by a Corsican nationalist. Five were in Spain by ETA Basque nationalists. And zero were by Rush Limbaugh, Shawn Hannity, anti-Obama-care listeners. (Applause)
Now, to show you the sensitivity of our elites, the only politically correct thing I could have said to connect the Nigerian in Detroit, the Army major in Fort Hood, and the Pakistani-American in New York is that they were not Rotarians. (Laughter.) Because if I told you the truth, which is all three were motivated by radical Islamist ideologies desiring to impose sharia and eager to destroy the United States, I would clearly be so politically inappropriate that MSNBC would have a heart attack trying to explain the rage they felt at this kind of vicious language being used to accurately describe the truth about our enemies and those who want to destroy us. (Applause.)
Callista says in our movie, "America at Risk," we have to have the courage to tell the truth, and we have to have the courage to act on the truth. And I want to leave you both with an analysis and with an assignment. Our elites are wrong on the basic values that define America. Our elites are wrong on the way in which you create jobs and have economic growth. Our elites are wrong in national security and what threatens America.
And, therefore, every person who cares about America's future has an absolute obligation to work as hard as they can from now to Election Day this year and to work for the next two years to replace the elites with common-sense, grass-roots Americans who at least understand the truth and who have the courage to act on the truth and who are not afraid to tell the truth, and they're not afraid to take the heat from our elites who, by the way, if we win those two cycles, will no longer be the elites. (Applause.)
So one of your goals should be to make it possible for every left winger to retire and write their memoirs because, unlike other countries, we treat those who have failed with dignity and give them a chance to earn a lot of money on talk shows and do other things. (Laughter.)
And I think the president should write a third book, and I think it would be terrific if we give him time after January of 2013 to write a very long and -- (cheers and applause) -- which will probably be entitled, "Why the American People Were Wrong And I Was Right Even If None Of The Policies Worked." (Laughter.)
But my last injunction to you, you do have seven weeks to change history. You do have a chance. There are two specific things I want to ask you to do. One, e-mail every friend you have in Iowa and urge them to vote "no" on the judges who are up because those judges usurped the power the people of Iowa, and defeating them is a very important step in the right direction. (Applause.)
And, two, we have a project at American Solutions called "The Power of 10." It's a system that lets you go online. It's designed to get you to go out and find 10 additional voters. If every volunteer and every activist on our side, on an off-year election, will just find 10 people and get them to vote, we will change the history of the United States. We will decisively defeat the left. Harry Reid will go home permanently. Nancy Pelosi will go home permanently, and we will have set the stage to finish the job in 2012.
Thank you. Good luck and God bless you. (Applause.)