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Hope Is an Excuse for Not Trying


RUSH: You've heard me say it: "The most expensive thing we pay for in this country is ignorance." (sigh) Because of ignorance, Hillary Clinton's viable. Hillary Clinton's the least qualified. She has no business being anywhere near the Democrat Party nomination -- nowhere near it, for any of the right reasons. Zilch, zero, nada. For that matter, neither is Obama. But Obama's got this soaring, JFK-like, totally vapid, vapid rhetoric. "It makes me feel so good, Rush!" Fine. You want to feel good? Enjoy it while it lasts, 'til he gets elected. (interruption) What? What now, Snerdley? (interruption) Snerdley says, "You keep underestimating the value of hope." I guess this is going to perhaps rub people the wrong way, and I don't like rubbing people the wrong way. I really don't.

I like to rub you the right way. I don't like being rubbed the wrong way. There's a specific way to do it that I like. I wouldn't want it done wrongly, incorrectly. I'm underestimating the value of hope, did you say? What are you hoping for right now, Mr. Snerdley? What are you hoping for? If you're going to talk to me about hope, how much time a day do you spend hoping, and for what do you hope? By the way, any of you on the phones want to try to answer this question, tell me what you're hoping for. What do you hope for? You're hoping for a better country. Okay, you are hoping for a better country. You think I'm not? Well, I'm not "hoping" for it! I'm trying to create it! I'm trying to make it happen. What do you mean, "hoping for"? I want it. Hope... You go look up the definition of "hope." Hope is valid. It's a valid emotion. You can't avoid it. We all have, "Gee, I -- I hope the plane's on time." "I hope my -- my refund check arrives next week to pay off my subprime sub-loan so I can go out and get my new refrigerator." Hope is the stepchild of sympathy. It's like sympathy. You can have sympathy for somebody.

Like, I'm looking at Bob Beckel right now. I feel terribly sorry for him, that he's where he is. He's irrelevant in the Democrat Party. But what good is that going to do him, my feeling sorry for him? Or what good is anybody feeling sorry for me going to do? After you get that out of the way, then where are you? I know that the liberals rely on hope; they rely totally on emotion. They're hoping for a better country. They live in the best damn country in the history of the human race; they don't have the ability to find it, see it, maximize it, participate in it, grow it. They're hoping for something else. They just want to get noticed. Hope is the logical extension of people who think they don't matter to anything, and a lot of people don't like not mattering. Everybody wants to have meaning in their lives. So if you hope for good things, if you hope for a better country, "I matter, because I care, because I hope for a better country." What are you doing to create it? You think we're going to be a better country by electing Hillary or Obama? Ha-ha. Your hope will lead you to a disastrous outcome.


RUSH: Brian says to me, "I hope a lot of conservatives show up and vote." Okay. What good is your hope to that outcome? What does hope mean? Let me tell you, folks. I'll develop this in mere moments, but hope is simply an excuse for not trying.


RUSH: Now, I'm not trying to irritate people with this hope business. By the way, I printed out a lot of e-mails today. I thought what I would do, because we had that caller from Mississippi yesterday who was great. It went on and on, he was just totally against McCain, explained why, said he loved me and loved the program, he was going to stick here no matter what happens and so forth. I got a lot of e-mails from people, "I like hearing people like that, Rush, because I feel like I'm not alone." So I went through this morning, between when I left the computer at home, which I guess was about 11:30 p.m., when I cashed it in last night, because I was tired after the Super Bowl party on Sunday night. So I cashed it in around 11:30 p.m., and I got in here this morning, about 3,000 e-mails had collected in the ElRushbo@eibnet.com e-mail address.

So I just went through a couple of them and I got a stack here of anti-McCain e-mails from people, and in the stack I also printed out a couple, "I wish you'd shut up. Why don't you get on board. Don't you realize you're hurting the party?" I've got a mixture of these things in here. And I have to remind myself, yes, we are into our 20th year of broadcast service to America here on the EIB Network. And over those 20 years, we've had a core audience, but some come and go, and there are new arrivals each and every day. You know what I always say, it takes awhile, steady listening, to understand the context of this program. But one of the things that I've always said to you folks in the audience is that we have like a familial kind of bond, a connection, and all of these media attacks on me have not been able to break that bond because the media did not create that bond. You and I did that together. I mean, you're not here listening to the program because the media has sung my praises over the years and created your curiosity. You are here because you listen to the program and you like it, and you get whatever you get from it. So consequently the media tries to drive a wedge between us, they can't because they didn't create the bond that exists.

Nevertheless, I feel it incumbent upon me to forever engage, constantly engage in having you understand who I am as a person, as a man, so that you will have some contextual understanding for the opinions and positions that I take. Mr. Snerdley has been on me for the last couple weeks on the whole concept of hope, and every time he brings hope up I ridicule it, and he just bows his head in there. I bring it up in the context of talking about the Obama campaign, which is filled with nothing but hope. Obama, just like McCain, is getting away with hiding the substance of what he believes, all this flowery talk of hope and the Camelot and JFK and so forth, and I realize, it's empty. The discussion of hope from a political leader is pure poppycock. It's empty; it's transparent; there's nothing there. It is totally devoid of substance. And every time I say this, Snerdley cringes and says, "I wish you wouldn't say that. People have to have hope."

Let me try this -- feel free to disagree, as always. I say this so that you will understand. I'm not putting people down with this. I love people. I want the best for people. I want people to understand the potential that is theirs. I want people to understand the opportunity this country provides. I don't want people sitting around wishing for things. I want people motivated and desirous to do things, because that's how you realize success. That's how you realize your potential. That's how you learn you've got more potential than you even knew -- in trying something. If you sit around hoping for it all day, it might sustain you for a while, but -- see, none of us can predict the outcomes in our lives, and so many of us use hope as a bridge to the eventual outcome we hope for from event to event or circumstance to circumstance. In my understanding, and in my experience, I should say, my hoping for something never made it happen. My desire for something did. I think hope -- let's look at liberals, and all these people that are fooling themselves with all this flowery, hopeful talk of a brilliant utopian future from Mr. Obama.

That hope, as exhibited by liberal Democrats, is nothing more than an excuse for not trying. You sit around and hope something happens, whatever it is. You can apply this to anything. See, folks, what I know from my own experiences is that I cannot predict the future, and I don't sit around hoping for outcomes, because what most people do in that circumstance is tell themselves negative stories. It's just the way we're made. That leads to all kinds of suffering, self-inflicted suffering. "Gosh, I hope I don't get fired next week." Start thinking I'm going to get fired or whatever it is, you generally end up thinking the negative. Now, people mistakenly place hope as the sentiment or the emotional state that will lead to the outcome of things, "Oh, gosh I really so hope this happens." But that's basically an excuse for not doing anything, for not trying, and so what you're doing is you're setting yourself up to have to deal with whatever happens, probably negatively, because you're not allowing yourself to be part of the equation to get the result that you want.

Faith, to me, is a far better thing to have than hope. Let me illustrate it in the political sense. A lot of people are hoping that Senator McCain will beat Senator Clinton, and that's the sole reason that they are supporting Senator McCain, because for whatever reason, they so dislike or are so afraid of Mrs. Clinton, and they think, they hope McCain can beat her. I have very little faith that he can. I'm not hoping he loses. I'm not hoping she loses. I'm looking at the circumstances. I don't have much faith that he can beat her, for the reasons that we've been into. Desire, on the other hand, is the equivalent of action in all of this. Hope equals no action. Faith is preferable to hope because faith at least has an optimistic aspect to it. Your religious faith is optimistic. It's an eternal life. It is all of the things that you think your devotion and your worship will bring you. That's optimism. Hope is simply sitting around, taking yourself out of the equation, subjecting yourself to circumstances that you can't control, admitting that you can't or don't want to have any influence on. You're basically excusing yourself for not trying. You're hoping.

You ever heard the phrase "hope against hope"? I'm sorry, hope against hope, it means it's not going to get you anywhere. Desire, however, is what leads to action. So if you want Mrs. Clinton to be beat, if you want her defeated, then that's going to lead you to a different thought process and action process and perhaps voting process than simply sitting around hoping so, because by hoping, you're placing the responsibility in somebody else's back pocket, in this case Senator McCain's. Now, that's where I have no faith that what you hope for is going to happen. Another illustration, and you've heard me say this. In this country, you look at our population, you could say that maybe 10%, 15% of the people are pulling the cart, and 85%, 80% are riding in the cart. The 15% to 20% pulling the cart haven't got time for hope. They know where they're going. They have a specific objective. They have specific goals. They have specific purposes and places they want to end up. The people being pulled in the cart are hoping they end up in a good place, but they're not leading anybody there. Now, don't misunderstand. Hope is not invalid. It's something we all experience. It's an emotion that we all feel, and a lot of us invest in it.

I try not to hope too much, because to me it equals inaction. I'm an action guy. I believe things get done when I apply myself to them, not when I sit around and hope that they get done. Sometimes I'll say to Mr. Snerdley when he's getting on my case about my destroying hope, I will say to him, "What's hope ever accomplished? Did Bill Gates hope when he was in school that he'd find the secrecy to the MS-DOS system getting on every freaking computer, or did he go do it?" Well, regardless whether you like Windows -- take your pick. The Wright brothers, did they hope the damn thing would work? They probably did. (laughing) But nevertheless, they had faith in their -- (laughing) I admit it's a fine point, but it's rooted in the fact that hope to me equals inaction and it's an admission that you don't know what future outcomes are because you can't possibly know what they are and that getting involved in the circumstances and activities that lead to the conclusion make far more sense to getting a conclusion that you want than just sitting around hoping that you get what you want. I hope this enables you to understand me a little better. (laughing)



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