Comments Regarding What Made America Great
(In response to a Pope Francis speech)
By Rush Limbaugh

September 24, 2015

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Pope Francis, sound bite number one, at his speech today before a joint session of Congress.

POPE FRANCIS: But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.

RUSH: Okay. Were you able, Mr. Snerdley, to catch all that? Here's what he said. "There is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps."

Okay, I'm gathering here that we have a pope who sees a gray area there between good and evil. There is good and evil and there's the marginal. There's good and evil, and there's the, what would you call it, the maybe not okay, the maybe okay. (interruption) That's right. The relative! Yeah, we have the good and the bad, and then the relative, where we apply a relative morality or whatever in order to make an assessment on whether something's good or bad.

"The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters," any idea what that is? I mean, you watched the speech, do you know what he's talking about here specifically? I don't. (interruption) You didn't watch this? Okay. Demands that we confront every form of polarization which would -- look, there's something you should know, folks, before I go on with this, and that is every Democrat that I have seen react to this is ecstatic and giddy with happiness.

They think the pope hit a grand-slam home run from their perspective on everything but abortion. And even there he equivocated a little bit, but they think that this could not have been better. The pope came and conquered and was them. They really do. The Drive-Bys, elected Democrats, I haven't seen 'em all, obviously, but the ones I've seen on TV who've been asked about it are just giddy with their praise. So you have to put that into the hopper here as you try to analyze what all of these remarks mean. Here is immigration, and it sounds to me in this bite that he is granting America absolution for what we did to the Indians.

POPE FRANCIS: We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants. Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected. ... Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent, but it is difficult to judge the past by the criteria of the present.

RUSH: All right. So to me it sounds like a partial absolution. Yeah, yeah, we kind of violated the rights of those that were here long before us. We didn't respect 'em, but kind of tough to apply modern day to back then, so been there, done that, gotta forget it. The message was immigration. Now, I'm sorry, I have a reaction to this, and I watched this, and my reaction, I knew this was coming. I mean, I didn't know the exact words, but I knew he was gonna bring up the subject and I knew he was going to end up saying something the Democrat Party would love, and they would interpret or be able to interpret it as something that's pro-amnesty, and that probably is what he said here.

But it struck me, this is not a new realization on my part, but it just struck me I think a little bit more profoundly because it was the pope saying it. It's almost as if in his mind and in the minds of many other people, in fact, that you have the world, and it is what it is and then there's this one place in the world where it's much, much, much better than anywhere else in the world. It's richer. It has more opportunity. It has more freedom and more liberty. It's vastly more prosperous. The standard of living is way, way higher. It's got all kinds of weapons to protect itself and so forth. It's just better, it's just demonstrably better.

And then the rest of the world is kind of eating the dust of this one really special place. And it's as though nobody ever stops to ask how did this one special place become special? They just assume that it was made that way, or that fate, or maybe in this case God, ordained it. And because there's only one special place in all the world, one place that's so much better, so much more advanced, so much more prosperous, however you want to define and characterize it, this place is so special, but it just happened. It's just the way it is.

And, as such, everybody else in the world is entitled to go there, simply because it exists. Everybody's entitled to go there, and anybody who wants to go there should be permitted to go there. And there ought not be any complaining about it, because in this special place, this one place that is far and away better than anywhere else on earth, everybody that's there was once from someplace else.

So everybody that's there had to go there to get there. So why should people going there to get there today not be permitted when everybody in the past was? No, I'm talking about the United States of America, not the Vatican. One special place, United States of America. It's far and away superior to every other place on earth, in terms of lifestyles, liberty, and freedom. In terms of the human condition, there's no place like it.

It's so special, everybody wants to go there. And there's not a thought given to how it got special. It's just assumed it was made that way, I guess. It's just assumed that it's just there. And it's also assumed that it's always going to be there. Call it the golden goose or whatever you want but everybody saying that we have no right to keep anybody out because nobody kept us out, we all had to get here. Nobody here now actually started here. Of course, that's no longer true.

But the whole construct of this is that, yeah, this is a special place, but not because of anything the people here did to make it special. It just happens to be. And the people who were here are here simply by winning life's lottery. It's all fate; it's all luck. And if anybody else in the world wants to come to this one special place, then nobody has the right to tell them they can't because we are all immigrants.

And nobody ever stops to ask in this debate, nobody ever stops to consider how did it get special? Because it wasn't made that way. We didn't just wake up one day and here is the United States of America, and it is the gem, the shining city on the hill, however you want to describe it, it had to be built. It was not there. But from the moment it began to be built, isn't it interesting that everybody in the world who heard about it wanted to go there?

Maybe I should change the tense. Everybody who heard about it wanted to come here. And now the people who lead this special place don't seem to have any appreciation for how it became special. In fact, if they have anything, it's guilt over how it became special. And so they either want to open the borders and let anybody in because it's not fair that we are here and we're able to get here and others who want to come here are not, it just isn't fair.

So this special place in the world, the United States of America, it just happened. It just is. And it's our responsibility, as those who are lucky and fortunate enough, to happen to have been born here. It is incumbent upon us to share that same luck and good fortune with everybody else. Otherwise we are mean, selfish, polarized, partisan, extremist, racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, whatever.

So it seems even from the pope, immigrants, anybody who doesn't live here, has an automatic right to come here just because there's no other place like it on earth. And what is never discussed is how it got so special. How did it happen? Why is it so prosperous? Why is it so free?

See, the correct thing to do would be to answer those questions and spread those answers all over the world. And that's what, to me, if I had the ability to command the attention of the peoples of the world, that's what I would tell them. I certainly wouldn't stand for policies that are gonna end up destroying this special place, because once this special place is destroyed and is no longer special, then where is everybody gonna go?