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March 22, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:22
March 22, 2007, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And greetings, ladies and gentlemen, thrill seekers, music lovers all across the fruited plain.
We are ready to rumble again here today on the award-winning Thrill Sacked.
Try that again, Thrill Pact.
Ever exciting Rush Limbaugh program.
The planet has a fever, according to Al Gore.
His testimony yesterday, we have highlights.
Had a little conversation between Vice President, former Vice President Al Gore and Oklahoma Senator James Zinhoff.
Lots of stuff on the agenda today.
Special welcome to those of you watching on the DittoCam at the newly revamped RushLimbaugh.com.
For those of you watching, I want to show you something.
I'm holding here between my formerly nicotine-stained fingers an official Arnold Schwarzenegger cigar.
I received today via overnight courier an official humidor from Governor Schwarzenegger, complete with, well, it's either his seal or the California seal on it.
Office of the governor of California SEAL, and he autographed it inside.
A nice little note saying how much he enjoyed being on the radio program and wants to do it more often.
So during the course of the next break, I will light the Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It's actually his band.
Again, his own band.
And the rapper, the Cellophane rapper, has his signature on it in gold, which, of course, I appreciate.
I'll report back on the quality of cigar as the program unfolds today.
The drive-by media gathered en masse in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, awaiting an announcement that leaked last night about Senator John Edwards' wife.
The latest, this is from the Politico website, the latest is that Senator Edwards is going to suspend the campaign because his wife Elizabeth, in testing this week, had a recurrence of the most common form of breast cancer.
And doesn't, we don't know if this suspension is permanent and going to get out of the race.
We have been told that the campaign staff he has assembled will go on hold, but will not disband the announcement, the press conference was supposed to start at noon today.
It still hasn't gotten underway, but that's normal for these things.
They always go late.
We will not jip it.
We will not join it in progress because it's, you know, these things leak, and it's pretty much a foregone conclusion what's going to happen here.
The other news out of North Carolina is Fox News is reporting that, and the only place I've seen this, they have sources saying that the charges against the three Duke lacrosse players are going to be dropped tomorrow and a little bit more to that, but I can't find anything on it other than at Fox.
So when details on all of these things come forward, we'll tell you about it.
The mystery creator of the anti-Clinton ad has been ID'd, and I told you people it had to be a Democrat, and it was somebody tangentially working on the Barack Obama.
Oh, speaking of that, we didn't play the new tune in the first hour yesterday.
And we need to get that handy there, Mike.
Mr. Broadcast Engineer, we'll have details on that.
I told you this guy was a Democrat, and I'll tell you why I knew it was a Democrat.
A, you put BarackObama.com in the exact font at the end of that commercial.
This is the, we're talking about the remake of the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial that ran in the Super Bowl 1984 that obliterated Hillary Clinton in the middle of a monologue while she's supposedly having a conversation.
But the first telltale sign to me that this was a Democrat was that the ad did not attack her policies per se.
It just attacked her.
It attacked her technique and her style, but didn't go after her policies.
If the Republican had put this ad together, then it would have been, I think, more of a little slash and burn on her policies.
Democrats are only going to go so far.
If you weren't with us in the last two hours of the program yesterday, then you don't know this and you haven't heard this.
Unless, of course, you went to the newly revamped RushLimbaugh.com and sought it and listened to it.
As you know, the Reverend Sharpton is close to breaking down.
He's very jealous of Barack Obama out there.
We've had tapes of Reverend Sharpton with the bullhorn outside Obama headquarters, demanding that Obama come out and debate things.
Obama not down for the civil rights struggle.
Sharpton demanding justice wants to know how it is that somebody that's never been involved in a struggle can be a leading contender, black contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, has resorted to referring to Obama's mom in a series of fat jokes.
A couple days ago, the Reverend Sharpton went into the recording studio, ladies and gentlemen, to continue this little jihad he's got against Barack Obama.
We have exclusive rights to Barack the Magic Negro as portrayed vocally here by Al Sharpton.
As you heard there, the chorus kept going.
Reverend Sharpton dropped the lyric line, started shouting protests during the recording of the tune Through the Bullhorn.
Barack the Magic Negro, that term popularized by columnist David Ehrenstein of Los Angeles Times.
And of course, the vocal portrayal there by Paul Shanklin.
All right, we're going to get to the meat of the program.
We come back from the break.
Many of you thinking it's time to rumble today.
The Senate has authorized subpoenas.
They've voted to send out subpoenas to Karl Rove and Harriet Myers.
We'll discuss this.
Got some interesting sound bites all coming up right after this first obscene profit timeout of the day.
Your guiding light and living legend, Rush Limbaugh, highly trained broadcast specialist, meeting and exceeding all broadcast expectations.
Held by the audience every day here at 800-282-2882.
Here are more details on the Fox News report about the remaining charges against the Duke La Crosse players to be dropped soon.
The source here is inside La Crosse magazine writer Paul Caulfield, and he told Fox News today that several sources have revealed to him that the assault and attempted kidnapping charges still pending against Colin Fennery of Garden City, New York, Dave Evans of Bethesda, Maryland, Reed Seligman of Essex Falls, New Jersey will soon be dropped.
Caulfeld said his sources include more than just attorneys for the defense.
There's no case here, and you'll be hearing a dismissal in coming days.
Something that leads credence to this is that the news earlier in the week was that the special prosecutors appointed by the North Carolina Attorney General's office have been trying to interview the accuser, and accuser is just all over the ballpark as she always has been, unwilling to be cooperative.
And the second woman has now gone silent.
So it's a very, very, it's going to look bad for Mike Nifwong out there.
And it always has.
It has for the longest time.
But this is not official yet.
I caution you on that.
All right, Republicans and Democrats sparred today over whether to force a showdown with President Bush over federal prosecutors as a Senate panel authorized subpoenas for political advisor Carl Rove and others.
The Democrats angrily rejected the president's offer to grant a limited number of lawmakers private interviews with various White House aides, including Rove, no transcript, and without a requirement they testify under oath.
This led to heated debate today.
In the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, we have an exchange between Arlen Specter and Senator Patrick Leakey Leahy.
If we don't like what we get, we can always issue a subpoena and move with a subpoena if we don't like what we get.
But why not take what we can get in the interest of...
No, no, no, what we're told we can get is nothing.
Nothing, nothing.
We're told that we can have a closed-door meeting with no transcript, not under oath, limited number of people, and the White House will determine what the agenda is.
That, to me, is nothing.
Whoa, Leahy, angry, ladies and gentlemen.
Leahy boiling.
What Specter was saying, come on, they've offered us Rove, and they've offered us Myers.
Let's bring him up here and let's talk to them.
And if we're not satisfied with what they say, then let's go get the subpoenas.
Let's get the ball rolling.
And that's when Leahy said, no, no, that's nothing, nothing, nothing.
Democrats furious over this.
Leahy is, well, listen to this next bite.
This is on a Today Show today with Meredith Vieira.
And she said, look, to paraphrase Tony Snow and President Bush, what you guys are involved in here is not a search for the truth.
They don't believe it is.
They say it's a political spectacle, a partisan phishing expedition.
What do you say to that?
Let me tell you this, Bernane.
You have something done.
It looks like you're trying to twist the way prosecution is done.
You affect law enforcement all the way down to the cop on the beach.
You read in the paper today where they forced prosecutors to change from a $130 billion suit against the tobacco companies down to a $10 billion.
That's money out of the taxpayers' pockets.
I have that story.
That story runs in the New York Sun today.
We'll get to that story in just a moment, a little bit later on.
But when you read that whole story, maybe it's the Washington, it's the Washington Post, I'm sorry.
What would he be doing quoting a New York Sun story?
It is the Washington Post.
And when you read the story, you find out how totally phony it is.
They had a debate in there.
They had a debate among the people involved in this tobacco case.
It was not at all about pressure being applied.
They had a debate, which is what goes on in these kinds of places.
At any rate, you see what happens here when you stand up to Democrats.
They lose it.
The era said, well, wait a minute.
They've already said that they're not going to do that, sir.
You have a compromise in mind over this whole thing.
No, I mean, they came up and said, this is our offer.
Take it or leave it.
Accept these papers where we've erased 100 pages or more so you don't even know it's on there.
Do a closed-door hearing where the public has no idea what was said and they're not under oath.
And they said, if you don't like that, take it or leave it.
Exactly right.
There is no criminality here.
Democrats try to make this out to be Watergate 2.
There is no criminality here.
And by the way, the more people look into this, the more there was cause involved for some of the dismissals of these U.S. attorneys.
One of them particularly for just dragging her feet and going nowhere on the prosecution of illegal immigration cases, not even bringing them forward.
In fact, there was a Bush loyalist was one of the eight that was targeted for being replaced here.
Look, this is totally a non-story.
Democrats can't get anything done legislatively.
Stories all over the stack of stuff today about how they can't come together on anything to do with Iraq.
Code Pink showing up at more congressional offices to protest the lack of things being done.
Another story in the political, no less, a left-leaning website that publishes a newspaper now and then two or three times a week.
This is these guys from the Washington Post that left the Dead Tree Paper, went over to the internet, started this politico website.
They are out saying that Nancy Pelosi, the honeymoon's over.
And Stenny Hoyer has decided, he's second command in the House for the Democrats.
Decided that the House is going to continue to hold open votes rather than have a definite closed period for votes.
This is something they excoriated the Republicans for doing.
The Republicans always held the votes open longer than scheduled in order to round up the votes, to whip the votes into place.
Democrats say, you can't do that.
That's a violation of the way the House operates.
But the House Democrats, which is not surprising.
I'm just surprised anybody's surprised about this.
Now, I want to say something here, and I'm going to be very, very diplomatic about this.
There have been many instances, well, there have been a few instances where the White House, in the recent past, has appeared to put up its dukes, entered the ring, and said, we're going to get in a fight on this, such as the NSA and the wiretapping and so forth, a number of other things.
And then all of a sudden, after a year goes by or two weeks or six, what was the most recent one happened, January and February?
They had everybody totally supporting them on something.
I can't remember what it was, but I just blew my gasket when they changed their mind on this.
And I can't remember what it is.
It'll come to me in just a moment.
My point with all of this is that there is a pattern of, and I look at, I must say this, because you're ready to rumble out there.
You're going, all right, finally.
Now, there is a pattern.
This may not be one of those instances, but there is a pattern where the White House, after a period of time, eventually relents and gives the Democrats what they want.
And my experience tells me that we can't go out too far on a limb as though this is going to hold up because the recent past indicates that sometimes it won't.
So I would like to suggest to people inside the White House: if you're going to draw a line in the sand like this and get everybody on your side thinking that you're going to hold fast and you're going to resist these subpoenas and you're going to say you're not going to participate in a phishing expedition and you're going to protect the executive branch in this constitutional medal over the separation of powers,
don't draw the line in the sand like this and then pull back and expect to have your credibility intact.
If you lose credibility with your political enemies along with your base, then you in deep doo-doo.
Look, it's the same for me.
It would be the same for me if I made a case about something and I was pedaled to the metal on it and I was out there and I was going to go as fast as I could on something and I assured you that I was not going to waver and then a period of time later, six months, six weeks, whatever, I changed my mind.
Where would you be?
You would be fit to be tied.
Rush, you caved.
You wussed out.
How can you do this?
We have had this experience on some issues with the White House.
And so while it looks like they're dead serious on this one, finally, we still have to understand that the pattern out there that does exist.
So I would suggest to people in the White House: if you've drawn the line in the sand, don't cross it or don't erase it, whatever you do, because you've got people rallying to your defense on this now, particularly out in the country.
It still remains to be seen what congressional Republicans, both in the House and Senate, are going to do on this.
They're crucial, by the way.
But look at one of the reasons why I'm sure that they're somewhat timid is because of the same pattern that I describe.
There are a lot of people who've gone out on the White House says X, and we're not budging from this and go, rah, rah, rah.
I got a bunch of people supporting it.
And some short period of time later, they do a 180.
All right, the John Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards press conference is ongoing.
Her cancer has recurred.
It is treatable but not curable.
Well, that's too bad.
It is only treatable.
Her cancer, breast cancer has spread to the bone.
Prognosis is that she could live for many years, but it's unknown at this time.
So they just learned that this week.
Her cancer has returned.
It's incurable, but it is treatable, which offers life-sustaining options.
The Edwards press conference is still going on.
Yeah, you know, Catherine Snipe passed away with lung cancer.
She never smoked.
49 years old earlier this week.
You just hate to see this and hear about this with anybody that you know or know of.
Period.
Anybody.
Back in just a sec.
I know.
Thank you.
Welcome back.
Rush Limbaugh and the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I have no way of proving that.
Well, I do.
Snerdley can back me up on this.
Well, I do have ways of proving it.
The people I said it to last night.
When the news broke last night that the cancer, the breast cancer of Elizabeth Edwards had resumed or had recurred, and that there was a press conference today to deal with this.
I had flash messages, instant messages I have.
I chat to Macintosh and the Mac OS, 10.4.9.
And I'm going back and forth with these people, and I said, I'm going to tell you what I expect the Edwards to do tomorrow.
I expect them to announce whatever the details are of Mrs. Edwards' cancer, and then I expect them to say the campaign will go on for the benefit of the country we both love.
I used that exact wording with instant messages of three people.
All morning long, the leaks about this said that the campaign would be suspended, that Edwards would not quit the race.
It's be suspended while he dealt with this and, of course, dealt with the security of their children.
But during the press conference just now, they both said, oh, this campaign goes on full speed ahead, and Mrs. Edwards is going to campaign as long as she possibly can.
Campaign's going to go on strongly.
And Edwards himself said, campaign will go on for the country we both love.
Now, I don't know, many of you sit there and say, Rush, you can say that you said this.
How can you prove it?
Snerdley, at about 10.30 this morning, 90 minutes before showtime, do you confirm, he's nodding his head.
I said this except, I said this exact thing to him, and he looked at me like I was nuts.
As did the people last night to whom I said this.
They suggested that I was off my rocker.
This would not possibly happen.
And yet, there it is.
I have to admit what?
What do I have to admit?
That it's shocking and surprising?
Well, it may be to you, but it's not to me.
This is not surprising.
Don't make me detail why.
I am not going to tell you why.
This just does not surprise me at all.
And Mrs. Edwards is going to get her treatment.
Here cancer is now.
I think it's in one of her ribs, what they said.
And it's incurable, but it's treatable.
And of course, she wants to have as full a life as she can.
And this makes, to me, this makes total sense.
Why suspend this in this circumstance?
I didn't expect it.
I mean, I fully expected Edwards to not quit the campaign or to even suspend it.
And that, in fact, is the case.
And I didn't say this beforehand, before the announcement came out, because I wasn't in the, I didn't feel like publicly predicting this, just out of respect to the Edwards.
Let them say what they're going to say.
I reported the leaks of others that were out there.
All right.
Again, just this reminder, folks, I want to make this clear one more time here.
The White House seems firm here in their resolve to fight these subpoenas that the Senate has authorized the subpoenas for Rove and Harriet Myers.
And as I suggested yesterday, go get some big gun powerhouse lawyers and just play this out as long as you can play it out.
Just delay these people, paper them with motions, tie everybody up, and try to get this strung out to the end of the term here.
There's plenty of precedent here for the Bush administration winning this.
There's no criminal activity that's taken place here whatsoever.
This is nothing more than a desire.
It's almost been an obsession with Democrats to get Karl Rove, however and whenever they could.
And Tony Snow, up to speed on this.
He was on Good Morning America at a bunch of shows, actually.
We have a limbaugh echo here from Tony Snow.
That is that liberals have Karl Roveitis.
Diane Sawyer said, if you haven't got anything to hide, why not go up and testify under oath?
Why not let Karl Rove go up there and show he has nothing to hide, testify under oath, and with a transcript.
Let everybody see it.
This is what I love, this Karl Rove obsession.
What do you want?
You want Karl Rove on TV or do you want the truth?
It seems to me that all this is.
Frankly, White House aides have to have the expectation that they can give their full advice to the president.
And if you have to think, okay, you're going to get called up on Capitol Hill because somebody has heard something from somebody or read an email, that not only has a chilling effect, it means that everybody's going to guard everything they say.
So the real question, Diane, is: is there a single fact that they will not have available to them?
And the answer is no.
They'll have all the facts.
So what you're missing now is a televised spectacle.
Not only, they've got all the facts, and not only is that the case, they want this televised spectacle, but there's another aspect to this too, and that's the separation of powers.
There simply is no criminality here.
And as such, there's no requirement that White House aides go up and answer questions from partisanly oriented members of the Senate and members of Congress who simply want to politically embarrass the president.
This is not Watergate.
This is not something that is even close to it.
Can you imagine what?
What do you think Leahy would do if George W. Bush said, I want to talk to your staffers?
I want to talk to your staffers and you, Senator Biden, and you, Senator Kennedy.
I want to talk to your staffers.
I want to see your staffers in the Oval Office.
And I want to find out from your staffers just who you've been coordinating with and for how long on trying to raise hell over my judicial nominees.
You have tried to destroy some of my judicial nominees' lives and their careers, not just their appointments.
I want to find out who it is that you've been working with and coordinating with on this.
You have a Karl Rove or a bunch of them.
You've got legislative aides and all this.
You've got chief of staff up there.
I want to talk to you.
What do you think Leahy and Kennedy would do if such a request or demand were made?
But Rush, but Rush, the executive branch has no oversight of the legislative branch.
That may be true, but this does not fall under oversight.
This is political.
It is a witch hunt.
It is a desire to find a crime.
And I'll tell you what else it is.
Listen to me carefully on this.
The reason that Leahy wants these people, Rove and Harriet Myers, up under oath, is to set a perjury trap.
He wants to pull a Patrick Fitzfong on them.
He knows there's no crime here.
He has said so.
He has said so previously in numerous television appearances, that there was no crime, no crime in firing U.S. attorneys.
Chuck Schumer has said the same thing.
So why in the world do you need him under oath?
There was nothing inappropriate.
The White House maintains it.
Alberto Gonzalez, the attorney general this morning, said, I'm not resigning.
I'm not quitting.
Everything was appropriate.
I'll be glad to go talk to these guys, but nothing.
I'll tell them, clarify whatever they want clarified.
But we're not sending people up there under oath.
It's because that's just a perjury trap.
This is just nothing more than a trap.
That's why I hope and I pray that the White House holds firm on this like they've held firm on the Iraq war.
I hope they hold as firm on this as they have on anything else because they've drawn this big line in the sand.
The Democrats are fit to be tied.
Make the Democrats continue to keep the country in tumult and chaos and make the American people grow tired and weary of it.
Tony Snow, again, on CBS early show with Harry Smith, who today acted as an appendage of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Harry Smith said, Tony, here's what it looks like.
These people certainly serve at the will of the president, pleasure to president, have been or are, have been kicked out for undue political influence.
Even on the front page of your Washington Post today, you had the lead prosecutor in the big tobacco case saying in Alberto Gonzalez's Justice Department, quote unquote, political interference is happening at justice across the department.
I'm going to get to that story in just a second because that's as phony and a contrived a story as you've seen.
Anyway, Harry Smith says the rule of law goes out the window in this Justice Department.
Harry, you're sounding like a partisan rather than a reporter here.
Let me please permit me to try to explain what's going on because if you take a look also reporting in the New York Times, what they've said is a look at the documents indicates that there is no political interference when people have looked at the available documentary evidence in the case of the U.S. Attorney Zippo.
So I think what you need to do is to stop trying to make a break for political interference and maybe do what we're asking members of Congress to do.
Let's figure out what the facts are.
Figure out what the facts are.
It's a perjury trap.
That's all they want.
They want to create their own process crime in the Senate Judiciary Committee with these subpoenas because there is no crime.
Now, they keep talking about this Washington Post story.
Let me find that here in the stack.
It's a long, drawn-out affair, and it's so this story was written.
This story was put together specifically to give people like Harry Smith and Diane Sawyer something to talk about today.
And I'm not surprised that Diane Sawyer and Harry Smith are ignorant or at least not thinking about the whole concept of separation of powers here.
Well, if you got nothing to hide, why don't you go you try that in any criminal proceeding?
Well, you've got nothing to hide.
Like Conrad Black, he's on Trash Car.
Conrad, you say you're innocent, got nothing to hide, to go tell everybody what you did.
That's not the way it works, folks.
It's not up to the innocent to prove their innocence in a court of law where charges have been made.
It's up to the accusers to prove the guilt.
Now, here, the guilt is being assumed.
Drive-by media is carrying that assumption throughout the country.
And of course, now everybody's out there the impression that White House and Roev and Myers are guilty of something, and they've got to go up and defend themselves.
That's not how it works.
No crime has been committed.
And the Democrats in this committee have said so themselves.
Okay, got to say something here first about the drive-by media.
This new website, The Politico.
This is two scoops that they have blown big time this week.
The first scoop they had on Sunday was Gonzalez is gone, and the White House has asked Republicans to go out and try to find replacements.
The White House shot that down, said to hell with that.
Now we've got the second scoop that they blew, and that is that Edwards was going to suspend his campaign.
Now, what is it that's driving these people to get this?
I suspect they're trying to beat Drudge.
I think everybody on the internet who breaks news aiming at Drudge, but that's two boondoggles in one week.
The people that started the Politico defected, they went over the wall at night when the guards couldn't see them from the Washington Post.
And let's see if the Washington Post slaps these guys around a little bit.
Now, it was on their blog today about Edwards and last night, well, this morning, that Edwards would not suspend, or would suspend the campaign.
Now, about that, I have a theory.
And you know me, I have a theory, and I pronounce it.
Everybody suspected, everybody thought that this campaign would be suspended.
Wife gets cancer, you've got two kids.
And now that we know the details, cancer's in the bone, it's not curable, it's treatable.
Nobody knows the circumstances around how much longer her life will last.
Nobody knows.
Could be a long time, at least if they're saying nobody knows.
So this leak last night or this morning on the politico that the campaign was going to be suspended.
Somebody told them that.
I don't think they just make it up out of thin air.
Now, yeah, the campaign, the Edwards campaign is not going to be suspended.
It's going to go on out there full speed ahead.
Scheduled appearances are going to happen.
Mrs. Edwards, in fact, is going to do as much campaigning as she can.
Now, this suggests to me that the look at let's just see how much sympathy or attention the press conference and the news today evokes and what it does to the campaign.
If this jump starts the Edwards campaign, right now he's looking good in Iowa.
But look, with all of these front-loaded primaries, super duper Tuesday, and a lot of them are in urban states with a lot of big urban areas, Democrat urban areas, Iowa's not going to be enough anymore.
Winning Iowa just to propel you forward.
And now Florida, the Florida legislature voted like 115 to 1 to move their primary up, our primary up, January 29th, which puts it before New Hampshire.
And there's a lot of traditions falling by the wayside here.
A bunch of states are saying, why the hell are we sitting around and letting these clowns in Iowa and New Hampshire decide the fate of our party?
What the hell are we doing?
We're California.
We're Florida.
We got 10 times as many people.
What the hell?
They may have ethanol, but yep, yep.
So there's all these arguments going on within parties over which states should be the de facto opening states Tuesday.
So Florida talking about going early, January 29th.
What's California?
California's up to February 5th now.
So I think what the Edwards campaign is going to do here is see what the reaction is within the ranks of Democrat voters as far as this announcement today is concerned and then go on from there.
If there's not a big jump, if this doesn't cause a breakout, if this doesn't cause a big uptick, then at some point, Senator Edwards probably will have to suspend the campaign, depending on the health of his wife as she goes through treatment for this.
Now, I just wanted to put that out there because everybody, you know, I should have predicted this before the program, what I thought that they wouldn't get out of the campaign.
If I used these exact words, folks, to three people last night and one person this morning, this campaign goes on because of the love of our country that we both have.
And those exact words were uttered today by Senator Edwards.
So we'll see if there's a bump from this.
And you say, Rush, how can you be so callous?
Hey, folks, politics, politics.
I tell you right now, if you went to a website that tracks news hits, you'd find that Edwards is at the top of the AP news hits, right?
probably got more hits on Edwards today than I had with Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday.
And I had hits all over the world with this.
I was stunned for somebody so irrelevant as I am.
I mean, there were reports on the Schwarzenegger thing with me in Russia, in India, I mean, all over the world.
160 different news sources in this country alone.
Edwards is going to get much, much more than that out of this.
And campaigns are what they are.
Now, here's this Washington Post story today that Diane Sawyer and Harry Smith cited.
And this story was written specifically for the drive-bys to give them something to go out and ask these White House people about.
The headline is, Prosecutor says Bush appointees interfered with tobacco case.
The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.
Sharon Eubanks said that Bush loyalists in Attorney General Gonzalez's office began micromanaging the team's strategery in the final weeks of the trial in 2005 to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.
The political people were pushing the buttons, ordering us to say what we said.
And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American people.
Eubanks, a 22-year career lawyer at justice, said that three political appointees were responsible for the last-minute shifts in the government's tobacco case in 2005.
Then associate AG Robert McCallum, then assistant AG Peter Kessler, and Kessler's deputy at the time, Dan Marin.
Now, the story prints out to two pages.
And if you read the entire story, and we will link to it at rushlimbaugh.com, you will conclude the entire premise of this story makes no sense.
And you will see that there was no political pressure.
But you have to read to the end of the story to get that.
There was a legitimate debate about how the government should proceed in this tobacco trial.
And in the drive-bys, the Post went out there.
They found this one guy who had sour grapes.
And this one guy might have even contacted them to get the story generated.
Be right back, folks.
Fastest three hours in media.
First hours in the can on the way to the museum, hermetically sealed.
And the warehouse housing artifacts to the Limbaugh Broadcast Museum.
But we got much more straight ahead.
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