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Oct. 9, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:12
October 9, 2007, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yeah, they did.
They reported it on CNN.
Oh, I got the audio coming up.
Oh, yeah, here we are, folks.
Rush Limbaugh.
Big smile on my face, a hearty laugh.
And three hours of broadcast excellence straight ahead here from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
A telephone number, 800-282-2882.
The email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
Big, big, big Republican debate.
It's at 4 o'clock this afternoon on CNBC.
Replayed tonight at 9 on PMS NBC, moderated by the partisan Chris Matthews.
Have some thoughts on this in just a second.
Remember, my friends, I am the friendliest, the most humble, harmless, lovable little fuzzball you could ever, ever know as a dynamic radio host.
And we demonstrate this day in and day out.
For example, look, ladies and gentlemen, what I am doing for you.
Not just for you.
Look what I am doing for all of America.
The phony soldier smear has tied up the Senate for days.
It has kept them distracted with me rather than figuring out ways to control you.
And by the way, how about this headline here in the New York Times?
I'm going to take partial credit for this.
Democrats seem ready to extend wiretap powers.
Another disappointment for the lunatic fringe of the Democrat base.
The Democrats in the Senate are going to sign on to spying on people outside the country without warrants.
And I got a whole series of stories on these types of Democrat caves and failures.
So while I have kept the Senate occupied, particularly the leadership from the Democrat side, kept them distracted so they couldn't come up with ways to control you, I am now for you and for all of America tying up Henry Waxman.
Instead of him poking his nose into your business, he's poking his nose into mine.
And that, my friends, is true service, not just to you, but to the country at large.
I think, you know, the Nobel Peace Prize is going to be awarded this Friday.
And it's a close call, according to CNN, between Al Gore and me as to who will win the coveted peace prize this year.
Well, there's some Eskimo too that's up for it, an Inuit tribe member is up for it.
So there's three of us, a close race, but the frontrunners are considered to be Al Gore and me.
Now, I might not win the prize, but they can never take this nomination away from me.
They can never take that away from me.
I might not win it, but I should, after the last 10 days, folks, I should be the recipient of the medal of congressional distraction.
Because I have certainly pulled that.
Here's what CNN reported.
This was Sunday, actually.
Not this morning.
It was a couple days ago on This Week at War.
The anchor Tom Foreman reported this.
Quick question.
What do Rush Limbaugh and Al Gore have in common?
On Friday, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced.
Among those nominated, former Vice President Al Gore and radio host, Rush Limbaugh.
Yeah, baby.
Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, as reported by CNN.
All right.
As I say, they can never, ever take this away from me.
We're going to get to the debate here.
I think something that I want to mention starts at 4 o'clock this afternoon.
And, you know, Chris Matthews is the moderator of the debate, and he was.
What do you say this?
I guess this morning on MSNBC, he was on with Joe Scarborough on Scarborough's show.
And this is what he said about moderating the GOP debate tonight.
If somebody says I'm not independent, it's going to be very hard for me to bite my tongue because for 20 years now, I've paid the price of independence.
I've been tough on everybody.
I've taken it from the left-wing blogs and the right-wing blogs every night of my life for the last 20 years.
I don't mind them taking any shot at me tonight, but if they accuse me of being partisan, I'll go rip.
It's not about me.
It's about them and who's going to be the next president in these very difficult times.
So he's going to go rip if they accuse him of being partisan.
I don't know how many of you have seen the YouTube video of Matthews' interview in his latest book that's on with Jon Stewart.
What Stewart show?
The Daily Show.
By the way, do you know what Air America is?
They've just started an atheist show.
Another brilliant programming decision from Air America.
They actually have named a host to do an atheist week or atheist hour or atheist show or something.
Right, going for the base.
They damn right are.
There's too much Christianity and religion on the radio elsewhere, they say.
So now we need to really shore up our base by going for the atheist audience.
Anyway, what John Stewart, Jon Stewart has, I mean, Matthews' book, I think, is 98 on the Amazon list.
And I watched this interview and Stewart just laughed at Chris Matthews over some of the life philosophies that are expressed in the book, Life is a Campaign.
That may even be the title of it.
And Stewart said, this is real.
This is all phony.
And he was laughing about it.
And on tape, you see Matthews actually complaining, this is the worst interview of my life.
Well, you don't get it.
And so forth.
But the point is that Stewart was laughing at him.
Now, I think in this debate, and everybody's focusing on the fact this is Fred Thompson's first debate in the Republican field.
But it is a little strange.
I think partly this is all about elevating the stature of Chris Matthews as an NBC personality, letting him moderate that.
But the idea that he is not partisan is absurd.
He's in a tank for Hillary Clinton.
We don't even need to chronicle this.
The fact that he gets hit from the left and gets hit from the right does not mean he's not partisan.
I mean, everybody gets hit from the left because they're just, they're lunatics.
They hit everybody.
Hill ABC hit Hillary Monday night on World News Tonight because of her vote on the Iran go-to-war resolution of going after their revolutionary guard.
And it was a story that was inspired by moveon.org.
I mean, the left is out there attacking everybody.
They're just unwound.
So anyway, I think this.
If I were an advisor to any of these Republican candidates, what they have to be able to do tonight with Matthews is not attack him, laugh at him because of this.
The base of the Republican Party, conservatives, and a lot of people, a lot of independents, so-called independence moderates, know that something is really wrong with the media today.
It is really not what it used to be.
They've always been biased.
They've always been partisan.
But today, it's worse than it has ever been.
The Republican candidates, all of them, need to rev up the base.
The Republican base is not jazzed.
They just aren't jazzed.
They're not jazzed by anybody.
I mean, they're expressing their support in polls for this candidate or that, but there's no jazz.
What these guys have to realize is that Chris Matthews tonight as a moderator represents what's gone wrong, what is terribly wrong with the media.
And by letting it be known that on behalf of these candidates, if they make some comment, humorous or otherwise, that they understand what they're up against with the media and what's happened to the media, that Matthews represents it.
They can go a long way to revving the base.
What do you think led to, among many things, one of the main things that led to McCain's precipitous fall from the inevitability of his own nomination as the Republican presidential candidate was that he went out and said the drive-bys were his base.
The Republican Party does not like people who sidle up and cozy up to the media.
The Republican base considers the media to be part of the enemy that has to be defeated and overcome.
And sitting there representing the drive-by media tonight that has to be defeated and overcome is Chris Matthews.
And so taking out after him, don't accuse him as being a partisan with the words.
There are clever ways to do this.
And if he does rip, even better.
If one of them causes him to rip, there'd be fireworks.
But I'm telling you, this is the kind of thing that will gin up the base.
Now, I know that political consultants say, don't go after the media.
It's horrible if you start blaming media bias for your failures or decline.
No, I'm not saying blame them for failures or decline.
Attack them for what they've become.
They are as much an enemy to any Republican presidential nominee as the Democrat nominee is because they are on the same side as the Democrat nominee.
They are in bed with Hillary Clinton or whoever, Barack, whoever ends up winning that nomination.
And that's who they're going to be battling.
And to pretend and to treat them with status that suggests that they are even-handed, that they are uninterested in outcomes of this election, that they're interested in fairness and objectivity is to ignore a salient enemy that they also face in the upcoming election.
Quick time out here.
We'll be back.
Watch to do on the big program today, so sit tight.
1972, I think this was.
Bang-a-gong, T-Rex.
How about that football game last night?
Do you see that football game?
Five interceptions by Tony Romo, and they still win by one point on a 52-yard field goal.
Too bad the game was on ESPN.
Anyway, welcome back.
800-282-2882.
The number to the phones quickly.
Eric in Charlotte, Virginia.
Welcome, sir.
Nice to have you with us.
Yes, this is the Eric Woods guy that you said was the best call you've ever had in your time of hosting this show.
I'm the guy who said mental, that Democrats, or liberalism is a form of mental illness, and I told you about that blacks, the analogy between the slave, the slave master, and the liberator or the pimp, the prostitute, and the preacher.
And you're one of the main preachers that these people have to go after.
That's why they're doing this thing with this soldier stuff.
But they have to go after the preacher.
And you're the foremost preacher that the pimps have to go to in order to keep the prostitutes on the, all within the harem here.
This is a fascinating analogy.
I'm a preacher that the pimps have to go to the prostitutes for in order to keep them quiet.
Well, yeah, you know, the pimp's job is to speak bad and evil about the preacher, and the preacher's job is to speak bad about the pimp.
The pimp is a truly bad guy.
And the reason why the pimp has to speak bad about the preacher is because he's trying to keep the prostitutes from going over to hear the preacher to get them converted.
And so I was saying that's what's going on with blacks in America and the Democratic Party in particular, the way they're, you know, they're the pimps, and we're in the middle of the.
There's no question.
I mean, I understand your analogy, and I do remember your call.
Well, Rush, I'm really, really, really, really kicked off at you right now, to be honest with you.
I love you like a brother, but I'm very ticked off with you because about, I'd say, almost eight years ago.
No, it's been a little more than that.
Let's not go back eight years.
We only have three hours here.
Hey, man, you're right.
You're right.
But, Rush.
Well, I usually am.
And that's a sign of my humility, and I say that, folks.
Don't misunderstand.
Humility is honesty, and I can be dishonest by denying that I'm right most of the time.
What is your opinion?
You're ticked off at me.
What for?
Well, because you're just speaking negative about what the Democrats are versus what you need to be doing.
As I asked you a number of years ago, if you were recruited and called to step up to the plate to run to be the president of the United States, would you take it?
You said yes.
Now, wait a minute, before you hang up on me, Rush.
I did not say I would take it.
No, you said it.
Because of the pay cut.
Look at it.
Eric, you're wondering.
I wish you'd get to the point.
I know why you called and you haven't gotten there yet.
My patience's wearing thin.
No, that is my point.
That the reason why is you're not putting forward, you're talking about the negatives of the Democrat instead of putting forward a candidate we need.
Right now, what we need, Rush, is if you would sacrifice your pocketbook, you make enough money to live on, you can retire right now anytime you want.
You know that.
But if you would sacrifice just, I'd say five months, Rush.
Listen to me, Rush.
Come on.
This is serious, man, because time's short.
But if you would sacrifice just five months of good time.
What are you saying?
You want me to run for president?
I am saying you better run.
Listen to me, man, because this is important here.
If Rush is just what you want to do.
I thought he was going to blame me for the base not being jazzed up.
Well, I am.
Well, you only been on your five minutes here.
Brevity is a solo wit.
We're losing the audience here, pal.
Get this.
No, we're not.
Yes, we are.
The audience is cheering me off.
The audience is trying to figure you out.
I'm trying to help them figure you out because I'm having trouble figuring out where you're going.
No, the audience wants me.
They're cheering me because they want to hear what I'm saying about you.
Rush, if you would sacrifice five months of your life and just step out there and say, okay, let me see if I'll get the nomination.
Because, Rush, you will get it.
You will galvanize us in a way that you would never, ever imagine.
Because right now, Fred Thompson is not going to really stir the conservative base, the pro-life base.
He's not.
He will get some.
Here's, Eric.
Look, I appreciate what you're saying, and I'm very flattered by it.
But here's the problem.
If I actually got into the race for the Republican nomination, I would win.
And the five months would not be five months.
The five months would turn into eight years because I would win the presidency as well.
And you've got to have a fire in your belly to do that.
And I love doing what I'm doing now.
I am doing what I was born to do.
And what Snerdley wants to weigh in.
What now?
Snerdly wants to know, and this is playing off Eric's point, Why is it, what's the question?
Why is it that I am considered the only conservative in the country today that we have?
Why am I considered the only conservative that we, you know, people talk about my braggadocio and lack of humility all the time.
But I got to tell you something.
I don't think of myself the only conservative that we have.
I don't think of myself.
Well, visible on the national stage.
There are a bunch of them that are visible on the national stage.
I don't think of myself that way as the only conservative that we have.
I think the better way to answer this is, why are the Republican presidential candidates not as conservative as the base is, whether it's represented by me or some other talk show host or whoever?
And I could only take wild guesses at that.
But I think fear has a lot to do with it.
And plus, where these people come from, many of them are Washington insiders, been politicians all their lives.
They play the equivocation game.
Think they've got to go out and get the moderates.
Think they've got to go out and pick off some Democrats, pick off a little of that Democrat constituency, a little bit of that one.
And then plus they play the, let me try to be friends and get the love and support of the media game.
And to do that, you can't follow the fire in your belly that is conservative.
And they may not be genuinely as conservative as we are.
And we'd have to go into an in-depth explanation of why that is.
And I think I just touched on some of the reasons.
I think there's a fear of being conservative on the part of a lot of people in public life because you get hit.
You get destroyed.
You get aimed at, certainly.
You get targeted.
All kinds of grief comes your way.
And then you win.
If you stick to it, then you win.
If you fight back, pick your poison and pick your battles wisely.
You fight back, not all the time, but when it's necessary, and you win because people like that.
I don't know these guys well enough personally to be able to explain why they're not conservative or why there hasn't been a conservative farm system.
It's always puzzled me why with the lessons of Ronald Reagan from the 80s that somebody hasn't said that's how to do it.
49 state landslides coming out, running against a miserable Democrat incumbent, Jimmy Carter.
We tell them how to do it.
I know we tell them how to do it each and every day on this program.
And that's why people are angry, I guess, that they're not paying attention or that maybe their conservatism is not as thorough as mine is or ours is.
Whatever.
I know it's frustrating.
So in that sense, Eric, I have to spend time talking about the Democrats here because the Democrats, as currently constituted, pose one of the gravest threats to our country as we know it today that I have ever seen, particularly Mrs. Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton, there's a great piece in The American Thinker today, and it involves me.
It's by Kylie Ann Shiver.
It's pretty long, and I'm going to link to it at rushlimbaugh.com later this afternoon.
But its title is Hillary, Soros, Alinsky, and Rush.
And basically what the author of the piece does is describe in different ways what I have been trying to tell you that the Democrats have in mind, that they are wolves in sheep's clothing, that they're wearing camouflage.
They're trying to portray themselves.
Mrs. Clinton is particularly as a centrist and a moderate when they are radicals.
They are socialist radicals who will do anything to get what they want, and they will expose what they really are going to do only after they get there.
They will not be honest and expose what they want to do before they get there because they would never get there.
They would be rejected.
Well, I guess I'll get into some of the details of this.
Happily, folks, I am Nobel Peace Prize nominee Rush Limbaugh, potentially winner.
This Friday, Al Gore has been campaigning for it, and he is the acknowledged consensus front runner on this year's award.
But I have been nominated and I am in the hopper, as CNN reported on Sunday.
Welcome back.
Here's the phone number, 800-282-2882, and the email address, rush at EIBNet.com.
All right.
Let me cherry-pick this piece in The American Thinker because it's quite long.
And it's about, in large part, the recent dust-up over the phony soldier.
But it's not about that.
So don't get worried here, folks.
You know, you been critical to me for being diverted by spending so much time on this.
And I'm telling you, you got to pick your battles, when to respond, and when not to.
This was one of those times to respond.
By the way, as I mentioned at the top of the program, I deserve a congressional medal for distracting them while all this was going on.
Anyway, Kylie Ann Shiver, the American thinker, Hillary Soros, Olinski, and Rush.
In 1995, George Soros appeared on PBS with Charlie Rose and said this, I like to influence policy.
I wasn't able to get to George Bush Sr., but now I think I have succeeded with my influence.
I now have great access in the Clinton administration.
There's no question about this.
We actually work together as a team.
If you want a complete rundown on all of Hillary's Soros, or Hillary's and Soros' nonprofit groups and how they work together in her plan to take over America, get yourself a copy of the book by her mentor, Saul Alinsky.
The name of the book is Rules for Radicals.
In it, you'll find the complete outline for throwing Judeo-Christian principles and honesty to the winds of revolutionary fervor.
Hillary Clinton has been the perfectly patient disciple of Alinsky's since she wrote her thesis about him, her senior year at Wellesley in 1969.
If her admiration of Alinsky had died with her thesis, nobody'd care, but it didn't.
He remained a close confidant until his death.
And his tactical fingerprints are all over her projection of the false centrist image that she is manipulating to garner political power.
It's all in the book.
The first attack on Rush, Hillary's media attack machine, Media Matters, first tried to get Hush Rush by getting him thrown off the Armed Forces radio network in May of 2004.
In a letter to Secretary Rumsfeld, they demanded Rush be silenced after his trivialization of the military misconduct at Abu Ghraib.
The gag on Rush was necessary, they wrote, to protect our troops from these reckless and dangerous messages, unquote.
Senator Harkin jumped on the Hush Rush campaign that time, too, just as he is now, demanding balance in the media.
With taxpayer-funded liberal propaganda organ NPR being broadcast to the troops 24-7, it's hard to believe that anybody can feel that one hour a day of Rush Limbaugh is a threat to balance.
If anything, that one hour of Rush may be the only balance to the unending live stream of the war is lost Harry Reid and his Democrat followers, Tom Harkin, John Murthy, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy, which is a good point.
Those guys are all over NPR proclaiming defeat, demoralizing the troops, and NPR is heard 24-7 on armed forces race.
Why we said in the beginning of this program, everybody said when we started the libs, you got to get balance on that show of yours.
You have to get people on the other side of fair show.
No, no, no, no.
I am equal time.
You guys own every other media outlet there is.
This is it.
On our side, I am equal time.
I don't need to be balanced.
But this is the ruse that they have continued to use.
The only reason that Hillary Clinton keeps up the public facade of moderation and doesn't dare to go on record with her deep disdain for our military is that she is following the Alinsky model, which admonishes revolutionaries to milk their white middle-class backgrounds and appearances to achieve the political power necessary to carry out the socialist revolution.
According to the Alinsky model of bloodless and socialist revolution, Rush Limbaugh represents a have as opposed to a have-not.
Now, what does Rush have that Hillary Clinton and Soros have not?
A lot, actually, good ideas being perhaps the first thing that comes to my mind.
But in the current battle, what Limbaugh definitely has is an established and quite verifiable reputation for unabashed patriotism.
This reputation is so strong that as soon as somebody attacks it, then real living American armed forces and veterans immediately come to Limbaugh's defense.
George Soros, on the other hand, even has a hard time being recognized as an American citizen.
And Hillary Clinton, even though she voted for the war, has done all she could to squirm out of it without apologizing ever since the war became more difficult than bombing an aspirin factory in the middle of the night.
Russia's have-patriotism status, and the Soros-Clinton comparative have-not status is the dynamic that makes Rush a prime target of their revolution.
They're using Alinsky's basic tactic in warfare against the haves, which Alinsky refers to as political jujitsu.
By the way, it's page 152 of his book, Rules for Radicals.
This tactic advises the have-nots to club the enemy to death with his own book of rules and regulations.
Rush is a great patriot, playing by the American Patriot Rulebook, but even a true patriot can be caught every now and then using one or two words that, when taken out of context, might be used to choke him on his own petard.
This works especially well for the revolutionaries in our high-tech age, and some of Soros' money goes to pay full-time listeners and media watchers at Media Matters to monitor every word of the haves.
In their battle-to-hush Rush, preferably before he gets a chance to skewer Hillary in the general election campaign, Hillary and Soros are using their media attack machine, Media Matters, to apply Alinsky radical tactics number eight and 10.
The eighth rule, keep the pressure on.
And this goes on and on.
But here's the conclusion.
In short, bringing down Rush or bursting the bubble of Rush supremacy, as George Soros might say, would prove more than a political plum in Hillary's pudding.
It might actually give her the throne of power in the Oval Office with George Soros her backer and enabler.
And the only one thing that remains to be seen is whether it'll be as easy to control the ballot box on Election Day as it apparently has been to control the Democrat Party.
Now, people ask me frequently, when did this current iteration of Democrats, these radicals, these socialist libs, when did they surface?
Well, you can go back to the 60s and before that.
I mean, FDR was a lib, but he was not a radical.
The guy was a pure, he was a patriot.
He defended the country.
Those Democrats, Hubert Humphrey and those people, LBJ was strong-armed and twisted people's arm, banged heads.
Jack Kennedy cut taxes like Ronald Reagan did.
There are many theories to explain what happened to the libs, but you go to the class of 1974, the Democrats elected after Watergate in 1974, I think is where you can trace this current iteration.
And they all come from this Alinsky school of thought, which is lie, obfuscate, mask yourself and your real intentions.
Come across as middle class as you can.
Use the usual liberal things of supporting the little guys, supposedly standing for free speech.
But in the reality of your life, you are working to form a total takeover of the government with your ideas becoming paramount.
But you know you can't get there by being honest with anybody about what they are, so you have to put out a facade.
And when this facade is uncovered and when it is exposed by people like me, the people who are telling the truth about you, according to the Alinsky model, have to be taken out.
They have to be destroyed, discredited somehow.
Whatever it takes, it doesn't matter.
The truth is irrelevant.
Only getting the power and being able to make the big change over in the way you want the country to be is important.
And however you get there doesn't matter.
The truth is not a factor.
Facts are not factors.
And this, I was talking earlier about the media.
The media has been incorporated into this.
The media, they themselves share the same socialistic ideals as the Democrats do, because they're going to be one and the same.
They'll enjoy the power.
They'll enjoy the social life that Washington will feature with these people having ascended to power.
There's all kinds of factors here.
But first and foremost is their ideology, their radical ideology.
And average ordinary Americans today understand that there is something terribly wrong with the media.
It is getting worse.
They are not interested in facts.
They are not interested in truth.
They are interested in pushing an agenda.
They hide behind such words as fairness, being objective, we try to get it right and this sort of thing.
But we've got a guy moderating the debate tonight or this afternoon, the Republican debate, who at a book party this past week talked about how the Bush administration's criminality has finally been proven or realized.
And he's out there saying he's not a partisan.
Now, I know it's a throwaway line trying to sell a book, which is not working.
The book's at 98 on the Amazon list.
But people in this country know there's something terribly wrong with the modern-day Democrat Party.
35% of Democrats in a poll say that Bush knew about 9-11 before it happened and thus had to let it happen.
One in five Democrats in a poll think that it would be better for the world if the United States lost the war in Iraq in the war on terror.
Average ordinary people, the people who make this country work, laboring away in anonymity, not seeking fame and frivolity and notoriety, they instinctively know that something is terribly wrong with the country.
And when they hear the Republican presidential candidates, they don't hear them addressing these wrongs.
They hear them discussing policy and so forth, which is all well and good.
But there is something terribly, terribly wrong in the country and with the Democrat Party and with the media.
And if one of these candidates, or all of them, would simply find ways to acknowledge to their base that they understand this and that they know they've got to overcome this and beat this opposition down, it would rally the base like I don't know what else could at this stage of the campaign because it's not going to be enough just to run against Mrs. Clinton.
You've got to give people reasons to vote for you.
You know, and there's, you know, the Republican Party is not a monolith.
There's all kinds of competing ideas that people putting pressure on certain candidates now.
If they don't, if they win the nomination, we're forming a third party here because we'd rather have somebody in there that we oppose that we can fight rather than somebody we elected that we disagree with and can't oppose and fight.
So, you know, it's really fluid.
And it's taking on this whole campaign's taking on a life of its own in ways that nobody could foresee, which is why early on, I'm telling you who I prefer here because it's too soon.
There's too much that can happen on both sides.
The Democrats are monolithic.
The Democrats, I care who the candidate is, says the same thing.
None of those Democrats are afraid to go after Hillary for a host of reasons.
She's going to be the nominee, and it's going to be up to the Republican nominee to be honest with the American people about what a presidency with Hillary Clinton would mean.
It's not that hard, but it may take some guts to do it.
I got to take a quick time out.
We'll be back and continue after this.
One more thing here.
The 13th tactic in Saul Alinsky's book, and he's one of Hillary's gurus, mentors, is this is on page 130 of the book, pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Well, at this stage, and for the last two years, I have been the target.
So they pick the target, then freeze it, personalize it and polarize it, and just keep repeating the process until as many people as possible believe the smear.
So these smears are going to continue, and the efforts are going to continue.
One of the things that we've, wow, I've spotted this.
You know, we've had on this program recently a large spate of seminar callers.
They're easy to spot.
And I like them.
They're fun.
Like to humor them and so forth.
But I think they're all part of the ruse.
And I think their purpose in calling is to create a circumstance where I or another host will say a couple of words that they can then take out of context.
I think it's all part of the ruse here.
So I told Sternley, no more seminar callers.
I used to have fun with them, but I'm not going to give them the added opportunity.
Screw them.
You know, they're idiots anyway.
And I know they get boring to listen to unless I, as a brilliant host, can make the whole experience fun.
But it's not worth what's up here with the target having been picked, personalized, frozen, et al.
Clark in New York City.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Rush, you're the best.
Well, thank you, sir.
On the Chris Matthews choice for tonight, if the Democrats agreed to have Rush Limbaugh moderate their next debate, I would think there'd be something intriguing at play.
But that's not the case.
Not just that, the Democrats won't even go on Fox News.
That's right.
But that's not because they're afraid of it.
That is also the tactic.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
That's just an effort to delegitimize Fox in the eyes of people, in the eyes of voters.
And they're afraid to go there.
I mean, I take that back.
They are afraid.
But the tactic is based on isolating Fox as something illegitimate.
Then the Republican Party must be tone deaf or dumb for picking Chris Matthews, who's only going to embarrass them tonight.
I don't think they picked him.
I think that they agreed to let MSNBC televise the debate, and MSNBC picks the moderator.
Well, I'm sure that somebody has a say in who moderates.
Well, I don't know, but I don't think the Republicans are going to go there anyway.
I don't think they're going to turn, unless it was just somebody totally ridiculous.
But anyway, Matthews does have the aura, as he's been presented by NBC as a journalist/slash commentator.
Look at the guy, Zetha saying he's not partisan.
He wrote Jimmy Carter's Malays speech in 1979 in which he blamed the American people for the malaise they were in.
He worked as a legislative aide for Tip O'Neill when Tip O'Neill was the Speaker of the House.
For him to say he's not a partisan is somewhat puzzling.
But you think the Republicans deserve what they're going to get because they're allowing Matthews to be the moderator?
Yes.
So I got a different view of it.
I don't think when you're running for president, you can be Afraid of anybody.
You cannot act like you're afraid of it, particularly a person in the media who is well known to be what he is.
The way to deal with this is to, with as much humor as you can, let the audience know that you know what they know, that the guy is a partisan.
And the whole thing could be a setup, but beat the guy.
Do it with optimism and have fun.
Go about it with good cheer.
And so on.
I'm telling you, folks, for one of these candidates this afternoon in this debate, which again starts at 4 o'clock, there is a gold mine waiting to be tapped out there if they can somehow, one or all of these candidates, convey to the audience that they know they're also running against the media as well as whoever else is up on the panel or the dais with them in this debate.
It's tricky because you can't blame the media for being unfair to you.
When you're running for president, you cannot whine about anything.
But these guys ought to know that.
And they also ought to have some empathy with those of us in their party and in their movement that we consider the opposition to be not just a Democrat Party, but the main component of what we call the drive-by media.
I got to run here back to close out the hour after this.
A couple weeks ago, I made a prediction to you about what the 2008 presidential election would be about and what it would not be about.
That prediction is already starting to manifest itself, ladies and gentlemen.
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