Two senators for McCain have left a special interest group promoting veterans' values because the vet group has run ads critical of Obama.
Yes, You heard me.
Greetings, my friends.
Welcome back.
It's Rush Limbaugh.
This, the EIB Network, the nation's most listened-to radio talk show.
Great to have you here.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
The email address, El Rushbo at EIBNet.com.
Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Gramnesty, prominent surrogates for Senator McCain's presidential campaign, stepped down yesterday from their positions with an independent group that released a pair of internet ads attacking Senator Obama on Iraq.
Lieberman and Graham were both on the policy advisory board of the organization, Vets for Freedom, which on Wednesday released its second web advertisement less than a week attacking Mr. Obama.
The senator's positions with the group, which describes itself, this is Vets for Freedom, as a grassroots advocacy organization pushing for victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The senators' positions seem to place in a contravention of new conflict of interest rules released by McCain's campaign that specifically prohibit anybody with a McCain campaign title or position from participating in a 527 or other independent entity that makes public communications that support or oppose any presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, I mean, you don't need me to analyze that for you.
You don't need me to say a word about it.
Meanwhile, Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch, strong overseas sales have boosted profits at Anheuser-Busch, the largest brewer in America, and the firm behind Budweiser.
Pre-tax profits for the third quarter jumped 27% to $793 million with income from overseas sales rising 22%.
Now, what's the oil company profits?
It's eight cents on a gallon of gasoline or something.
This story is actually from late 2006 that describes the bang-up profit year enjoyed by Anheuser-Busch through which Cindy McCain made the fortune that Senator McCain lives off of.
Has Senator McCain ever complained about obscene beer profits?
And has he ever suggested that we need to look into these excessive profits in beer and maybe roll them back?
Or is it just some obscene profits that he is against?
I have it.
I have an idea.
We need, take this one to the bank, folks.
We need to have, make sure that Anheuser-Busch can no longer drill for more beer.
It's just, the guy, the guy that published Scott McClellan's book is a guy named Peter Osnos.
He is a huge, far-left liberal.
His publishing house is affiliated with The Nation magazine.
His company has also published the prosecution of George W. Bush for murder.
So far, this man's name is Peter Osnos, and so far, six books have been bankrolled by George Soros.
So there is a George Soros connection to the Scott McClellan book.
In addition, this guy, Peter Osnos, has ripped me.
A reporter and editor at the Washington Post during the 70s and 80s before going into book publishing.
Osnos writes a weekly column for the left of center Century Foundation.
In a March column, he denounced Rush Limbaugh as bombastic, aggressive, and mean, bemoaning how the late William F. Buckley Jr. left behind a right-wing culture that tends to be as coarse and leaden as his demeanor could be buoyant, charging Buckley provided unfortunate cover to others who followed with a spirit that was distinctly and consistently malevolent.
So that's the publisher.
This is the guy who published McClellan's book.
This is probably the guy who wrote McClellan's book.
It is stunning to me to listen to everybody out there who knew McClellan say that they have never seen anything like this from him, heard anything like this from him, that he never once spouted anything like this.
I'll tell you what's going to happen.
I'll tell you what's going to happen to McClellan.
The left is going to use him up here.
Scott, they look at you as a nerd.
You are a useful idiot.
And they're going to give you about 24, 48 hours here of a lot of attention.
And now your book's gone to number one.
You're going to make some money off of it.
But they're going to throw you away as soon as they've used you.
As soon as they've gotten everything out of you that they can, they're going to toss you aside, and you're going to be friendless.
You're going to have nobody.
Because what you have done is not just dishonorable.
It is ungrateful.
Scott McClellan, nobody would know who you are were it not for George W. Bush.
George W. Bush kept you on in an incompetent way, kept your incompetence out of loyalty.
This is the kind of thing that just irritates people to no end, especially your friends.
And what's even happening now a little bit, folks, it's starting to trickle out out there.
Even some of these people on the left are saying, I don't care what he's saying.
Now we knew this all along.
Why didn't he say this earlier?
The left is not totally embracing this guy.
There is a connection with George Soros and Peter Osnos and McClellan in his book.
And Vincent Bugliosi, the longtime lawyer that used to be on every night talking about O.J. Simpson, he has written a book called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, 4,000-plus Iraq American Soldiers in Iraq being murdered by George W. Bush in a pointless, worthless, unjust war, published by the same guy by the same publishing house, George Soros.
So Scott McClellan has a new bunch of friends.
In addition to this, this I love.
Bob Wexler, U.S. Congress, from just south of us here, and he's in Boca Raton.
He called yesterday for Scott McClellan to appear before the House Judiciary Committee to testify under oath regarding the devastating revelations made in his new book.
Here's what Wexler said in his released statement.
The admissions made by Scott McClellan in his new book are earth-shattering and allege facts to establish that Carl Roevan, Scooter Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney conspired to obstruct justice by lying about their role in the Playing Wilson matter and that the Bush administration deliberately lied to the American people in order to take us to war in Iraq.
Scott McClellan must now appear before the House Judiciary Committee under oath to tell Congress and the American people how President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Carl Rove, Scooter Libby, and White House officials deliberately orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people.
I hope this happens.
All this is going to do right now is just add to his book sales, but I hope this happens because he doesn't have any information.
He wasn't in any of the meetings.
He was a deputy for all those years.
He had no input in policy.
At times, he even complains in the book about being kept out of the loop.
He was not a big-time player.
He doesn't have anything substantive to tell these people.
He probably didn't write this garbage that's in his book.
So let Wexler call him up there and let him tell Wexler and the House Judiciary Committee, well, I really don't know what Rove and Libby talked about.
I just assumed, you know, they went behind closed doors in the timing.
Well, no, I never actually saw Vice President Cheney.
The reason he can't stand on two legs on this is because everybody knows who the leaker was.
The league was Richard Armitage.
Everybody knows what a travesty of justice this whole case against Libby was.
Everybody knows the real two liars in this whole case were Wilson and Plame.
I mean, this is just classic.
I hope he ends up up there.
And I hope these guys demand everything from him that he purportedly knows.
Because under oath, we would most likely find out he doesn't know diddly squad about what's in his book because he didn't write it.
In case you're wondering what's going on here, an 18-year-old from Dallas, no, from Houston, called a little over a half hour ago after I had reported that the La Scala opera in Milan is going to convert Gore's stupid lying piece of garbage movie on global warming into an opera.
And the young man called and said he thought I was being disrespectful of classical music.
And as you remember, ladies and gentlemen, we, some of you may not, late 80s, early 90s, on occasion, devote an entire hour, sometimes more, to classical music bumps to elevate the cultural level of our society.
Looking for Paclebill's Canon and D.
I just requested it.
I know I gave it to the broadcast engineer many, many moons ago, which would have been Kiki de la Garza.
And Kiki de la Garza is long gone.
Where is Kiki, by the way?
Do you have any idea, Mamon, where Kiki de la Garza went?
Nobody knows where Kiki de la Garza is.
Still collecting the health care benefits, though, I know that.
Nevertheless, it's up there somewhere in one of our file cabinets.
The broadcast engineer will endeavor to find it before the program expires today.
George Newmayer at the American Spectator today has an entirely different take on the Scott McClellan business.
He says the talking point of the day from the White House regarding McClellan's surprisingly non-bland memoir is that this is not the Scott we knew.
Newmayer says, actually, it is.
What's likely is that just as the White House pushed him out to make statements he couldn't cobble together on his own, so too did the editor of his book, What Happened.
At least that's what I deduced from Ari Fleischer's Wednesday night interview with CNN's Campbell Brown.
Fleischer said that he asked McClellan if he had worked with a ghostwriter on the book.
McClellan said no, but allowed that his editor had tweaked some of the copy.
Tweaked probably means massively wrote.
And if so, why should this surprise the White House?
Why is the White House surprised that a dullard they manipulated could also be manipulated by a book editor?
Exhibit A of the thesis of McClellan's guided book is McClellan himself.
Why did Bush hire him in the first place?
And it goes on, but here's the conclusion.
In this case, the Bush administration's self-inflicted wound was to hire a stooge who at first manipulated and then released into the world to be manipulated by others.
They handed him talking points and he read them to millions.
And then his new masters handed him talking points and he wrote them up into a best-selling book.
So New Mayor, a little, the White House deserves what they got here to a certain extent because they knew they had an idiot.
They knew they had a dullard.
They knew they had a stooge who couldn't put his own thoughts together.
They had to do it for him.
And then they replaced him, Tony Snow, Tony Snow with immediate accolades.
Everybody's, oh, how great.
What a great improvement.
And he sat there.
McClellan's fuming and simmering over this and getting angry.
So the set took place, stage was set, and it was just a matter of time before their left got their hooks into McClellan.
Let's go to some of the soundbites from him this morning on the Today Show.
Meredith Vieira interviewed him.
One of the questions was, you had to know, Scott, that this book of yours was going to cause a firestorm.
When I went to work for President Bush back in 1999, then Governor Bush, I had all this great hope that we were going to come to Washington and change it.
He talked about being a uniter, not a divider.
This was a president that had a record as governor of Texas of being a bipartisan leader, of someone who brought people together to get things done, an approval rating well into the 70s.
And then we got to Washington, and I think we got caught up in playing the Washington game the way it's played today.
And I think a lot of Americans like me would like to see us move beyond that bitter partisanship that exists today.
This just, this, I get, this just frosts me.
This is just this.
Scott McClellan, you are using the language of the left.
A lot of Americans like me would like to see us move beyond the bitter partisanship that existed.
Don't you understand you don't?
Your job was to help your president prevail.
This is an ideological battle.
And as far as the president working with other people, what the hell, where were you?
What do you think he was trying to do?
Have you ever heard of the new tone?
Let Ted Kennedy write the education bill for crying out loud.
He's got the Kennedy family up there eating popcorn, watching Kennedy movies in a White House theater.
He went out of his way to bring Democrats into the White House for policy purposes.
You had to be there.
This is an example of how out of touch this guy is or else these are not even his words.
Blame Bush for the partisan divide?
This is a president who would never attack Democrats.
This is a president who would never lead a conservative movement against liberalism, but rather tried to accommodate them and tried to end all of this so-called rancor that went on during the Clinton years.
This is flummery.
Here's the next bite.
The next question from Meredith Vieira.
Carl Rove says this doesn't sound like you.
Sounds like left-wing bloggers.
The administration has come out and said that you're disgruntled, that you're just mad because you got pushed out of the job, and this is your way of getting even.
One of the most defining, two defining moments that caused me to become increasingly dismayed and disillusioned with the way things were going in Washington, D.C. One was the revelation that I had been assured, and Carl Rove and Scooter Libby both.
I asked them point blank, were you involved in this in any way?
Both assured me in unequivocal terms, no, we were not involved in this.
The other defining moment was in early April 2006 when I learned that the president had secretly declassified the national intelligence estimate on Iraq for the vice president and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters.
And we had been out there talking about how seriously the president took this selective leaking of classified information.
And here we were learning that the president had authorized the very same thing we had criticized.
Scott, National Intelligence Estimate, the President does not leak it after he declassifies it.
I am doing my best to stay NPR type composed here.
It is impossible for something to leak, Scott, that has been declassified to assign nefarious motives to the president.
For declassifying, do you not remember, you idiot, that the drive-by media and the Democrats were clamoring for this?
How in the world can something be leaked when the president declassifies it?
It's not possible.
Semantically, etymologically, this is not possible.
Also, this business about Rove and Libby involved.
Hey, Scott, have you ever heard the name Richard Armitage?
They were not involved in the leak.
Scott, if you had any gonads, you would understand that what happened to Scooter Libby is one of the major travesties of justice that has occurred in our lifetimes in the U.S. legal system.
Leak a declassified document?
The era then said that you seem to stop just short of saying President Bush and his administration flat out lied.
What happened was that we got caught up in the excesses of the permanent campaign culture.
You get caught up in trying to sell this war to the American people.
Much of that information was based in what could be substantiated.
But at the same time, as we accelerated the build-up to the war, the information that we were talking about became a little more certain than it was.
The caveats were dropped.
Contradictory intelligence was ignored.
Intelligence that had a high level of confidence was combined and packaged with intelligence that had a low level of confidence.
And together, that made it sound like the threat was more urgent and more grave and gathering than it really turned out to be.
This is a guy who hasn't the slightest clue what he is talking about.
This is left-wing liberal talking points.
His book is filled with fiction.
President Bush delivered 24 major speeches on Iraq over two years, starting in September of 2002.
In October of 2002, Congress cited no fewer than 23 reasons when it overwhelmingly gave President Bush the right to remove Saddam Hussein.
Isn't it interesting, Mr. McClellan, that the people who voted and gave the president permission, he did not act unilaterally, are now saying they were lied to.
They had nothing to say with this.
They had nothing to do with this.
They want to wash their hands of it.
They want to wash their hands of victory.
You want to wash your hands of victory.
There was no permanent campaign.
That was the Clintons.
The Clintons didn't govern.
They campaigned.
And great classical composer and performer Bo Diddley, the EIB network, and El Rushbo, the prestigious Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Subway has apologized.
Apologize to the homeschoolers out there for disqualifying them, not allowing them to enter the essay contest.
But this, folks, this is worse than you even know.
Here's a little bit of their apology from the press release.
We at Subway restaurants place a high value on education regardless of the setting, and we have initiated a number of programs and promotions aimed at educating our youths in the area of health and fitness.
We sincerely apologize to anyone who feels excluded by our current essay contest.
Our intention was to provide an opportunity for traditional schools, many of which we know have trouble affording athletic equipment, to win equipment.
Our intent was certainly not to exclude homeschooled children from the opportunity to win prizes and benefit from better access to fitness equipment.
To address the inadvertent limitation of our current contest and provide an opportunity for even more kids to improve their fitness, we will soon create an additional contest in which homeschooled students will be encouraged to participate.
When the kids win, everybody wins.
Sweetness and light.
Isn't it just lovely?
I've been thinking about this.
What is this?
Traditional schools, many of which we know have trouble affording athletic equipment.
Public schools, we are talking here about public schools, have trouble affording equipment.
My friends, I'm sure that you are aware because we have made mention of it on this program before, of the per-pupil dollar amount being spent on students in these schools.
It's anywhere from $12,000 a student to places in New Jersey to close to $20,000 a student in other schools.
And just like I'm sick and tired of hearing my own party criticize and bash the United States economy and the private sector and the people in it, I have very little patience in hearing how poor the public schools are.
Money is not the problem.
There are much poorer countries doing a much better job educating their populations.
Maybe if they spent a little time on mathematics and grammar and English and reading and a little less time on polar bears, bullies, conflict revolution, environmentalism, and showing Al Gore's movie, maybe we would all be better off.
And if you let them go out in the playground and play tag and dodgeball, let somebody learn what it's like to lose, maybe they'd be better prepared for life.
Let's look at, you know, the Target stores.
Here, get this.
Subway, Target, there are all kinds of companies that are doing this, giving money to the public schools.
Where the hell does it go?
You go to the Target website.
They have paid out totally in recent years $229 million to the schools.
You know where it goes?
Directly to the principals.
This idea that we are so underfunding education.
Even if we were, that would not be the problem with people coming out of schools not being able to read their diplomas.
Anyway, Lisa in Sycamore, Illinois, thank you for waiting.
You're up next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush Mega Diddles from a piano teacher here in Sycamore, Illinois, and mother of five.
It is such an honor to finally speak to you.
Thank you very much.
And I am a loyal listener every day.
And I want you to know that listening to you is like experiencing my favorite moment of every week during football season, Sunday afternoon kickoff.
You give me that every day.
You like football.
Love it.
Are you kidding?
It's great.
So you're a Bears fan, probably.
Absolutely.
Well, everybody has to have a team, I suppose.
Well, my question today for you, and by the way, I agree with everything you've said today about socialism.
I'm always trying to educate my kids about the evils of socialism and media bias, which we can point out every day in the Chicago Tribune.
Excellent.
And how important our freedoms are.
But my question to you is, do you think Obama and McCain plan on going after the obscene and excess profits of, say, the Hollywood crowd?
I'm not sure that there are any.
You know, they have occasionally the big blockbuster movie, but their box office is in trouble out there, Lisa, because they keep making trash that nobody wants to go see.
But every time they do a G-rated movie or for kids or a value, look at the box office goes nuts.
I think they're doing pretty well around the world with the latest Indiana Jones movie, but I don't know that their profits are all that obscene anymore.
I still get your point.
When he go after baseball players, when he go after athletes, you're a piano teacher.
I'm sure you don't earn anywhere near what an athlete earns because nobody's paying to watch you do your job.
Exactly.
But some might say that their jobs are worthless.
You know, you get into a value analysis of jobs.
Aren't there people that do this?
Well, those athletes are not nearly as worthwhile to our society as teachers are.
Don't you know that, Mr. Lindbaugh?
And they say these people should be making a lot more than athletes are.
The athletes shouldn't be making as much.
Now, Bill Clinton went after CEOs.
They went after corporations in 1993 when he retroactively raised taxes.
Clinton went after the millionaire tax.
Any CEO that was paid more than a million dollars, the amount above a million was no longer deductible.
You know what this gave rise to?
Stock options.
Stock options and bonuses.
That were never taxed in the first.
And we know where the stock options took us.
Absolutely.
To more obscene profits and unfair deals than the big guys.
But there were two people, two groups of people exempted from Clinton's millionaire tax, actors and athletes.
Oh, very interesting.
Yes.
I did not know that.
The bottom line is we can totally understand, Lisa, Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat, attacking the United States.
We can understand him attacking the United States economy.
What's tough to swallow is when our own party is doing it.
In terminology used, that's almost identical to what Barack Obama would say, or Ted Kennedy would say.
That's when there are days that feels like I'm chewing cud.
Jim in St. Joe, Michigan, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Thanks, Rush, for taking my call.
I've been listening to you for the last two days with a lot of frustration about the Republican Party.
And it sounds like that you may have finally conceded that the Republican Party is not going to be the venue to advance conservative ideas.
And so I know Obama is the Messiah, but Rush, conservatives are looking for a Moses, a Moses who will go to the Republican Party and say, let my people go.
Are you ready to do that?
No.
I don't believe in third-party candidacies.
They don't work.
They're not going to work.
That's not the way to do this.
I can give you a couple of scenarios.
But here's just one.
The liberal Republicans have taken over the party.
They've nominated somebody who goes out and says things like they say, gets along with Democrats.
They're all one big happy family so that all the liberal Republicans in New York and California can get along with all the liberal Democrats in New York and California.
Our candidate gets beat by 150 electoral votes, anywhere from 50 to 150.
We have a 70-seat deficit in the House of Representatives, perhaps a 10 to 12-seat deficit in the Senate.
And at that point, we start rebuilding the Republican Party because those who have taken over and have decided this is the way to win get shellacked and lose big time.
Now, this is going to end up being a major rebuilding effort.
You go back and study Reagan in 1976 and Reagan's platform fight.
I love studying Ronald Reagan histois.
76, he was the most popular.
But Gerald Ford got the nod because he's sitting vice president.
Gerald Ford got the nod at the convention.
But Reagan, at the platform fight, put in every conservative plank he could squeeze in there.
He hardly ever mentioned Gerald Ford's name.
And then, of course, that paid off four years later.
It paid off in 1978 in the midterm elections to a certain extent.
I mean, we didn't gain any control back.
But the same sort of scenario.
We have squandered conservative leadership.
I was telling this to Snurdley yesterday, one of the top of the hour breaks.
Conservatives in the media is a great thing, and it has had profound impact, and it has made incredible advances.
But we don't have votes on legislation.
You can have all the conservative media you want, but if you don't have a political party, a political party is the vehicle by which ideological advances take place because we are a representative republic, and people vote on these things, elect our people, go to Washington, and theoretically stand for what they were elected to do.
This whole process is going to have to start all over again.
This is not about going to the Republican Party and telling the conservatives, leave it.
Let these people have it.
It's about retaking it.
And retaking it is not going to happen this year.
Retaking it and rebuilding it is going to start in 2010, even if McCain wins.
But I want to tell you this.
And I've mentioned this before, and it's a daunting thing to face.
Another one of these things that makes me feel like I'm chewing my cud.
If McCain wins, then the liberal Rockefeller-type Republicans, the country club blueblooders, they're going to point their fingers at all of us.
They're going to say, see, see, this is how you win.
You win by being a big tent.
You win by welcoming independents and Democrats.
And they're going to say, this party was never conservative.
Reagan was an aberration.
Reagan wasn't even conservative.
This is how you do it.
And so then we're going to have to say, well, you guys, you think you won, but you didn't.
You won with Democrats crossing over as Democrats into your party.
If you guys think you won, you guys need to leave the Republican Party and join the Democrat Party.
If anybody wants to say what really needs to happen to free up the Republican Party, all these liberal Republicans who are having a bang-up good time over the fact that they're broadening the tent and they're bringing in all these liberal Democrats and independents, just go join the Democrat Party.
I mean, if you're going to suggest that McCain put a Democrat on his ticket, if you're going to suggest that he espouse liberal policies in domestic issues, why are you staying in the Republican Party?
Just go join the Democrats.
And we'll take care of the Republican Party.
This is where this is headed.
We'll see.
A lot's going to depend on what happens in November in terms of how quickly all this can be rebuilt, but it's going to have to be.
And the reason is very simple.
There hasn't been any conservative, elected conservative leadership at high levels leading a movement, mobilizing, inspiring the American people.
What we have here, and I'll spend a little bit more time on this when we come back from the break, but we have people who are conflating and confusing being a Republican with being a conservative.
Sadly, they are, in many cases, two totally different things.
Be right back.
Way to go, Mike.
Here's Paco Bell's Canon and D. Paco Bell, not Taco Bell, Paco Bell, P-A-C-H-E-L, B-E-L, Paco Bell.
Pop the P. Doing our part to raise the cultural level of the United States with our classical music bumps today.
It's really interesting, folks.
If you have any interest, you ought to go look up what exactly makes something a canon, C-A-N-O-N.
If you'll note the repeating, cascading melody line here.
A truly compositional work of art.
Johan Paco Bell and a Canon in D.
And now from Paco Bell in D, Canon and D, to the sliding to the sewer of the Republican Party.
Here is what I think is happening.
Most people are conflating party with ideology.
Some of them know it, and they do so in an opportunistic way.
Here's what I mean by this.
We all know that third parties are failures.
I mean, this guy thinking, am I going to be the Moses and lead people out of the Republican Party?
No, that's not the way this is going to work.
Because we all know that third parties are failures.
So third party is not a viable option.
We also know that Obama is as left-wing as anyone we have ever had running for president in this country, which makes a victory for him a very troubling prospect for us.
Let's face it.
So these people want to really be behind a Republican nominee because they're so afraid of Obama Obama.
I mean, the most liberal guy that's ever run, oh, can't have that.
So by fiat, just by automatic, we got to vote for McCain.
But they know that he's terribly flawed.
They're going to vote for him.
And they'll defend him if he's attacked.
But they're worried about him, too.
So they attack the party, or they attack the movement.
Elections are the means by which we correct these things.
The Republicans could have nominated a conservative, but the field was quite weak.
The open primary process in the early states played into the hands of non-conservatives, mostly McCain.
So the party is merely the instrumentality or the instrument through which we offer our positions and seek votes and then move those ideas into reality.
The party is what we make it.
And after eight years of moderate Republicanism with no genuine conservative leadership, the party will now stand for four years of liberal republicanism.
So we've gone, what is by definition not conservative is going to be liberal.
So we've gone from a moderate Republican, compassionate conservative kind of, that's moderate Republicanism.
Now we've gone to liberal republicanism.
We're going to have that for the next four years.
I mean, you put aside a rock for the moment.
That's not an ideological matter.
At the same time, third and fourth tier pseudo-conservatives who have no influence in the grassroots, or for that matter, with most conservative intellectuals, are seizing the moment to claim that their supposed brand of conservatism is on the ascendancy.
Liberalism is what's on the ascendancy in the Republican Party, and that will lead to defeat eventually, and that's when we rebuild it.