RUSH: Why didn’t you ask me this five minutes ago when you came in the room? I’m starting the program. Yes, I have been — stop the tape. Stop the theme music. Yes, I’ve been watching the Sotomayor stuff. What do you think I’ve been doing? Start the tape. From the beginning. I’ll tell you what, though, I had to turn it off. The woman is scary. No, no, no, not the way she looks, the stuff she’s saying. She’s making it up. The stuff that she said in her speech, oh, it doesn’t matter. She’s exactly who we know she is. She’s a reflection of the Bamster and they’re trying to get past that today, and Jeff Sessions was great. I’ll tell you another reason. Pat Leahy, the chairman of the committee, this guy needs a drain in his throat. I keep wanting to clear my throat every time I listen to this guy. He’s starting to sound like Larry Flynt, have you noticed that? (doing Flynt impression) I’m just reading the closed-captioning.
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Yes, I’m going to get to Sotomayor. Frankly, we can sum this up in five or six seconds. Everything she’s saying today is not true. She is denying what she said previously in the features. She’s saying that she was just trying to inspire Latinos when she said that wise a Latina has a richer decision, better decision-making process than a white male. She got into a little bit of a disagreement here over the quote from Sandra Day O’Connor. She’s basically making it up. She’s pretending she never said what she said before. It’s obvious she’s been coached about how to deal with this. She is who she is. Orrin Hatch just raked her over the coals. She says, ‘Well, the Ricci case was decided on precedent.’ There was no precedent! That was a summary judgment case. They didn’t even publish the opinion. There was no precedent in the Ricci case that she could cite, yet that’s her excuse.
Jeff Sessions was just tremendous. His interrogation, cross-examination from top to bottom was just 
great. It exposed all of the hypocrisy and the reality of Sonia Sotomayor. Now, this is all good, folks. These things need to happen because exposing her will help the people of this country understand who Obama is. And I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion until the vote happens that she gets on the court. Looks like it, but you never know. There’s a long time to go and there’s plenty of opportunity for snafus. I guarantee you, I just guarantee you this: If there were video — good video, indisputable video — of Sonia Sotomayor making that statement about wise Latinas being better judges than white men, she wouldn’t be sitting there today. If there were video of it. In that speech, that’s practically the least offensive thing that she said. Sessions really, really grilled her on this notion that she made a speech again that judges make policy.
Well, she tried to tiptoe around that and did a 180 on it. She’s not the person that you see today that she has been all of her life, when she’s making speeches. So odds are that she gets confirmed but the process here is good, because it’s helping to inform people who are watching this just who she is, because she’s Obama. She’s a reflection of Obama.
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RUSH: Okay, while all this Sotomayor stuff is going on, one of the things that’s happening here in much of the pop culture analysis is that all of this minutia and detail is being focused on and the big themes here are what’s being lost. Ricci is a great example, the firefighter case in New Haven. Everybody is talking about, ‘Well, she did this, she did that,’ and relates to the wise Latina comment and so forth and she’s trying to explain it away on the basis of precedent. The fact is she buried the case. Remember, now, this was a case with three judges, she was one of three, they decided it on summary judgment. It’s no trial. And then buried the case. There was no published opinion. She was doing everything she could to make sure that her reasoning on this and her participation in this case would never, ever be made public.
If it hadn’t been for Jose Cabranes, it would have worked. Jose Cabranes was not a member of the three-judge panel, I don’t believe. He was a member of the full panel in the Second Circuit, and he looked at it, and he was shocked, and he had to write himself and say that he was shocked at how she had just totally ignored the Constitution and her ruling. And all of this back-and-forth today about Ricci is an attempt for her to retrace her steps, recast what she did, lie about the fact that there was 
precedent involved when there wasn’t. She is oriented around racial and ethnic matters. She does believe that minorities have been given the short shrift simply because they’re minorities and it’s one of her jobs to change that circumstance so that minorities, whether they’re right or wrong under the law, get the break, it’s who she is. And that’s the kind of thing that needs to be brought out.
Now, what I find fascinating about this, and this is one of the things that I have mixed emotions. On one hand it heartens me. On the other it discourages. Every one of these liberals that come up there as appointees to one court or another and even in a lot of cases some liberals running for office, but especially Sotomayor, it is clear she does not have the courage of her leftist convictions. She is a big believer in affirmative action, but she will not dare go public and act as a crusader for it, because she knows it’s not a winner. So these people, Sonia Sotomayor, what you should be learning from these hearings if you’re watching is how she’s trying to bury who she really is. That’s the whole point of this. That’s the way she was rehearsed, bury who she is. The liberals know that if they are wide open and honest, verbally, about things that they believe and say and want to do — this is eventually what’s going to trip up Obama, by the way, and Barney Frank and all these people. It’s going to trip ’em up. The only question is are we going to have too much of this stuff implemented and making it very difficult to roll it back by the time all this awareness takes place.
This woman knows — trust me on this, folks. Do not doubt me — Sonia Sotomayor knows that her views are nowhere near the mainstream. In Ricci, she couldn’t afford to write an opinion based on what she really thinks, she wouldn’t be sitting here today had she done that. This was all calculated to get here today. Remember, she was first touted for the Supreme Court I think by Clinton back in ’98, so she’s been on the so-called fast track among the elites and the glitterati in the DC legal circles, and so that Ricci decision of hers, she was going to decide it the way her heart and mind told her to but she wasn’t going to be public about why because it would not have helped her whatsoever. So she’s not a crusader in the public sense. She’s not out there standing up for affirmative action, ‘I really believe in it, this is what we need,’ she’s trying to hide that fact which tells everybody affirmative action and the things that she believes are not mainstream.
She is not the middle of the road. She is a radical on the left like Obama is. She believes in affirmative action enough that she couldn’t write an opinion disavowing — I’ll tell you something else. You know what would have been very easy for her to do today? When the whole wise Latina thing came up, when Sessions brought it up, all she would have to say was, ‘You know what, I misspoke, really, I misspoke and I shouldn’t have said that, that doesn’t represent –‘ and everybody would have applauded and it would have been buried, but she didn’t, she tried to excuse it and reposition it and say that she didn’t really say it or that she said it but this is what she meant by it, that it was taken out of context. I don’t know how you take those things out of context. She could have very easily just swept this away by saying, ‘I misspoke and I’m happy for the opportunity here to tell the nation I misspoke.’ And what’s anybody going to do there? If you go after her then, then you appear to be mean-spirited and all that, and she coulda shut this down and she didn’t. Why didn’t she shut it down? Because she believes what she did in Ricci is right. She probably views being overturned by the Supreme Court in Ricci a huge setback for the country as she views it to be.
So in the end — and very smart legal beagles will tell you this if you don’t trust me — she buried the Ricci case in an unpublished opinion that makes sure the affirmative action position wins but doesn’t dare try to defend it publicly. That’s Sonia Sotomayor. That is why it is imperative that people understand who she really is and what these hearings are really all about. We’re not going to get the real Sonia Sotomayor unless these Republicans continue to push and push and push, go back to Ricci, ‘I’m not satisfied with your answer, sounds to me like you really wanted to bury your decision here.’ And, by the way, that would be totally proper. We’re getting here to judicial philosophy, which is not pubic hair in a Coke can. We’re getting to judicial policy. It would be entirely proper for every Republican to go back to Ricci, go back to the wise Latina thing, because in that Ricci decision she buried what she really believes, hoping nobody would ever see it, now she’s called on it here, and she cites something called precedent, which there wasn’t any precedent in the case. She is hiding who she is.
The left is practiced at this because in their hearts they know they are not the majority of thinking in this country. See, that doesn’t matter to them because the democratic process is largely irrelevant to them. That’s why there are things like ACORN and other ways to gain and hold power outside of elections using the judiciary, for example, as that. They don’t care that public opinion really doesn’t favor them. They know that it doesn’t. That just makes them have more contempt for the public. So it’s a fascinating thing to watch here, but it hasn’t changed my mind any. This is a stealth radical who’s doing everything possible to keep her radicalness hidden and buried. And of course there are many other radicals in this room, starting with Pat Leahy and going on down the line to Chuck-U Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, there are a lot of radicals on this committee just exactly like Sotomayor, and they’re doing everything they can to help her bury who she really is. The Republicans can put them on defense. It’s interesting to see how hard they push.
Speaking of pushing hard, all this business Obama going out to Michigan today, seeks a boost there, the people in Michigan are saying, ‘We are Ground Zero when it comes to the economic meltdown. We’re looking at 20% unemployment. It’s about time he got here.’ That’s what Democrats in Michigan are saying. If I were you people in Michigan, the worst thing could possibly happen to you is that Obama’s coming and gonna announce more policies. You people in Michigan — I know, those of you in this audience listening in Michigan, you know why your state’s in trouble and you know why some of the cities are in trouble. They’ve been run by Democrats for way too many years, raising taxes, crime is up, people are out of work, the auto companies have their problems now and here’s the guy that’s the architect of nine-and-a-half percent unemployment, the architect of just unimaginable debt going to Detroit to help?
This is like when you see Geraldo Rivera on Fox you know that somebody’s died. In fact, when I was watching Michael Jackson the first day, when it was rumored that he had died, but nobody was reporting it, I knew, I knew that when Fox put Geraldo on, Michael Jackson was dead. Geraldo is the grim reaper. I don’t care who it is, somebody dives off a cruise ship, somebody gets tossed off a cruise ship, somebody has a drug overdose, when Geraldo shows up, somebody’s dead. And Michigan, you’ve got the equivalent of the economic grim reaper showing up here. A guy that believes in everything that’s been done in that state that has caused your economic problems is showing up with Biden’s teleprompter, backup teleprompter and no questions. It was a town hall, now it’s just a speech.
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RUSH: And here’s another question, ladies and gentlemen, about Sonia Sotomayor and the decision in Ricci. Obama said we need people with ’empathy,’ and she used empathy, not the law, in deciding against the white firefighters. Why doesn’t she just say, ‘I was empathizing with the minority’? Why not just say it? Where’s the empathy here? It’s a huge qualification, is it not? Obama says it’s a huge qualification. Well, I would think, then, that Sotomayor could say she was empathizing. She was using empathy as the president said he wants in justices. But she didn’t, did she? I’m telling you: the woman’s hiding who she is. Many liberals have to.
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RUSH: Charles in Jefferson City, Missouri. Great to have you. It’s the state capital out there for those of you in Rio Linda. Nice to have you with us. Hello.
CALLER: I wanted to say something about Sotomayor. Years ago I read your book and, of course, listened to you through the years and one of the things I learned from you is that liberals excuse themselves from the rules and laws that they put on others, and Sotomayor is just like that. She lies, she gives a misrepresentation about what she really believes, and, you know, that’s typical. It’s not just a reflection of Obama. It’s a reflection of every other liberal. It’s a reflection of Leahy, of Reid, of Pelosi, of all these people.
RUSH: Exactly right. Exactly right. You have these people who don’t dare publicly say what they really believe. Even in her legal opinion in Ricci or in her testimony, don’t say what you really believe because it’s killer. This is one of the things that heartens me, as I say, it also gives me pause at the same time, because it still works. But it heartens me that these people still can’t be up-front honest about who they are and what their plans are. Interestingly enough, though, I will contradict myself. Obama is doing exactly what he wrote in his books he was going to do. Now, in his speeches he is not out saying, ‘I want to destroy the US economy.’ He is saying, ‘I want to remake America.’ And they mean the same thing, but he doesn’t have the guts to tell us. The liberals don’t care what you think. The more of you who disagree with them, the more contempt for you they have. Democratic and liberalism cancel each other out. They conflict.