RUSH: Ben Smith has it in The Politico today: ‘John McCain’s communications director, Brian Rogers, takes a sledgehammer to McCain primary foe J.D. Hayworth,’ and this is true. Hayworth announced his candidacy for McCain’s Senate seat yesterday. He had a speech or two out there to make, and the McCain people didn’t like very much about what J.D. had to say. So look at this: Here they are taking ‘a sledgehammer’ to a Republican on day one. Now, McCain never did take a sledgehammer to Obama, who is destroying the country — and we’re going to get a chance now, I guess, to see if the era of McCain is over depending on how this primary goes out there. But I just remember during the McCain-Obama campaign, it was going to be ‘honorable,’ and remember Mark 
McKinnon and Steve Schmidt were worrying about ‘civility’ and ‘staying above the fray’ and McKinnon even said he would quit if there were attacks on Obama by the McCain campaign because of the historic nature of the Obama campaign.
So what we have here, folks, is a teachable moment about RINO Republicans: They will go after conservatives more than they will ever go after any liberal, including ones who are destroying the country! ‘Senator John McCain has full confidence that the people of Arizona will again return him to the US Senate this year and will work hard to earn their continued support. … Former Congressman Hayworth obviously disagrees, and it was sad to see [Hayworth] use blatant lies and fabrications to attack Senator McCain when he ‘officially’ entered the race for US Senate today. … Mr. Hayworth falsely said [blah, blah]. Mr. Hayworth falsely said [blah, blah]. Mr. Hayworth falsely said [blah, blah]. Mr. Hayworth falsely said [blah, blah, blah, blah]. … One would think that when asking Arizonans to entrust him to represent them in the US Senate, Mr. Hayworth would have the decency to at least respect them enough to tell the truth.
‘Instead, Mr. Hayworth has started his campaign with a litany of lies. Sorry J.D., the people of Arizona aren’t stupid. They’re on to you.’ This is McCain’s spokesman! ‘Mr. Hayworth has obviously resorted to lies and distortion today because he has no record of his own to stand on.’ Now, this is a great line coming out of the campaign McCain. Why the hell didn’t they use it against Obama? Why DON’T they use it against Obama? Talk about no record of his own to stand on! He was a community agitator. He had a five-minute career. (angry McCain impression) ‘That’s right, Limbaugh! That’s right! But we were running an honorable campaign, something you wouldn’t understand. See? See!’ I guess not. But the honorable campaign was designed to lose. But I just wanted to point out here, folks, how RINO-type Republicans will go after conservatives. I mean, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen, but they wouldn’t go after Democrats this way, and they wouldn’t go after a president who’s literally destroying the US private sector this way. I’m just pointing it out. Just saying it.
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RUSH: Victor in Boca Raton, Florida, I’m glad you waited, sir. You’re on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Great. Hello, Mr. Limbaugh. Mega dittos to you from your fans at the Free Republic.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Sir, I would like to hear your opinion on Sarah Palin’s endorsement and campaigning for John McCain. Thank you, sir.
RUSH: Well, I’ve been waiting for this question to come up, and I see there’s a story out there today that Joe the Plumber says that he cannot and will not support Sarah Palin because of her endorsement of McCain. It is problematic, but you know what’s going on here. She’s a Republican. She’s not a tea partier, she’s not a third party person. She’s a Republican. McCain picked her. No matter what has been written about how she wasn’t supported by some people, I think — and I’m not coping out here — I just think I understand the reality of the circumstance. Maybe she coulda stood mute and not said anything but it would have really, really caused some problems in the other direction for her if she had not endorsed McCain. She’s in a no-win in this situation as far as I can tell. I’ll have more when we come back.
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RUSH: I haven’t forgotten about Sarah Palin and McCain, I’m not avoiding this. Folks, I’ll say again, Sarah Palin is not a tea partier, she spoke there, but she is a Republican, and I’ve interviewed her a couple times for my newsletter and the radio show, but I haven’t gotten into any of this kind of thing. We talked about her bio and her book. So my guess is as good as yours. But I think if she’s going to have a political career, it’s going to have a big capital R next to her name, not a capital TP or some other party, not third party. She’s going to go Republican. And there are just rules. Politics is repulsive to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, but the one thing that she knows — I mean, you’ve seen the story about how she went into Daytona and totally took over the place. Danica Patrick who?
Sarah Palin went in there and was mobbed at the Daytona 500 on Sunday. She was in there to speak I think to the Daytona Chamber of Commerce on Monday, and she went into the drivers meeting before the race on Sunday and got standing O’s from everybody on every crew. She could not get out of there, signing autographs, and there’s one person that made that happen, and that’s John McCain. Despite whatever happened during the campaign to belittle her and closed budget and all that stuff, one thing she knows is that nobody would know any more about her than they knew before McCain picked her were it not for the fact that he picked her. You remember how upset everybody got at George W. Bush back when Specter was still a Republican, was running in the primary against Pat Toomey, and Specter was a Republican disaster, but Bush is out there endorsing him and raising money and I think he did a couple campaign appearances, and people: ‘What the hell is this? Why didn’t he get behind Toomey? Where are the conservatives?’ It is a problem in a lot of people’s views. This is just how parties work.
This is why, folks, the tea party movement must stay oriented on reclaiming the Republican Party and not going third party, but reclaiming it, and then establishing a new set of principles here that rewards conservatism first, foremost, and down the line. It’s going to be a slow evolutionary process because the RINOs are entrenched in this party, and a lot of them are very wealthy, personally and corporately. And they’re not going to give up the power that they’ve got easily. It’s going to be an ongoing battle. We’ve talked about this battle for two years. As conservatives you and I know that we’re persona non grata in the RINO Republican Party and in the liberal Republican Party, the New York elitist, Washington corridor Republican Party. We know those are the people saying the era of Reagan is over. They’re the ones that didn’t like Reagan in the first place. He was embarrassing, they didn’t like abortion. It boils down to the social issues with these people.
There’s this new group of Republicans called the Mount Vernon group, and they’re coming out with position papers on stuff. The Republican Party is fighting the tea party people now for control of the party, there’s a big battle going on. And I think personally four or five of these very prominent members of this Mount Vernon group said, ‘I’m not joining if the social issues are going to be part of our mission statement, I don’t want any part of it,’ meaning they don’t want this party having a thing to say about any social issue, not just abortion, but anything else that’s cultural. They want it to remain fiscal and political only, not cultural. So the battle is going to be raging. And I hate to put words in Sarah Palin’s mouth because I’m just guessing and I’m neither defending nor criticizing, I’m just observing and I think I understand why she’s doing this. I don’t think in her mind she has a choice. She wouldn’t be who she is, she wouldn’t have all of this opportunity in front of her had McCain not chosen her. So this is the obligatory payback and I think after this it’s over.
This is the right thing being done that is required, given circumstances, and then don’t talk about it anymore, don’t go into any appearances, don’t do that, just do the endorsement and move on. And we’ll see if I’m right. Usually am. But I haven’t spoken to her about this, so I apologize if I’ve got this all wrong, I’m not trying to put words in her mouth, I was asked what I think about it and that’s what I think about it. And, frankly, one more thing, it doesn’t matter. Her endorsement of McCain doesn’t dampen anything I think about her. It has nothing to do with it. This is issues, issues, issues to me and look for consistency on that side. But, you know, I’m not kingmaker, I even feel a little strange here saying, ‘I’m going to be watching.’ I’m just a guy on the radio telling you what I think about it every day, and that’s what I’m doing here. Snerdley, would you get the smirk off your face? You wouldn’t even let me try to be humble!
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RUSH: You also have to think of something else here, folks. Imagine if Sarah Palin had not endorsed McCain. Can you imagine the media field day with the following: ‘Oh, wait a minute! Governor Palin, he’s good enough to be president — he’s good enough for you to be his vice presidential running mate — but he’s not good enough to be Senator from Arizona?’ Can you imagine what they’d do? By the way, did anybody who seriously read her book know that she would do this? She doesn’t have one bad thing personally to say about McCain in her book. With all of the record straight that she did vis-a-vis the McCain campaign and some of the staff, every comment she made about McCain in her book was positive. But I shudder to think what woulda happened if she’d endorsed somebody besides McCain and the media gets on this.
‘Oh, yeah! He’s good enough to be president, but not good enough to be Senator from Arizona.’ You know, loyalty is loyalty, and sometimes people want ideologue purity over loyalty and not realizing that loyalty is actually part of a party. By the way, Joe the Plumber has backed off, too. At BigGovernment.com, Joe the Plumber says he shouldn’t have said what he said about Palin, that he likes her and thinks that she’d make a good president. Hillary Clinton has said that if Palin’s elected president she’s going to be visiting Canada a lot more, which is where Clinton’s girlfriend is. So there could be a double meaning there. But that’s not a bad notion, Hillary in Canada a lot.