RUSH: Here’s Palin, by the way, last night on Hannity. He said, “We talked about your husband going rogue.” That would be Todd Palin, the former first dude. “You haven’t gone rogue. You haven’t given an endorsement. You getting any closer to giving an endorsement?”
PALIN: If I had to vote in South Carolina in order to keep this thing going, I’d vote for Newt, and I would want this to continue. More debates, more vetting of candidates, because we know the mistake made in our country four years ago was having a candidate that was not vetted to the degree that he should have been so that we knew what his associations and his pals represented and what went into his thinking, the shaping of who our president today is. That vetting did not take place. I want to see that taking place this time because America is on that precipice, it’s that important, we need this process to continue.
RUSH: Sarah Palin’s got that godlike Obama echo now when she appears from Alaska. Great picture behind her of the lake — well, not a picture, she’s actually sitting there in front of a window, big lake behind her, the godlike Obama reverb, Sarah Palin speaking on Fox. So she didn’t endorse Newt, but she said if she was a South Carolinian, she would vote for Newt to keep this going. This morning on the Fox News Channel, Fox & Friends, Dick Morris appeared and Steve Doocy asked him a point-blank question. “Can Newt Gingrich make a comeback here?”
MORRIS: Yeah, he sure can. I think Newt could very well win in South Carolina. And if he does, then you have a real contest in Florida and down the road. If Romney wins in South Carolina this is basically over, because then he’ll go on to win in Florida fairly easily and we won’t have much to talk about in the mornings.
RUSH: Okay. We’ll see if — and don’t misunderstand this, now, please don’t misunderstand. Let’s just see if Sarah Palin saying on Fox last night that, if she were a South Carolinian, she’d vote for Newt impresses enough South Carolinians to move Newt over the top there and, in fact, keep it going. You remember Operation Chaos? There were two things that I had decided I wanted to do in Operation Chaos, aside from having fun here on the radio. The Republican nomination was wrapped up in April. It was over. Obama wasn’t being vetted. The press was totally covering for Obama. About as far as the press had gone with Obama was David Ehrenstein in the LA Times with the “Magic Negro” column. And there had been some other black leaders who were debating whether or not Obama was authentic, down for the struggle.
But in terms of being vetted, who he really was, who his friends were, where’d he go to school, what were his grades, none that was being investigated, none of it was being reported, and I thought that Hillary and her campaign would be the only organization willing to go there. Since the Republican primary was over, I wanted to keep the Democrat primary process alive for a host of reasons, sending in as much confusion into their convention as possible. Plus, it was a fun radio thing to do. But it had a political objective as well, and it worked. Operation Chaos, “Okay, Republicans, your votes don’t matter in your primary anymore because McCain’s got it, so go out there, temporarily find a way to vote in the Democrat primary and vote Hillary everywhere.”
We became her best bud — and in Indiana, pushed her over the top. In Texas, it had an impact. It kept that race going, the hope that Obama would end up being vetted, and at the end of the day the Democrat primaries went on for more than seven months and Obama STILL wasn’t vetted. Obama to this day, after all the years of the 2008 campaign and now the three-plus years of his presidency, still hasn’t been vetted anywhere near as much as Romney gets vetted for one day or Newt gets vetted for one day.