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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I don’t want to get on a tangent here, but I know that there’s been this ongoing discussion of whether or not Romney ought to release more tax returns. I got home yesterday afternoon and I saw practically the entire Republican establishment thinks he should. What an asinine thing to suggest. The National Review, a big, long editorial explaining why Romney should do this. It was silly. I’m convinced people on our side in the establishment don’t know who we’re up against. This is not commonplace politics-as-usual. You can’t reason with these people.

So Obama and the Democrats are demanding that Romney release more tax returns. And people on our side, “Well, I think he should. I think he should get the issue off the table.” It’s not gonna get the issue off the table. The Obama people don’t want Romney’s tax returns released so they can find out if they’re aboveboard. It doesn’t matter what they say. They’re going to be mischaracterized and used to hurt Romney. Romney’s right to hang in tough on this. I couldn’t believe this was even a matter that people would think about for longer than five or ten seconds ’til I saw all these names of people on our side. National Review, George Will, I mean the list is long, Bill Kristol, people that think Romney ought to do this.

You can’t reason with these people. Why would we want to acquiesce to their demands? Why would we want to please them? Why would we want to get their approval? We ought to be the ones making demands that Obama release things and come clean. We ought to be making demands that the media finally go vet the guy and tell us all who he really is. We already know. They continue to try to hide it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I don’t think Romney ought to release his tax returns, quite honestly.

I love these guys. This is really hard. National Review was crucially important to my conservative education. As you all know, one of the biggest thrills of my life was to have been able to meet William F. Buckley Jr. And sometimes they do things over there that I just don’t understand, and yesterday they had this big editorial where they join the chorus with the Democrats demanding that Romney release all of his tax returns back to the day he was born, probably before. I hope Romney is keeping track of who on our side is caving to Obama’s demands. I hope he understands it’s the Tea Party sticking by him and not the establishment Republicans. I hope Romney understands that it’s the Tea Party and the conservative base that is supporting him on this tax return issue. That it’s the Republican establishment and their associated media allies which are trying to acquiesce to demands from the Obama campaign, from the White House.

This is not commonplace politics. This is not going to make the issue go away. All these guys want the issue to go away. They want the issue of Romney’s tax returns to go away. It’s almost as though the tax returns are their own and they just want it to go away. How they don’t understand that all it will do is amplify the tax issue, the wealth issue, and give Obama, the Democrats hundreds of thousands of pages of stuff to lie about, to distort. How this is not understood is peculiar to me. But I guess it shouldn’t be. I do think that it’s an indication there are still people on our side who do not understand who these people are. They’re not just the Democrats of the day.

This is not the Democrat Party of Joe Lieberman. Joe Lieberman, who was Algore’s running mate in 2000, has been drummed out of this party. He had to run as an independent for his own Senate seat, whenever the last time he ran. This is not the Democrat Party of Bob Strauss, all these old guys that go out and have a cocktail at the end of the day and talk about how wonderful it is to run Washington and so forth. These are radical, monothematic ideologues who have no desire to be reasoned with. They have no desire to be treated reasonably. That’s a sucker bet.

I guess it shouldn’t after this many years, but it still surprises me that so many fall for this. I guess, you know, the realization to the Republican establishment is that a full-fledged conservative nominee is a guaranteed loss because, to them, a full-fledged conservative nominee equals a Goldwater-landslide defeat. For some reason, they don’t associate full-fledged conservatism with Reagan-landslide wins. They see Goldwater. They see independents getting nervous and not liking conservatives.

They see the same things the liberals see in many cases. It’s, I think, the result of never getting out of Washington. It’s living in that place where there is definitely a political culture, a social culture that is insulated from the rest of the country. We’re in a war here with no rules. We’re in a political war with no rules, where truth and being reasonable and taking the high road doesn’t get you anything, with the other side. Taking the high road and trying to reason with these people is not gonna get their respect.

Why would you want it anyway?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This tax return business, you people in the Republican establishment, you know what you’ve done with this? Well, let’s just look at this particular campaign. What would you say, Snerdley, the last two years the Republican establishment — I say this without judgment — have been pushing Romney, right? The Republican establishment, it’s been clear as a bell, they’ve wanted Romney all along. They’ve done everything they can to split the conservative vote in the primaries. They did everything they could to denigrate genuine conservatives in the primary. They wanted Romney, Mr. Moderate, Mr. Mainstream, Mr. Establishment, Mr. Respectful, whatever, they wanted him, fine and dandy. The establishment media on our side, they’re the ones that were pushing Romney, fine and dandy. As I say, I’m not making a judgment here.

But now those same people who were telling all of us, “It’s Romney, it’s Romney,” are now telling us that Romney hasn’t done what’s necessary to establish his validity as a candidate and therefore needs to release his tax returns? Where was this two years ago? Why now? Why now do you want to undercut the guy you told us was the only chance we had? No, I’m dead serious. The Republican establishment was obviously pushing Romney, and now that Obama and the Democrats are squealing about his tax returns, for some reason they get scared about that, and all of a sudden after two years of telling us Romney’s the guy, now they tell us, “Well, Romney’s got some more to prove.” Really? Interesting position that you’ve put yourselves in. You push a guy that you tell us now has not been fully vetted and it’s up to him to do it.

We need to turn this around. It’s Obama who should release his loan and mortgage records in the Rezko deal. That hospital where Michelle was hired, the no-show job for 300 grand because her husband was a state senator. Let’s see those hospital records. Let’s see the history of Michelle Obama’s being hired at that hospital. Let’s see the truth of how that happened, since everybody’s making a demand for records of some kind here. How about the admissions offices that accepted Obama into Occidental and Columbia and Harvard. How about releasing all of their records as well as his transcripts. We haven’t seen Obama’s medical records, his health report, other than the annual physical from the White House doctor. We haven’t seen anything on paper which would establish all these wonderful credentials the elites in our culture have told us Obama possesses.

I think everybody who currently works for Obama, who worked at Bain or Goldman Sachs or other investment firms ought to release all their tax returns for the last ten years. “Democrats Attack Romney Over Layoffs Made by Obama Bundler.” In 2001 a steel plant in Kansas City run by Bain Capital laid a bunch of people off. The guy running Bain Capital at the time is now a bundler and fundraiser for Obama. Romney left in 1999. In 2001, Bain closes down this steel plant. The media and the Democrats now are attacking Romney over layoffs orchestrated by Bain Capital when an Obama bundler was running the place. How’s that for chutzpah? Well, there’s a lot of paperwork that Obama could release that would help us validate all these claims that have been made about Obama that we haven’t seen any evidence of.

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