RUSH: Well, how was your weekend, ladies and gentlemen? Everything okay? Everything cool? Everything private? Anything private? Do you realize Barack Obama, by looking at your metadata — everybody says, “Rush, this metadata, don’t get all concerned about the metadata.” For example, in the Verizon Hoover operation. I was, by the way, toying around with the idea of J. Edgar Obama, you know, over the weekend. But then I get to thinking how many people are gonna know who J. Edgar anybody was?

Anyway greetings, folks, great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.

The hits just keep on coming. The revelations just keep on coming. Ladies and gentlemen, and we’ll talk about Edward Snowden as the program unfolds, of course. He’s largely irrelevant. He personally is largely irrelevant here. And one of the points I want to try to focus on is what he represents and what he’s actually describing here. You know, he actually is very articulate. I was stunned when I found out this guy’s 29 years old. He doesn’t have any formal education. He has a high school equivalency, 200 grand at Booz Allen consultancy for the CIA, the NSA, 200 grand. People who work at the NSA don’t make that. But consultants outside can.

But this guy really is articulate. For 29, this guy is mature. This guy is wise. This guy has a level of maturity and, well, I don’t want to say wisdom, but he knows the ways of the world. He knows what he’s up against. When I was 29 I wasn’t capable of speaking this way, I don’t think. Certainly not operating this way. And I’m not trying to build him up or tear him down into anything here. You know, these tech guys, some of them are just on a really narrow focus. They’re brilliant when it comes to their area of expertise and their area of interest. I think this guy’s profoundly articulate, and he’s extremely thoughtful. You know, he didn’t reveal any actual findings. All he did, if there are any, what he did was reveal the process.

But I’ll tell you, he’s largely irrelevant. The fact is, this is the biggest snooping enterprise against Americans ever. That’s the takeaway here. This is the fundamental point. I heard last week — back to this Verizon sweep operation, the metadata, “Don’t worry about it, Rush, all they’re gonna do is get phone numbers here. And then they’re gonna get phone numbers and calls and length of time, but they’re not gonna know the content of any of those phone calls.”

Well, you know, it’s fascinating. I read a lot of tech blogs, and you can learn a lot about people by what they write. I’m not gonna identify this blog, but this is from a tech blog that I read, and the poster here, the blogger is very, very upset about this metadata. Listen to what he says are potential problems posed by the metadata.

(interruption)

Oh, when I said that Verizon was not the only one, how did I know? Common sense. Why would they focus only on one phone company? Snerdley is asking me, “Why when the Verizon announcement came, the announcement that it was Verizon surrendering all the phone data and you said it’s everybody else, too, how did you know?” Common sense. AT&T’s out there, Sprint’s out there, T-Mobile’s out there. I mean, if you’re gonna sweep everybody, you’ve gotta go to all the providers. Anyway, so this tech blogger is trying to alert his buddies, “Hey, don’t be fooled by the fact that metadata doesn’t tell ’em anything. They can learn all kinds of stuff about you with just the metadata.” The metadata, again, being just the phone numbers involved, no recordings, no wiretaps, no listening in, just the phone numbers, and the length of calls, the number of calls.

For example, this guy was wondering — he-he-he — I want to share, and this obviously are his concerns. They know that you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 in the morning and spoke for 18 minutes, but they don’t know what you talked about? Give me a break. They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge, but they don’t know what you talked about? They know that you spoke with an HIV testing service and then your doctor and then your health insurance company in the same hour, but they don’t know what you talked about?

They know you received a call — get this one — they know you received a call from the local NRA office while it was having a campaign against gun legislation, and then called your senators and congressional representatives immediately after, but they don’t know what you were talking about? They know you called a gynecologist, they know you spoke for a half hour, and after that you called the local Planned Parenthood number, but nobody knows what you called about?

The guy’s got a good point. They can tell what you’re doing by virtue of the metadata. All they gotta do is know who’s on the other end of the calls, and they can do that with reverse phone directories. These guys can clearly find out whose name is associated with what number. It was an interesting post. These people that always tell you what their fears are. Now, this is a leftist, obviously, with these fears? Folks, I am noticing — and I don’t think it’s a tipping point because I don’t want to send anybody here off in the wrong direction — but there are a lot of youngsters who voted for Obama who are now having the whole idea of the idealism that they thought he represented blown up.

Just like this guy, this Snowden guy. This Snowden guy said he didn’t vote for Obama. He voted third party, but he believed Obama, or he hoped Obama meant it when Obama said he was gonna clean all this stuff up. And then when Obama didn’t clean it up, and in fact made it worse is when this guy said, “Okay, that’s enough, I gotta go forward. I gotta go public with it.” And he did. Oh, yeah — yeah — he waited ’til after the election. Look, there still are a lot of questions about this.

(interruption)

What, Snerdley? You have a question? What’s your comment? Snerdley wants to know if I think this guy ought to be punished, right or wrong. I must tell you, I am conflicted about this in a number of ways. I’ll give you a classic example why I think — well, not classic, but it’s a good example. Remember the Pentagon Papers? Daniel Ellsberg released to the New York Times secret documents from the Pentagon about the Vietnam War, and they had a profound effect.

Now, that action that Ellsberg took was against a Republican administration and a Republican Department of Defense and the media loved this guy. He’s in the Whistleblowers Hall of Fame. This guy has done 10 times what Ellsberg did. You think about Nixon and Watergate, Nixon is a piker compared to what’s happening here with Obama. Literally. I’m not even speaking to you politically. Nixon didn’t even dream of the stuff that’s happening. Nixon did not use the IRS against people. He dreamed of it. In fact, it was used against him. Nixon did not do any of the stuff that this regime is doing. And yet this guy’s not yet achieved Daniel Ellsberg hero status, has he?

The regime is saying this guy’s gotta be silenced, this guy’s gotta be prosecuted. And the media, they’re going back and forth on how to deal with this, ’cause this has got a lot of people shaken up, because Obama represented a panacea, if you will. Some of these people really drank that Kool-Aid and believed it. We had an idealistic utopia coming that this was stuff exclusive to Bush, all this torture and all this spying and all this warrantless wiretap searching and the Supreme Court deciding who’s the president. These people were consumed with this rage. It was literally eating them alive. So Obama comes along — leave the racial aspect out of it — Obama comes along and promises none of this is gonna go on and he’s gonna get to the bottom of it. He’s gonna stop it. He’s gonna expose it, and country’s gonna get its respect.

Now they’re finding out that all he did was build on it. There are a lot of disillusioned people out there, but nothing’s gonna come of it, folks, because of race. I told you — and look, I don’t mean to sound like a See, I Told You So — I just know that there are a lot of people who are still waiting for the smoking gun or something that is gonna cause the low-information crowd to wake up. There are still people dreaming for the sake of the country’s future we have got to remove Obama from office. It just isn’t gonna happen, and it’s not gonna happen in large part because of race. I think that the opportunity still exists and the focus of attention ought to be this is what you get with liberals. This is what you get with liberalism or Democrats if you want, but this kind of big government, this kind of overreach, this kind of insecurity, this kind of violation of privacy, this is exactly what you get. This is who liberals are. That, to me, needs to be the message.

There’s a post Ricochet.com which is a website that was started by, among others, Peter Robinson. Peter Robinson was the guy who took over Firing Line for Mr. Buckley and calls it Uncommon Knowledge. He took over the premise of the show. He’s got a website now, Ricochet, and he’s got a post out there over the weekend by a woman named D.C. McAllister. And this woman cites the Limbaugh Theory. And she said it’s right on the money except it’s not complete, and she completes it in her way. Now, I’m not trying to be snooty — that’s not the word. I have mentioned what she says needs to be mentioned for the Limbaugh Theorem to be complete.

She agrees with every aspect of it, but she says that is not the full explanation of why Obama gets away with being allowed to be unattached to all the things going wrong that are of his architecture. And her theory is what we’ve talked about here on this program I don’t know how many times. White guilt. Race. She quotes Shelby Steele, as we have countless times here. It’s a good post and it’s a good point. In addition to everything else in the Limbaugh Theorem, the fact that there is so much guilt, white guilt that’s behind the election of Obama, that that same white guilt is simply not gonna show up and hold him responsible. Not you and I. I mean, we voted against Obama, so we don’t have white guilt, but there’s a lot of white voters that voted for Obama simply because of racial reasons, hoping to get rid of racism or wanting people know they weren’t racists or whatever, but it’s all oriented towards how Shelby Steele has described it, and I think brilliantly, white guilt.

Ms. D.C. McAllister’s point is that that’s another reason why Obama’s not gonna be held accountable. It’s why he’s not going to be held responsible for anything. The whole reason for his existence — and he’s exploiting it, by the way, and knows it — is that enough people in this country feel so guilty over slavery and the civil rights violations that whatever is necessary to assuage that, they will do.

I mentioned to you two weeks ago, maybe longer, that, in my view — and I’d like to be wrong about this — but I can’t foresee any circumstance where the first African-American president be removed from office. Can you tell me who in the Congress is gonna make that move? Give me a member of the House of Representatives that is gonna make that move and then be joined by enough other members to make it a reality? Tell me who’s gonna do it? Nobody’s gonna do it. And why aren’t they gonna do it? If it were ever justified, if it were ever something that were truly constitutionally justified, still not gonna happen because of race.

So consequentially all of this has actually exacerbated racial strife, just divided the country even more so on racial lines, and that was another thing that was supposed to end with Obama’s election.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me try to explain something, ladies and gentlemen. You look at all that we’ve learned about our intelligence gathering, not only our ability in this country, but how it’s actually happening. And Snerdley asked me if I thought this guy, Snowden, should go to jail and I mentioned I’m conflicted. And here’s why. See, it boils down or comes down again, in my mind, to who’s doing it. Because a person’s ideology matters.

Do I want somebody in charge of this kind of surveillance who doesn’t like this country as it’s founded? Do I want somebody collecting this kind of data on everybody who is in the middle of trying to transform this country into something the founders never intended it to be? On the other side of this is you would hope that our country and our intelligence agencies are able to determine planned attacks against this country and citizens against this country and uncover those in enough time to thwart them. In that sense, you want this kind of ability. And, by the way, the ability exists. This genie’s not gonna go back in the bottle.

So in my mind, it does matter who’s in charge of it. It does matter. The political identity of the people who administer something like this matters incredibly. You look at the focus on how the leak happened and the motives of the leaker, if you focus on that, I think you missed the main question. The main question is, why is such a gigantic surveillance operation even necessary? What is really going on here? Who is the enemy? The Tea Party, we know, is an enemy of this administration.

We know that conservative Republicans — and I could give you names — are enemies of this administration. We know that this administration has people in it who consider conservative Republicans to pose a greater threat to them than Islamic jihadists. So in deciding how you think or how you feel or what you think about this, I don’t know how you take that out. The government’s not just this thing sitting there that people run. There are certain kinds of people running it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There’s another story about this representing the demise of the regime, and it’s from the UK Telegraph. You’ll not see stories like this in the US media. Now, you’ll see ’em lately dance around this, but you won’t see this. This is by Damian Thompson. Headline: “Edward Snowden has Blown the Whistle on this Presidency. You Have to Wonder: Will Obama See Out His Full Term?” UK Telegraph. Now, the UK Telegraph doesn’t understand what it is that’s propping Obama up. They don’t understand what it is that’s excusing Obama from any accountability.

Folks, if there were any other president, any other, I don’t care what party, who had been in charge for five years and with the economy alone what it has been, they’d be history. The guy would be reviled. There wouldn’t be any effort by anybody to allow the guy to scapegoat himself. It would not happen. There are two reasons why this does happen, and the racial component is one that cannot be denied. So this UK Telegraph headline, “You Have to Wonder: Will Obama See Out His Full Term?” That’s not the question. The question is: Will America last through Obama’s full term? That’s the question, to me.

Will the country survive the implementation of Obamacare? Will the country survive all this spying and all this data collecting? Will the country survive amnesty, will the country survive every plan this man’s got? That’s the question. The question is not will he serve out his second term ’cause that’s a no-brainer. Yet the UK Telegraph, ’cause they live in the real world and think, my gosh, the population of any country learning this about their president, they’d be livid. Not here. Not here! The racial component alone is not gonna permit it. It’s not gonna allow it. That coupled with the basic ignorance of the low-information voter.

And, by the way, there are a lot of intelligent low-information voters. There are a lot of low-information voters that don’t watch TMZ. These are people that don’t care to get involved in this, it just makes them nervous. They’re not all ignoramuses. Some of them are, but not all. But listen to some outtakes here or some excerpts from this piece in the UK Daily Telegraph by Damian Thompson.

“I do not see how Obama can talk his way out of this one. Snowden is not Bradley Manning: He’s not a disturbed disco bunny but a highly articulate network security specialist who has left behind a $200,000 salary and girlfriend in Hawaii for a life on the run. He’s not a sleazy opportunist like Julian Assange, either. As he says: ‘I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.’

“It will be very difficult for the Obama administration to portray Snowden as a traitor. For a start, I don’t think US public opinion will allow it. Any explanations it offers will be drowned out by American citizens demanding to know: ‘So how much do you know about me and my family? How can I find out? How long have you been collecting this stuff? What are you going to do with it?'”

In the UK Telegraph, this is what they think the American people’s reaction to this is. “Suddenly the worse-than-Watergate rhetoric doesn’t seem overblown. And I do wonder: Can a president who’s presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term?” That’s Damian Thompson, the UK Telegraph. That’s, again, I submit to you, not the question, folks. The question, will the land of the free survive Obama’s full term? That’s the question. With the economy, and there’s no substantive improvement in the economy. Don’t be gulled into thinking what’s happening on Wall Street is representative of what’s happening to the economy. It’s not.

There’s no real uptick on jobs. There aren’t any careers being created. People have lost jobs. Jobs are vanishing. Taxes are going up, skyrocketing high. The divide between rich and poor is only gonna get worse. Obamacare’s gonna be fully implemented. If it is, folks, 20 grand for a family to be insured? Then we’re talking immigration, amnesty, 11, 12 million people. Look at what’s on tap. If Obama could, he’d wipe out the Second Amendment, if he could. You know who he is; I know who he is; you know where he’s headed. Everybody in this administration’s headed the same way. Look at the IRS scandal. Look at what the FDA is doing and the EPA and the autocratic-like, Dictatorial regulations coming out of the various branches and cabinet positions of this administration, and the question is not is Obama gonna survive. The question, will America as founded.

There’s always gonna be an America. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I must always clarify. I think, like I said Friday, we are in the midst of a coup taking place. This government, this nation, is being — what terminology would not affect you? Taken over? Is that too dicey? Does that make you too nervous? Transformed? Regardless, there is a peaceful coup d’etat going on. Most people, when you tell ’em there’s a coup going on, you think of rebels in tinhorn dictatorships riding around in 25-year-old Jeeps firing machine guns at the rebels, and at the citizens on the dusty road. That’s not what’s happening here. That’s not the kind of coup that’s taking place here.

The kind of coup that’s taking place here is nationalizing one-sixth of the economy, the health care system, under control of government. They’ve taken it over. They are attempting to totally bastardize the immigration system in this country, take that over and destroy it. If you look at the IRS scandal, this is what happens in tinhorn banana republics: enemies of the regime are targeted, punished, votes suppressed, not allowed to raise money, basically not allowed to be in opposition. We’re in the middle of a coup. And the question is not whether Obama survives it, folks, it’s whether the country does. Sorry. I wish the UK Telegraph’s take on this was right, but it isn’t. Normally it would be.

But we have a unique set of circumstances here that accompany Barack Obama in the Oval Office, and those circumstances are like an impenetrable fortress around him. And he is fully aware and exploits it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s David, Placerville, California, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Rush, what an honor —

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: — it is to talk to you. I’ve been waiting so long to get through, and today you were talking and you asked the question to the audience about, you know, what’s behind Obama and this NSA thing and, you know, is he truly concerned about the country or is there some other motivation? And of course you alluded to the fact that there was. And I got all excited and I go, “I know the answer.” So I thought I would call you. And this is basically, like you mentioned, his enemies list that’s not any different to anything else that he’s done. He has this list, and that is what drives this guy. And so I wanted to just share that with you briefly.

RUSH: Well, I don’t know that you’re ever going to find a written list. But that’s the point. People are looking for a smoking gun memo from Obama instructing the IRS. There isn’t one. And there isn’t one because it’s not needed. Obama put people there who he knew would do what he would do if he were there. Everybody is Obama in this administration. Some people say, “My gosh, how could some of these wackos have gotten past Obama’s vetting?” They didn’t get past him. It’s exactly who he wants there. He wants people there who he doesn’t have to send a written memo to. He doesn’t want to have to have instructions written down or an owner’s manual.

And these people, they’re not hard to find. They’re all over academia. Not hard to find people that want to crucify the Tea Party. Not hard to find people that want to make sure Obama’s opponents don’t raise money. You don’t have to work very hard to find people in this country who would love to help Barack Obama make sure that conservative Republicans’ votes don’t count or don’t even take place. You don’t have to look long and hard to find people like that. So that’s why I say it matters who’s collecting this data and for what purpose. It matters. I can see good purposes for this, if it’s in the hands of the right people who have a handle on who our real enemies are. But, in the wrong people’s hands, it could be really problematic. That’s what’s frightening about it.