RUSH: Gotta hear this. Do you remember yesterday I read a short two-paragraph post from HotAir.com in which one of the posters, somebody I’d never read a post from, I don’t remember her name even now, and I didn’t recognize it yesterday. But she said that Bruce Jenner, Caitlyn Jenner being a Republican was the greatest thing to come down the pike for the Republican Party in a long time because it showed, since this guy, Bruce Jenner, this big transgender new female, Bruce Jenner is a Republican, that shows the Republican Party has heart.

That shows the Republican Party is not mean to people. That’s a great opportunity. The Republican Party can now take this and run with it and use Bruce Jenner being Republican, say, “See? We don’t crush people, look, we are diverse.” Classic. Somebody who believes all these allegations about Republican branding and wanted to take occasion of Jenner’s sex change to say great things about the Republican Party kind of pooh-poohed it here, but here’s George Pataki, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination on CNN last night.

Now, nobody saw this, because it’s CNN. That’s another thing. I’m sorry to sidetrack myself, but every time I mentioned things I’m reminded of something I saw earlier. It’s TV ratings. CNN and MSNBC, I don’t know how this is possible, they have lost even more audience. I mean, we’re talking audiences now in the 60,000 range for MSNBC and barely over a hundred thousand for CNN, national news networks, 60,000 people. MSNBC, they’re getting to the point they have so few viewers that they’re not gonna end up with ratings, they’re gonna get an asterisk. And CNN’s treading dangerously close.

It was a Breitbart story. Whoever wrote the Breitbart story made the point that Jeff Zucker running CNN decided to try to get all of MSNBC’s audience and at least have his grow by moving far left, to try to attract all the people that watch MSNBC, which is not very many. He goes so far as make a joke, whoever wrote this, went so far as to make a joke that CNN has even been promoting and sponsoring riots in cities all over the country just to create an audience. And I thought, wait a minute, that may not be a joke. Whenever there’s a riot, CNN’s there and they get deep in the middle of it and they won’t let it go. I thought it may be one of these efforts where a Republican tells a joke and it actually ends up being true.

Anyway, here’s Pataki. He’s on CNN last night, and as I say, nobody saw it, that’s why we are playing it for you. He’s on Wolf Blitzer. They’re all upset. Huckabee yesterday went out said, “You know, I wish I had-a known when I was in high school that I could have said I’m a woman. I would have loved to have gotten into the women’s bathroom.” He was making a joke about Jenner, and in an inadvertent way he was accusing transgender people of faking it and making it up just to be able to hang around women.

Well, the media didn’t like this, and the guardians of temperance didn’t like this, and the politically correct didn’t like it and the properly sensitive and the people with no sense of humor, they didn’t like it at all. So here’s Wolf Blitzer talking to Pataki, the former governor of New York. He said (imitating Blitzer), “Mike Huckabee actually said, he actually said after Caitlyn Jenner’s announcement yesterday, referring to transgender children in school sort of making fun of the fact that some of these kids want to go in the girls locker room as opposed to the boys locker room. Are his comments appropriate? Can you believe he said that, George? This is unfair. Do you believe he meant that?”

PATAKI: Obviously he didn’t mean it seriously, but I think the more important point is we should give people their dignity and let them make their own decisions. People often make decisions that I don’t agree with, but in a government where it’s supposed to be of the people, if someone chooses a path that’s different from mine, we should respect that as opposed to mocking it or in any way trying to prevent that.

RUSH: And that is George Pataki seeking the Republican presidential nomination, suggesting Republicans should not mock transgenders as Huckabee did because if they choose a different path than mine, who am I to say it’s wrong? Who am I to say that it’s wrong for a man to love another man? So we shouldn’t mock.