RUSH: Audio sound bites. We haven’t been there yet and there’s some gold here. We’ll start with a montage, this of many in the Drive-By Media who all of a sudden now, they’re all in lockstep with Trump, all of a sudden Trump’s brilliant, all of a sudden Trump is making perfect sense. This is about his allegation that Ted Cruz may have a citizenship problem.
WOLF BLITZER: Donald Trump does make a good point. There are some Democratic lawmakers who say they will go to federal court.
DANA PERINO: I think Donald Trump is not wrong in that if Ted Cruz became the nominee, would the Democrats try to gum up the works?
PAUL CALLAN: Trump’s right, it’s never been litigated in the Supreme Court.
KENNEDY: Does Trump have a point?
GERALDO RIVERA: Trump is right that this is a hUUUuge distraction.
JOHN BERMAN: You hear a statement from John McCain, does it prove Donald TrumpÂ’s point?
CAROL COSTELLO: The Washington Post wrote an article about this and it called Trump brilliant.
JOHN BRABENDER: It could be in the courts for years and it could hurt a lot of other candidates on the Republican ticket.
RUSH: they’re thinking there Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio or another. So the Republican establishment’s gonna have to be very careful on this. The Republican establishment, they hate Cruz. They hate Cruz more than they hate Trump because they think Trump would be somewhat malleable, might have a little bit of a chance of working with Trump. But they look at Cruz as just rigid, inflexible conservative, no way, they despise him.
But they got very careful, because their chosen candidate at the establishment is Rubio about whom many could make the same claim if the purpose here is to tie people up and, as it’s said here, gum up the works. But, see, the Drive-Bys are clearly excited about this. And Trump is — and they’re right. The Washington Post says in the piece, Trump is brilliant. The same people that will not report the size of Trump’s crowds and will try to castigate Trump’s audience as a bunch of Nazis and so forth, all of a sudden now Trump has become brilliant. Ron Brownstein, CNN’s Newsroom this morning, was asked, “What’s going on here, Ron, with Trump and Cruz?”
BROWNSTEIN: What Donald Trump is doing in his characteristic way is raising a political issue, and it’s very similar to what he’s done by raising questions about whether Cruz’s evangelical faith is legitimate. In essence he is reminding a Republican primary electorate that was 93% white of the voters in 2012 that Ted Cruz is not someone who looks like them. And I think he’s very consciously drawing a line around Ted Cruz and raising questions about whether he is in effect an “other” that you can’t entirely trust.
RUSH: Wow. So Brownstein thinks that Trump is making a racist argument against Cruz and that Trump’s real purpose here is to tell all of you stupid, dumb white evangelicals that Cruz doesn’t look like you. In fact, Cruz may be one of those illegals you hate, you bitter clingers. Yeah. Cruz may in fact be one of them. That’s what Brownstein says that Trump’s trying to do. Clearly absurd and a great example of how people will overthink something in order to come up with a unique point of view that nobody else on TV is saying.
Last night CNN, Anderson Cooper 360 speaking with the New York Times infobabe, Maggie Haberman, formerly of The Politico about all this, and this is how their little chat went.
COOPER: When Trump went after Ted Cruz in the past, Rush Limbaugh, you know, powerful radio host, basically kind of, you know, said back off. Do you see that happening here, or because we’re, you know, we’re less than a month away until Iowa, do you see this escalate?
HABERMAN: It is an interesting fact that in the last couple of weeks, especially — months especially, the super PACs backing Ted Cruz made advertising investments on a lot of those radio shows. They know that that is their target audience. They know that these are Cruz backers. These are hosts who have given Ted Cruz antibodies repeatedly when issues have come up, but there are a lot of people who also like Trump within this audience, and so I’m not so sure you will see Trump criticized quite the same way.
RUSH: What is she saying? Is she saying because Cruz had a spot buy here that we go easy on Cruz? Is that really what she’s saying? And what is this business of antibodies? These hosts have given Ted Cruz antibodies repeatedly when issues have come up? The fact that Cruz had an ad didn’t even cross my mind until I heard this sound bite. Anyway, this is the way they think and how they determine why it might be that certain people are criticized, not criticized, or criticized in a certain way. Told you there was gold in these bites.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: A lot of people say, “What do you mean, Rubio said that Trump isn’t qualified?” He did! He wasn’t talking about whether or not he’s a citizen. He just said Trump’s not qualified. That’s what they’re saying about Cruz: He not qualified, not eligible. Rubio did not say that Trump isn’t eligible; he just says he’s not qualified. When it comes to Cruz, you know, Rubio and Cruz had this big fight going back and forth on foreign policy and immigration and other things. Rand Paul has chimed in.
Rand Paul said, “Yeah, Ted Cruz is qualified to be president — of Canada.” They’re all jumping in. McCain has jumped in, as I mentioned. Grab sound bite number four. This is last night in Phoenix. He’s on the radio out there, and he got a question. “Ted Cruz says that Donald Trump jumped the shark with his suggestion that Cruz might not be an American-born (sic) citizen. The answer, according to lawyers, is that his mother was an American so he is an American citizen. Did Trump jump the shark, Senator McCain?”
MCCAIN: I do not know the answer to that. I know it came up in my race because I was born in Panama, but I was born in the Canal Zone, which is a territory. Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it was a territory when he ran. That’s different from being born on foreign soil. I think there is a question. I’m not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s, uhhh, worth looking into. I don’t think it’s illegitimate to look into it.
RUSH: See how this is all gonna…? It doesn’t matter what the answer is, because the answer is years down the road. I mean, you let people who can write 75,000-word blog posts on what “natural born citizen” means go after this? (snorts) Can you imagine when these people get to court? So Senator McCain, he would love to derail the Cruz campaign, and they’ve been trying to derail the Trump campaign, so that’s what’s going on. I want you to hear an ad Marco Rubio has started running in Iowa today, and it’s run on his website. I don’t know what kind of an ad buy supports it, but it’s on his website, and the left is apoplectic over this.
RUBIO: Our goal is eternity. The ability to live alongside our Creator for all time, to accept the free gift of salvation offered to us by Jesus Christ. The struggle on a daily basis as a Christian is to remind ourselves of this. The purpose of our life is to cooperate with God’s plan. To those whom much has been given, much is expected, and we will be asked to account for that, whether your treasure is stored up on earth or in Heaven. And to me I try to allow that to influence me in everything I do. I’m Marco Rubio, and I approved this message.
RUSH: Whoa! This is… I mean, this is blatant! This is right out there. This is up front. This is, “I am a Christian,” this is what it means, this is how I live it, and this is who we are!” This is on less than a month away from the Hawkeye Cauci, and that is Rubio making a pitch. It’s a highly evangelical turnout on the Republican side in the Iowa caucuses, but, man! I do’nt remember seeing an ad as pointedly proud and explanatory of Christianity as this one.
Here’s Rand Paul. This is on CNN again last night, Don Lemon, who… Did I read this right? Don Lemon had too much adult beverage on the air on New Year’s Eve and had to go to sleep on a sofa on the set or some such thing? Did I see that right? Or no, he was out there somewhere…? Maybe he was in New Orleans, down there in New Orleans with one of the infobabes. (interruption) He did? He said Kathy Griffin had a nice rack? He must have been drunk then. He said Kathy Griffin had a nice rack? Well, anyway…
He was overindulging adult beverages. Don Lemon cannot get a break no matter what he does. I mean, from asking if the missing Malaysian airliner actually got swallowed up by a black hole, to any number of other things — Ferguson, Missouri, protest — the guy’s got the lives of 20 cats. And that’s good. We like Don Lemon here. He’s great for the sound bite roster. Here he is, in fact, interviewing Rand Paul on CNN last night. He says, “I want to talk to you about this issue with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and whether he’s a citizen or not or whether he’s eligible to be president. What do you think?”
PAUL: You know, I think absolutely without question he is qualified and eligible to be the prime minister of Canada. The one thing that I think is striking is you may be aware that some people thought the president wasn’t a citizen, and this went on and on and there was an entire movement. And they wanted to maintain that it was partisan, it wasn’t racial, it wasn’t this, wasn’t that. But then when they actually have somebody who was actually born in another country, I haven’t heard a peep from any of the same people. I am the first Republican to say, “You know what, there’s been a whole double standard on the whole birth issue.” I don’t know the answer for Ted Cruz.
RUSH: Now, I… (sigh) This is what people that are trailing by small or a large amount, this is how they join controversies like this
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Gloria Borger this afternoon on Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN, I mean, giddy. They are so excited here that McCain has gone after Cruz. They hate Cruz. They despise Cruz. They despise Trump. But they hate Cruz more. And the fact that McCain has gone after him, they know McCain hates Cruz. And they’re so excited. And he’s so mad, McCain is, he’s even ended up siding with Trump. That’s how much McCain hates Cruz, and that’s how much it all makes the media happy.
BORGER: Imagine how much John McCain does not like Donald Trump. Donald Trump was the man who said, if you recall not too long ago, that John McCain was not a war hero, because he was a POW. This gives you a sense of the kind of lack of respect that McCain has for Ted Cruz and the way he dislikes him like a lot of other members of the Senate feel the same way. Well —
BLITZER: John McCain has no great love for Ted Cruz. No great love —
BORGER: No love.
BLITZER: — for Donald Trump either.
BORGER: Exactly, but if he had to choose, obviously in this particular fight, look whose side he took.
RUSH: (imitating Borger) “It’s so exciting, it’s so exciting, you know McCain hates Cruz, look what he did.” They can barely contain themselves.