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RUSH: Waldorf, Maryland. This is Bob. And I’m glad you waited, Bob. Great to have you. Hi.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh. You know, in this country, sir, we have a few things that are worth fighting for. Voting is damn sure one of them. To sit back and watch the people of Colorado have their vote basically taken from them and have the people of Louisiana have their vote undermined. To have everybody cheer the will of the party to undermine the voters of the United States and to do everything they can to steal an election is ridiculous.


To sit back yesterday and listen to you cheer for these people that stole that election in Colorado, when the party bosses jumped up, stole those delegates, did not allow those people to vote, and to listen to Rush Limbaugh, a man I’ve been listening to for 20 years, think that was a good thing? I cannot tell you, Mr. Limbaugh, how disappointed I am to hear that.

To have a constitutional attorney stand up and cheer Mr. Cruz, “Oh, it’s a great day, it’s great day in Colorado, we won 33 delegates.” This is Soviet-style tactics. And to listen to you guys cheer about this is ridiculous. The one thing Mr. Trump has done is exposed all of you, forcing you to take your mask off. You might as well just go ahead and endorse Mr. Cruz. You might as well just get it over with.

RUSH: Can you hang on through the break? I’ve only got a few short seconds left here, and there’s not enough to respond to you, and I want to respond. If you want to hang on for it and I can get your reaction, that’s fine. If you have to go, that’s fine too. What do you want to do? He hung up. How many callers would refuse an opportunity to be held on through the break? What are you nodding your head at in there for? I wasn’t aware I was cheering anything yesterday. I just reported what happened.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. So the prevailing thought is that Ted Cruz didn’t win anything. No! That Colorado cheated everybody. Colorado went out there and they denied people the right to vote. And it’s a constitutional right, it’s a God-given right, we get to vote, we get to choose what happens.

I want to read a quote to you. I want to remind you again of the name Curly Haugland. He might pronounce it Haugland, I’m not sure how, but he is an unbound Republican delegate from North Dakota. To many of you people that’s the sticks. But I’m gonna tell you what he said. He was on CNBC’s Squawk Box. He said, “We choose the nominee, not the voter.” He said, “The media has created the perception that the voters choose the nominee, and that’s the conflict here.”

He went on to say, “The rules are still designed to have a political party choose its nominee at a convention. It’s just the way it is. I can’t help it. Don’t hate me because I love the rules.” He went on to say, “The rules are still designed to have a political party choose its nominee at the convention. It’s just the way it is.” Remember all the outrage that got? Well, it didn’t get much outrage, and I was stunned that it didn’t.

The Republican Party and the Democrat Party are private organizations. They are not public. They are private. They feed off the public and they do business with the public and they attempt to sell things to the public, and they attempt to influence the public, but they are private organizations. And the illusion is the public gets to determine what the party does. But that’s not the case. The party determines what it does. The party determines what it thinks. The party determines its strategy.

What more evidence do you need than the last seven years? The reason so many people are not supporting them anymore, they’re not responsive. They have made people think they’re listening to ’em. They’ve made you think by asking for you money that they’re gonna do what you want to do. They campaign for your vote by telling you they’re gonna do what you want, but it never happens, does it? So what choice do you have, abandon them or keep putting pressure on them, or what have you.

But they can set up whatever rules they want. And people entering their business have to play by those rules. Folks, this isn’t complicated. You may not like it, but there’s no cheating going on here. There is no rule that says every state has to do it the same way. Colorado chose to do it the way they want and they made no bones about why. I don’t want to waste my breath explaining this again because actually it’s gonna fall on deaf ears. I explained it in so much great detail yesterday, but it obviously didn’t permeate.

What survives is that Colorado cheated, Colorado was undemocratic, Colorado denied people the vote, and to top it off, Ted Cruz is out there claiming he did something brilliant and won it, when it was rigged in his favor. You may not want to hear it, but Colorado structured its rules precisely to prevent Cruz from winning it. They structured their rules specifically to prevent Trump from winning it, all the way back in August.

The rules that Colorado put together were designed to make it almost automatic that an insider, that an establishment candidate was gonna win, because you had to have money, big staff, knowledge, wherewithal, to go out and work the system. You had to basically go out and win the votes of all those delegates in all those districts throughout that state rather than campaigning for votes from the public. They did it that way figuring Jeb Bush, maybe Marco Rubio, would be the only two, maybe there was a third, capable of winning.

It was a way back in August that the Republican establishment in Colorado attempted to ace out the outsiders. And it ended up biting them in the rear end, because Cruz is an outsider as well, and Cruz ended up learning the rules, mastering the system, and comes out of there with a win. This is not what the Colorado GOP was envisioning back in August.

Now, you can blame me all you want for the fact that Trump didn’t play there, but I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t write the rules. All I’m doing is telling you what happened. And it’s been widely known since August that that’s the way Colorado was going to do it. And Colorado’s not alone. There are other states where delegates, after the election, the primary’s taken place, the delegate selection process is still not complete after the primary vote. It’s still going on and it’s gonna go on throughout the convention.

But this is the whole reason Trump exists, ’cause people are fed up with this. They’re fed up with the establishment. They’re fed up with the unresponsiveness, the lack of any kind of empathy, connection, what have you. What do you want, for Ted Cruz to stand up and refuse the votes because Colorado was undemocratic? Would that be the manly thing to do, for Ted Cruz to stand up and say, “you know what, I can’t in good conscience accept my victory in Colorado because they cheated. They did not fully let Donald Trump compete fairly out here and so I’ve gotta give my votes back.” Is that what you want?


Can I go back and read this note to you that I got from my friend, the Trump supporter? “I would guess that most of us,” he begins, “most of us Trump supporters believe the country is F’d beyond repair. However, we love this nation, what it stands for, what it has done and what it could do. I think that what most Trump supporters have in common is if there is a scintilla of a chance of saving our country, Trump is it. Very small chance, but the last chance. If Trump can’t pull it off, it’s over. What’s going on is very depressing for even me. I always thought that a candidate that took it to the media would win. I never factored in my thought process betrayal by the candidate’s own party.”

I couldn’t believe the last sentence. “I never factored in my thought process betrayal by the candidate’s own party.” If somebody came along and could run rings around the media, I thought the party would embrace this guy. And that hasn’t happened. I don’t know how to ask. Do you Trump supporters really think that the GOP is just gonna lay down and let you have this? Do you think it was ever going to be a fair fight? Somebody wants your house. You gonna open the doors, let ’em come in and take it?

“Not a good comparison, Rush, my house isn’t public.” Neither is the Republican Party. It’s a private organization. It’s run by a very few elite people, and it has always been. I can give you analogies all day long, but this is not civics 101 playing out here. It is the political or party basis of life and death and they’re just not gonna sit out there and let you kill ’em. They’re not gonna sit by and let the votes of people who are not official members of the party determine what happens to them. They’re gonna do everything they can, including, as they’ve said, vote for Hillary, if they have to, to hold on to what they’ve got.


I know the illusion is this. This is what people think. The party should be sitting there, and you transfer to the party your attitude. “We really don’t like the Democrats. We think the country is hanging by a thread, and we’re all united to try to save the country, and we realize the media is a number one impediment. They’re also part of the enemy, so to speak, and we’re all united in this sense of purpose of saving America and reinstituting constitutional principles, limited government.”

Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not the Republican Party today. That’s not who they are. You don’t have that in common with them. So you think here comes Donald Trump, and he’s doing things nobody’s ever done before. He’s running rings around the media. He’s drawing huge crowds. He’s doing it without campaigning for other people’s money. He’s not raising money. He’s got no donors. That’s the biggest threat this party has yet, that he’s doing it without donors. They’ve got to stop that. ‘Cause these people don’t have Trump’s money. Without donors these people don’t have a way to put their kids in college, for crying out loud.

You think they’re just gonna sit there, “Wow. Look at that guy. We got a guy here that may even be able to beat Hillary. We got a guy who can run rings around the media,” and they’re gonna unite behind the guy? There’s no way. I lived under this illusion for a long time, too. I thought everything I thought and every desire I had, every political objective I had, my party shared it. I was wrong. They don’t. And it was a hard awakening. It was a shocking discovery, when I figured this out. It wasn’t all that long ago, either.

There are all kinds of different agendas here. And right now the Republican Party’s number one objective is to save itself from Donald Trump and his supporters. It’s not to embrace them. It’s not to grow the party using Trump as the magnet. That’s the worst thing. They don’t want Trump to be the one that grows the party. That puts Trump in control of the party. They’re never gonna give that up. That’s gonna have to be taken from them. As James Carville said, “This is war.” It is. And just because I understand it and am able to explain it to you, as simply and as easily understandable as anybody else can make it, you think I’m cheering it. I’m just trying to help you understand it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’m gonna try to say it one more time. I don’t expect for this to be understood. I expect to have to say this again. But I’m still gonna say it one last time. The Republican Party, the Democrat Party — the Politburo of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Supreme Soviet, the ChiComs, the Castro brothers, whoever — will always write rules that maintain their control over their enterprise. They are never going to write rules that enable outsiders and nonmembers to storm the gates and take over.

The rules that are governing this convention, this year, and this primary were written in 2012 after the party saw what nearly happened to them then. And these rules are designed to stop Ron Paul or somebody like Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Well, they didn’t anticipate somebody like Donald Trump, so they didn’t write any rules specifically about Trump. But the rules are written to make it impossible for any outsider to come in and take over. The Republican Party is not going to allow the party to be taken over by the result of, or as the result of, a popular vote anywhere.


Otherwise, there would not be delegates to a convention that they control. The first order of business of any business is to stay open. The second order of business is to make sure the people who run it continue to run it. To stop coup d’etats, so to speak. Anybody therefore attempting to take control of such an organization had better figure out how in hell the organization has written rules making it hard to do. I’m sorry to say, but my belief, it is incumbent on somebody challenging the existing rule to figure out how the insiders play their game and beat them at it.

And in order to do that, you have to know what they’ve set up. You have to inform yourself what the rules are. You have to learn how they are trying to stop you. You have to know what that is so you can make an end run around ’em or so you can make a full frontal approach and smother ’em. Whatever your tactic, you’ve got to know how they have attempted to protect themselves and thereby prevent you from succeeding. And if you think — if anybody thinks — that a popular vote of American citizens will be enough to take over a political party, you’ve got another think coming.

They’re simply not gonna allow it. Why do you…? The Electoral College is the same circumstance. It’s not the people of this country that elect the president. It’s the electors. And you need 270 of ’em to win, and each state has their own number. And there are all kinds of rules if the popular vote does not produce 270 electoral votes, and guess what? The House of Representatives picks the president, and the people be damned, except the people elected the House of Representatives. So it’s not the people be damned.

It’s the representatives of the people deciding who’s gonna be the president if the Electoral College technique failed. And you know why the Electoral College was set up? To prevent direct democracy from deciding who is president. There’s nothing happening here that is unprecedented. There is nothing happening here that has never happened before. There is nothing happening here that’s even under the table. Everything that’s happening in every state — Colorado, Louisiana, New York, wherever you want to go — has happened.

All you have to do is read the owner’s manual. Hire somebody! There isn’t any cheating. There isn’t any trickery. All there is is a bunch of powerful people telling every one of us, “No,” we cannot have what they have, and, “No,” we cannot run what they run. So if we want to take it over and run what they run, we’ve gotta figure out how they’ve written rules to deny us and outsmart them within their system. It’s the conflict. You can be an outsider, but you gotta become an insider to beat ’em. Figure it out!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. All right. I can tell I’m going to have to go even further, ’cause now I’m getting questions. “Well, then why are we even doing this?” and then, “Well, so, the Democrats aren’t cheating, either? Is that your theory? It’s their rules and Bernie doesn’t have a chance, so it’s just what it is?” No, no. Look, I’ll keep going. I’ll explain this. I’ll give it one last try. And I’m not gonna be repeating anything I just said. I’m gonna take the next steps here. It seems obvious to me, but apparently it isn’t. It’s a good lesson for me to learn, here.

I will go further.

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