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RUSH: The John Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards press conference is ongoing. Her cancer has recurred. It is "treatable but not curable." Well, that's too bad. It is only treatable. Her breast cancer has spread to the bone. The prognosis is that she could live for many years, but it's unknown at this time. So they just learned that this week. Her cancer has returned. It's incurable, but it is treatable, which offers life-sustaining options. The Edwards press conference is still going on. Yeah, Catherine Seipp passed away lung cancer. She never smoked. Forty-nine years old, and she passed away earlier this week. You just hate to see this and hear about this with anybody that you know or know of -- anybody, period.
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 RUSH: I have no way of proving -- well, I do. Snerdley can back me up on this. I do have ways of proving it: the people I sent it to last night. When the news broke last night that the breast cancer of Elizabeth Edwards had recurred and that there was a press conference today to deal with this, I had flash messages, instant messages -- I have iChat, Macintosh, the Mac OS, 10.4.9 -- and I was going back and forth with these people, and I said, "I'm going to tell you what I expect the Edwardses to do tomorrow. I expect them to announce whatever the details are of Mrs. Edwards' cancer, and then I expect them to say, 'The campaign will go on for the benefit of the country we both love.'" I used that exact wording in instant messages to three people. All morning long the leaks about this said that the campaign would be suspended, that Edwards would not quit the race but his campaign would be suspended while he dealt with this and, of course, dealt with the security of their children. But during the press conference just now they both said, "No, this campaign goes on full speed ahead and Mrs. Edward is going to campaign as long as she possibly can." The campaign is going to go on strongly, and Edwards himself said, "The campaign will go on for the country we both love."
Now, many of you sit there and say, "Ah, Rush, you can say that you said this. How can you prove it?" Snerdley, at about 10:30 this morning, 90 minutes before show time, do you confirm I said this? He's nodding his head. I said this exact thing to him, and he looked at me like I was nuts, as did the people last night to whom I said this. They suggested that I was off my rocker, that this would not possibly happen, and yet there it is. (interruption) I have to admit what? What do I have to admit, that it's shocking and surprising? Well, it may be to you, but it's not to me. This is not surprise and don't make me detail why. I am not going to tell you why. This does not surprise me at all. Mrs. Edwards is going to get her treatment. I think her cancer is in one of her ribs, is what they said, and it's incurable, but it's treatable. Of course she wants to have as full a life as she can, and to me this makes total sense. Why suspend this in this circumstance? I fully expected Edwards to not quit the campaign or to even suspend it, and that in fact is the case. I didn't say this beforehand, before the announcement came out because I didn't feel like publicly predicting this. Just out of respect to the Edwardses, I wanted to let 'em say what they were going to say. I reported the leaks of others that were out there. |
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RUSH: For this new website, The Politico, this is two "scoops" that they have blown big time this week. The first "scoop" they had on Sunday was: Gonzales is gone and the White House has asked Republicans to go out and try to find replacements. The White House shot that down and said to hell with that. Now we have the second "scoop" that they blew, and that was that Edwards was going to suspend his campaign. Now, what is it that's driving these people to get this? I suspect they're trying to beat Drudge. I think everybody on the Internet who breaks news and so forth is aiming at Drudge, but that's two boondoggles in one week. The people that started The Politico defected. They went over the wall (at night, when the guards couldn't see 'em) from the Washington Post. Let's see if the Washington Post slaps these guys around a little bit. It was on their blog today about Edwards and last night -- well, this morning that Edwards would suspend the campaign.
Now, about that, I have a theory. And you know me. I have a theory, and I pronounce it. Everybody suspected, everybody thought that this campaign would be suspended. Your wife gets cancer, you've got two kids, and now that we know the details. The cancer is in the bone. It's not curable; it's treatable. Nobody knows the circumstances around how much longer her life will last. Nobody knows. It could be a long time, or it could not. Nobody knows. So this leak last night, or this morning on The Politico that the campaign was going to be suspended, somebody told 'em that. I don't think they just made it up out of thin air. The Edwards campaign is not going to be suspended. It's going to go on out there, full speed ahead, and scheduled appearances are going to happen. Mrs. Edwards, in fact, is going to do as much campaigning as she can.
Now, this suggests to me that, look, let's just see how much sympathy or attention the press conference and the news today evokes and what it does to the campaign, if this jump-starts the Edwards campaign. Right now he's looking good in Iowa, but, look, with all of these front-loaded primaries, Super-Duper Tuesday -- and a lot of people are in urban states with a lot of big urban areas, Democrat urban areas -- winning Iowa is not going to be enough just to propel you forward. Now, Florida. The Florida legislature voted like 115-to-1 to move their primary up -- our primary up -- to January 29th, which puts it before New Hampshire. There's a lot of traditions falling by the wayside here. A bunch of states are saying, "Why the hell are we sitting around and letting these clowns in Iowa and New Hampshire decide the fate of our party? What the hell are we doing? We're California. We're Florida. We've got ten times as many people. What the hell? They may have ethanol, but yip yip."
So there are all these arguments going on within parties over which states should be the de facto opening states to this. Florida talking about going early, January 29th. What's California? California is up to February 5th now. So I think what the Edwards campaign is going to do here is see what the reaction is within the ranks of Democrat voters as far as this announcement today is concerned, and then go on from there. If there's not a big jump -- if this doesn't cause a breakout, if this doesn't cause a big up-tick -- then at some point Senator Edwards probably will have to suspend the campaign, depending on the health of his wife as she goes through treatment for this. Now, I just wanted to put that out there because everybody... You know, I should have predicted this before the program what I thought, that they wouldn't get out of the campaign. I used these exact words, folks, to three people last night and one person this morning. "This campaign goes on because of love of our country that we both have," and those exact words were uttered today by Senator Edwards.
So we'll see if there's a bump from this. You say, "Rush, how could you be so callous?" Hey, folks, politics is politics. I tell you right now that if you went to a website that tracks news hits, you'd find that Edwards is at the top of the AP news hits. He probably had more hits on Edwards today than I had with Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday. I had hits all over the world with this. I was stunned. For somebody so irrelevant as I am, there were reports on the Schwarzenegger thing with me in Russia, in India, all over the world. One hundred and sixty different news sources in this country alone covered it. Edwards is going to get much, much more than that out of this. Campaigns are what they are. |
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