RUSH: Okay, folks, it’s a moment of truth. We are mere hours away now from Tropical Storm Isaac, which everybody is desperately hoping becomes a hurricane. I can’t believe this. They are desperately hoping that it becomes a hurricane. It’s the Democrats’ wet dream that this thing hits New Orleans. So, you know me. My middle name is Solutions. I have some ideas for the Republicans. How to deal with the tropical storm, slash, hurricane hitting New Orleans.
The first thing we do is offer to send 500 bus drivers to New Orleans, paid for by us, to make sure that the buses that were not used by the Democrat mayor during Hurricane Katrina will be used to evacuate people should it become necessary. The second thing that I think the Republicans ought to do is send bags of money instead of sand. Bags full of money to shore up the levees in New Orleans. This would accomplish many things. A, it would show our compassion. B, we could have Romney’s five sons who CNN last night asked, “What’s it like to be rich as sin,” or whatever. They did. Piers Morgan asked Romney’s sons, (paraphrasing) “What’s it like to be stinking rich?” So we have Romney’s five sons deliver the bags of money to shore up the levees.
Now, this will accomplish much. It will show our compassion, and it will do something else. Once we publicize that we have sent 500 bags of money — well, whatever number of bags, bags filled with money to shore up the levees, what will happen? The poor of New Orleans will storm the levees and steal the bags, thereby putting themselves at risk for the eventual flooding that will happen once they remove the bags of money. And that way the Republicans can get rid of even more Democrats in Louisiana and shore up the state for themselves. How about those two ideas, folks? Am I not thinking or am I thinking?
Great to have you here. EIB Network, El Rushbo. 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com. 
Please stop sending me e-mails about Chris Matthews. I’m not gonna play the Chris Matthews sound bites. I’m not gonna get into it. We’ve got a ban on MSNBC. The ban is in force. Matthews went nuts yesterday, just accusing every Republican from the RNC chairman down to Newt Gingrich to being a racist for simply daring to even mention Obama’s name. You can’t even criticize Obama now.
Let me tell you what this is all about, folks. It’s real simple. Chris Matthews is not a lunatic, he’s not crazy, he’s not insane, and he’s not losing his mind. Well, I don’t know about that, but there is a purpose to this. And the purpose behind this is to pressure the Republicans into not even mentioning Obama at the convention. Here the first time in many years that the nation will be focused on the politics of our country, and the Republicans go first with their convention. And the last thing in the world that the Democrats want is for the Republicans to talk about Obama and his record, Obama and the kind of guy he is.
They’re trying to intimidate. All that was yesterday was an attempt to intimidate every speaker at the convention to modify the speech so as to not talk about Obama. It’s a warning, “You do it and we’re gonna call you racists, and you know how you hate that, and you know how we can make it stick with our friends in the media.” They know that Obama is the biggest liability they have going into this election. They are trying to intimidate the Republicans from the RNC chairman to Romney on down the list not to say a thing about him. And my fear is that it’s gonna work, to one degree or another.
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RUSH: Albert in San Francisco, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Great to speak with you. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I had a question for you. Yesterday you talked a little about how Mitt Romney and the GOP were going to have the convention be about Obama being “a nice guy but incompetent.” In Sunday’s paper on the front page of the New York Times — I’m not sure if you saw this — they specifically talked about (it was pretty lengthy article) how Romney is going to have a harsher tone during the next stretch of the campaign. So I was wondering what you thought about that article in relation to this Obama being a “nice guy”?
RUSH: I think everything in the Drive-By Media is intended to intimidate Republicans into shutting up. I think all these charges of racism, all these stories about Romney adopting a harsher tone that are accompanied by a warning: “You’d better not do that! Look how likable Obama is!” I think what’s going on here is the left knows how vulnerable Obama is. The Democrat Party knows what an absolute disaster they’ve got on their hands. The Democrat Party knows they’re hanging by a thread here.
They know that the vast majority of the American people do not want any more of this. The only choice they have is to neuter their opposition. They cannot pump their own guy. There’s nothing about this guy that makes you say, “Four more years!” There’s nothing in his performance, there’s nothing in his record that anybody wants more of other than the Moron Vote, the Taker Vote. But that still is not a majority of people in this country. So there is an all-out effort on the part of the media and the Democrats (it’s all the same bunch) to scare, frighten, and intimidate all Republicans into shutting up about Obama.
‘Cause that’s all they can do. And they keep going back to that because, in their minds, it works. In their mind, they succeed in neutering Republicans. They look… For example, this fight over delegate selection. I guarantee you the media’s looking at this and thinking, “All right, this is exactly what we need. (clapping) We’ve got the Republican Party now doing our bidding for us! The Republican Party is trying to get rid of our nemesis!” What Carville, what Obama, what Plouffe, what Axelrod, what all these guys know is their biggest enemy is the conservative population of this country.
So they’re embarking on a effort to disenfranchise us from our leadership. They’re trying to get the leadership of the Republican Party to cast us aside by making them scared to death of what’s gonna happen to ’em if they don’t. They are doing everything they can to try to intimidate and silence any criticism of Obama because that’s instant death for them. Again, it’s all rooted in the fact that they’ve got nothing positive they can say. There’s not one thing that’s happened in these four years that the Democrats are saying, “Four more years of this, this is what people want.” Not even health care. They don’t even talk about it. People don’t want that. Poll after poll after poll, majority, Americans don’t like Obamacare, want it repealed.
So they’re taking advantage of two things. They know they can intimidate Republicans. They know they can silence them. They know that they can get ’em to shut up. They know they’ve got a black president, and all they have to do is charge Republican criticism as racism, and that will shut the Republicans up. Now, meanwhile, while you cite this New York Times story that’s warning a harsher Romney is coming, what they want to achieve with that, they want Romney’s people to read that, “Oh, no, we don’t want to be harsh. No, no, we’re not gonna be harsh.” So they’re hoping that the Romney campaign changes its strategy so the New York Times will applaud them for not being harsh.
All the while this is going on, the New York Times is urging Obama to get harsh. The media is urging Obama to get tougher. They want Obama to be mean. They want not just Samuel Jackson and Ellen Barkin running out there hoping Republicans die; they want Obama running around and saying things, that are not specifically that. But they want harshness, they want hard-hitting, they want gloves-off fisticuffs from Obama, at Romney, while at the same time they want Romney sheepish and trying to be above the fray by saying what a nice guy Obama is but he’s incompetent, or he’s in over his head or what have you.
Look, this is everything to these people. It’s their lives, and running government, controlling it, having power over people, that’s what they salivate over, that’s what they live for. And they’ve got an absolute disaster on their hands in this administration. It’s an abject failure no matter how you slice it. Look at what’s happened. These guys are dyed-in-the-wool socialists. They’ve got pretty much everything they wanted. They got their nationalized health care. They got their stimulus spending. They’ve got their debt run up like crazy. They’ve got tax increases in the pipeline scheduled to hit en masse January 1st. They’ve got everything they want. But the problem is the American people aren’t doing tap dances. The American people aren’t celebrating.
The American people are rejecting them. In the midst of their glory, they’re being rejected. The American people don’t want what these people are succeeding at doing, and in that sense it’s a failure. They’re not in love. I don’t even buy this likability stuff in the polling data. I don’t trust any polling data on Obama simply because of the racial factor in it. To me that’s what’s frustrating about watching the Republicans. They do not know the great hand they’ve been dealt. ‘Cause they get up and they see this AP story and they get scared, “Oh, my God, we’re racist, we’re sexist, oh, my God, we hate Hispanics, oh, there’s a war against women, oh, we hate women.” Who believes this garbage?
It’s asinine to think a majority of people actually believe this garbage of a War on Women. Nobody thinks the Republican Party’s got one going except literal morons whose votes are not gonna change anyway. The Democrats thank God — well, whoever they thank — that the Republicans don’t seem to be able to muster the confidence that they otherwise ought to be feeling out the wazoo. Obama ought to be ten points down with this kind of performance. With this record, with the country and the economy in the shape it’s in, Obama ought to be ten points down. And he may well be if not for these doctored polls. And I don’t mean doctored by the pollsters, but rather polls that don’t reflect the truth because people are lying to the pollsters. They don’t have the guts to tell the pollster the truth, for a host of reasons.
The Democrats believe their own press. That’s their biggest problem. The Republicans biggest problem is they believe the Democrats’ press. And the Republicans’ biggest problem is they think that everybody that reads this AP story agrees with it. And what are we back to? We are back to the thing that I tell you that irritates me most about people, and that is, giving a damn what people think of you. That’s what frustrates me more than anything here is all of this internecine war within the Republican Party about conservatives, the only reason the establishment cares about that is because they’re worried what people think of them. To have this opportunity to contrast who we are with what they are, and we don’t even have to tell people. They’re living this disaster. It should be ours for the taking. This is low-hanging fruit. This is a hanging curveball, whatever cliche that you want to offer.
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RUSH: Okay, I got this New York Times story that the last caller asked about, and it makes my point. Here we go. New York Times story from Sunday: “Republicans have a message for Mitt Romney: itÂ’s time to go positive.” Notice it says here “Republicans have a message for Mitt Romney.” It is not Obama, not Democrats, not media.
“Republicans have a message for Mitt Romney: itÂ’s time to go positive. Prominent party leaders, unsettled by the frequently combative tone of Mr. RomneyÂ’s presidential campaign, are pressing the presumptive Republican nominee to leaven his harsh criticism of President Obama with an optimistic conservative vision that can inspire the party faithful, appeal to swing voters…” When is the last time you ever read anywhere that conservatism appeals to swing voters? I thought conservatism repelled swing voters. I thought independents didn’t like conservatism. Too combative. This piece doesn’t even know what it is. Well, I’ll tell you what this piece is. This piece is designed to get Romney to shut up. This piece is designed to neuter Romney and any other Republicans who might be thinking of criticizing Obama.
Come on, folks, ask yourselves, just how hard-hitting has Romney been? All they’ve done is tell the truth. Obama’s cutting $700 billion out of Medicare, not us. All they’ve been doing is telling the truth. And yet the Times has this story: they better tone it down. Republican consultants are advising Romney that he’d better be inspiringly conservative so as to obtain swing voter support. Here’s another excerpt from that same New York Times story. “Their worry: that the angry tenor of the Republican primary season could carry over into the general election, leaving Mr. Romney trapped in a punch-counterpunch campaign that would limit his ability to define fundamental differences with the Democrats.”
How in the hell does that limit your ability to define differences, by shutting up? The Republican primary season ended months ago. What the hell is this carryover business? And what ugly tone was there in the Republican primary? There wasn’t an ugly tone in the Republican primary season. So this New York Times story, it sounds to me like you’ve got some Republican consultants in there who are talking to the New York Times, who are trying to influence Romney into shutting up and not be hypercritical — for whatever reason — they’re wrong, but for whatever reason.
How in the world do you speak positively by Barack Obama and his record without lying? The only way to speak positively about Obama, the only way to take Obama and talk positively about his record is to lie about it. This is what they know. Anyway, that’s what the guy was asking me about, and I just wanted to read to you some excerpts to explain my reasoning and reaction to it. Don’t doubt me, folks.