RUSH: Yesterday I lamented on this program that none of the presidential candidates are lashing out at Democrats, and the fact that they are securing defeat, that they own defeat, that they want us to lose, that Democrats want to quit. I expressed incredulity, and said, ‘If I were one of these presidential candidates, I’d be out there beating these Democrats all to hell over this.’ Well, I don’t know if he was listening or not, but last night on Hannity & Colmes, Rudy was the guest and Sean said, ‘Have the Democrats become the party of surrender in the war?’
GIULIANI: What they’re doing is unprecedented in war. Find me another time that an army or a nation announced their retreat in advance, and handed their enemy a written timetable. I mean, it’s like, you know, Xeroxing and handing out to them, ‘We’re going to retreat from the field in the following order and in the following way.’ I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this before in the history of war. I think it is inherently irresponsible, and it puts the remaining troops who are left behind — as you do this kind of sequenced retreat, it puts them in greater jeopardy.
RUSH: Well, so Rudy is speaking out about it. He was on Hannity & Colmes last night. Also Sean said to him, ‘Should family be off limits in a campaign?’
GIULIANI: There were personal issues. There were mistakes I made. Despite that, and while those things were going on, crime went down 57%, homicide went down 67%; 660,000 people removed from the welfare rolls. A deficit of $2.3 billion changed into a surplus of multibillions, taxes reduced 23 times, and then we had to deal with September 11. So, it seems to me you take a look at that and say, ‘What’s the balance here? Is this guy the kind of guy that can lead the country? No matter what’s going on, he’s going to stay focused and get results?’
RUSH: Rudy Giuliani fired up out there last night on the Fox News Channel on Hannity & Colmes. If he keeps that up, he’ll stay the front-runner. If he keeps that kind of talk up, particularly on the Democrats, because that’s who he’s going to be running against. I know right now it’s the primaries and so forth, but the news that’s being made by Democrats is certainly salient in that it threatens our way of life that we’ve always all come to expect, and speaking of parking lot candidates, it’s not looking good out there for Senator McCain. You may have seen this on the Drudge Report. ‘There’s a new spot on his upper forehead, raising concern among campaign watchers. It’s a dark nickel-sized spot. It was evident this week as McCain was touring Iraq. A top McCain source said, ‘It’s a minor blemish, the senator remains in excellent health.’ It was in 2000 that McCain underwent surgery for the removal of two malignant melanomas from his left temple and left upper arm along with lymph nodes from his neck and a portion of his salivary gland. He has remained cancer free since then. One photo released by the public affairs operations center in Iraq shows McCain with an odd black spot on the forehead.’
Plus his campaign announced it raised $12.5 million dollars in donations. That’s way, way low. McCain is now revamping the whole campaign team, and people are starting to wonder. This is awfully strange. By the way, here’s a good point. ‘Hillary Clinton in the $26 million in the first quarter, whoa, whoa!’ She didn’t raise $26 million in the first quarter. She’s been raising money for six years. She’s been raising money for her Senate campaigns and storing some of that. She’s raising money for primaries, raising money for the general. She took ten million and transferred it from Senate campaign dollars, unused there, which you can do. She didn’t raise any $26 million, and of course Drive-Bys are still obsessed with how Mitt Romney raised so much money with him being so low in the polls. Now we find out today that Barack Obama, ‘godlike for the godless,’ has raised 25 million, just one million underneath Hillary — and she’s got something like 50,000-plus donors.
Obama has 83,000 donors, and Obama did raise his money in a lot shorter period of time than Mrs. Bill Clinton has raised hers. This BS about Hillary Clinton raised $26 million in the first quarter? It’s a crock. She’s been collecting money for years, and people said, ‘Why wasn’t McCain doing this?’ You know, it’s been well-known. It’s one of the worst kept secrets out there that McCain is going to run for president, but even if he decided not to, why not start collecting money for it ever since 2000 or 2002 or 2004, whatever? Now they’re reworking the campaign, and the media is just jumping all over the guy about his reports of success in Baghdad. These are the people he was relying on, the Drive-By Media! They were going to be his insurance policy. They were going to love him. Now there’s something else that’s happened out there in the blogosphere.
A guy named Jonathan Singer at a blog called MyDD, published an interview with John Kerry yesterday, and Singer said, ‘There’s a story in The Hill, I think on Tuesday, by Bob Cusack on the front page of the paper talking about how John McCain’s people — John Weaver — had approached Tom Daschle and a New York Congressman, I don’t remember his name, about switching parties. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what your discussions were with him in 2004, how far it went, who approached whom… if there was any ‘there’ there.
Kerry said (Kerry impression): ‘Well, I don’t know all the details of it.’ I served in Vietnaaaaaaaaaaaaaam. But he went on to say, ‘I know that Tom [Daschle], from a conversation with him, was in conversation with a number of Republicans back then. It doesn’t surprise me completely because his people similarly approached me to engage in a discussion about his potentially being on the ticket as Vice President. So his people were active — let’s put it that way.’ So the guy says, ‘Okay. And just to confirm, you said it, but this is something they approached you rather than…’ and Kerry said, ‘Absolutely correct. John Weaver of his shop [called me].’
So Kerry is out there in this Internet blog interview, saying that it was McCain who approached him about being the veep! Well, now, I think this is probably BS, because our source here is John Kerry. I’m not sure I believe this. In fact, I’ll bet it was probably the other way around. I’ll bet it was Kerry approaching McCain a number of times. We know McCain said that he would consider when he was asked early on. He wasn’t going shut down the idea. Kerry is ‘a good friend’ of his so forth. The point I’m making here is, none of this is good for McCain: this nickel-sized blemish on his forehead, the fundraising that was low compared to others and disappointing, and now Kerry out there saying that it was McCain that approached him to be veep. Kerry also implies that McCain was talking to Daschle about changing parties in 2001.
They got Jim Jeffords, Jumpin’ Jim, from Vermont to leave the Republican Party and go to the Democrat Party. Kerry is out there doing interviews about his book that he wrote with Teresa on global warming. Has he ever heard of Algore? Sometimes this stuff is just too difficult to keep up with because it’s senseless. Anyway, all this stuff out there with McCain having to revamp his campaign, and he’s going to delay his official announcement now. He’s already announced it on Letterman. He’s going to delay the official announcement. The New York Times has it. Adam Nagourney: ‘Revamping his campaign finance effort, including adopting big-dollar fundraising techniques pioneered by President Bush…’ Hell, he’s got all of Bush’s people! What do you mean, adopting? What have they been doing? Why did they get such a late start on this when everybody’s known what McCain is going to do, including himself?