RUSH: Continuing here for just a second on the left’s attempts to get both feet back on the ground in this smear that has bombed out, just to review: this past Monday, Senator Reid goes on the floor of the Senate, reads a letter that he has written to the CEO of Clear Channel Communications, the syndication partner of this program, asking them to demand that I apologize and get spanked or whatever for being outrageously critical of soldiers who are serving in the military, but disagree with the president’s war policy and because I called them phony soldiers. [sic] I did no such thing. Two words that they have now amplified into hundreds and thousands of words, where they have interpreted my meaning; interpreted my thoughts; they have accused me of falsifying transcripts; they have accused me of all kinds of things. Two words, ‘phony soldiers,’ has led to a smear that has been going on here basically for a week because the original incident happened one week ago today. So Senator Reid asks all the senators in the Senate to sign his letter to the CEO of Clear Channel.
Forty-one senators sign it. Not all the Democrats even signed it. He sent the letter to the CEO of Clear Channel Communications, who replied late yesterday afternoon basically saying, Senator Reid, get over yourself. Another defeat for Senator Reid — could only get 41 senators on this. The House resolution that was drafted Monday to condemn me has, according to news reports that I’ve seen, been moved to the back of the burner. The Republicans, led by Jack Kingston of the House, have their own competing resolution praising me if the Democrats do bring this forward. So what’s happened here, they’re just trying to take attention away from the disaster that was their Petraeus ad, the Betray Us ad that MoveOn.org ran. It backfired on them big time in every way possible. They had to pay the difference in the rate cut they got from the New York Times. The New York Times had to admit that they finagled their rate cut for this group, making it sort of an in-kind contribution. General Petraeus’s approval rating shot up to 61% after the ad.
The Democrats in both the House and the Senate called him a liar to his face essentially before he even testified in his report. The whole thing blew up. So it was time to divert attention from that and try to regain the high ground on their supposed appreciation for the troops. So here comes my use of the term ‘phony soldiers,’ when I was referring to genuine fraud, fake phony soldiers, and they misinterpret that on purpose and tell people I was talking about legitimate heroes, who just happened to disagree. That has fallen apart because it’s patently absurd. It’s one of the biggest lies that’s ever been told about what I said. So now people are starting to examine the timeline. How could he have been talking about Jesse MacBeth, they’re asking, when he didn’t mention Jesse MacBeth for two minutes after saying phony soldiers? Well, the previous day I did a Morning Update on Jesse MacBeth that was recorded on Monday afternoon. These people now want to get caught up in what was in my mind? I’ll be glad to tell you what was in my mind, but you can’t because you don’t know.
When I had the caller on the air and he was talking about these kinds of frauds, I said, yeah, phony soldiers, with Jesse MacBeth right in my mind because the Morning Update had just been recorded two days ago and it ran the previous day. And we had learned about a lot more phony soldiers in the research of putting that thing together. Then we learned about the ABC News program on Monday night where they did a story on MacBeth and phony soldiers and so forth. It’s all over the place. Of course, I was thinking about multiple phony soldiers! They tried to say, ‘He said MacBeth, but he said plural with ‘soldiers,’ so he’s making it all up.’ Then they went to the timeline, which I just discussed. They were trying to say that the timeline doesn’t fit Limbaugh’s explanation. When I say it’s Stalinist-like, this is exactly what I mean. The timeline is not relevant here. The timeline has nothing to do with this. The content has everything to do with this. How can I defend something I didn’t say that they say I said?
Everybody that’s on their side is simply, once again, trying to divert from all this, and there’s no need to divert from it, because the central point here is, what did I say? What was the content? The timeline is not relevant, unless they want to try to make me out to be the liar. They are the liars; they are the frauds, and they know it full well. Senator Reid and all the senators that signed the letter know it, and all the House members that denounced me on the floor of the House simply accepted a blatant lie. And now to cover their acceptance of the lie they’re trying to say, ‘Limbaugh is still fudging on this, the timeline.’ Timeline’s irrelevant, even though the timeline holds up. It’s the content here that’s important. I say two words. They amplify this to hundreds and thousands of words to say something I didn’t say. Then they get into my head for me and say, ‘This is what he thought and this is what he meant.’ And, of course, the willing accomplices in the Drive-Bys that reported this duly accepted the premise without challenge, without question. A couple of them did call us over time.
So you have a very interesting situation. We’ve reached a new day, when interpreters are allowed to determine the meaning of words spoken by others. What happens with that is the loss of meaning. If watchdog groups who nobody seems to care to verify their authenticity or who the hell they are or what their agendas are — Byron York has a piece — I’m going to read the last paragraph of his piece. I’m going to have to print it out. Wait ’til you hear who some of the staff at Media Matters for America are, and for whom they used to work. We know Mrs. Clinton admitted to starting the organization. We know it’s a Clinton front group. We know what its reason for existence is. And it’s, as far as she’s concerned, probably doing a bang-up job. But the timeline in all this that they keep focusing on is simply now once again to divert attention to the fact that they have blown the story of the content of what I said. The blow-back is starting to get to them. Now even their Drive-By accomplices are starting to get tired on cable news networks of having to report this. ‘What is this with Limbaugh? Why is the Senate condemning a private citizen? Why can’t the Senate and the House start working on getting us out of Iraq?’ Well, I’ll answer that. They have been trying to. Fifty-five different resolutions have been offered.
They have failed. Yet, supposedly overwhelming numbers of the American people want us out of Iraq. If that number is true, 70%, 60, whatever it is, want us out, how come they can’t get it done? And because they can’t get it done, they have angered their lunatic fringe even more. The lunatic fringe expected the process to begin in February after they were installed in charge in the House and Senate in January. They have tried and they’ve tried and they can’t get it done, and money keeps getting appropriated for the war effort, Bush keeps skunking them, and their fringe lunatic base is simply fit to be tied. So guess what it’s time to do? Distract from their failures. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, need to get the heat off them. They know that the lunatic fringe despises me, so get this false charge ginned up, this smear. And the lunatic fringe, who doesn’t care about the truth anyway, jumps right on it, and then not only forgets the failures of Reid and Pelosi, they get all excited and happy that Reid and Pelosi are finally taking it to Limbaugh! He’s been getting away with too much for too long. But the whole thing is built on balsa wood. The whole thing is built on just a deck of cards that are transparent.
It’s a flat-out smear and lie as anything I’ve ever seen is. But this is the testing grounds for the 2008 presidential campaign playbook. There will be other such hits like this on me and others from now through the election. If they win in 2008, these people, MoveOn.org and Media Matters for America who have, in fact, many of them previously worked with Mrs. Clinton. One of them is Sidney Blumenthal’s son who is at Media Matters for America, I think his name is Max, and Sidney Blumenthal was Mrs. Clinton’s henchman in the White House, organizing all these investigations and hit pieces on Mrs. Clinton’s enemies. So what will happen if they win the White House in 2008 is that all these people that have previously been with them and are new to the force, learning how to investigate, learning how to trump up charges, will be given positions in government, where they will then be able to conduct investigations on the part of the government — not just little groups out there — official investigations on the part of the Clinton administration against whoever the Clinton administration decides needs to be investigated.
I use the word ‘investigate’ lightly. The word smear would be more accurate: Who Mrs. Clinton wants smeared when she’s president. This is a little cottage industry, a training exercise, if you will, for people who will eventually be appointed by her to positions of power in the federal government. So that’s what this is really all about. It isn’t about phony soldiers. It’s about a smear. It’s not about the timeline. It’s about content and techniques that these operatives use, hiding under the notion that they are nonpartisan; they’re simply trying to get the facts of things out. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are partisan hacks, bought and paid for by Mrs. Clinton, and through shell organizations such as George Soros has set up, and that’s who they are. It’s a Democrat Party operation. That’s why there’s total unity, whenever there’s a smear and a lie, that’s why they don’t question it because it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not.
The smear and the attempt to destroy and discredit people that might get in her way are what this has always been about, and it will continue. They’ll refine their techniques; they’ll refine their tactics; they will try to learn where they went wrong on this. They will not learn the main lesson: Don’t try to tell somebody that what somebody said was a lie when it wasn’t. They’ll continue that theme when the area is a little grayer, but they’ll have to pick and choose their targets well, people who do not have a microphone three hours a day to deal with it, such as Scooter Libby, for example. I could give you any number of examples of people who do not have access to their own microphone or Internet page or whatever to deal with this stuff in a protracted and detailed way. They will be future targets, as well as those of us who do have microphones, because we are perceived to be in the way of the coronation of Hillary Clinton in January of 2009.
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RUSH: I checked the e-mail here during the break, and some people think, ‘You know, Rush, are you sure you haven’t been talking about this too long? Is some of it maybe going to your head a little bit? To bring Hillary Clinton into this and to say that she’s out there trying to destroy whoever gets in her way…’ this is a problem when you say things to people like this, they don’t want to believe that that kind of thing is possible in our Civics 101, to them, political system. Yeah, I think it’s totally possible, and I can give you some evidence for this, ladies and gentlemen. Mrs. Clinton helped found Media Matters for America to deal with the vast right-wing conspiracy. Do you know any liberals who deal with the vast right-wing conspiracy by debating us? Taking us on in the arena of ideas? No, it’s all about smears and character assassination, destruction, discreditation — always has been. But what did Mrs. Clinton do long before she founded Media Matters?
Does anybody remember the term ‘bimbo eruptions’? Mrs. Clinton managed bimbo eruptions. We were told that Betsy Wright managed bimbo eruptions, but we’ve since had Don Van Natta and there were two Clinton books that came out. One of those books made it plain that Mrs. Clinton managed the bimbo eruption war room. Now, what were bimbo eruptions? I realize some of you are new to the program and may be new to caring about this. You might not have been paying attention or weren’t old enough in 1993, ’94, ’92, the campaign, to be familiar with the term. What were bimbo eruptions? Bimbo eruptions were women with true and unfavorable stories about Mrs. Clinton’s husband’s unethical behavior. There was Kathleen Willey. There was Gennifer Flowers. There was Juanita Broaddrick. There was Paula Jones. There was Monica Lewinsky. There were countless others that probably existed that we didn’t hear about. It was Mrs. Clinton’s job during the campaign of 1992 to get hold of those women before they erupted and read ’em the riot act, let ’em to know what would happen to them if they did, take care of them somehow to keep ’em quiet.
The bimbo eruptions were women with true and unfavorable stories about her husband’s unethical behavior. Hillary’s job was to perform character assassination on those women who did come forward. She helped portray them as phony mistresses or having phony allegations. She portrayed them as stalkers. In the case of Paula Jones, she was trailer park trash, to which the feminist movement readily signed on and said, ‘Yes, she’s trailer park trash.’ The purpose was to change the story by distracting everybody from what these truthful women had to say. Well, what does Media Matters for America do? Character assassinations on people to distort their true and damaging stories, to distract bimbo eruptions to now ‘talk show eruptions’. This is Mrs. Clinton’s timeline, and she’s doing it with the usual: character assassination, portray them as phony, liars, make up facts, all of these things are part of the bimbo eruption philosophy. This is how Mrs. Clinton has done business for a long time. Now, she should have to answer for both of these as she aspires to become president, but she won’t be asked about it. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is truth. The bimbo eruptions were real, managing of them was real, destroying those women, making sure they didn’t come forward in the first place. If they did, rake ’em over the coals, distract, and destroy them. Forget the truth; destroy them. They stood in the Clintons’ way. Can’t have that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To those of you who are worried — I’m not being critical — ‘Rush, maybe you’re going on too much with this. Is some of this perhaps going to your head?’ No, no, no, no. Folks, Mrs. Clinton signed Harry Reid’s letter to the CEO of Clear Channel, who runs the syndication company of this program. She signed it! She signed the letter asking for the CEO of the company that syndicates this program to spank me, to make me apologize. You’ve gotta understand what we’re dealing with here! It ain’t beanbag and it’s not Civics 101 that’s going on right now. I realize a steady dose of this, people are not going to want to hear it, and we’re not going to do a steady dose of it day in and day out, but this is about more than me. This is a much, much larger issue than me. This is about a tactic, a series of tactics, what the country will look like if these people get into the White House and these kinds of things can happen from the government aimed at anybody, not just these little so-called special interest groups that aim at media figures that they have problems with.