RUSH: We move on to Mrs. Clinton. Let me set this one up, because what’s fascinating about this is that Mrs. Clinton has been shielding herself from certain reporters, certain questions she doesn’t want to deal with — and, in fact, she’s been praised by reporters for doing this, most recently Anne Kornblut in the Washington Post. I pointed this out to you on Friday. She made it known that Hillary’s only talking to certain people in the media, and most of them are editorial writers, that she’s avoiding beat reporters, and that it’s a sound strategy. It’s very smart. So Anne Kornblut, the reporter, says (paraphrased), ‘Yeah, Hillary is avoiding me. That’s cool. Whatever it takes,’ just like when Clinton was lying through his teeth through the nineties, and we got reports on how lying was clever and helpful, spared feelings. They marveled at how well he did it, and Anne Kornblut was marveling at how well Hillary Clinton was managing her media. Now she ran into somebody in her own party at a town meeting in New Hampton, Iowa, and this guy’s name is Randall Rolph, of Nashua. He compared Clinton’s vote on Iran to the one Clinton cast for the Iraq war resolution, asking, ‘Why should I support your candidacy?’
The vote that he was complaining about was her vote in the Senate to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a ‘terrorist organization,’ and Randall Rolph stood up and said, ‘Why should I support your candidacy? You won’t renounce your vote for the Iraq war. It appears you haven’t learned from your past mistakes,’ and she said, ‘Well, the premise of the question’s wrong and I’ll be happy to explain it to you,’ and then she suggested that Randall Rolph was a plant, saying his question was ‘based on something somebody obviously sent you.’ Now, she backed down after awhile. She said, ‘I apologize. It’s just I’ve been asked the very same question in three other places,’ but these are her people! You know, these are her people. This is the anti-war left that she’s running into that she had been shielded from, and when she gets a question she doesn’t like, she lashes out. We have audio of some of this.
HILLARY: What wasn’t in what you read to me — that somebody obviously sent to you — is that —
ROLPH: I take exception. This is my own research. I have not —
HILLARY: Well, then let me finish! Let me finish telling you —
ROLPH: Those are my words! Nobody sent that to me. I am offended that you would suggest it.
HILLARY: Well, then I ap– I — I apologize. It’s just that I’ve been asked the very same question in three other places, so let me apologize.
RUSH: This is projection. She’s out there thinking that people are plants in her own crowd — which is what they do! They’re the ones that put people like Code Pink and others in audiences of Republicans, or in the Congress and try to disrupt them. This is not unprecedented. We go back to the archives. On April 14th, 2004, City College in Harlem, John Kerry held a town meeting, and a retired professor at the school, Walter Daum, was highly critical of Kerry, and just as Mrs. Clinton told the person asking her a question, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ essentially, is what Kerry here told Walter Daum.
KERRY: If you don’t leave a stable Iraq with a legitimacy to whatever entity is going to transform the government, you have the potential for a civil war. You have the potential for Shi’a versus Sunni versus Kurd. There are all kinds of potentials. Let me just finish.
DAUM: They are united against the occupation.
KERRY: Yes, and — but — but the point is this, sir. You’re not listening to me.
DAUM: Oh, yes, I am.
KERRY: Well, then you haven’t…frankly…listened, because, in fact, the course that I have proposed is to turn over to the United Nations the full responsibility for the transformation of the government and for the reconstruction.
RUSH: This guy took Kerry off his game there. He was wandering around in vain search for a thought. Of course this will always work, right, turning it over to the UN? Has he suggested this since? Has Kerry suggested letting the UN fix this mess since? No, of course not. It then continued.
KERRY: I have consistently been critical of how we got where we are, but we are where we are, sir, and it would be unwise beyond belief for the United States of America to leave a failed Iraq in its wake, and I want the Americans out, and so do Americans want —
DAUM: No, I don’t! You say, ‘Stay the course,’ Senator.
KERRY: Let me just finish. ‘Stay the course’ of leaving a stable Iraq.
RUSH: Now, this is 2004. This is when Kerry is running for the presidency and an anti-war professor at the school where he was speaking at was taking it to him. ‘You’re phony! You don’t believe any of this, and none of the people who are there want us there,’ was this guy’s point. Kerry says, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about; you’re not listening.’ ‘Oh, yes, I am.’ But also a point to be made here is here’s Kerry in 2004 supporting a stable Iraq, not wanting to pull out of there and leave a mess. My, how things have changed since he lost the election! Two more. Mrs. Clinton has produced a new ad about 9/11, at Ground Zero. The ad shows Hillary wearing a mask over her face at Ground Zero. Here is the audio.
PAID ANNOUNCER (dramatic music): She stood by Ground Zero workers who sacrificed their health after so many sacrificed their lives, and kept standing until this administration took action. So now that almost every candidate is standing up for health care for all, which one do you think will never back down?
RUSH: All right. Now you remember every time Rudy Giuliani or George Bush go to Ground Zero, it’s, ‘I can’t believe they’re exploiting 9/11! It’s not fair.’ Now listen to this media montage analyzing Hillary’s ad.
SHIPMAN: That is an extraordinary ad!
CARNEY: ‘I’m electable. I’m strong. I’m safe.’
HEUVEL: Rudy Giuliani has exploited 9/11 for his own purposes…
LAUER: How effective a strategy is it for Hillary Clinton to try to get her arms around 9/11?
HEAVILY GREEK-ACCENTED VOICE: I think it’s an excellent strategy. It shows no pa’ty, no candidate owns 9/11.
RUSH: I don’t know who that last person was. I need to get my Greek translator to understand that, but basically you see that the Drive-Bys say, ‘Oh, this is a wonderful, great strategy! Great strategy!’ No surprise. No big deal, just a continued pounding of illustration after illustration after illustration. I also have a story in the stack here. It’s a column in the Washington Post by a Brit, guy named Geoffrey Wheatcroft. I’m not really sure who he is, but his piece is, ‘Who Made Hillary Clinton Queen?’ and he says: You Americans don’t understand how we in Europe see you. (It’s not what you think, folks.) He basically says in no circumstance, would somebody with as empty a résumé as Hillary Clinton be considered for national leadership. Why is it that she is assumed to be the best you have? We would like to know here in Great Britain.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s this piece in the Washington Post, it’s from yesterday, actually. It’s by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. ‘Among so much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there’s nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency? … We all, nations as well as individuals, have difficulty seeing ourselves as others see us. In this case, I doubt that Americans realize how extraordinary their country appears from the outside. In Europe, the supposed home of class privilege and heritable status, we have abandoned the hereditary principle (apart from the … constitutional monarchy), and the days are gone when Pitt the Elder was prime minister and then Pitt the Younger. But Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger. At a time when Americans seem to contemplate with equanimity up to 28 solid years of uninterrupted Bush-Clinton rule, please note that there are almost no political dynasties left in British politics, at least on the Tory side.
‘Admittedly, Hilary Benn, the environmental secretary, is the fourth generation of his family to sit in Parliament and the third to serve in a Labor Party cabinet. But England otherwise has nothing now to match the noble houses of Kennedy, Gore and Bush. And in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton’s résumé even be considered a candidate for national leadership. It’s true that wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina … or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines … Such things also happened … in the early days of women’s entry into British politics,’ but not anymore. ‘More to the point, women who make political careers in other democracies do it their way, which usually means the hard way. Not many people had fewer advantages in life … than Golda Meir, born in poverty in Russia and taken to the United States as a girl before she settled in Palestine. She was one of only two women among the 24 people who signed Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. After serving under David Ben-Gurion as foreign minister, she became prime minister in 1969.’ He goes on to discuss her qualifications.
‘What a contrast Hillary Clinton presents! Everyone recognizes the nepotism or favoritism she has enjoyed: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has written that without her marriage, Clinton might be a candidate for president of Vassar, but not of the United States. And yet the truly astonishing nature of her career still doesn’t seem to have impinged on Americans. Seven years ago, she turned up in New York, a state with which she had a somewhat tenuous connection expecting to be made senator by acclamation… Until that point, she had never won or even sought any elective office, not in the House or in a state legislature. Nor had she held any executive-branch position. The only political task with which she had ever been entrusted was her husband’s health-care reforms, and she made a complete hash of that.’ So this guy goes on: What in the world are you Americans thinking? Which, you know, I’ve asked this question myself. Will somebody tell me what it is that she’s done that recommends her to be president? It is her last name, and it is — between you and me, a dirty little secret — the real desire is to get Bill Clinton back in there, at least as far as many Democrats are concerned. The other thing is the Clintons have become royalty to the Democrat Party. The specifics don’t matter. It’s just about power and control. They think she can win. ‘It’s her turn. She’s deserving of this! She’s owed this for the excrement sandwich her life has been, being married to Bill Clinton. She gave up her own glorious future to be president of Vassar and a big feminist leader, in order to get where she wanted to go, to help him get where he wanted to go. It’s just her turn now!’ That’s what I would say to the Brit guy.