RUSH: Now, let’s go to the audio sound bites. Mike Huckabee, he just happens to be up in the order here on The Tonight Show last night, had his big appearance out there. Yesterday on his campaign tour bus in Iowa, he talked with reporters about his appearance with Jay Leno.
HUCKABEE: My understanding is there’s sort of a dispensation given to the late night shows; is that right?
RUSH: No, it’s not right. There’s no dispensation with NBC and the Tonight Show. Huckabee in effect crossed a picket line to appear on the program. Doesn’t matter to me, it’s totally irrelevant. He went in a side door. It’s the Letterman show that made a deal with the Writers Guild of America, and so Letterman’s show had union authorized jokes last night, the Leno show didn’t. By the way, the Leno show jokes were funnier than the Letterman show jokes. I stayed up and watched. Well, I didn’t stay up, I was up, and I was engaged in other stuff. I had the football game on, Oklahoma and West Virginia on. And I said, ‘It’s 11:30, I’m going to turn them on.’ I haven’t watched either of those shows in I can’t tell you how long. And Letterman’s [sic–Leno] in a bit of trouble last night because he claimed he wrote his own monologue, Letterman claimed he wrote his own jokes, which is a violation of the strike because he’s a writer’s guild member and he’s also a performer. A clause says that a performer cannot write his own stuff in the middle of a strike, and Leno said that he did. It’s unclear if anything will happen because of this. But Huckabee was confused, he said, ‘I thought there was a special dispensation that was arranged.’ No, that was only with Letterman. It’s not a dispensation. They have a separate deal to end the strike for Letterman writers. So on The Tonight Show last night, Jay Leno said, ‘The Democrats also seem to be in a dead heat in Iowa. Let’s say you win. Who would you want to win on a Democrat ballot?’
HUCKABEE: I have a great respect for Barack Obama. I think he’s a person who is trying to do in many ways what I hope I’m trying to do and that is to say let’s quit what I call horizontal politics. Everything in this country is not left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. I think the country is looking for somebody who’s vertical, who’s thinking, let’s take America up and not down. And people will forgive you for being left or right —
RUSH: Okay, now, after that, I don’t want to hear from any of you Huckabee people who tell me he’s Ronald Reagan. When he first says Obama is the guy closest to him on the Democrat side, and then he eschews all of this left-right, conservative, liberal, Democrat-Republican, let’s take the country up instead of taking it left or right. See, that’s the thing, folks. You take the country up by taking it right. It’s been established. So what we have here is an excellent example of populism and appealing to the center, the great unwashed, the moderates, the independents. This is not conservatism.
Now, it’s interesting. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the Breck Girl was given space to outline his big campaign theme of attacking special interests. And without reading the thing to you, let me summarize what the Breck Girl was saying. He said if you’re a business that creates wealth, you’re a special interest. If you redistribute that wealth, you’re not a special interest. That was his theme. Well, here is the dirty little secret, folks. The redistributionists today are the trial lawyers, the Breck Girl’s biggest contributors, not to be confused with special interests, you see. By the way, the trial lawyers, they often rake in obscene amounts of money in cases where harm to anyone is hard to find. That’s how Edwards made the money to afford his 20,000-square-foot house, buy the land across the street. This is kind of interesting, too. You may not remember this, but I will remind you.
There’s a guy living across the street from Edwards’ 20,000-square-foot mansion plus his gym and his swimming pool, who knows what else is in there, and all the acreage and the trees he cut down to give himself a view from the 20,000-square-foot house, and across the street there’s a shack, and it’s lived in or was lived in by a gun-toting Republican who doesn’t like Edwards, and Mrs. Edwards said she didn’t like living this close to a guy like that that had guns and lived in a shack. In other words, Mrs. Edwards doesn’t like living close to that second America that her husband’s out there always talking about. Well, guess what? Somebody, and nobody knows who, came up with $1.6 million to give this shack-owning, gun-toting Republican, $1.6 million to buy him out and he’s moved out of state. He is gone and they’ve investigated the sale records and they can’t find — the guy whose name the deed’s in didn’t have the money to do it, somebody gave him the money, trying to figure out, follow the trail, who actually bought this thing. But the point is the Edwards had an undesirable neighbor from that other America he’s always claiming he wants to do so much for, and they got rid of the guy, they got rid of the shack, and they got rid of his guns, and the guy happened to be a Republican. So he’s got enough money somehow to buy his 20,000-square-foot house, and buy the land across the street from the gun-owning Republican.
Now, he and the rest of the Democrats want people and voters to think that their enemies are the businesses that produce goods and services and their saviors are the lawyers and politicians who are going to get even with these people. In other words, what the Breck Girl and Barack Obama, and I fear Mike Huckabee, based on that clip from the Tonight Show, they want you to fear Big Oil. They want to you fear Wal-Mart. They want to you fear Starbucks. They want you to fear people who make incandescent lightbulbs. Oh, don’t get me started. I am fit to be tied over this energy bill that bans those things in 2012, the incandescent lightbulb, never hurt a soul. More on that as the program unfolds. Wait ’til you hear the list of illnesses being caused by these compact fluorescents. I have the story here in one of the stacks of stuff. But look at their enemies list. It’s Big Oil, it’s big anything, it’s Big Pharma. So Edwards, Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and apparently Huckabee, want you to fear and think of as your enemy the businesses that produce goods and prosperity and jobs and services, and instead, they want you to look upon themselves in government as saviors, as the politicians as saviors, your bulwark against the people and big this and big that, that are out to screw you.
But here’s one thing that I know for sure. Even the most overpaid CEO in this country can do nothing to me. The most overpaid CEO cannot take my freedom away. The most overpaid CEO cannot raise my taxes. The most overpaid CEO cannot tell me where I can and cannot smoke my cigars. The most overpaid CEO in the world cannot tell me what I can and cannot drive. The most overpaid CEO in the world cannot tell me what kind of stupid damn bags I have to use in a grocery store. But politicians and lawyers can take away all of those liberties and freedoms and property, and they do it on too regular a basis. So any time a politician comes up and says, ‘Mr. Limbaugh, your enemy is Big Media, your enemy is Big Food, your enemy is Big Oil, your enemy is big this or big that, and I’m going to protect you from them.’ I say, ‘You don’t need to protect me from them. They’re not harming me at all. They’re not hurting me at all. They’re making my life better. You’re the one standing in my way, Mr. Politician.’
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