RUSH: What a sad state journalism must have to be in. We know it is, but it was on display last night, the sad state of journalism. You know it’s bad when they have to drag Tom Brokaw out of Jurassic Park to moderate the debate. What happened to Brian Williams? What happened to Charlie Gibson? What happened to Katie Couric? Why go to Jurassic Park? Folks, I am sitting here, all I can do today is laugh. I’ve been having so much fun getting ready for today’s show and I’m going to share it with you, greetings, great to have you with us, we’ve got broadcast excellence straight ahead, it’s already Wednesday, right? It’s the fastest week in media, the fastest three hours in media. Telephone number is 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address is ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
So I’m reading various reactions to the debate, and we will parse the debate as it goes on. The LA Times calls it a draw. If this was a draw last night, then Obama was worse than I thought. Mark Steyn writing at National Review Online, he said, ‘Republicans have cause to be disappointed by last night: As everyone says, Obama wins by not losing. He looks more and more as if he’s already the president, while McCain prowling the stage seeking to ‘connect’ looks more and more like Yosemite Sam after the dynamite failed to go off.’ What a great line. Yosemite Sam after the dynamite failed to go off. (laughing) But then he writes we gotta go into a positive attitude here before we go into terminal spin because if you look at the polling data that’s out there, it’s confounding. Last week we were told the election is over. Chuck Todd last night after the debate said the debate was over before it started when the markets closed yesterday afternoon.
The Drive-Bys have been telling us for a week now that it’s over and yet Zogby has Obama up two, Hotline has Obama up one, and the Battleground poll has Obama up four. This is a tie. These polls were before the debate last night. These are the daily tracking polls, but I mean this is by no means over. And they’re doing everything they can to convince you that it is while the race is obviously tightening up, 47-45 in the Reuters C-SPAN Zogby poll. Let’s see, 47.1 to 45.2, so, yeah, basically two points. Battleground has Obama up four. They seem to lag a little bit behind in picking up the changes. But where’s this Obama bubble? Where is it? You know, this is not happening because of anything McCain is doing. It might be happening because of a little bit of what Sarah Palin is doing, but I actually think that it’s a result of people more and more now paying attention and looking at Obama. I think this Ayers stuff is damning. The Obama campaign is clearly defensive about this. They’re talking about it again last night. I think Obama is going to have to come out and denounce ACORN at some point, ‘This is not the ACORN I knew,’ because they’re all over the news with all their voter fraud. They raided the ACORN offices in Las Vegas and they found fraudulent voter registrations for the Dallas Cowboys roster.
Now, can you imagine on Election Day, if this had not been caught, the election officials looking at their list of voters that might come in, they see Terrell Owens, Tony Romo, they say, ‘Wow, the Cowboys are coming to Nevada to vote today. Wow. Hope we can get an autograph.’ But this is happening in Indiana, it’s happening in Missouri. ACORN, it’s widely understood now, is a totally fraudulent Democrat voter registration organization and affordable housing group. Their fingerprints are all over the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac affordable housing crisis, and they are Obama’s community organizer group where he worked when he was agitating in the streets in Chicago back in the early days. He’s not going to be able to escape this. All the hype, all the media biases, it’s over. Obama can’t close this. He could not close this against Mrs. Clinton. Mrs. Clinton was finished by the Democrat Party superdelegates. He could not close it and he has not closed this. So stay bucked up out there, ladies and gentlemen, ’cause this is by no means over.
Now, something else that I’m laughing at. I read the Los Angeles Times today, and I say, ‘Who are these people?’ The LA Times today is quoting various McCain aides — plural — saying McCain will lose the election if the financial crisis remains the number one issue. Now, who are these people? Who are these McCain aides saying something silly like that? They’re essentially saying that McCain has no hope if the economy remains the number one issue. Barack Obama is profoundly vulnerable on the economy! I hope this is a bunch of people that are sabotaging McCain and not actually his aides, because this is silly. It is stupid. Obama is vulnerable on so many points and Yosemite Sam did not want to go there last night. Yosemite Sam once again talking how proud he was to have worked with Ted Kennedy and how Reagan worked with Tip O’Neill. How many people watching the debate last night do you think know who Tip O’Neill is, or was? He’s still out there pursuing this great bloc of moderates that everybody mistakenly believes don’t like partisanship.
I’ve gotta ask this question again. Here we have these moderates and they don’t like partisanship, they’re offended by it, they want politics above the usual fray, right? So what happens, if a Republican, say McCain, gets partisan, then these elite moderates get offended and then go to Democrats, as though the Democrat Party is not partisan? This is a myth. We have been lied to about this. These great moderates out there that Senator McCain is seeking are simply Democrats-in-waiting. They’re going through the motions of acting like they don’t have an opinion on anything. All this talk about making sure that we appeal to people that don’t like partisanship, for crying out loud. Moderates did not and have not defined this country and if moderates ever do start defining this country, it will cease to exist as we know it. I’m reading the New York Times and at this point I just had to laugh.
Charlie Black, who has been around Republican presidential politics as long as I’ve been doing this show and probably longer, he’s a McCain aide, you know what he told the New York Times, Dawn? Did you hear McCain’s $300 billion idea last night for mortgages? Buy ’em directly, the Treasury secretary to buy these mortgages? Charlie Black, you know who he credited as having come up with this idea? Hillary Clinton. So McCain’s number one fundraiser financial advisor is out there crediting Hillary Clinton in the New York Times, at least the way he’s quoted, crediting Hillary Clinton for McCain’s mortgage idea. I knew it sounded like a communist idea when I heard it. Now I know why. It has roots with Mrs. Clinton.
Some debate thoughts here before we get into the specifics of the audio sound bites, which will come later, ladies and gentlemen. It was a terrible debate by both candidates, both were mediocre. But the problem was the moderator. The questions were terrible, the answers were not much better, the moderator was bad. He cared more about keeping the clock going and so forth. This is supposed to be a town meeting, a town meeting where the people get to ask the questions. Brokaw filtered the questions. Do you know there were a lot of areas not discussed last night? Do you know what topics did not come up? You tell me that the Drive-By Media is not protecting Obama. Here’s something that did not come up. Abortion. Because if abortion comes up, we find out that Obama’s for infanticide. Well, McCain may not say that, but Obama would be on pins and needles there. Gun control did not come up. Judicial nominations, Supreme Court nominations did not come up.
This debate was horrible. Whoever decided to screen these questions had an agenda in mind, and it was to protect the anointed one — that one. Oh, and that’s another one. The Democrats and the Obama campaign they’re all over the place today, they’re mad as hell over McCain saying ‘that one.’ These people are awfully defensive. They’ve even got a poll of black people saying they don’t like it, they don’t like what McCain said last night. Wait ’til you hear the CNN post-debate commentary. James Carville suggesting riots will occur in America if Obama is ahead in the polls and loses the election. Now, we’ve got to applaud these comments. We want CNN to continue to make these comments. They’re nervous. They’re trying to frighten people. There’s one other issue that did not come up last night: Immigration. Four issues that have been profoundly important and all over the place in every presidential race in the last 20 years: abortion, gun control, judicial nominations, and immigration. Tom Brokaw, from Jurassic Park, succeeded in seeing to it that those subjects did not come up. McCain may not have lost the debate. Everybody is saying he did, but Obama didn’t say anything of substance. We could put together another, uh, ah, uh, ah, uh, uh, that would probably go for 30 minutes if we did it today. But I’ll bet whatever numbers of people tuned in dropped off like a rock.
All I know right now is that the debate numbers were not anywhere close to the vice presidential debate. Did you hear, it was about 10:23 last night, Obama said if the United States conserves energy that will hurt Russia? Let me tell you what’s hurting Russia right now. Did you see the oil price? The oil price is at $87 a barrel. You know who’s hurting today? Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and the KGB, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Oh, and guess what we have found out about Bill Ayers? As recently as two or three years ago he was in Venezuela having a joint meeting on education with the socialist leader Hugo Chavez. We’re loaded today, folks, we’re going to be throwing this stuff at you as fast as you can take it. So Obama’s point is we inflate our tires and that takes down the KGB. If we just run around and keep our tires inflated, the KGB will not be able to help us, going to hurt ’em. Those tire gauges are kick ass, folks, and we learned it again last night. I thought that was the most naive comment of the night, and he made a special point of it. He thought it important to note that as a matter of dealing with the Russians, if we conserve energy– Obama, if we start producing energy, you little squirrel, if we start producing energy, is what’s going to threaten the Russians. We start conserving, we’re conceding! If our only policy is conservation, we are conceding.
And get this. I don’t want you people worried after Obama assured everybody last night there are only a handful of small businesses that would be affected by his tax increase, just a handful. What are they going to do, put all the small businesses in a lottery and draw some out? But folks, of all the things that upset me the most in this debate, I went out to dinner, a friend of mine had a small little birthday party at a local eatery here in Palm Beach. So I’m driving home and I’m listening to the first half hour of the debate on the radio. I had to turn it up ’cause Brokaw from Jurassic Park is mumbling, and it’s hard for me to understand exactly what he’s saying. I don’t remember the exact question, but he starts asking both candidates about sacrifice, what they would tell the American people about sacrifice. And that is like rubbing a raw nerve with me, this whole notion — the Democrats have been on this, ‘The president never asked people to sacrifice after we started the Iraq war.’ What does that mean, tax increases? That’s what the left means.
But this whole notion of sacrifice, that is a bogus concept in the first place. They will not define it for you as they really mean it. Let me tell you what Brokaw and the rest of the left in this country mean when they start promoting you and me ‘sacrificing.’ They are saying America is in decline. We are in a permanent state of decline. We all need to make sacrifices now because our better days are over, so we all have to give up something. That’s not what we have to do. We need, with all that’s going on, to go out and work even harder to produce even more. And we can, we have done it throughout our entire existence. The whole notion of American exceptionalism does not exist in the minds of Barry Obama and all of his supporters on the left, both in the Democrat Party and the media. American exceptionalism, growth, economic opportunity. We’re going to come out of this slide that we’re in at some point; we always do. We’re gonna grow through the roof again, unless we have somebody in the White House whose express purpose is to redesign the functioning of this country.
How about health care is a right? If we’re going to say, and he said it last night, Obama, ‘Health care is a right,’ well, if that’s a right, why isn’t the car a right? Gotta get to work. Why isn’t food a right? I would say that we need food on the daily basis far more than we need health care. You don’t eat, you eventually will die and the buzzards will get you. Health care, a lot of us can go without health care for weeks, months, years at a time. But health care is a right? Dangerous times in the mind of little Barry. What more do these people want to sacrifice tax-wise? We’re already paying 30 to 50% of everything we make now, depending on what state you live in. More sacrifice? We’re already taking care of people in this country who won’t take care of themselves, and a lot of people around the world who can’t. What more sacrifice do we have to make?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me tell you what’s going to happen here, folks. Do not — do not — throw in the towel. This is nowhere near over. Obama has a history of not being able to close elections when his opponents are still on the ballot. He wins big when he doesn’t have an opponent. Ask the babe in Chicago he kicked off the ballot. Ask the guy in Chicago he kicked off the ballot, effectively, by having his divorce records made public. McCain’s going to be on the ballot. He doesn’t close races. Mrs. Clinton was on the ballot; it was only the superdelegates that took him over the finish line. Here’s what’s going to have to happen. (sigh) We are going to have to drag Senator McCain — I want you to listen to this carefully. Snerdley, I want you to hear this. It will affect call screening.
We’re going to have to drag Senator McCain over the finish line and then we’re going to have to deal with what he does in the Oval Office ourselves. That’s how this is going to have to work. We have to save the country from Obama and then save it and the Republican Party from whoever McCain puts in his cabinet. We have to do this one step at a time. Do not throw in the towel. Do not believe Chuck Todd. Do not believe the Drive-By Media. Do not believe this is over. It isn’t. Do not fret over Senator McCain raising your expectations in Albuquerque on Monday, going after Obama hard as he can and everybody thinking, ‘Wow, are the gloves gonna come off in the debate?’ and then you watch this thing last night, and you don’t need your Ambien when it’s time to hit the pillow. So these expectations… (laughing) A friend of mine sent me a note and said, ‘I can’t believe what I’m watching; Obama fumbles the ball and McCain’s picking it up and handing it back to him rather than taking the ball and running with it.’
(interruption) No! Don’t believe it. It doesn’t matter. What happened in this debate last night, it’s clear, Snerdley, that these debates are not going to shape the election. Nobody won that debate. Obama was mediocre. You can say what McCain was what he was, but the Drive-Bys say, ‘Well, Obama may not have been all that great, but he looked smooth. He looked debonair. He looked like the guy standing in the corner at the cocktail party with the cigarette looking at everybody walking by condemning them, making jokes, putting them down and so forth. Yes, he’s cool, calm, and collected.’ He’s still the most unachieved, unqualified, unprepared individual a major political party has ever nominated — and maybe any third party has ever nominated — to be president of the United States. He’s done nothing. He talks, and he says nothing when he talks, says nothing better than anybody else ever has said nothing, but it’s still nothing. So one step at a time. We drag Yosemite Sam across the finish line, and then we deal with what we’ve gotta deal with there to save the Republican Party. It’s all going to happen, but you gotta stay tuned in here.