RUSH: I always try to delay sound bites mentioning me ’til later in the program so as to not to be distracted, but let’s go to the audio sound bites, MessNBC Hardball’s Chris Matthews talking with White House chief correspondent there F. Chuck Todd.
MATTHEWS: Let’s look at Rush Limbaugh now, because I think Rush Limbaugh cuts to the heart of that argument. And this is among conservatives in the country. If you’re a liberal, watch this, because right now the action ideologically in this country is in the right. It’s the way the Democratic Party was back in the sixties. This is where the action is ideologically. It’s been yanked to the far right. Here’s Rush Limbaugh doing some of the yanking today on radio.
RUSH ARCHIVE: ‘… I have no brief for Christine O’Donnell. But I’m just going to tell you a Senate full of Mike Castles is not gonna get us anywhere. It’s gonna get a bunch of Republicans their chairmanships on the committee but it’s not going to do anything to reverse Obamaism. Not one thing. If that’s our majority with a bunch of Mike Castles there, we’re in trouble.’
MATTHEWS: Well, there you have it.
RUSH: ‘There you have it.’ I mean it’s indisputable. And like I further pointed out, if you get 51 seats and four of them are Mike Castle types — Snowe, Collins, Voinovich, and Castle — you don’t have 51 seats. You need 60 seats in there anyway for a legislative majority. Look at the Democrats. They got 59 seats, they can’t get anything done in the Senate, and who do they blame? They blame the Republicans! You watch. We get 51 seats, and a bunch of Republicans go along with the Obama agenda and get it passed, and we get blamed for it because we’re the majority. There’s a downside to this. Last night Philadelphia, WTXF-TV Eyeball 29 News correspondent Steve Keeley live in Delaware reported this about Christine O’Donnell.
KEELEY: I worked in, uh, southern Delaware when I started in TV news. And southern Delaware… There’s only three counties here, but Kent and Sussex, Delaware, is a whole different world, uh, than the northern New Castle County part of Delaware. And there’s real people down there, and they saw this coming. She had the endorsements of things like the National Rifle Association, Rush Limbaugh, who people listen to on the radio down there. So this is not a surprise to two-thirds of this state for sure because she trounced him in middle and southern Delaware where those people all live.
RUSH: So there you have a local TV Eyeball 29 News correspondent saying I own middle and southern Delaware, and everybody who lives there knows it. We move over to CNN and The Situation Room of Wolf Blitzer during the ‘Strategy Session’ segment. Wolf Blitzer was speaking with Mary Matalin about the 2010 midterm election. Donna Brazile is in this next bite. Blitzer says, ‘I’m curious to get your reaction here, Mary. Charles Krauthammer, a lot of our viewers will know his name…’ Not that many, Wolf. Not that many of your viewers will know Charles Krauthammer’s name, but that’s a minor point. ‘Charles Krauthammer says as far as what’s going on in Delaware, the Palin endorsement is disruptive and capricious. In Delaware, O’Donnell and the Tea Party are favored to lose. That could be the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats controlling things. Mary, what do you think’s going on over there in Delaware?’
MATALIN: There’s only one man in the country as far as Charles, and that’s Rush Limbaugh, and I think he’s got his finger on the pulse. This is not about Sarah Palin versus the establishment Republicans. The argument against O’Donnell is, ‘She can’t win.’ On what evidence? She’s 11 points down in a blue state, which means she has to make up 5-1/2, not 11 points, she only has to make up half that distance. If you want to talk about college, her opponent, the Democrats, wrote a paper in college, ‘The Making of a Bearded Marxist.’ Hardly what you want to run on if you want to look backwards so she has under two months and she has two monster messages. She can potentially be the 51st Senate vote, and she would be a reliable fiscal conservative Senate vote. The argument against her that some conservatives are making that she can’t win is unknown.
RUSH: Yeah. And of course, as I said: I’m in charge of who can and can’t win, not the GOP establishment. I haven’t said yet that she can’t win. Until I say it, it’s not a factor. So Donna Brazile was in there, too, and Wolf Blitzer said, ‘Donna, you’d rather face her, though, than face Mike Castle as the Democrat. Is that right?’
BRAZILE: No question. We like some of these Tea Party candidates. It’s very easy to go up and tell the electorate, ‘You know, this is [the]Rush Limbaugh-Sarah Palin handpicked candidate. Do you want this person to go to Washington, DC? No! Democrats had to go out there and say, ‘These candidates are handpicked by Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin. You want this person in Washington, DC?’ I guarantee the answer will be ‘Hell, no.’
RUSH: (laughing) (interruption) What campaign did she win? Let’s see, she ran Gore’s campaign. Uhhhhh…. Ummmm…. Really, I don’t want to be rude. I don’t know, Snerdley. She has ‘never done never’? ‘She done never won a campaign’? Hmm. (interruption) Well, I know that Bob Shrum hasn’t won anything. I didn’t know Donna Brazile. I know she ran Algore’s campaign. You know, her big problem, though, was Naomi Wolf. Naomi Wolf, she put herself in charge of Gore’s wardrobe. You know, the earth tones? Hey, Clinton Portis, you want to talk about packages? Did you see what Naomi Wolf did to Gore on the cover of that magazine? Oh! That didn’t help.