(Playing of Happy Feet.)
I guess we can call this the bathroom stall update theme, Paolo Conte on the vocal portrayal here. Let’s go to the sound bites. The real point about this, I think, has been missed and that’s because, of course, I have been gone. Since I am back, I will make the real point. I want to review some audio sound bites of this first, a montage. The Drive-By Media just loved talking about the details of gay bathroom sex when there wasn’t any gay bathroom sex.
LOTHIAN: It’s not the primary function of public parks, restrooms and rest areas, but for men in search of anonymous same-sex partners, they are popular destinations.
TWEKSBURY: A thrill to the hunt, to the excitement of sex in a public place.
PINSKY: People can genuinely get up and say, ‘I’m not gay, but I’m still one of these people that have sex with men.’
KING: They’re not gay, but they have sex with men?
KELLY: Tapping a foot, which apparently, this is lingo.
CARVILLE: He’s not gay, but he’s a man having sex with a man.
SHUSTER: (Reading transcript) ‘Craig tapped his toes several times and moved his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. Craig moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot, which was within my stall area.’
MATTHEWS: This man used leg signals, hand signals.
CARLSON: I have been bothered in men’s rooms.
ATKINSON: He peered through the crack of the door and used hand signals to indicate he wanted sex.
KING: Why men’s rooms?
RUSH: (Laughing.) That’s Larry King, ‘Why men’s rooms?’ That’s where the men are, Larry. Don’t make me laugh. Folks, I came back here, I don’t know how you do it, but I caught a cold in Hawaii. I caught a cold last Wednesday. I thought I was over it on the airplane coming home on Saturday night, Sunday, and I woke up yesterday worse than ever. ‘Oh, my God, this can’t be!’ How do you catch a cold in Hawaii? Every time I go away and play golf I get one of these things, AT&T, Pebble Beach, last November, really bad. I missed a couple workdays because of that one. That was almost ‘let’s go to the hospital’ time. Anyway, that’s the montage. So Larry Craig, we got all the details of gay bathroom sex of which there was none in this scandal. Let’s go to Senator Craig himself. This is August 28th. This is in Boise, Idaho. He held a press conference, a portion of his comments here.
CRAIG: While I was not involved in any inappropriate conduct at the Minneapolis airport or anywhere else, I chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in hopes of making it go away. Let me be clear. I am not gay. I never have been gay.
RUSH: All right, so the Republicans threw Larry Craig under the bus, and you know who was driving the bus, Mitt Romney.
ROMNEY: I think we’ve all heard the story about Bill Clinton and the fact that he let us down in his personal conduct with a White House intern, and that strikes me as another one of these extraordinary acts of falling short of what America would expect of elected officials, particularly one who should be held to a higher standard.
RUSH: This is a guy that was supporting Mitt Romney. Just throw him under the bus like that. This is pandering. This is pandering to the Christian right. This is pandering to values voters out there. It insults them to go this way. Tom DeLay was on PMSNBC last Thursday, and he had this exchange with the reporterette Contessa Brewer. Basically, she said to start it off, ‘The Republicans have also had a very strong message about morals,’ and this is where I want to take this. But DeLay will set it up here. Contessa Brewer, the reason I’m going to play this bite is because she is going to make the point that I’m going to expand upon after this bite is played. She said, ‘The Republicans have also had a very strong message about morals. They like to announce they take the moral high road on many issues yet earlier you had Republican David Vitter who was linked to a prostitution ring and last year you had Mark Foley, Bob Ney and you, yourself, still facing charges of money laundering and conspiring to launder money. So the question is, if you’re going announce you take the moral high road, do you have to stop living in glass houses?’
DELAY: Well, Contessa, you’ve just exhibited the double standard in the media.
BREWER: And how is that?
DELAY: Well, you’ve just listed a bunch of Republicans, but you didn’t list one Democrat. I mean, the fact that William Jefferson was caught with $90,000 of marked bills in his freezer and —
BREWER: But we have — congressman, pardon the interruption, but — but that is a story that we have covered over and over again. No, actually it doesn’t upset me. But because the Republicans — here’s the problem —
DELAY: No, here’s the problem —
BREWER: It’s the hypocrisy. If people live in glass houses, they shouldn’t throw stones.
DELAY: Contessa, if you’ll let me finish.
BREWER: Go ahead.
DELAY: The problem is, the media has a double standard.
RUSH: She said it, and the fascinating aspect of this to me, which I’ve pointed out, I’ve been pointing this out countless times on this program for many, many years, and she says, ‘It’s the hypocrisy.’ The left in this country, folks, has made it a point to go after the hypocrisy of conservatives and Republicans, not really the behavior. If they go after the behavior, they have to condemn the behavior on their side of the aisle. The whole point of the left is to have no standards, because if you have no standards, you can’t be held to any standards. If the left established standards that it wanted to adhere to, then it would have to jettison the supporters that come from the pervert ranks of the Democrat Party, the depraved, the gutter dwellers out there, they are all Democrats, and they are Democrats because the Democrats will not judge them.
Now, in the case of Larry Craig here, the impression is being left that he was forced to resign over being gay, and he wasn’t. He wasn’t outed. There’s a blogger at the Washington Post that’s all happy today because, ‘I got Craig. I outed Craig.’ Was he outed? Has Larry Craig been outed? He has not been outed. In fact, he resigned because of the heat that he received for pleading to a misdemeanor for disorderly conduct. Everybody else seems to be filling in the blanks here with their own agendas. Now, remember, as I said moments ago, my friends, the aim of the left is to aim straight for the hypocrisy of conservatives and Republicans, not the behavior. In this case, they need the behavior of Larry Craig in order to hit the hypocrisy. We’ve had to deal with this before. Everybody out there that I’ve been watching this morning is making the argument that I made some time ago, and that is that the left’s position seems to be that since they have no moral standards, they can’t be held to any moral standards. Moreover, since we, on the right, do believe in moral standards, they say we must live perfect lives, which, of course, is not possible because nobody’s perfect. That’s what original sin is all about. Original sin exempts this. Nobody can live a perfect life.
So the left seems to want to zero-in and discredit virtually everyone who exhibits a failed lifestyle regardless their values. Of course, this is nonsensical because it’s not possible. That’s what they’re trying to do. We conservatives understand this as well. This is why we seek to limit the power of the elites, a handful of imperfect people who ride into power and want to determine what everybody can and can’t do. Democrats, everything they do is perfect because there are no standards that they adhere to. There are no rights. There are no wrongs. There’s no good or bad. Nothing applies to them. They are perfect. Liberalism is the standard, and it’s a standard that says everything goes. But they go even further. If one or a group of people who belong to the party of family values fails to live up to a high standard, then the entire party and movement is condemned. That is the tactic they’re employing here. The truth is that when they take this position on the left, they expose the idiocy of their views. The bottom line is this. We all ought not strive to be more perfect because we are imperfect. We ought not strive to be good and moral because we can’t be. That’s what their philosophy is. You shouldn’t try to be perfect because you can’t. You shouldn’t try to exude any morality because you can’t. What kind of philosophy is that? Therefore, if Larry Craig had been a Democrat and liberal, there would be no supposed hypocrisy because Democrats and liberals have no moral standards. If he would have changed parties, why, he’d be in great shape today.
This is the logic of the left, and it’s studied and it is purposeful. They need this position to defend the reprobates amongst themselves. I don’t need to name the reprobates. Why do they defend felons? Why are they trying to get felons the right to vote again? I have some friends in town today that went out to buy some shoes and some dresses, some ladies in town that I know. Do you know that there is not a law in this town to prevent the owner of the store from cutting a little peeping hole in a dressing room and staring at them as they take their clothes off? There’s not. As long as he doesn’t film anything, as long as he doesn’t tape anything, take any pictures, it’s okay for anybody in the store to check out these unsuspecting women anywhere in New York City. So the local council said, ‘This is not good. We need a law to stop this.’ The New York Civil Liberties Union is opposing the law, saying, ‘Well, who gets to sit in judgment of who looking through a peephole is behaving in a lewd manner?’
So here you have a classic illusion of what we’re talking about. The left simply cannot allow laws to determine what is good or bad because they need the exemption. They need to be able to support and get the support of the perverts and the winos, the reprobates of American culture. They can’t do that if they come up with a political philosophy that condemns that behavior. For example, if you oppose the left’s agenda and one of the items on the agenda is expanding this idiotic hate crimes agenda to homosexuals where you receive more jail time for what you think when you commit a crime, if it happens to be against a homosexual you can add jail time to it because you must have been thinking bigoted thoughts of homophobia, and that’s on the left’s agenda. If you oppose that and so forth, you are mean-spirited, you are a bigot and are promoting a wedge issue and deserve no pity whatsoever. It’s very convenient for the left here. The point being that you are to be judged on how you support the left’s agenda. If you support the left’s agenda then you get away with anything and they will not condemn you. We saw this in the Clinton administration, folks. You had Bill Clinton accused of rape. He was accused of sexual abuse in the oval orifice, all these other things, and the left-wing so-called women’s groups are either silent or found ways to defend him.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Robin in Las Cruces, New Mexico, welcome to the program.
CALLER: I wish you’d been here last week. I think it’s a matter of simple arithmetic about this Larry Craig affair.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: It’s just the power in the Senate.
RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. He didn’t have an ‘affair.’ I know what you mean, but let’s not contribute to this. He did not have an affair.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Tap the foot out there.
CALLER: Larry Craig happening. Whatever excuse they can land on — and this one, this seemed to blind-side people. They couldn’t think past it, and it was just an excuse. Anything to get rid of a Republican senator, and I know there’s a Republican governor who will appoint a Republican, but he comes up for election soon and I think we should all send contributions to the successor, because he hasn’t prepared for an election.
RUSH: Well, I think the RNC will do their best to take care of that. You make a good point that what they’re doing here is simply trying to go after Republicans. And the Democrats do this because they have little confidence that they can beat Republicans at the ballot box. I tell you, they’re going to go after David Vitter of Louisiana next, and Pat Leahy made the point yesterday on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace who said, ‘Look, before we get to the choice of the new attorney general, let’s discuss the resignation of your colleague, Larry Craig. Senator Leahy, let me start with you. What do you do make of the case? Did he have to go?’
LEAHY: We have another senator who apparently, uhhh, used telephones in the Republican cloakroom to call the so-called Washington madam, uh, set up, uh, illegal activity with — with call girls. And nobody seems to be upset with that. Uh, frankly, I would think that that, as compared to a — a sting operation in a men’s room in — in Minnesota, would be as serious. I mean that’s a — a question that the Republican Party will have to answer.
WALLACE: You’re talking about Louisiana Senator David Vitter.
LEAHY: Yes.
RUSH: Yes. Yes. Of course, he wouldn’t be talking about a Democrat! A Democrat can do whatever they want and there’s no problem whatsoever. Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy can make the famous waitress sandwiches at La Brasserie, and it’s a résumé enhancement! But we’ve addressed this. This is all about hypocrisy. Howard Dean, when he was running for president, folks, I will never forget, said he was going to root out Republican hypocrisy. Now, you have to understand this is the target here. They claim to be able to discredit Republicans on the basis of hypocrisy. They can’t condemn the behavior because they protect and encourage the behavior when practiced by people who support them, or by themselves. So they have to go out and target hypocrisy. Larry Craig was not caught doing anything. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor, trying to make the whole thing ‘go away.’ That’s what caused his downfall. So now you hear Leahy say, I want to go after David Vitter, as though there are no Democrats who have patronized call girls and madams and so forth. But, see, even if there were, that’s okay because they aren’t critical of it. The left does not criticize prostitutes or prostitution, and so when they visit a madam or a call girl, why, there’s no hypocrisy and so there’s no crime, there’s no guilt, because in the land of the left, there are no standards. In fact, the more depraved you are, the more valued you are, because the more unique and different you are and the easier it will be to make you a victim! The greater pervert, the more depraved you are, the more attractive you are to the Democrat Party and the American left. Ben in Charlotte, North Carolina, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. Tera iPhone dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much. You’re on your iPhone now?
CALLER: Yes, I am.
RUSH: It sounds awesome!
CALLER: Yeah, I think so too.
RUSH: It just sounds awesome. I hear you just fine.
CALLER: Good. My point is in regards to how you and Tom DeLay are handling when asked the question, ‘Where’s the double standard?’ They do — I mean the media will get on William Jefferson but what they won’t do is hold the entire party accountable for what William Jefferson does.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: So I don’t think that he summed it up nicely. When Tom DeLay was talking to her, she said but we did hold Jefferson accountable. His response should have been, ‘Yes, but did you hold the Democratic Party accountable?’
RUSH: Well, I understand that. But you, of course, are exempting me from this criticism I hope because I did make that very point in my analysis after that sound bite, not about DeLay, who should have said it; but I did point out that, what they do is they take the behavior of a Larry Craig or a Vitter or whoever and condemn the whole party for it. They condemn the whole conservative movement for it. You must have missed that.
CALLER: I’ll exempt you for that.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: The other thing is sometimes they bring up things that we aren’t really bringing up anymore. I mean, my mother-in-law is a really liberal person.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: When the debates were going on, she kept commenting on, ‘Ha! All of the Republicans have been divorced! All the Republicans have been divorced.’
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And I’m like, ‘Who’s talking about divorce?’ She’s acting like [they are] hypocrites because they’ve been divorced, as though we’re the party of, you know, no divorce. They’re talking about things we’re not even talking about.
RUSH: I know. I’m forced now to go back to my brilliant monologue here following the DeLay sound bite in the first half-hour, but the point here again is that when you have a values voter base party, which the Republican Party is, I mean, the values voters vote for them, and the Christian right votes for Republicans for the most part. So when you have Republicans who fall off the moral bus, if you will, the Democrats try to say, ‘A-ha! We have hypocrisy here.’ They go after the ‘hypocrisy’ rather than the behavior. The Democrats do not hold themselves to any standard because they don’t protect any, they don’t promote any. They don’t say they adhere to any. Now, the interesting thing is this. You get a lot of Republican candidates who have been divorced. Divorce has been very, very good to a lot of guys. It’s made ’em happier. It’s got ’em different families — and everybody fails! There’s not one person that does not commit some kind of a sin. It is impossible to live a perfect life. Democrats have been trying this for I don’t know how long. If you didn’t serve in the military, you can’t support the defense budget. If you didn’t serve in the military, if you didn’t sign up in ’69 to go kill commies in Vietnam, you have no right to talk about the use of the military today because you’re being a hypocrite.
‘Where were you when it was time to kill commies? You’ll be glad to send other people’s kids off to kill people but you wouldn’t go do it yourself, so you shut up!’ This is because the left cannot beat us in the arena of ideas, folks. They have to shut us up either by discrediting who we are or blaming us for being hypocrites and so forth, and what they hope to do here, in the long run, is, ‘Okay, here’s somebody who’s divorced, so he can’t talk about gay marriage. Why, I know some of the most healthy and loving relationships among gay people and here’s a divorced Republican. He shouldn’t be allowed to comment,’ and that’s how it works. See, the thing to understand about this… It may sound a bit extreme, but to understand this, the left must by definition have no standards so it can’t be accused of violating them. Now, just because somebody makes a mistake in life does not mean they don’t know the difference between right and wrong. It does not disqualify them from being able to tell other people what’s right and wrong. We’ve got fewer and fewer people willing to say what’s right and wrong because they’re attacked as intolerant, as bigots, as prejudiced people. If somebody says to you I think we must teach more tolerance in the schools. Really? How about teaching more math and more history? Tolerance is simply respect, and it used to be taught at home. To give up whole class periods to teach ‘tolerance’ is nothing more than a liberal trick to make sure that people do not judge and do not condemn behavior which in the old days automatically would have been, because we all know what’s right and wrong. It doesn’t mean we all live perfect lives because we can’t, but we all know. But more and more of us have been intimidated into not saying what’s right and wrong and not being judgmental because we’re going to face all kinds of hell directed towards us personally.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Tom in Boise, Idaho. I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Mega dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’m just calling about the Larry Craig issue. I live here in Boise, and, you know, I agree with you about the media trying to point out, you know, Republicans’ hypocrisy and all that, but I think you’re wrong about why the Republicans threw Craig under the bus. It wasn’t so much the gay issue —
RUSH: Oh, I know why they threw him under the bus? What do you mean I’m wrong about why they threw him under the bus?
CALLER: Well —
RUSH: Why did they throw him under the bus?
CALLER: It wasn’t so much about the gay issue. It was about him lying to us and about the whole way he handled the situation. You know, he just showed incredibly poor judgment in the whole way he handled it, trying to cover it up and not tell anyone. He didn’t even tell his wife about it.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: He didn’t tell his staff.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: He didn’t hire a lawyer.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: He thinks he can just brush it under the rug. And, you know, around here, Republicans were already upset with him about how he voted on the amnesty bill, and already weren’t going to support him for that reason.
RUSH: Right, right, right, right.
CALLER: This is just icing on the cake.
RUSH: So to speak.
CALLER: So the gay thing had little to do with it. It was a horrible lack of judgment on his part and the way he lied to us.
RUSH: That may be, from your standpoint, but I guarantee you for the Republicans in Washington, it was not that at all. It may have been a minor factor in this thing. Believe me, it was the solicitation of sex charge in a bathroom, the toe-tapping, the foot-tapping. You know, Republicans just have a tendency to be gutless, and this was one of the shining examples of it. They jumped and made all these decisions right before they found out what had really gone on here. It’s all because they’re afraid of being called hypocrites and so forth, and some Republicans are going to say, ‘No, Rush, you are wrong. We stand up for moral values. We are going to make sure of it. We can’t afford to back people who do not stand up for the morality and the lifestyle that we promote and so forth.’ Yeah, I understand all that but at the same time, folks, you can’t sit there and just let the Democrat Party pick you apart. I know it’s a fine line (sigh) but in this kind of battle, in this war, there are certain factors here that have to be weighed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Larry Craig was forced out, folks, because the Republicans are scared. The Republicans have been told they can’t win the next election. They have been told that they have no chance and that they’re going to lose even more seats. The Republicans accept the labels that liberals apply to them, and they refuse to stand and fight. Now, the most logical way for the Republicans to have responded to Patrick Leahy and other Senate Democrats on Larry Craig was to say this: ‘You know, Senator Leahy, when you leaked to NBC News and were forced to resign from the Intel Committee, we didn’t call for your resignation from the Senate. When Barney Frank knew of a male prostitution ring being run from his townhouse, he didn’t resign. When Harry Reid was involved in sleazy land deals, several of them in Nevada, he didn’t resign from the Senate. So who are you to lecture anybody about any of this? You people have committed far more grievous acts of indecency than Larry Craig committed here by tapping his foot in a bathroom.’
I know some of you out there are very upset with me because you think I’m being tolerant of the activity of Larry Craig, and that we can’t have these kinds of people in our party, we certainly can’t have elected officials this way, and I understand you’re angry with me about this. I’m telling you something, this double standard that exists and the cowardice and the fear that the Republicans exhibit is not comforting, not with an election a little over a year away. The presidential campaign is going to be brutal, and it can’t be filled with defensiveness. People are going to have to stand up and fight for what they believe. There are ways of dealing with what these Democrats have said. You’ve got Barney Frank; you’ve got Gerry Studds; you’ve got Harry Reid; you’ve got Dianne Feinstein in an area that wasn’t even looked into about steering money from her committee in the Senate to businesses that her husband benefits from. Not to mention Leahy, who leaked when he was on the intelligence committee and was forced to resign. If anyone ever convicted of any crime should resign from the Senate, why is Ted Kennedy still there?
I went to Wikipedia, it’s everybody’s favorite authority, right? ‘Kennedy entered a plea of guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury. He received a sentence of two months in jail, which was suspended. The sentence was notable in that the statute for the crime provided only for mandatory jail time and not the discretion of a suspended sentence. An Edgartown grand jury later reopened the investigation but did not return an indictment.’ Well, Craig pled guilty to a misdemeanor as well. But Kennedy pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing an injury. Now, I suppose if he had done so in a men’s room, the liberals would have demanded his resignation, right? By the same token, what was Larry Craig’s mistake? Larry Craig’s mistake was not tapping his foot in the Oval Office. If he was tapping his foot in the Oval Office he’d still be in the Senate. But he had to go to a men’s room in the Minneapolis airport.
Now, the Ted Kennedy thing occurred in Martha’s Vineyard which makes it totally different, right? So when Republicans simply sit there when the likes of Leahy and others make these statements and hold themselves out as the epitome of morality and virtue and get all defensive, ‘We don’t want to offend Senator Leahy. We don’t want to offend Senator Reid. We don’t want to offend our values voters,’ and so forth and so on. This is not to condone Larry Craig’s behavior, whatever it was or was not, folks. It is time to realize here that these people who are demanding all of these resignations and saying that they’re going to go after David Vitter should have been long gone from the US Senate for things far worse than what either Vitter or Craig are alleged to have done; and yet they get to sit there and act as the moral judge? Sorry. Doesn’t fly with me. I don’t care whether Larry Craig’s a reprobate or not. It doesn’t matter in this case. It’s the people who are telling me and my party how we must comport ourselves when they couldn’t walk in our shadows. You can sit there and you can play holier-than-thou on this morality stuff but if you’re looking for perfection in elected officials, if you’re looking for people who are never going to fall off the wagon, never going to walk something other than a straight line, then you’re going to be looking forever.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: David in Atlanta, thank you for waiting. You’re on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: 1986 dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Well, thank you, sir. Great to have you here.
CALLER: I’ve been listening since the Sacramento days on KFBK. I wish I was still there. Hey, I wanted to comment on the whole Larry Craig thing, and I agree with you partially that it’s been overwrought and that, you know, really jammed in, blown out of proportion. You know, it was a misdemeanor that he pled guilty to. Nothing else was necessarily proven and so on. But I don’t necessarily agree that the Republicans overreacted and threw him under the bus. You know, I really think he got thrown out of the bus more than anything else, but —
RUSH: No, Mitt Romney ran over him after throwing him out of the bus.
CALLER: Well, that’s true. That’s true. Mitt Romney did pretty much completely dismiss him, yeah. At the same time, though, I have to think that, we are the party of the higher standard. Yes, everybody falls, you know, everybody sins, and, you know, as a Christian I believe in that very, very strongly and firmly, uh, but we have to maintain enough of the double standards, necessarily that the Democrats have done as well.
RUSH: I understand that, but what did Craig do?
CALLER: Well, in this case, not necessarily much, but at the same time, you know, if somebody gets themselves caught with their hand caught in the cookie jar or whatever they’re doing, it’s probably up to them to kind of say, ‘You know what?’
RUSH: But see, there was no hand in the cookie jar here. There was a toe-tapping in a men’s room stall in a bathroom with an undercover cop on the other side of the stall.
CALLER: Yes, it seems pretty clear, though, Rush, that what he was doing he knew what he was doing, that it wasn’t a mistake — and we don’t know that. We can’t prove that. It’s really of [sic] a word of one against the other. At the same time, though, you go back to the Mark Foley thing and how Republican, the Senate [sic–House] leadership handled the Mark Foley thing and they swept it under the rug as well as they could. Denny Hastert, you know, he refused to do anything about it and looked into it [sic], and then look what happened there? And, you know, I don’t know if you can say that lost us the election, but it was certainly a huge deal.
RUSH: See, now, I’m glad you brought up Foley, because I’ll tell you I think the Democrats’ war room screwed this up, and I think some heads are going to roll. This Larry Craig thing should have happened a year from now. They’ve wasted it. What’s it doing happening now? This is something… You know, the Foley thing, that they held that in the bank for a year and a half, and they used it earlier than they wanted to because the polls were showing Republicans were going to hold onto the House, so they had to go to the mat and they had to use the Foley thing. They had that in abeyance. The Republicans had maybe not done the right thing with what they had known way back when and so forth, but look, if we adhere to this notion that we have the moral high ground, then we had better expect — and if we’re going to sit there and let people like Patrick Leahy and Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd and Harry Reid, if we’re going to let them be the moral arbiters of the US Senate and who’s fit to hold office in Washington DC, then we may as well fold up shop, on the basis that we can’t field a team that will be morally untouchable. I know this is a tough one, folks, but the future of the country is at stake here, I think. This is the liberals do everything they can to gain control. Look at what they’re already talking about doing if they win! They’re going to control as much of your life as possible. I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Steve in Springfield, Oregon, thank you for calling, sir, I appreciate your patience.
CALLER: Hey buddy, mega dittos from — (muttering)
RUSH: (Muttering.)
CALLER: Hello?
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Anyway, we’re right next to Idaho, I know that because I studied the old-fashioned geography and I just wanted to say that you’re wrong on the Larry Craig thing.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: I don’t want that kind of guy in my party, you know, and I don’t want a guy who’s going to try to pick up a guy in a men’s room in an airport and I don’t want a guy in the White House who’s going to try to sodomize an intern in the Oval Office. I just don’t want it.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, I understand that, and I totally agree with you.
CALLER: Okay. Well, you’re mocking members of the Republican Party that were talking about hypocrisy, and I agree with everything that those leaders in the Republican Party said. You were repeating them in a mocking manner.
RUSH: No, no, no. To me this is a matter of the people on the left dictating who among us gets to serve who’s fit to hold office. That’s what bothers me about this. I think the Republicans reacted a little too quickly in throwing the guy overboard because he didn’t pick anybody up in the bathroom.
CALLER: Oh, man, you know how hard it is to — he wasn’t toe tapping, man, he was playing footsie, you know, and that bathroom isn’t like the first one you come to. It’s a well-known bathroom, you gotta go out of your way to get to it. I’m sorry, dude, he did it, and that press conference where he says, ‘I’m not gay,’ that reminded me of President Clinton saying, ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman.’
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I’m glad he lost the seat. He should have been gone.
RUSH: I agree with that. What’s wrong with being gay?
CALLER: Nothing, but —
RUSH: Exactly right. If he is, he should have proudly come out and said so.
CALLER: I guess there’s nothing wrong with sodomizing the intern, either —
RUSH: Really make the Republicans mad then.
CALLER: Should have admitted it and Craig should have admitted it. I don’t like that kind of hypocrisy. I’m not sure I want, you know, a guy like that, you know, in charge of making laws about our penal system, you know. I don’t think he should have held onto his seat, or anybody else’s.
RUSH: Well, I got news for you. The guys that are making laws about the penal system and every other system out there are probably just as much reprobate as Craig is in their own way. The idea that we got people clean and pure as the wind-driven snow up there is a myth.
CALLER: No, we don’t. All right, buddy. Well, that’s pretty much all I wanted to say.
RUSH: Okay. I appreciate your call, Steve. Thanks so much, buddy, it’s great to have you out there, especially in Oregon. It’s a lonely place for Republicans to be. I’m glad you’re with us.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’m going to take another stab at this Larry Craig business. The police report does not say that Larry Craig ‘played footsie’ in the bathroom at the Minneapolis airport. If he had played footsie, I assume the prosecution wouldn’t have signed a deal for a misdemeanor. Anyway, that’s not the point. Here’s the point. A standard has not been made and met with the resigning of Larry Craig. Look, can I go through some recent history for you to try to illustrate for you what my problem with this is? Larry Craig was the latest to go for what seem like rational reasons: ‘Oh, he played footsie in the bathroom? He’s soliciting male sex? We can’t have that! He’s gotta go. Get him outta there!’ Alberto Gonzales? He split the scene after Republicans pushed him and joined with the Democrats. This is for what seemed like rational reasons. ‘Why, he was incompetent! Why, he was involved in the US attorney firings.’ There was no crime! No crime was ever committed by Gonzales, but it seemed rational. ‘Rush, he had to go,’ and the Republicans joined the Democrats in pushing him out the door. Rumsfeld? Rumsfeld went. That was supposed to fix things. ‘Yeah, if we get rid of Rumsfeld and give the libs what they want, man, they’ll turn around and support us on Iraq.’ Right. Gingrich? DeLay? They resigned for what at the time seemed like rational reasons, and Republicans joined in on that, too. ‘Yeah, you guys really gotta go. You’re embarrassing us here. Newt, you’re having an affair. DeLay, you got yourself indicted out there. You got a go. You’re making it look bad for us. Kick ’em out!’
We have Bob Livingston resigned after it was revealed that he’d had an affair, and lots of Republicans thought that was a good idea. ‘Yeah, Bob, you gotta get out of there. We’re trying to nail Clinton on this stuff and it doesn’t look good if you’re in there. You gotta get out of there. You go, Bob. Make it look good, very helpful.’ Then Mark Foley. Mark Foley was ousted before the November election with Republican support and that was supposed to fix things. Do you detect a pattern here, ladies and gentlemen? Every so often, Republicans quit! They’re forced to resign with other Republicans joining in, pushing them out the door. During this same period, may I cite for you the name of Congressman William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana), who is still a member of Congress? I don’t recall if he’s able to hold onto his committee position, but whatever. There are plenty of other examples of this kind of behavior. You don’t see any Democrats pushing each other out the door. You don’t see them leaving of their own volition. You see them defended. I know what you’re saying. ‘But, Rush, we don’t want people like that in our party.’ I understand that, but there’s a trend, folks, and every time we get rid of one of these people we’re supposed to reap the rewards. Republicans are showing the world that we are not going to tolerate this kind of ‘reprobate-ness’ in our party. We’re not going to put up with it! We’re going to clean it out because we are the party of values and standards and so forth and so on. (laughing) Meanwhile, we lost the House last November. We lost the Senate, and it looks worse for the coming November. But, forget it, folks, because I — as has been pointed out by several callers today — have totally lost touch on this issue and have no idea what I’m talking about.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’m going to try one more time here with Larry Craig, ladies and gentlemen. If you want to talk about standards and morality… I’ve got people calling this show accusing Larry Craig of crimes that he didn’t commit and accusing him of conduct that he didn’t commit. I mean, everybody talks about Craig cut a deal. How about the prosecutors cut a deal? If they had him on lewd and lascivious behavior, why did they cut a deal to something that’s less than that? I’ve been through this, folks. I have been through this. You people out there are falling for Democrat talking points. If they had such a strong case, why did they cut a deal with Craig? We keep hearing that he cut the deal. Well, local officials had to sign the deal. If his conduct was lewd and if he did, in fact, solicit sex in a public place, why not throw the book at him? Why not? That’s what you do when you have someone dead to rights and you seek to prove a point and deter certain conduct. If you don’t want that kind of stuff going in your bathroom, and you’re an airport cop in Minnesota, and you don’t want this stuff going on and you found it, you throw the book at the person that did it, and you send a message. But they didn’t do that. Another thing, folks. This is not about the Republican Party. Some of you callers are insisting this is about the Republican Party. You’re falling for Democrat talking points. You are acting defensive, and you’re trying to maintain a high moral standard for yourself. You’re making it about you personally, when in fact you’re sitting around and you’re watching Democrats decide to pick off any of our guys they want, and you’re helping ’em!