RUSH: We’re gonna start with some of the debate sound bites. I don’t know how many of you saw it. Snerdley didn’t see it. Did you watch it, Dawn? Watched half of it? The people I talked to who did thought it was one of the best, that everybody in it did well, on balance. What, you disagree with that, Snerdley? Oh. He’s upset. Of course you would miss the best one. A lot of people, I haven’t heard anybody tell me they thought it was bad. But here’s a question from Stephanopoulos. This is interesting. This is quick, goes by in six seconds here.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Should voters consider marital fidelity when making their choices for president?

RUSH: Right, now, here’s the guy who worked the bimbo eruptions war room for Bill Clinton. Here’s a guy who worked the bimbo eruptions war room for Clinton, with James Carville, asking this question. And, you know, our guys will gladly go to a debate moderated by Stephanopoulos or Diane Sawyer — oh, Diane Sawyer, I did listen to some… ah, the questions, the tone of voice. Oh, my goodness, her questions went twice as long as some answers while she’s lecturing the candidates on sticking to the time limit. These guys, they don’t want to go to Trump’s debate, but they’ll let Stephanopoulos ask them this stupid question about fidelity from the guy who covered ’em all up for Clinton. I mean let’s go back. This is from the film The War Room and this is Stephanopoulos talking about talking somebody out of making an allegation of infidelity against Clinton.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Think of yourself. I guarantee you that if you do this you’ll never work in Democratic politics again, nobody will believe you, and people will think you’re scummy. The alternative is you don’t do it. It causes you some temporary pain with people who tomorrow aren’t gonna matter, and you have a campaign that understands that in a difficult time, you did something right.

RUSH: That’s Stephanopoulos from The War Room, the movie made about how he and Carville fended all this stuff off, and he’s talking to a potential bimbo eruption and he’s threatening, “You don’t do it, you don’t do it.” And now he gets to turn around, he gets to ask our guys whether it ought to matter. No, Clinton told the girl, “Put some ice on it.” Stephanopoulos didn’t do that. Here’s Newt on the infidelity question. Stephanopoulos said, “Speaker Gingrich, what do voters need to know about this issue, infidelity, from your perspective.”

GINGRICH: I think it’s a real issue. I think people have to look at the person to whom they’re gonna loan the presidency, and they have the right to ask every single question. They have to have a feeling that this is a person that they can trust with the level of power we give to the presidency. I said up front openly, I’ve made mistakes at times, I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness, I’ve had to seek reconciliation, but I’m also a 68-year-old grandfather and I think people have to measure who I am now and whether I’m a person they can trust.

RUSH: All right, that’s the answer. Not much you can do with that question, I mean it is what it is. I don’t have any experience at it, so I don’t know how I’d answer it. But the people I talked to thought everybody in this debate handled it well. Here’s the bet business. Rick Perry says, “I read your first book, and it said in there that your mandate in Massachusetts should be the model for the country, and I know it came out of the reprint of the book. It’s not in the reprint of the book, Mitt. You know I’m just saying, you were for individual mandates, my friend.”

ROMNEY: You know what, you’ve raised that before, Rick, and you’re simply wrong.

PERRY: It was true then. It is true now.

ROMNEY: Rick, I’ll tell you what. Ten thousand bucks? Ten thousand dollar bet?

RUSH: Ten thousand dollar bet. Rick, you’re just wrong, I never came out for the individual mandate, $10,000. Now, what Romney should have remembered is this from Perry on September 12th in Tampa.

PERRY: Yes, sir. The company was Merck, and it was a $5,000 contribution that I had received from them. I raise about $30 million, and if you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended.

BACHMANN: I’m offended for all the little girls and the parents that didn’t have a choice, that’s what I’m offended for.

RUSH: Okay, so Perry admits he can’t be bought for five grand, Romney shoulda known ten wouldn’t do it. (laughing) I think this bet was hyperbole. I think it was a toss-off, but the media doesn’t. Perry’s reaction, “What, you got ten grand to throw around, that’s not what regular people — Mitt, regular people don’t have $10,000 to throw around,” and the truth is that Mitt Romney does have $10,000 to throw around and not really miss it. That’s why some people, “If you’re gonna bet something that means anything, you know, bet one of your houses.” If you really mean this.

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RUSH: We are at audio sound bite number 14. This is a media montage as soon as the debate was over at ABC analysts were chomping at the bit to talk about Romney’s $10,000 bet.

JACOB TAPPER: The fact that Romney was trying to wager a, uhh, $10,000 bet in a debate in Iowa, the median income in this country means that $10,000 is roughly three months income.

DAVID MUIR: Not too many caucus-goers here in Iowa would ever place a $10,000 bet, uh, even if it was a sure thing.

AMY WALTER: It really is Mitt Romney who made most of the headlines, and not all of them were very good. Obviously, the $10,000 bet being the top one here.

RUSH: So the media consensus after the debate was that Romney had committed a tactical error by betting an amount of money that the average Hawkeye Cauci attendee will never see, and certainly would never wager — and, therefore, failed in the important area of relating to the Hawkeye Cauci attendee, and so forth. That was their analysis. Now, here’s Perry on the bet. We’ve got, I guess, Sunday Fox News, and Iowa Public TV’s conversations with the candidates, this a montage of Perry talking about Romney’s wager of ten grand in the debate the night before.

PERRY: Driving out to the station this morning I’m pretty sure I didn’t drive by a house, uh, that anyone in Iowa, uh, would even think about that a ten thousand-dollar bet was possible. (chuckles) Holy mackerel, that’s just a lot of money for most people and I guess not for Mitt.

RUSH: Well, it’s not a lot of money for Mitt, “But holy mackerel,” it is a lot of money for Hawkeye Cauci attendees. A lot of money for most people, especially to bet. Now, to say that most people wouldn’t bet it even if it was a sure thing? That’s going a little far. We got gamblers throughout this country. Every time you vote for a Democrat it’s a giant gamble — with your own money. Let’s see here. And we’ve got more. This is Fox & Friends this morning. Romney’s on there. Brian Kilmeade says, “You wanted to bet him ten grand. Do you think you sent the wrong message to the people of Iowa?”

ROMNEY: This was a — an outrageous number to — to answer an outrageous charge from him, and it’s been proven wrong time and time again. He keeps raising it and I said, “Okay, let’s put something outrageous out there. It’s like saying, ‘Hey, I’ll betcha a million bucks X, Y, or Z.’ Afterwards, my wife came up and said, ‘Mitt, it’s a great debate. You’re great at a lot of things, just not betting.'” (laughs) So we’re over with that.

RUSH: Oh. Okay. So his wife didn’t like it, no more bets. Not happening anymore. Michelle Obama spends ten grand in tips on hotels in Spain. Michelle Obama probably spends $10,000 a toe getting a pedicure. Look, everybody’s all up in arms here about Romney wagering ten grand. Folks, I literally find all this stuff interesting. Now, Newt’s comment on the Palestinians. Oh-ho-ho! Has that ruffled some feathers? This is Newt, we go to Friday on The Jewish Channel, cable network. Correspondent Steven Weiss interviewed Gingrich and this is what Newt said about the Palestinian people.

GINGRICH: There was no Palestine that was a state. It was part of Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are, in fact, Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community.

RUSH: Oh, folks! That is lighting dynamite. That’s lighting dynamite and throwing it in a crowd of liberals. Oh, I know it’s a hundred percent true. Golda Meir said the same thing. Numerous statesmen and women have said the same thing, but the conventional wisdom something different now: The Palestinians are a historical people, and they are living in a historical place stolen from them. I mean, that’s it. (interruption) Well, they should go to Jordan, not just Jordan, other places, too. But there’s not a race of people called the Palestinians. There never has been, and Newt’s right about this. But they exist as a foil for the other Arabs. I’ll tell you who sells the Palestinians out all the time is other Arabs. What happens to the Palestinians, basically what they do to themselves, is what the rest of the Arab terrorist world points to and says, “See, that’s why the Jews are so bad! Look what the Jews are doing to our people.” You need that to keep happening if you want to keep blaming it all on the Jews. So Gingrich and Romney spar over his remark. Newt starts off and this is in a debate Saturday. Newt starts off explaining that he was right about it.

GINGRICH: Was what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes. Are we in a situation where every day rockets are fired into Israel while the United States, the current administration, tries to pressure the Israelis into a peace process? Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth: These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, “If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?” We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, “Enough lying about the Middle East!”

RUSH: Okay, that’s one of these dead-on truths again, but the truth’s politically incorrect because it’s so threatening to people, upsets applecarts. Here’s Romney’s reply.

ROMNEY: Anything I say that can affect a place with rockets going in, with people dying, I don’t do anything that would harm that process; and, therefore, before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say, “Would it help if I said this? What would you like me to do? Let’s work together, because we’re partners.” I’m not a bomb thrower, rhetorically or literally.

RUSH: Okay, so Romney, instead of saying that, what I’d do is I’d call Bibi. I’d call my buddy Bibi! (They got in an argument over who knows Bibi better.) I’d call my buddy Bibi and say, “Look, I’m thinking about saying this. Do you think I should say it? You know what? I won’t say it. I want to do whatever I can. We need to work together.” Okay, so Newt, Newt then replied, after Romney said he’s “not a bomb thrower, literally or rhetorically” and said he would call his buddy Bibi Netanyahu and say, “Let’s work together. I want to tell the truth about the Palestinians, but I won’t if you don’t let me,” here’s what Newt said.

GINGRICH: I think sometimes it is helpful to have a president of the United States with the courage to tell the truth, just as it was Ronald Reagan who went around his entire national security apparatus to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and who overruled his entire State Department in order to say, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Reagan believed the power of truth restated the world and reframed the world. I’m a Reaganite. I’m proud to be a Reaganite. I will tell you the truth even if it’s at the risk of causing some confusion sometimes with the timid.

RUSH: “Confusion with the timid,” and Newt’s a Reaganite. Should I remind ’em, Mr. Snerdley? Should I remind ’em? When the chorus began, “The era of Reagan is over,” Newt was right in there with it. Just saying, just saying. But you can’t deny these answers, statements in this debate are grand slam home runs. He didn’t say he called Bibi for permission. “Let’s talk about it, let’s work together, let’s figure out what’s going on here.” Yeah, I’ll tell you what’s absurd about this. We’re supposed to be upset here at something Newt Gingrich says is gonna whip up the Palestinians? They’re already whipped up! Nothing Newt says is gonna make terrorists even more terroristic. That’s what’s absurd.

“You’re going to really whip them up! We’re trying to have peace with these people! How dare you tell the truth about them!” Yeah, Newt’s gonna anger them. He’s right: You can’t tell the truth too many times in our culture today.

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RUSH: Newt Gingrich has responded to a candidate pledge circulated by an Iowa social conservative group, the Family Leader, and Newt essentially has pledged not to cheat on his latest wife. He hasn’t signed it yet, but in a long written statement responding to it, he said “I pledge to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others.” So Newt’s gonna sign the “I Won’t Cheat” pledge. I pledge to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my latest spouse. (interruption) No, he didn’t put a time frame on it. He just said he’s gonna do it. Well, not do it in this case, pledge not to cheat. I thought you did that in your wedding vows, but what do I know, I’ve only done it three times myself. Vows. Vows. Not the other.