RUSH: High Point, North Carolina, Scott wants to weigh in on the Trump announcement. Greetings, sir. Great to have you on program. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, really, really awesome to talk to you.

RUSH: I appreciate that, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: On the Trump announcement, I think personally it was refreshing, not all the same rhetoric and consultant gobbledygook. And, you know, it was pretty straight talk, a little bit all over the place sometimes, but I can certainly relate to his China talk, love-hate relationship with my situation. But I think the smartest thing about the announcement was not
really what he said, but what he did.

RUSH: What did he do?

CALLER: He ended his announcement about five minutes before the Rush Limbaugh Show.

RUSH: Oh, yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly right, something that had escaped my mind. You’re exactly right. He knew exactly when to wrap up.

CALLER: I don’t know when Bush exactly announced, but how much have you talked about Bush’s announcement versus his? Because he ended it at the right time pretty much.

RUSH: Well, Bush announced after the program yesterday.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Which was a very considerate thing to do. The Bushes are very polite people. I acknowledge this, and we’re gonna get to Jeb’s announcement. We’ll get to all of them at some point. A bunch of them announced that we haven’t talked about, what, 16 now or 20, I don’t even know what the number is, but there’s a lot of them in now.

CALLER: Well, he definitely trumped the Bush announcement, I would say.

RUSH: Yeah, I’d have to say that you’re right. So you didn’t find him braggadocios, that’s not off-putting to you, like when Trump says, “Hey, I’m really rich and I’ll show you here in a minute. I’m not ashamed of being rich.”

CALLER: Doesn’t me. I’m sure it is to a lot of people, but I mean there are other people in the race that are kind of straight talk, not typical. I mean, Carson is another one up there, not a political, never held office, but, you know, speaks his mind and is very articulate as well.

RUSH: You know, you reminded me of something I heard before Trump made his announcement this morning. I saw this on CNN. Some infobabe, I don’t remember who, was lamenting Trump getting in the race, is a clown, and so the real problem with Trump getting in is he’s going to make the Republican lower tier look good. And she cited Ben Carson as an example and how unfortunate that is, that Ben Carson is gonna end up looking presidential because Trump getting in is a clown.

And, folks, let me tell you something. This dovetails exactly with what I was talking about yesterday and a point that I’m gonna continue to try to make for as long as I am doing this program. Dr. Benjamin Carson is one of the finest, most accomplished human beings on this planet who has done more for people than most people in politics will ever do. And he’s done it personally, not with other people’s money.

Dr. Ben Carson is a first-class human being and citizen. He is exactly the kind of person that you could trust running any government institution. You would trust him to babysit your kids. He’s just an admirable human being. He has overcome great odds. He’s brilliant. He’s temperate. There is everything in the world to recommend about the humanity of Dr. Benjamin Carson, and here he is on CNN today ripped and said it’s unfortunate that somebody like Ben Carson will be made to look serious when Trump gets in as the clown.

There is not a single person in the media today that could wear Dr. Benjamin Carson’s uniform, whatever uniform he puts on in a day, a business suit, if it’s surgical scrubs, there’s not a single member of the media that could do anything close to what Ben Carson has done with his life. But he gets — and he’s not the only one — ripped to shreds, denigrated, destroyed, and for what? He holds to traditional values. He believes in morality. He is just a decent guy and he ends up a target for destruction. And he’s not the only one.

The same thing happened to Romney. Whatever you think of Romney and his politics, as a human being there’s none better. As a man of integrity, man of character, there’s none better. These people get destroyed and nobody stands up to defend ’em because then they get destroyed or attacked. It’s one of the many things that’s just out of whack. Compared to Hillary Clinton?

Every government worker, every federal employee, every record about every federal employee’s been hacked. Does that include Hillary? Has her private server been hacked? We demand to know this. We have every right to know whether her server’s been hacked. Did the ChiComs get her? They got everybody else. And why did the ChiComs want to hack every government employee? Not because they want their credit cards. The ChiComs don’t need anybody’s Amex account. They want to be able to collect data on federal employees to either recruit them as spies or blackmail them or both. And that would hold for Hillary Clinton if she becomes president.

You don’t think the Clintons have things that they don’t want people to know about? Even the Clintons. We think we know everything there is to know? I bet we don’t. Did Hillary’s server get hacked? Did the ChiComs know everything there is on that server that Hillary doesn’t want anybody to know? If they were able to get past every bit of security supposedly protecting every federal employee, here’s Mrs. Clinton’s little server in Chappaqua or whatever the hell it was, maybe that’s the reason why she’s not releasing 30-some-odd-thousand e-mails. These are serious questions.

But you compare Dr. Carson to the Clintons? I mean, it’s not even — talking character, accomplishment, intelligence, credibility, believability, every characteristic that matters, virtue, it’s no contest. The Clintons can’t even get on the same stage. And yet they’re placed there by a fawning accomplice media that’s doing the job of running around and destroying, literally, great, good, fine people. I think it’s unfortunate how easy it appears to be. It’s unfortunate how complete character assassination can end up being for somebody who just… why would you even want to destroy someone like Ben Carson? Why?

All he’s done is save the lives of children. I thought that’s what mattered to people on the left and Democrats. So much pro bono, brain surgery on young children, that was his specialty. They even made a movie about him, a movie about his life, it was so extraordinary, it was so exemplary, it was so inspiring. Now we got some no-accomplishment twit on CNN claiming that the worst thing about Trump getting in is he’s gonna make Ben Carson look legitimate. That’s what wrong.