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RUSH: You know, so yesterday I make the point, and actually a couple days before that I made the point that Hillary has pulled out of Ohio. She’s basically suspended campaign operations in Ohio. I said, “That’s kind of shocking. I mean, Ohio, you can’t win without winning Ohio.” You know what’s in the New York Times today? It doesn’t matter. Our old buddy Jonathan Martin, used to be at Politico, “Ohio, Long a Bellwether, Is Fading on the Electoral Map.” It doesn’t matter anymore. Ohio, you’re too white, too many white people to be in any way meaningful in a presidential election.

JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH: Now, somehow Ohio still remains crucial. No Republicans won the White House since the “Jurassic” age without winning Ohio. But for the Democrats, it doesn’t matter. Hillary pulls out, no big deal.

Greetings. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. 800-282-2882. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

Okay. I have to tell you, I am being inundated — well, inundated may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. I’m getting a lot of emails from a lot of people who are getting full-fledged panicked. I mean, it’s time to keep the sharp objects away from some of these people. They are convinced that two things are happening.

They are convinced that Trump is blowing this as badly as anybody could blow anything by not forgetting about this porn star, tweeting out about this woman, this Alicia Machado babe even at three o’clock this morning, while other issues are much more important, the issues that frame and define Hillary Clinton as unqualified and unfit and as corrupt. And they wish Trump would stop this. There are too many other things, it’s getting too close to the election now to be sidetracked by all this.

This Alicia Machado thing is a setup. It was a fix that has been in and has been planned by the Clinton campaign for a long time, just like Sandra Fluke was. In fact, Mollie Hemingway has a terrific story, and it doesn’t even mention me. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it doesn’t, a terrific story on how the Democrats set up this whole Fluke thing. I’m not gonna review too much of this, but it was made to look like it was a spontaneous event, that the Republicans were engaging in their War on Women and so forth, when in fact it was scripted and planned as a trap, as a setup for Republican candidates.

And Mollie Hemingway claims the same thing’s happening here with this Alicia Machado, which I think is true. And thus people are just scared to death that Trump is blowing it by falling for this and spending so much time on it and taking it all personally and wishing he would just forget it and move on to other things.And they are forgetting — well, I’m not gonna excuse it. Look, I’m sharing you with what I’m inundated with.

There’s another thing, too. The panic is not just about that. The panic is about the debate. The post-debate polls are coming in and it’s clear that in the scientific polls that Hillary prevailed. And there are accompanying stories that Trump refuses to believe it and that some Trump surrogates refuse to believe it and that the Trump team actually likes these flash polls, they don’t discredit the flash polls. You know, the Drive-Bys and noted conservative intellectuals pooh-pooh those flash polls that take place, these online polls where you click on who you think won as many times as you want. They trash those polls being inaccurate and unreliable and meaningless, in favor of the scientific polls ’cause the scientific polls are scientific.

The Trump team is out there saying, “We love these flash polls. That shows how popular the guy is. You can’t discount those flash polls.” They don’t want to hear talk about the flash polls don’t mean anything. To the Trump team they mean everything. They are a window into the vast popularity Trump has, which is much greater than the popularity Hillary has, and that I don’t doubt. But popularity is not the single determining factor, as we all know, in how people vote.

But there’s all kinds of conflicting information, but what I have gleaned — see, I don’t watch the stuff anymore, folks. I’m not depressed, and I’m not panicked. And I thought long and hard before opening this line of communication today with you. I thought long and hard about telling you this. I’ve mentioned this to Mr. Snerdley. He said, “Go ahead. They’re not gonna think that you’re phoning it in.”

I said, “I’m not worried about that.” I said, “They might think that I, by not watching TV every night, might think that I’m not fully as informed as I should be.”

“Come on, Rush, there’s nobody in the world that’s gonna think you’re not informed.” True. I understand. But, folks, I have — and it’s not just in this campaign. I think I’ve mentioned a number of times, I finally have had my fill. Just like the Sunday shows. Years ago they stopped being appealing to me. There was a time in my life when the McLaughlin Group was appointment television, the McLaughlin Group, I was in Sacramento, it’s the 1980s when that show started, and when I saw the McLaughlin Group I had dreams of being on a show like that someday. I’m planning my career rise and climbing my career ladder.

I was never invited to be on that show, but it doesn’t mean anything. I was invited to be on Novak’s show and a bunch of others. The point is — don’t want to sidetrack myself here — at some point they stopped, and this is not a criticism of them; it’s a comment on me. At some point they stopped exciting me. They became predictable. I knew, based on the guest panel, what was gonna be said. Who needs to watch Eleanor Clift every day to know what she says or what she’s gonna think? And the same thing with the Sunday shows.

You couldn’t pull me away from This Week with David Brinkley. They had the roundtable there with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson and George Will, and then Brinkley was the straw that stirred that drink. You couldn’t pull me away from it, and now, I mean, even if those same guys were on it, you reach a point where you don’t learn anything, you’re as informed and as knowledgeable and you have your opinions.

It’s not that I’m not open to other opinions or ways of thinking. It’s just the shows, in a broadcasting sense, Meet the Press, I never did watch the stuff on CNN. I don’t watch any of it, is the point. I don’t watch cable news at night. So I can honestly tell you that I am not in a funk, I am not depressed, I’m not suicidal, I’m not thinking it’s over, and I told Snerdley today maybe I’m making a mistake.

Maybe I ought to be watching this stuff so that I end up being as depressed and fatalistic as everybody else and come in here every day and reflect it. But I’m sorry, folks, I can’t. I don’t want to get depressed, I don’t want to get down in the dumps, and I don’t want to get teased with the idea that everything’s rigged and everything’s fake. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that’s going around now. You know me. I see everything.

I do my own show prep, and I’ve never stopped doing my show prep, and then there are all kinds of little helpers that send me stuff, trying to help. I got one this morning. I didn’t see this on my own. Some website I never heard of has done a narration of the post-debate video to “prove” that Hillary had assistance in her podium. She had maybe a secret teleprompter and other things because her cleaner, her guy… When nobody was looking, some guy came out and snatched a bunch of stuff like papers and stuff from Hillary’s podium while nobody was looking.

He was banished off the screen, and nobody did that to Trump’s podium, and so the theory is that Hillary was cheating; Hillary had some assistance in there and that nobody knows about it, nobody cares to find out about it. But this one website… I got people sending me this, and then the usual bromides about all the election locations that are rigged and fixed now. I just don’t spend a lot of time focusing on that. If elections were rigged, the Republicans wouldn’t win any. I understand the Democrats attempt fraud left and right. I’m not…

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not being na�ve. But the overriding point here is, folks, that I don’t immerse myself in the media narrative every day. I establish my own media narrative on this program, and that’s what I live. I’m aware. I’m aware of what the Drive-Bys are doing. I come in and report on it and tell you every day, but I don’t immerse myself in it. And, as such, if you are feeling fatalistic and defeatist and depressed thinking it’s over, I don’t. And if you do, I think I understand why, depending on how many of you might be immersing yourself in it.

What am I talking about is CNN every night, Fox News every night, MSNBC, whatever it is. If you’re watching television, I don’t care what you’re watching. If you’re watching cable news, you are going to get a distorted picture. Even on Fox. Don’t forget, now, Trump is so unusual and so outside the norm that having a perspective, a proper perspective report on Trump network-wide is gonna be difficult.

You’re gonna have individual guests or commentators that may be able to put this all in proper focus. But I just don’t even subject myself to it. So I’ve got my Stacks of Stuff here. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not living in denial about things. I’ve got all the news here. There’s further polling data on Hillary post-debate having won it. The conventional wisdom on Trump just not being able to get past this Alicia Machado story, tweeting at three a.m. about it — a tweet storm, as it was. And people wishing he would get back to the issues, so forth.

And various other stories relating to what the Trump campaign is doing. In fact, here’s one. There was a… I guess the New York Times had a story featuring unnamed members of Trump’s campaign admitting he lost the debate, and Trump is apparently livid about that, as are members of his campaign, and they are telling surrogates such as the people who go on TV to speak for Trump in the campaign to stop saying he lost the debate.

Trump doesn’t think he lost the debate. Do not say that and do not agree with it. Do not go along with it just to make it look like you’re thinking the right way. “We didn’t lose the debate. There are three of them. We used the first debate to set Hillary up.” They’ve got their own charter here about what their strategy is with these debates, and so they’re a little bit upset that even some Trump campaign people are going on TV and admitting, “Yeah, Trump lost the debate,” or admitting that the flash polls afterwards don’t tell an accurate or full story.

The truth of the matter as I see it here? I don’t see the Democrats acting like this is in the bag. I don’t see them acting like it’s over and it’s smooth sailing. I see ’em panicking. Did you see what the U.N. did? The U.N. sent out a story from their… I didn’t even know the U.N. had a news agency. The United Nations has a new agency. They ran a story begging the eight million Americans that don’t live in the country, scattered around the world, to sign up and vote against Trump. We can’t have Trump. Trump is the worst.

The USA Today newspaper, which has not — and I didn’t know this, but that’s what they say. They say they haven’t endorsed for the presidency in 34 years but they have now. It’s too important. Nobody should vote for Trump. We can’t have Trump. You gotta vote against Trump. We gotta get rid of Trump. Trump must go. The New York Times, same thing: Trump must go. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, pulls out of Ohio.

Hillary Clinton is not pulling ahead. Even in these post-debate polls where it is indicated by the New York Times that she won the debate, it doesn’t mean anything. She’s not getting a boost; she’s not getting a bump in the other polls. And even the people responding to these “who won the debate in your opinion” polls, most of them are not saying it matters in terms of changing their mind or influencing how they’re gonna vote. Gallup has a new report today that young people…

A greater percentage of young people than in the last, I think, 10-15 years are now saying they’re not gonna vote, and that’s got the Democrats panicked. The youth vote, Obama got it. Obama got a vast majority of the Millennial-type youth vote. The same cohort is claiming in polling data anyway that they’re less interested in voting this year in greater numbers than we’ve seen. That’s got the Democrats bothered. They’re bothered by the fact that Hillary is not 50 points ahead.

They’re bothered by the fact that Hillary can’t pull away, that she doesn’t have a lead. The media is upset! F. Chuck Todd and a number of media people are expressing frustration at their inability to take Trump out despite everything they’ve thrown at him. They know they have abandoned the principles of journalism. They know they’re making no pretense at anything journalistic. Fair? Objective? All out the window. They’re throwing the kitchen sink at Trump and they’re admitting it doesn’t work.

It isn’t taking him out, no matter which poll you look at. You also have to keep in mind that it is an objective of the media-Democrat Party complex to dispirit you, to depress you. It is their purpose. The media-Democrat Party complex objective is to get you so depressed, so dispirited that you think it’s over now. Beyond help. It’s beyond fixing. They want to you lose your enthusiasm. They want you to begin to think of Trump the way they think of Trump.

And you notice the thing that they are not doing? For all this talk about what Trump’s not doing and what he ought to be focusing on instead of the porn star, whatever she is, the Hillary campaign’s not talking about what great stuff she’s got planned. The Hillary campaign is totally devoted to Trump. They’re not exactly running a big, positive campaign on all the great things that lie ahead of America if only Hillary Clinton is elected. They’re not going there.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, folks, there was a piece… I’ve talked about this, but I’m gonna read you an excerpt of it again. Thomas B. Edsall used to write for the Washington Post, and I think he has something to do with the Obama campaign now. If I’m wrong about that, it doesn’t matter. This ran in the New York Times, actually. It was July 23rd, 2012. The headline: “The Politics of Anything Goes,” and here’s an excerpt from the article, and it is directly applicable to right now.

Here we go: “Now, faced with a tough re-election fight, President Obama has, in fundamental respects, adopted the strategy he denounced eight years ago. [Obama] is running a two-track campaign,” in 2012 here. “One track of his re-election drive seeks to boost turnout among core liberal groups; the other aims to suppress turnout and minimize his margin of defeat in the most hostile segment of the electorate, whites without college degrees.”

My point is back in 2012, this guy in the New York Times wrote of Obama’s reelection strategy, which means the Obama campaign had told him what it is. The Obama strategy was to dispirit, to depress, to suppress vote turnout of “white” Americans “without college degrees,” primarily white men. And it’s the exact the same thing that they’re doing now — the exact the same thing they’re trying now — and you have to have a stiff upper lip and resist this!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Before that 2012 story in the New York Times, there was a 2011 story in the New York Times by Dan Balz. No, wait. Thomas B. Edsall. Edsall wrote both of them. The 2011 story in the New York Times, it was in November, and it acknowledged that the Obama campaign for 2012 was going to write off white working-class voters. Their research, their internal polling data told them they already had.

So instead what they were going to do, acknowledging the loss of white working-class voters, which went big for Obama in 2008, they were going to focus on minority outreach and registration, and there began the focus on such things like gay marriage, go after that group of people, then amnesty and so forth, because they made the determination they were gonna lose the white working class vote.

One year later, Edsall rights another piece. They didn’t just write off white working-class voters; the Obama campaign embarked on a strategy involving the media to depress and dispirit turnout, essentially to suppress turnout of white working class voters. These are old Reagan Democrats, blue-collar people who all of a sudden stopped being termed blue-collar people and became white working class.

When they’re blue-collar, that means they’re in the Democrat camp and they’re pro-union and they’re the greatest guys on earth. But when they’re not gonna vote the Democrat, the media changes the description and calls them white working men without college degrees.

And this is an important thing to remember, because you’re being bombarded by the Clinton campaign. When you turn on CNN, MSNBC, when you read any newspaper, when you go to over half the websites out there, you are not reading the media; you are not reading the news. You are reading the Clinton campaign and a coordinated effort to distract you, to depress you, to dispirit you, and to suppress your interest in voting. The objective is to make you think you have no chance, that everybody else is aligned against you.

The real world is a common phrase they use — the real world — and that’s not Trump’s world. The real world is not you people supporting and voting Trump. The real world is everybody supporting Hillary. The real world is everybody watching NBC, CBS, ABC, in terms of the way they speak and write in the Drive-By Media. And it’s all aimed, it’s all oriented toward making you think that you are part of some small, irrelevant minority, trapped in the past, being overrun by a bunch of progressives who want modernize and take the country in a different direction. You’re just an old fuddy-duddy, and you’re uneducated, therefore you’re not smart, and you just want to stay rooted in the past where you used to run the show. All of this is coming from the Clinton campaign.

I don’t care if you turn on NPR, even Fox News, portions of Fox News. Depending on the show you’re watching, you’re gonna see a commentator from the Washington Post. You’re gonna see a commentator from the New York Times. You’re gonna see a guest from the Drive-By Media. And you’re probably gonna recognize it, and you’re gonna get miffed.

But the point is you cannot escape it except listening to this program, because there’s not one syllable of this program that is influenced by the Drive-Bys. Well, as I said the other day, it’s hard to succeed in constantly, always avoiding it. It’s a daily effort to avoid getting sucked in, because there is so much, and it makes it look like, gee, everybody thinks this, and who wants to be an outlier. You don’t want to be an outlier. You don’t want to think that you’re the oddball or in a group of oddballs, and that’s exactly how they present everything.

I’ll give you another example. That religious freedom law in Indiana. The way that was covered, if you supported the religious freedom law in Indiana, the media made you think that you were a member of 10% of the population, in terms of your thinking. Along with the way they report on it, they also adopt a tone that includes an assumption that everybody watching them agrees, too, with whatever they’re saying about something.

So in this case, the news of the day is that Trump has lost it. The news of the day is that Trump’s gone full-blown nutty. The news of the day is that Trump has lost his focus, that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, that Trump’s rank amateur status has finally surfaced. And since wherever you go in the Drive-By Media that’s what you’re going to hear or see, or a flavor of that. You are supposed to think, “My gosh, I don’t think that, but it seems like everybody else does, oh, no, oh, no, we’re losing.” And it’s all a myth.

You just have to resist it. And you have to look at ways that you can disapprove it, in your own mind. The way I do it is to look at how they’re presenting Hillary. There isn’t anything positive about the Hillary campaign. Every aspect of the Hillary campaign is focused on destroying Trump. And this is what they always do.

Now, Obama was different because he was an empty canvas, and people could make him whatever they wanted him to be. He was an unknown. He had been a senator for a couple days. He didn’t really have a record, first African-American president, did not get particularly partisan in public, only in private did he do that. And so most people didn’t see him as a radical; they saw him as a, wow, such a positive change from Bush, who they had succeeded generating hatred for and the war in Iraq. So people could make Obama whatever they wanted him to be, which was always gonna be positive.

Hillary’s not that. Hillary’s not an empty canvas; she’s not an empty slate; Hillary’s got higher negatives than she has positives. They know it. So they’ve taken the focus off of her. They’ve taken the focus off the fact she doesn’t have an agenda. Well, not one that she can ballyhoo. The things that she wants to do are just double down, triple down on what Obama’s done. Nobody wants more of that, so they don’t talk about that. They focus exclusively on Trump. And now this Alicia Machado thing has been blown up into the biggest thing that has happened in the campaign so far.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We’re gonna start in Youngstown, Ohio. It’s Michael. Great to be with you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Mega Buckley, Ohio, dittos Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Hey, listen, a couple days ago we had a nice Pence rally in Leetonia, Ohio. A thousand people showed up. So Mike’s talking, a wonderful talk, and he brings up NAFTA and he brings up TPP. Keep in mind we live in the Rust Belt. He says, “Did you hear Donald’s remarks about NAFTA and TPP?” and the crowd was screaming joyfully, and he said, “Did you hear what Hillary said?” And they said, “What’d she say?” And he said, “She said it was the greatest thing ever.”

The crowd went berserk.

The crowd starts chanting, “U! S! A!”

They’re going out of their minds. People gotta realize, this election’s about one thing, one thing only: Jobs. If Trump stays on focus with getting rid of TPP, keeping manufacturing in the Rust Belt, not only is he gonna carry Ohio — and I heard you mention that she’s pulling out of Ohio. But how about Michigan? How about Pennsylvania? How about western New York? You know he’s already gonna carry West Virginia ’cause of the stuff she did with the coal. So, you know, these little things they’re doing on the side, they don’t amount to a hill of beans if you’re not gonna give people jobs.

RUSH: Did I hear you correctly in all of that, express some — shall we say — “dissatisfaction” with Trump not being focused on those things while he is toying around with the former overweight Miss Universe?

CALLER: Well, as far as that goes, shame on the media. I’m gonna probably say her name wrong, but I saw they were talking about on Megyn Kelly the other night, is it Broaddrick, Anita Broad…? What was the woman that Bill Clinton raped?

RUSH: Juanita Broaddrick.

CALLER: Juanita. Now, you have that, and I heard about the tweeting thing she was going back and forth with Chelsea over. You know, I had three younger people that said, “What is that all about?” They never even heard of these Bill Clinton scandals. So if they want to go there, there’s a lot of dirt to go there, but the focus needs to stay on jobs. The Rust Belt only cares about jobs.

RUSH: Okay. So, again, you think Trump is making a mistake by continuing to focus on the Clintons and fighting back, defending himself on these charges that he called this woman a pig?

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: He should stay focused on the jobs, focused on the Rust Belt.

CALLER: Stay focused on the jobs, and you will win the day.

RUSH: Okay. So are you worried?

CALLER: Oh, no, I’m not worried. I think Trump’s gonna win, and hopefully we’ll have eight years of Trump and eight years of Pence.

RUSH: So you’re not worried about this?

CALLER: Not worried. You know, Rush, if you came — and I know you lived in Pittsburgh for a while, and I’m about an hour from Pittsburgh. If we get in the car and we drove around for an hour, you’re gonna see a 95% Trump sign versus Hillary sign.

RUSH: Yes. Yes, I’ve heard this. Salena Zito, who used to write for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, seems to be making a project out of documenting the rural Democrat vote throughout the state of Pennsylvania. Not just rural, just outside the cities, small town, medium-size town. And apparently Trump is going just gangbusters in that state and has it in play.

There are so many things like that that defy the conventional wisdom. The Republican ought never — I mean, Pennsylvania never in normal election would never be in play. But here it is for Trump despite all of these forays into the areas people think are a waste of time, such as this former Miss Universe or whatever that… I guess you can’t even say she gained a lot of weight.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, I mentioned this Mollie Hemingway piece. I’m torn as to whether or not to even devote time to this since so many people think that Trump is off the reservation here, ought to get back to the issues instead of being sidetracked and defending himself against whatever the charge is regarding the former Miss Universe. But Mollie Hemingway has written a great place here at The Federalist, and the headline — let me just touch on a little bit of this. By the way, this is I think a first. This is a story about Sandra Fluke that does not mention me. I mean, I’m not even alluded to in this story, which I didn’t think was possible. But Mollie Hemingway has done it.

“Alicia Machado Is 2016’s Sandra Fluke, A Democratic Public Relations Scam —Democrats and the media work together seamlessly to push the idea that innocent, random young women are victimized by mean old Republican men.”

Now, this piece starts with a little history about who Fluke was and how she came to be. “In February 2012, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing about how an Obamacare mandate would harm religious liberty. These religious liberty concerns have been upheld at the Supreme Court all the way down, but were dismissed as illegitimate by Democratic leaders and their many allies in the media,” back in 2012 at the time.

“Democrats on the committee,” the House Oversight Committee, “wanted to have a Georgetown Law student testify in favor of forcing religious groups that provide student health plans to violate their consciences if they don’t sponsor abortifacients and birth control.”

Now, remember, this was all about making Georgetown supply abortifacients in violation of their religious beliefs, a Catholic school. Well, the members of the committee refused to seat the Georgetown law student in the committee hearing, and Democrats walked out in protest, later holding an event that was made to look like a congressional hearing. It ended up being an ad, but the Democrats scheduled a fake committee hearing that was made to look just like a real committee hearing, and the Georgetown law student was testifying. And that’s when the Georgetown law school student claimed that she needed $3,000 a month of free birth control pills, which you can get for 12 bucks at Walmart.

originalAnd she was demanding that Georgetown look the other way. They didn’t and it was sexist and racist and all of this, and she was demanding that Obamacare include and pay for every form of contraception that any woman wanted, for the most part. The Democrats ran that, and it looked like it was a genuine congressional hearing.

And thus that Georgetown law student “became the centerpiece of the Democrats’ ‘War on Women’ messaging that they pounded throughout the year. The media completely ate it up, hook, line, and sinker. Within minutes, she was put on every major network and cable outlet. The media ran with stories about how women weren’t allowed to testify at the hearing, even though two female college administrators did testify. … The facts were no barrier to the headlines, which included CBS’ ‘Dems decry all-male House panel on WH contraception rule’ and CNN’s ‘Angry lawmakers challenge lineup at hearing: ‘Where are the women?'”

That’s how it all started, and it was planned, and so is Miss Universe. She has been planned. This has been something that’s designed to be injected in the campaign after the first debate, actually at the debate. And a lot of people are saying, “Somebody needs to tell Trump this whole thing has been jigged up, it’s not legitimate, it’s not real, and he shouldn’t give it any more time.”

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