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RUSH: There are two long-form pieces that I want to call your attention to today.  Victor Davis Hanson back with a brilliant piece about the Clintons and who they are and what motivates ’em. It’s at National Review Online, and I just love it because it, essentially, in his own words, makes points that I have been trying to make about the Clintons since I first became aware of them in 1990. 

There’s another piece, and this also is a piece right after my heart.  It’s by somebody named Thomas Frank.  Now, there are two Thomas Franks, and one of the Thomas Franks is a big lib who wrote about what happened to Kansas. Meaning, why are people voting against their self-interest by voting against liberals and so forth. 

This is a Thomas Frank writing for the U.K. Guardian.  The headline to this piece: “Forget the FBI Cache; the Podesta Emails Show How America is Run.”

I have noted on several occasions what’s at stake here.  The establishment, who they are, why they will do anything to hold onto power.  And this piece nails it.  And the brilliant aspects of this piece is that you can learn it.  You don’t have to tell anybody what you think. 

It’s all there in the Podesta emails, the WikiLeaks document dump.  It’s all there, how these people in the establishment are devoted to the preservation of their own power and their own place within the establishment. That ideology comes a close second.  That what they’re really focused on is power.  And anybody that has power they will sidle up to.  And it explains the unification of people from Hollywood, from Silicon Valley, from Wall Street to Big Finance to corporate America to multinational corporate world and how it relates to the Democrat Party and the media and so forth. 

It’s everything that I’ve told you.  It’s everything I’ve theorized to you about who these people are and why they’re members of the establishment, what’s beneficial and how you can’t get in, how it’s closely guarded.  But the great thing about this peace is that he documents it and proves it by virtue of what the various members of the establishment are writing to each other in the Podesta email dump. 

There’s so much more than has been reported, for example.  There are emails to Podesta from other powerful people begging him to get their kids a job, begging him to get their daughter a job or their wife a job or get them a job or get them a free flight on some Saudi billionaire’s jet somewhere, and it all happens.  And none of it is merit based.  It’s all based on membership in this club, which, again, has nothing to do with merit, it has a little bit to do with ideology.  It has more to do with your resume. You know, where you went to school, where you work, who your parents were, legacy things like this. 

But it is so well done.  I’m stunned it runs in the Guardian.  The Guardian’s a left-wing paper in the U.K., and this piece just indicts the establishment.  It explains why Trump is winning.  It explains why.  It doesn’t specifically say so, but if you read it you’ll understand why Trump has got so much support, why so many people are so fed up because the last thing this group cares about is the country.  They don’t care about what’s good for the country.  That falls by the wayside in the wake of considerations of what’s good for them. 

Now, none of this is a surprise in terms of you know that there are people like this, but this documents it and it’s extensive, and it’s primarily Democrats.  The Republican members are there as pets so to speak, but they don’t rank.  But it’s all about Republicans who want to be, who want to be in this club, who want to be taken seriously, who want to be accepted.  It’s classic high school, except the people we’re talking about are multimillionaires. 

I’m not gonna take the time to read the whole thing.  I may give you excerpts, but I’m pointing you to it.  We’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com.  “Forget the FBI Cache; the Podesta Emails Show How America is Run.” And, boy, is that right.  And it has nothing to do, literally has nothing to do with the will of the people. It has nothing to do with what you learned in civics 101 in junior high school. It has nothing to do with what you think the country was founded to be.  That’s not at all how America is run, nor who runs it. Depending on who you are and how much you think about these things, it will confirm suspicions that you’ve had.  It’s great.  It’s stunning. 

And then the Victor Davis Hanson piece is just over the top in its brilliance at defining the Clintons for us and for everybody.  It’s nothing that you don’t know again — well, some of it might be.  But it is so well crafted, and it’s just dead-on right.  Let me give you just an excerpt paragraph from Victor Davis Hanson here

“Of course, the Clintons are not only corrupt but cynical as well. They accept that the progressive media, the foundations, the universities, the bureaucracies, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley honor power more than trendy left-wing politics; they well understand that their fans will, for them, make the necessary adjustments to contextualize Clinton criminality or amorality. Sexual predations, the demonization of women, graft, and unequal protection under the law are also of no consequence to the inbred, conflicted, and morally challenged media — who will always check in with the Clinton team, like errant dogs who scratch the backdoor of their master after a periodic runaway,” wanting to be let back in.” 

It just dissects everything that is the Clintons: Clinton, Inc., Clinton friends, how the Clintons managed to go from paupers to multi-, multi-, multimillionaires without producing anything, without generating anything.  It’s a story of Clinton grift, Clinton graft, Clinton corruption.  It’s everything that you know, so well-crafted as to be undeniable.  So those are two long-form pieces I want to call your attention to.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We’re gonna start in Stafford, Virginia.  This is Carna.  Great to have you.  Hi.

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  Thank you so much for taking my call.

RUSH:  Well, you’re more than welcome.  You bet.

CALLER:  Okay, I want to say that I want to thank you so much for being a voice for millions of us who are completely fed up with the corruption and the dishonesty in our government and media.  I’m thankful that you have the platform and you can be our voice.

RUSH:  Well, I’m happy that that’s how you see me.  Yeah.  I just… I come here every day and I share with you what I think about things, and the fact that it dovetails with what you think is… That’s awesome.  I’m glad to hear it.

CALLER:  Oh, I don’t trust the polls at all.  I feel the media is so dishonest and I just feel that this election truly is about “we, the people” versus the corrupt political establishment, and we just want our voices to be heard — and through our votes, that will happen.

RUSH:  It really is.  You know, that’s not just a bunch of words.  Folks, let me make a little deviation here for something.  Around the holidays each year I try to take a brief moment to tell you how much I appreciate all of you.  A couple of weeks ago we had an advertiser, a sponsored dinner here where — as with many of our sponsors — we try to pick a day for as many of them as possible to get here, and I made remarks, as I usually do.

And I want to tell you something I told them.  They all have phenomenal success on this program, and that’s because of you.  And I told them. I gave them my philosophy of this job, my program and how I go about it, what I think the objectives are that have to be met, the business objectives.  And I told them that what enables them to have success as advertisers and sponsors of this program is you.  And how the relationship that I have with you is what makes everything work, and that I do this program for the audience. 

It’s a focus of mine that I’ve had since day one, that everything here is done… Everything’s for the show, not for outside interests or not for anything other than you.  It’s to service the reasons you’re here and to meet the expectations you have of what you expect to hear — the level of competence, the talent, the information. Everything you expect, I try to meet that and surpass it each and every day.  I told them in no uncertain terms that the wonderful aspect of all this is the connection that I have developed with you, the people who listen to the program, and it’s what makes their advertising work.

I said, “It’s because there is a mutual respect and a sophistication on the part of people that listen to this program. They understand how things work.  They understand why there are sponsors, and they understand the role sponsors play in the success of a commercial enterprise like this in a free market.”  We don’t have donors; we don’t have underwriters; we don’t have people making pledges.  I mean, this all has to make it or break it within the market.  I praised to the hilt those of you in this audience and your sophistication of how things work and your loyalty.

I just — I really do.  I consider it to be a matter of great fortune for me that just by virtue of the fact that I can come here every day and just shoot from the hip and be totally honest about what I think about things that are happening that resonates with so many of you, is a godsend.  It is a blessing.  And I have never taken it for granted. Meaning: I never assume that you’re gonna be here no matter what.  There’s a deep amount of respect.  I was reminded of this because Carna, our first caller, thanks me for speaking up for you. 

I just appreciate that she has that attitude about what goes on here.  ‘Cause it really is, folks.  We’ve reached a crossroads here.  I mean, in the 29/28 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve had massive attitudinal shifts about government and about people in it and about how the country works, and I used to have a misguided perception of how things work.  And as I’ve done this more and I’ve gotten older and acquired more experience and knowledge, I’ve developed a greater understanding.  It’s not an us-versus-them thing per se, but it’s close to that. 

There is a ruling class.  There is an establishment.  There is a collection of elites, and like any collection of powerful people, they arrange things so that they benefit constantly.  I mean, it’s what any powerful group of people do.  If you run your family, if you have a family, you want to arrange things so your family does well.  I mean, it’s human nature to do this. But the collection, the assimilation of power that has occurred in this establishment has now resulted in their interests — their selfish interests — superseding by a lot the interests of the country at large. 

So there is this battle for the kind of country we’re gonna be, and we’re in a battle with people who don’t care what kind of country this is because they’ve got it made already.  They’ve got it jacked.  They’ve arranged things so that they benefit no matter what happens “out there,” and by that I mean in the rest of the country.  They don’t live “out there,” and what happens “out there” doesn’t affect them and the way they live and the way they manage their future for their kids and their friends and themselves. 

It’s a very closed relationship — this club, this clique, whatever you want to call it — and you can’t get into it by simply being good what you do, by excelling at what you do, merit-based things.  It’s not how you get in it.  There are other tests that have nothing to do with the traditional ways you and I have been taught to climb a ladder of success.  Their ladder exists and people climb it, but they don’t reach higher rungs by getting better at what they do, outcompeting other people at what they do.  There are other ways. 

And let me… This would be a good time. I mentioned at the top of the program that I ran across this piece in the U.K. Guardian:  “Forget the FBI Cache; the Podesta Emails Reveal How America is Run.” I read this thing today.  It prints out… We’ve linked to it at RushLimbaugh.com, and I really would recommend you, when you have time, reading it. It’s not that long.  It prints out to four pages.  For some reason it’s large font here so it’s really not that many pages at a normal font size. 

But let me just give you three paragraphs hear to illustrate what I mean.  I’ve tried to explain this in my own words over the years about who these people are, what motivates them, and how they work together in stacking the deck for themselves — and it’s Republicans and Democrats.  It’s not based on ideas. It’s not based on, “Our ideas are better than the Democrats.”  It has nothing to do the way these people organize their lives.

It has to do with power, total power. “The emails currently roiling the U.S. presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.

“They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers. The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like.”

This is a reference to a story not long ago where some of these elites, a friend of theirs bought a house in West Virginia and they couldn’t understand it.  Some member of this club actually bought a house in West Virginia, and the others were so puzzled they had to go there to see what it looked like.  They had to drive to West Virginia to find out why their buddy bought a house there.  They couldn’t believe anybody would do it.  So this is a sly reference to that. 

“They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

“Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades.” He goes on to talk about how these are stolen emails maybe, he’s not sure. He’s nervous about trafficking. He acknowledges that they might be illegally obtained and gotten but that they can’t be ignored. 

So he says: “With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty. … High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.”

Honorary degrees, awards, backslapping, telling each other how wonderful they are and how average everybody else is. 

“Certain industries loom large and virtuous here. Hillary’s ingratiating speeches to Wall Street are well known of course, but what is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers now seem to stand on every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that. In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet,” even before Obama was elected.  He turned out to have named them all. 

“The far-sighted innovators of Silicon Valley are also here in force, interacting all the time with the leaders of the party of the people.” He goes on to say that what orients and unites all these people, it is liberalism, they all admit that it’s all being Democrat, but it’s power. It’s acceptance. It’s “this is who runs the club.”  It’s a club everybody wants to get into and you can only get into it if you are of a certain mindset, if you have certain pedigree, if you have a certain amount of money or show a potential to being able to earn some and thus spread it around opportunity-wise for other members’ kids. 

It’s a closed clique.  They are not the best and brightest. They’re not the smartest. They haven’t had to prove themselves in the market in many of these peoples’ cases, the career politicians.  This is the establishment.  This is the elites. This is the ruling class that Angelo Codevilla wrote about.  Their concerns just have very little in common.  Illegal immigration, to complain about it is so, so uninformed and so small-minded.  They never encounter, they never face the consequences of their own laws. They don’t face the consequences of their own directives or actions. 

They live insulated lives of privilege and luxury because they’ve set themselves up this way.  And anything that comes along that might upset all of this — and that’s Donald Trump in this series — cannot be allowed to get anywhere near it or close.  So every instinct I’ve had about this has been borne out to be accurate.  This is a fascinating piece to read, the whole thing.

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