RUSH: Let’s go to the audio sound bites. Here’s a montage. We put this together to illustrate the hypocrisy. Obama’s calls for ‘sacrifice’ interspersed with details of his wife’s vacation.
OBAMA: (June 1, 2009) A sacrifice you may not have chose to make, but a sacrifice you are nevertheless called to make.
ATTKISSON: The First Lady’s group is said to occupy 60 rooms. A posh hotel, $3,000 to $6,000 a night.
OBAMA: (June 1, 2009) Making a sacrifice for the next generation.
ATTKISSON: The First Lady will visit the king and queen on the taxpayer’s dime.
OBAMA: (March 30, 2009) A set of sacrifices from all parties.
ATTKISSON: The Air Force version of a 757: $146,000 for the round trip.
OBAMA: (November 26, 2008) I’m willing to make some sacrifice because there are people who are goin’ through tough times.
ATTKISSON: Expenses for Mrs. Obama’s staff: That’s $95,000 just for Secret Service.
OBAMA: (January 12, 2009) Everyone’s going to have to give.
ATTKISSON: One newspaper called Mrs. Obama ‘Marie Antoinette.’
OBAMA: (January 12, 2009) Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game.
RUSH: A little montage there of Obama telling us we all need to sacrifice and we all need to cut back, interspersed with details provided by Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News of the largesse, the luxury, the expenses of the vacation taken by Michelle (My Belle) Obama. You want to hear that again? Want to hear that again? It does resonate, does it not? It does permeate out there. It cuts through all the fog much like our similarly produced montage with Bob Torricelli. Okay, play it again. Sacrifice for you, trips to Spain for them. Oh! And have you heard, have you heard Lynn Sweet, the formerly respectable Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times she blogs for, said the real reason for the trip was that one of Michelle’s friends was in pain. One of Michelle’s friends was really suffering and Michelle had promised to spend some time with one of her friends. It was really some emotional disorders, emotional dysfunctions. Some very upsetting things happened in Michelle’s friend’s life, and Michelle had promised to spend some type with her. That’s what Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times said. That’s the real reason for the trip to Spain…with 40 people and a bunch of Secret Service people, and 60 rooms. ‘Cause she had a friend that’s in the dumps, depressed, got the blues, down and out. So while Michelle was ministering to her depressed buddy in Spain, Obama has been demanding and asking of sacrifice from you.
OBAMA: (June 1, 2009) A sacrifice you may not have chose to make, but a sacrifice you are nevertheless called to make.
ATTKISSON: The First Lady’s group is said to occupy 60 rooms. A posh hotel, $3,000 to $6,000 a night.
OBAMA: (June 1, 2009) Making a sacrifice for the next generation.
ATTKISSON: The First Lady will visit the king and queen on the taxpayer’s dime.
OBAMA: (March 30, 2009) A set of sacrifices from all parties.
ATTKISSON: The Air Force version of a 757: $146,000 for the round trip.
OBAMA: (November 26, 2008) I’m willing to make some sacrifice because there are people who are goin’ through tough times.
ATTKISSON: Expenses for Mrs. Obama’s staff: That’s $95,000 just for Secret Service.
OBAMA: (January 12, 2009) Everyone’s going to have to give.
ATTKISSON: One newspaper called Mrs. Obama ‘Marie Antoinette.’
OBAMA: (January 12, 2009) Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game.
RUSH: That’s Obama telling you to sacrifice, to give it up for America while his wife is in Spain. Now, the woman in question here. Her gynecologist’s father had died, and so she had to spend some time with Michelle. Her gynecologist’s father died. Now, are woman really that…? I wouldn’t know, have to ask. Are women really that close to their gynecologists that when your gynecologist’s father dies, you need a vacation in Spain? Her friend, who is the wife of the head of Obama’s campaign fund and the gynecologist who delivered Michelle’s daughter, her father died early in July. And she was depressed and distressed, and so she had to go to Spain with 40 other people in 60 rooms because her gynecologist’s father passed away — the gynecologist who delivered Michelle’s daughter. Now, you compare… We have a name for Michelle: ‘Moochelle.’ Mooch, mooch, Moochelle Obama. That will tick ’em off, won’t it, Snerdley?
Moochelle Obama. You compare her with the hated Sarah Palin. Moochelle Obama keeps a personal staff of 24. Now we know why: To administer to gynecologist friends whose fathers pass away. Her personal staff includes a makeup artist and a hairstylist, a total annual government salary of more than $1.6 million for the personal staff of Moochelle Obama, plus their travel expenses. Her Secret Service for security is extra on these trips. Now, you compare and contrast that with the hate and the ridicule that is thrown at Sarah Palin who did what? She sold the governor’s jet, she dismissed the government’s cook, she prepared her own meals, she returned the governor’s automobile and drove her own car, she dismissed the governor’s security staff, and knows how to use her own gun. So Michelle’s gynecologist, her father died. So she needed to go to Spain to sort it all out. All right, there you have it. That’s why.
I, as you’ll hear when we come back, I, ladies and gentlemen, am being blamed for the worldwide media take on this trip.
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RUSH: Now, by the way, folks, this new explanation from Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times, of Michelle’s friend’s father dying, the gynecologist’s father died, and she needed to spend time with Michelle, that’s coming from one anonymous source. One anonymous source told Lynn Sweet, and now the rest of the media is running with this, ’cause they know that this does not look good. You ought to hear the sound bites, ‘the optics, the optics, the optics,’ that’s a word that every one of these media people have used, the optics don’t look good. It’s not the optics. It’s the substance, you people. Remember Bush would go to vacation in Crawford, Texas, to a shack, Bush’s house in Crawford, 1300 square feet, it’s a shack, and he go down there, what would he do? He’d ride a bike through the woods and he would chop wood and the media gave holy hell for taking all these vacations.
Obama’s taken more vacations in a year and a half than Bush took in four years in terms of total days and hours. And a lot of Bush’s vacations were to his house in Crawford, Texas. The media was just bored being out in the sticks in Texas. Texas is a foreign country to them anyway, and they had to go down there and cover that. And when Bush did invite ’em he made ’em ride bikes with him showing how out of shape they are, but the optics are very, very bad. We never heard this explanation before for Michelle Obama when the trip was brought up to Robert Gibbs and David axle. All last week, the week before, at the White House briefing, ‘Why is Michelle doing this? Why is the family split up on his birthday?’ We didn’t hear, ‘Well, Michelle’s gynecologist’s father died.’ In July. That’s another thing. Michelle’s gynecologist’s father passed away in July, and the gynecologist said, ‘Gosh, I need to spend time with Michelle.’ Okay, guess what? Let’s call Spain. Let’s see if we can get 60 rooms in Marbella. We’ll put this trip together on the fly. Folks, it just doesn’t wash out there. Here is media mantra on the optics of Michelle’s trip being bad.
O’DONNELL: The optics of this trip are not good.
ALLEN: Democrats are a little worried about the optics.
WITT: The optics of this trip.
SCARBOROUGH: Democrats just don’t like the optics.
OLBERMANN: The white house should have thought of the optics.
MALKIN: The optics couldn’t have been worse.
YGLESIAS: There is a question of optics.
TODD: Worried about optics.
WALLACE: There should be people at the White House who are solely focused on the optics.
HENDERSON: In terms what the optics mean.
KRAUTHAMMER: The optics are terrible in the middle of a recession.
SANCHEZ: The bottom line answer is optics matter.
RUSH: Is the Journolist list still going? Are these guys still plotting at another location on how to cover this stuff? I mean that’s from across the political spectrum. You have people on Fox, you have people all over the media using ‘the optics are bad.’ Why can’t they just say, ‘You know, these pictures don’t look good.’ The optics? ‘Cause they’re trying to fool people in Rio Linda. That’s why.
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RUSH: There’s a story from Sunday in The Politico: FLOTUS’ ‘Star Power in Demand.’ This is Moochelle Obama. ‘With midterm elections looming, the White House has started debating how to unleash an untapped political weapon: Michelle Obama.’ Now, they can’t send Barack out there to help Democrats, but her star power is such that she’s got great approval ratings. They’re gonna send Moochelle out there to help wavering Democrat candidates. Ha!
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RUSH: Last night on MSNBC, somebody from the Center for American Progress, Matt Iglesias, was asked the following question: ‘Is it too defensive to say taking the trip at a time of economic unhappiness was tone deaf and that the White House should have thought of the optics first?’
IGLESIAS: You always have to think of optics. At the same time, you know, people do need a vacation. It’s hard to know where it is you could have gone that you would be immune to criticism. Remember Bill Clinton always took criticism from the right for his sort of random vacations. Some of these people, Rush Limbaugh is very good at ginning up sort of phony controversy.
RUSH: There you have it. So I, ladies and gentlemen, your host, responsible for the phony controversy worldwide. I’ll tell you who ginned this up. It was the UK press. It was the UK media that had all the pictures, the ten-page stories of all the luxury, the hypocrisy, the expense. It was the UK media. Clinton’s vacations? Clinton polled his vacations. What to wear, where to go, took a lot of ’em, who to grab on vacation, they polled that, too. But, you know, folks, again to remind you, when Bush went on vacation, he went home. He went to his little shack in Crawford and chopped wood. He even made world leaders come down there, Vladimir Putin went down there. The king of Saudi Arabia went down there for barbecues. His vacation was to his home and they were ridiculing Bush constantly. And this Iglesias idiot, ‘Well, you know, people do need a vacation.’ Here’s Axelrod last night on the Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer said, ‘Was the criticism of her vacation in Spain with her daughter fair?’
AXELROD: She wanted to take her daughter on a trip. They went with some friends of the family to celebrate another little girl’s birthday. There aren’t all that many places to go where you get privacy. Wherever you go, security’s gonna come not because she asked for it but because that is the nature of her position in life. She’s a very good mom, she’s very committed, and she wanted to do something with her daughter.
RUSH: Yeah, that was the original story, that the daughter wanted a trip to Spain. Oh, yeah, okay. How many of you, your daughter comes to you at age nine, ‘Mommy, mommy, I want to go to Spain.’ ‘Fine. Great. We’re gonna call 39 or 40 friends and we’ll get 60 rooms over there in the hotel and we’ll fly over in a Boeing 757 — whatever you want, Sasha, you want to go to Spain.’ But then all of a sudden we get the story that it was Michelle’s gynecologist’s father, the gynecologist is a woman, her father died, she’s depressed and wanted to spend time with Michelle. So they can’t get their story straight. They know the optics don’t look good. What they’re essentially saying here is that my verbal optics are better than even the pictures that we’ve all seen over there. And that’s what’s sticking in their craws, the reason why I’m to blame. The pictures are one thing. The UK media did the pictures, see Michelle (My Belle) on the beach, the pine trees, the palm trees, you see Michelle (My Belle) touring, you see Michelle (My Belle) and the kid with the king and queen of Spain. You see all of this, a star-studded Hollywood fundraiser on Saturday night at the hotel. You see all those pictures. But that doesn’t bother them. What bothers them is me, I gin it up, it’s my optics they’re worried about, the optics that I create that they’re concerned about.
Here’s Tim Kaine, the Democrat National Committee chairman. He was on the Today show yesterday. Matt Lauer: ‘If you had a do-over here and you coulda planned the first lady’s vacation with Sasha, would you have planned the trip that we’ve seen her take giving the current economic conditions or do you think that was much ado about nothing?’
KAINE: It’s wrong to talk about the first lady’s family vacation as a politician. She’s a mom. This was an opportunity for Michelle to join friends and friends’ daughters with a vacation with her kids and give them some exposure to a part of the world that they hadn’t been before and I don’t think you talk about that, give it political analysis. I’m glad that both the president and first lady are so focused on being good parents.
RUSH: All right, fine and dandy. The Democrats will cover their bases any way they can. What I really want to know is, your the president of the United States and it’s your birthday, and on your birthday, your wife, your daughter, and 40 friends hop a Boeing 757 to Spain for five days while you stay in Chicago and go to a barbecue with Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King and shoot hoops with some basketball players. Does anybody have any questions about those optics?
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RUSH: Cokie Roberts, Good Morning America yesterday, cohost George Stephanopoulos asked her, ‘White House hopes this Michelle Obama vacation thing gonna blow over but they probably could have seen the criticism coming?’
ROBERTS: What real difference does it make? The fact is Spain could use some help, too, and we need Spain to be stronger economically than it is in the Eurozone. I mean, you can make this case (snickering) if you really need to. Whatever the First Lady does is not going to make any difference one way or the other. And, you know, she did go with her child. It was not like a — uh, a Jackie O trip, you know, where she was sort of whiling away her time on a yacht.
RUSH: What’s the difference? What is the difference? So now the take from Cokie Roberts is that Michelle Obama was stimulating the Spanish economy. Well, Iran needs some help. Will the Obamas next vacation there? And I’ll tell you who really needs some help: They’re almost close to cannibalism in North Korea. Will Michelle (My Belle) Obama take a vacation in North Korea to help them out?
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RUSH: Greg in Louisville, Kentucky, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: Good, sir.
CALLER: This Obama crowd is amazing. What’s ‘un-American’ is the government owning a controlling interest in a major car company. I mean, that’s what’s un-American.
RUSH: (laughing) Absolutely — and, of course, let’s not even mention that Jennifer Granholm is the architect of a state in decline like we haven’t seen in I don’t know how many years in this country. Maybe ever.
CALLER: Well, that’s why I was wondering. It seems like that Michelle Antoinette could comfort her friend on the Gulf Coast or in Nevada or California, one of the resorts out there where we really need some help. It’s just an illustration of what I say about the liberals: You know, we got states like Indiana that are in surplus; we’ve got states like Michigan and California that are billions of dollars in the hole. It’s all about cutting the spending, and it’s apparent Michelle Antoinette can’t control her own spending and the government can’t control its spending.
RUSH: Well, but you heard Cokie Roberts at ABC News say that Michelle was helping Spain’s economy. Spain needs some help, too.
CALLER: Well, maybe the Spanish can elect Democrats this fall.
RUSH: Well, it was a stimulus plan.
CALLER: (chuckling)
RUSH: But, you know, here’s the thing. There are two stories. The first story was that Michelle’s daughter said she wanted to go to Spain for her birthday, a vacation present, something like that. Then the story came out from Lynn Sweet at the Chicago Sun-Times: No, no, no, it’s not that, Michelle’s gynecologist’s father died in July and needed to be comforted. Republican states — responsible states like Indiana — are now having to bail out these irresponsible states like California, Illinois, New York, Michigan, and so forth and so on. You talk about social justice. I’m responding here to the caller who’s talking about Michelle (My Belle) and why doesn’t she stimulate others. By the way, did I see that they are begrudgingly gonna take couple days on the Florida Gulf Coast? Pensacola, is that where they’re going?
People like Obama call that ‘The Redneck Riviera.’ The elites, the pointy-headed academics, the people who are all much better than we are, far superior to us, call the Gulf Coast ‘The Redneck Riviera. (interruption) ‘Any mongrels in The Redneck Riviera?’ Well, Obama said he’s a mongrel. So if he goes, there will be some mongrels. (interruption) Yeah. That’s what… (interruption) Yeah, just… (laughing) That was just Snerdley asking me a question.
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RUSH: How are the Obamas gonna squeeze in a redneck Riviera vacation in their already busy vacation schedule? I mean these people are taking four vacations this month. Well, maybe a couple of them in July, couple of them in August. They’re supposed spend most of August in Martha’s Vineyard, ten days up there. That’s why Skip Gates goes. Skip Gates has a place on Martha’s Vineyard so the Obamas are gonna go up there. And they’ve been to Spain. Well, Obama didn’t go, but these people vacation left and right and there’s no criticism of it. ‘Well, presidents need their vacation time.’ Bush didn’t, of course. Bush didn’t. Bush refused to play golf during the Iraq war. Obama plays golf, shoots hoops. ‘Presidents need their recreation time.’ Bush didn’t but Obama does. Where are they going to find the time to squeeze in a couple days in Florida?