RUSH: You know how you can tell that Newt Gingrich is at the top of the slate? You don’t need polling data; you just need to look at the media coverage. You just need to look at the media coverage. You move on to the Republican primaries, Newt is rising so fast in the polls that the media is trying to tie him to Freddie Mac. They love Freddie Mac. They’ve bailed out Freddie Mac. They’ve done everything they can to keep Freddie Mac going. Executives at Freddie Mac are gonna be paid a hundred million dollars in bonuses while Freddie Mac needs another $6 billion bailout. That’s where the Occupy Wall Street crowd should have been all along, but they don’t care about that. When government’s spending the money they’re all for it.

So Newt is now under assault because he has ties to Freddie Mac. The darlings of the media, the darlings of the Democrat Party, the darlings of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. In fact, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both left out of the financial regulatory reform bill. There were no reforms instituted against Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. All of these financial regulatory reforms aimed at the financial business, guess what, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac exempted. So Newt consulted for them. And all of a sudden now Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may as well be guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. Profound inconsistency here.

Now, for the record, Newt has already responded to the accusations about his role in Freddie Mac a number of times. I think he’s even mentioned it during the debates. He said that he was hired as a consultant, but that’s a crime now. If you look at the headlines, you look at the news stories, Newt being a consultant to Fannie Mae is a crime, even though they love Fannie Mae. Even though they want Fannie Mae to sustain it, they want Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac to stay alive and kicking, Newt consults ’em and all of a sudden Newt’s filthy, Newt’s dirty, Newt’s tainted. And of course what they’re really going after is the fact that Newt’s a hypocrite because the Republicans think that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac are problems, put there’s Newt taking money from ’em.

Newt says that he told ’em that the housing market was a bubble that was about to burst. He told them that they were making a mistake handing out loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Newt says he told them what they were doing wrong and what they needed to fix it and he did get his consultancy fee for it. If all that’s true it’s a shame they didn’t listen to him. Doesn’t matter what they paid him; it was good advice. Certainly better advice than what they’ve gotten from their own wildly overpaid executives. Certainly better advice than they’ve gotten from Obama.

And then there’s this new book. This is from the Huffing and Puffington Post, or PuffingtonHo.com, whatever it is. “New Book Says Newt Gingrich Bought off His Wife to Stay in the Race — A new e-book on the 2012 election released Friday says that Newt Gingrich went on an ill-timed cruise to Greece this year and spent over a million dollars in jewelry at Tiffany’s to buy off his reluctant wife Callista so that she wouldn’t object to his running for president.” Now, the book doesn’t cite named sources, but why should it? The Politico doesn’t, either. Anonymous sources, anonymous facts, anonymous details now make up the bulk of reporting in the State-Controlled Media. Now a new one — an e-book! For those of you in Rio Linda, an e-book is a book that you would read on a Kindle.

That may not help. Uh, it is a book that you would read on an iPad. It is a book that you would read on an iPod Touch. Forget it. I’m talking about reading! What am I doing here? Reading in Rio Linda? I’m sorry, folks, it’s a… Anyway, “The book does not cite named sources, and the Gingrich campaign immediately dismissed the sniping from former campaign officials. Several of Gingrich’s former top campaign advisers now work for rival candidate Rick Perry. The book, from Real Clear Politics’ Tom Bevan and Carl Cannon, raises the question of whether Gingrich’s former aides were talking to Perry before they left in June. The Perry aides deny the accusation.”

Apparently, Perry was trying to siphon Newt’s staffers before Newt went on the cruise. The name of the e-book: “‘Election 2012: The Battle Begins,’ does not offer evidence that current Perry advisers Dave Carney and Rob Johnson left Gingrich because Perry had begun to express interest in running for president himself. But the question lingers.” No evidence! No, of course not. There is no evidence. The book doesn’t offer any evidence, “but the question lingers.” “The vitriol expressed for Callista Gingrich in the e-book is intense. The sentiments have been aired before. What is new is the lengths to which Gingrich’s former aides … go to trash Callista Gingrich. ‘She’s the single worst influence on a candidate I’ve ever seen,’ one ‘campaign strategist’ told Bevan and Cannon.

“This same source said that Gingrich bought ‘a necklace reportedly worth six figures … to ‘buy Callista off’ so she’d acquiesce to a presidential run.’ Gingrich’s ex-aides said that the former House Speaker from Georgia ignored their advice not to go on a luxury cruise to the Greek islands in late May because he feared damage to, or even the loss of, his marriage to [Callista]. ‘In Newt’s mind, it was the cruise or his marriage. And he didn’t want to get married a fourth time,’ said a source identified by Cannon and Bevan as ‘a person with knowledge of the discussions.'” So you can tell now that Newt’s at the top. There’s just no evidence. The questions linger. (interruption) The Fanny and Freddy stuff? He has answered for the Fannie and Freddie stuff.

(interruption) He’s gotta do better than saying he can…? (interruption) All right. (interruption) Okay, okay, okay, okay. (interruption) Look, I’m not here to defend Gingrich. Do not misunderstand anything. I am your humble host reporting and digesting all the filth and trash that’s out there about all of our candidates. I’m sifting through it and I am then retransmitting it to you. “Next week, another similar project will get off the ground, when the first of four 2012 e-books by Politico’s Mike Allen and former Newsweek editor-at-large Evan Thomas will go on sale. Allen and Thomas’ book is being edited by former Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham and is also being published by Random House.”

Meanwhile, Newsweek is about 12 pages every issue, and these guys are no longer there. At any rate, okay, so Newt gets a million dollars from Fannie Mae — to consult — and he says he told ’em what they were do wrong and they didn’t listen to him. (interruption) Well, yeah, that’s a good point. I told you all for free. I did. I have been telling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac everything in the world to do right, nobody’s paid me. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac haven’t paid me. By the way, a million dollars over eight years was Newt’s deal, by the way. (interruption) Boy, you are really sniping. You are really sniping. (interruption) Newt’s deal with Freddie Mac was for a million dollars over eight years. Okay, I’m just warning, for those of you on the phones today, Snerdley’s loaded for bear. My guess is if you want to call and talk about Newt, I’ll never see you today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This e-book that I quoted, “Election 2012: The Battle Begins,” by Perry advisors Dave Carney and Rob Johnson, it really is… I haven’t read it all, obviously, but from what I’ve read it really seems to be a huge hit piece on his wife, on Newt’s wife Callista. I always thought that one of the most sacred tenets of modern journalism is you’re supposed to leave the wives out of it. Really, and Callista not doing anything. She not inserting herself in any way, she not out there talking about policy, she not talking about arugula and steak and telling lies about food desserts and this kind of stuff. You know, she shows up and smiles, and that’s about it, and yet this hit piece, this book is obviously aimed at her; and it’s clear, too, ladies and gentlemen, that the target of this smear actually (in terms of voters) is the Tea Party.

That’s meaning is they’re trying to influence the Tea Party with negative vibes about Newt, and they’ve got some ammo. If we want to we can go back and get all the stories where Newt has done things which are not conservative. The couch deal with Pelosi, saying, “The era of Reagan is over.” Newt was one of the early Republicans to say that, and he eventually retracted it. So that’s the reason, but the larger point is: You don’t need a poll to tell you who’s hot on the Republican primary side. Whoever is hot is hit. It’s a full-fledged take-’em-out media approach, and the only guy who is immune to this is Mitt Romney. Mitt is not hit. They’re saving that up for later. It was Herman Cain, it was Sarah Palin before Herman Cain, and it was Michele Bachmann when she won the Iowa straw poll. They think they’ve taken Herman Cain out. They’re still hitting Herman Cain, and now they’ve moved on to Newt — and if somebody comes along and replaces Newt at the top in the polling data you won’t need the polling data to know. You’ll just have to see who it is the media’s decided to take out among our side next.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Say, folks, a quick question: Do we ever get stories on gifts Ted Kennedy bought for his wife over the years? We didn’t. Did we ever get stories about what Bill Clinton bought for his wife over the years? Well, in one way, yeah. You could say that it cost Clinton a lot. In fact, Newt’s getting off cheap. Hillary got health care. Callista got something from Tiffany. It just depends on your perspective in these things. But my point is, Kobe Bryant, he went out, he had to buy a big, giant ring. You think Newt’s the only husband in politics that has ever had to go out and do something like this? And, by the way, what is wrong with buying your wife something from Tiffany? What is wrong with that? Why is that a problem?

The only difference is Newt bought it with his own money. Democrats never do it with their own money; they always use ours. But why is there a guilt trip here to be associated with going out and buying your wife something at Tiffany & Company? Or taking her on a cruise? What is the crime there? (interruption) Well, I know, the “timing” of the cruise because it was middle of a presidential campaign and so forth, but I just think all of these double standards that exist, these efforts here to criminalize things when, in fact, what everybody ought to be looking at is — in all candor — this Occupy stuff. We’re witnessing a nation in great decline. The Sandusky stuff at Penn State, too.

Everywhere you look, folks, you see things that make you queasy, angry, filled with apprehension, angst, unease, whatever. This Occupy stuff, that’s directly traceable to the White House. The White House and Obama personally, personally, not just orchestrated these things, he created the mind-set: All of this class envy, running around, creating all this hatred in people’s minds for the achievers in our society, the successful in our society. I think all of this — the shootings, the drugs, the squalor, the filth, everything — associated with Occupy Wall Street you can trace it right back to the White House. They got what they wanted. Barack Obama was the inspiration for the Occupy movement.