RUSH: I don’t know. I don’t know what all the hubbub’s about. I really don’t. See, I’m old enough, ladies and gentlemen. Some of you may not be, but I’m old enough to remember when a reckless affair with a very young woman by a high government official who had access to powerful, sensitive intelligence was not a big deal. I’m old enough to remember when, as long as it didn’t get in the way of the work being done, it wasn’t anybody’s business. I’m old enough to remember when a high government official had an affair with a very young woman, that there was no security risk involved, that there was no possibility of blackmail. It was a fairly long time ago. It was considered no big deal.

A high government official having an affair with a very young woman was considered no big deal at all to the hip people in New York and Washington. That was only a problem for the hicks. It was only a problem for the hayseeds. Well, I’m speaking of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. If you go back, nobody had any worries whatsoever about it. In fact, back then, when something like that happened, what happened? It trashed the woman. You go out and claim that that’s exactly what you’d get if you drag a dollar bill through a trailer park. You go out and the bash the woman. The party of women, the party that believes in women, the party that stands up for women, the party that respects women, the party that gives women everything they want, went out and trashed the woman. And that was considered cool and fine and okay.

But now this Petraeus thing comes along and there’s an entirely different look-see into this. Now everybody’s worried about the what did she know, what was Petraeus guilty of, what was being covered up? And some people appear to want to get to the bottom of it. And others don’t. I still find it fascinating. I’m sorry, folks. I find it fascinating that all this gets released after three o’clock on Friday. Do you realize how much stuff gets dumped after three p.m. on Friday? Not at noon Friday, not at ten a.m. on Friday, but after three p.m. on Friday. I’ll tell you something else about this Petraeus and Paula Broadwell thing.

Snerdley, let me use you. Let’s say that one of your girlfriends is really harassing you in e-mail and you call the FBI and you say, “Hi, I am Bo Snerdley, and I’m being harassed by a bunch of –” do you think the FBI would drop anything to investigate your problem? They would tell you to take a hike and ratchet up your spam filter and not bother ’em anymore. But a woman calls the FBI and says she’s being harassed by somebody. They don’t know it’s Petraeus. I mean, at that point, they don’t know it’s Petraeus. They stop everything, and they start investigating the e-mails of the woman sending the threatening stuff, and then at first they think that Petraeus’ e-mail has been hacked. Then they realize, talking about stuff going on under the desk, that Petraeus is having an affair. But I don’t know how you get the FBI to stop what they’re doing and investigate somebody harassing you in the e-mail.

We now know who that was. “Jill Kelley, social liaison to MacDill Air Force Base, is mystery woman Paula Broadwell harassed via email leading to FBI probe. Jill Kelley, 37, of Tampa, Fla., reportedly alerted the FBI several months ago about threatening emails she had received from Petraeus alleged mistress, biographer Paula Broadwell. The mystery woman who blew the lid off former CIA Director David PetraeusÂ’ career-ending affair is also tied to the military.” What am I reading from here? This is the New York Daily News. She is “a sexy social liaison for an Air Force base in Tampa who says she and the ex-general are just ‘friends.’ Jill Kelley, 37, a married mother of three from the Gulf Coast city, alerted the FBI several months ago after receiving emails from PetraeusÂ’ alleged mistress, biographer Paula Broadwell, warning the stunning Tampa socialite to ‘stay away from’ the spymaster. The raven-haired Kelley, who has an unpaid position as a social planner –“

My point here is she’s not a ranking military. She’s a socialite. She calls the FBI, says she’s being harassed by somebody in e-mail, “I need you to investigate.” And they do! There’s so many unanswered questions with this. Of course, what, if anything, have to do with Benghazi? What, if anything, does it have to do with — well, have you seen the food stamp news? Oh, the numbers of Americans on food stamps skyrocketed. They held the news ’til after the election. They held the news ’til today or over the weekend. It skyrocketed from the record highs that it already was. But they held the news back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Now, the Petraeus business. Folks, right before the election we learned of a Democrat senator who went down to the Caribbean and was engaging in orgies sponsored by a donor. He’s a Democrat by the name of Bob Menendez. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to anybody. Nobody cared. In 1996, 1997, whatever it was (I forget the years), the Lewinsky story broke, and we learned that Bill Clinton — the highest government official in the land — was having a tawdry, multiple-month affair with an intern.

Nobody uttered one bit of concern over national security threats, blackmail threats. In fact, everybody came out to defend him. “Hey, it’s just sex. Hey, it didn’t affect the way he did his job. It’s none of your business. It’s between him and his wife and the vast right-wing conspiracy. And who are you to start attacking love? Doesn’t the world need a little more love?” Now David Petraeus is discovered to have been in an affair with his biographer-ette.

A third woman in a triangle was asking the FBI to investigate threatening e-mails, and the FBI stopped everything and did it? You try that. Snerdley, I want you to call the FBI this afternoon after the program and tell ’em you’re getting harassing e-mails from somebody in the Philippines, and see if they will conduct an investigation. (interruption) Well, okay, Singapore. I don’t care where. You just tell ’em you’re getting threatening e-mails. I want to know if they stop everything and look into it.

Now, Broadwell’s father “defended his daughter today as an ‘exceptional person’, saying he supports her 100 percent after details of her sordid affair with the decorated general were made public. General Petraeus’s relationship with Broadwell, his biographer, was revealed on Friday,” after the EIB Network went off the air and “after an FBI investigation which suspected corruption between the pair.

“Broadwell’s father Paul Kranz, a retired high school basketball coach, suggested that the explosive revelations that led to Petraeus resigning as CIA director, have been used to cover up a bigger scandal. … Mr. Kranz told MailOnline today that the shock of the past few days is ‘just the beginning of a process.’ He spoke this morning on the snow-covered drive of his modest bungalow in Bismarck, North Dakota, where he lives with wife Nadene.

“He said: ‘I’ve been advised by attorneys not to talk right now. This is private property. I hope you understand this is the beginning of a process. I can’t say more than that. I couldn’t if I wanted to.’ On Sunday, Mr Kranz … told the Daily News: ‘This is about something else entirely, and the truth will come out.'” He said all this while saying he wasn’t gonna talk about it. So now they’re saying: Okay, what is it really about, then?

It turns out that Paula Broadwell has been giving speeches and telling people what it’s about. In part, she was making a speech and said… Let’s see, when was this? “Petraeus’ Mistress Suggests Benghazi Attack Aimed at Secret CIA Prison.” Now, I don’t know when she said this, but it’s recently. ‘”Now, I don’t know if a lot of you have heard this but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner, and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try get these prisoners back, so thatÂ’s still being vetted,’ Broadwell said during the question-and-answer session of her presentation when an audience member asked her to comment on Libya.”

So you libs are all thinking Obama has shut down CIA secret prisons, but Broadwell says that the CIA annex in Benghazi was one, or could possibly have been, that some prisoners might have been kept there, that there were a couple of Libyan militia members imprisoned there and that the whole attack was to get them out. Now, I don’t care whether that’s true or not, it certainly had nothing to do with a video. It certainly had nothing to do with insulting Mohammed.

This is from Breitbart.com: “Petraeus Mistress Suggests Benghazi Attack Was Aimed at Secret CIA Prison.” That’s one version. And then it turns out that she gave a lecture in Denver back on October 26th, and in that lecture she claims the CIA annex in Benghazi did ask for help but didn’t get any. She also claims, as I told you, the attack on the consulate was intended to lead to the rescue of some prisoners being held at the CIA annex. In fact, she confirmed reports from Fox News that the men in the CIA annex had asked for help from the commander-in-chief’s In-Extremis Force. She admitted in this lecture that the request for help went all the way to the top.

Petraeus was telling her things. She said there was a failure in the system. She said that Petraeus knew all of this but that he wasn’t allowed to talk to the press because of his position. She’s telling people this at a lecture. Now, that’s pretty serious, since Petraeus did brief congressmen soon after the attack in a closed-door session, and he doesn’t seem to have told them any of this because when it got out that Broadwell said, (paraphrasing) “Yeah, a couple prisoners in there, and, yeah, there was a request for help from the commander-in-chief’s In-Extremis Force.” Apparently Petraeus told her that but he didn’t tell Congress that. And then this bit about the CIA annex having taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner and that the CIA thought the attack on the consulate was an attempt to get ’em back, it’s interesting to note the CIA’s denial of this claims that Broadwell may have been talking about the Fox News report, but Fox never mentioned anything about CIA taking prisoners.

So this is another tangled web of deceit. And then all of this is brought down because a second woman in the triangle over at MacDill Air Force Base who has nothing to do with anything officially, she works in the social services office over there, her name is Jill Kelley, was apparently getting threatening e-mails from Broadwell saying, “Stay away from my guy.” So Jill Kelley, social liaison to MacDill Air Force Base, called the FBI — she’s 37, mother of three — says here she’s a looker, raven-haired looker, mystery woman who blew the lid off Petraeus’ career-ending affair, tied to the military, a sexy social liaison for the Air Force Base in Tampa, says she and Petraeus were just friends.

The married mother of three alerted the FBI several months ago after receiving e-mails from Broadwell warning her to stay away from the general, from Petraeus. “The raven-haired Kelley, who has an unpaid position as a social planner for MacDill Air Force Base, said in a statement yesterday that her relationship with Petraeus was platonic, dating to when Petraeus ran the US Central Command from the base.” So she’s making out like Broadwell was jealous of her. And Broadwell was sending her e-mails warning, “You stay away from my guy,” so she felt threatened enough to call the FBI. The FBI looked at into it, started examining e-mails.

They first thought that Broadwell had hacked into Petraeus’ e-mail and they got very, very concerned about national security and secrets and, “Oh, no, what have we got going on here?” Petraeus knows none of this is going on. They keep looking and looking, and finally they find out that Petraeus and Broadwell are having sex under the desk or what have you, leads ’em to believe there’s an affair going on. I don’t even know the timeline when Obama was told, ’cause I don’t know who to believe. All I know is, if the powers that be have any control over this story, the outcome will only be one that benefits the Democrat Party.

If they have any control over this at all, there will not be an outcome that harms Obama. There will not be an outcome that harms the Democrat Party. And while I don’t know how serious it was, there was talk at some point that Petraeus would make an ideal presidential candidate, right? On the Republican side. Well, sorry, in our party this is not a resume enhancement. So factor that into this as well.