RUSH:  This is Renee in Aurora, Illinois.  You’re first.  It’s great to have you.  Hi.

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  Thanks for taking my call.  I’ve got laryngitis so ignore the voice.  I just want to make a quick comment.

RUSH:  Let me tell you something, your voice sounds sexy.

CALLER:  I like that.  That’s better than the laryngitis.  I was a Democrat for 34 years, and I am not —

RUSH:  Wait a minute, you’ve been on hold for a year, because it says you were a Democrat for 33 years when you called.

CALLER:  No, I was adding it up as I waited.  It’s 34 years.

RUSH:  I just wanted to make sure you haven’t been on hold for a year.

CALLER:  Yeah, the extra year does matter.  Barack Obama took care of that.  And while I’m no longer a Democrat, I do consider myself a practical feminist versus a rabid one.  And I just want to say that never in my lifetime did I ever think I would see a female nominee, let alone a president. I figured that would be my daughter or my granddaughter —

RUSH:  May I interrupt you for a question?

CALLER:  Go ahead.

RUSH:  Seriously, now.  I’m not trying to be provocative.  When I ask questions I’m genuinely curious and trying to learn.  Did it matter?  I mean, did it matter that someday there’d be a female or a woman president, was that a big deal to you?

CALLER:  Well, I think it mattered because if you look at where women started versus where we have come to, I think that would have been — and it is a significant milestone in history.

RUSH:  I’m not denying that.  Just in the real world I think women are the ones that have all the power anyway.  I think women run more — but that’s another discussion.

CALLER:  I don’t even know that it’s as much a matter that one would become one, is that it was possible.

RUSH:  Okay.

CALLER:  That would probably be —

RUSH:  Okay, well now that’s happened, you were anticipating it, you thought it would be a big deal, now it’s happened.

CALLER:  Yes.

RUSH:  So what?

CALLER:  Most of the decades of work that I did was for my daughters and my granddaughters, and yet I’m faced with a candidate that, there’s not one character quality that I can find in her that I would want my daughter or granddaughter to possess.

RUSH:  Well, then why did it matter that there ever be a woman president, if it’s character and other qualities that matter?  Here you’ve got the first woman, something you longed for, something you thought would eventually happen, and now you’ve got it and you’re disappointed by it.  Her.  You’re disappointed in her.

CALLER:  I’m disappointed for the same reasons that I would be if these qualities were in a man.  She’s dishonest. She’s corrupt. She has no moral decency that I can find.  And yet right now she’s a little higher in the polls than Donald Trump.  Now, if you told me ten years ago I would vote for Donald Trump, I would have figured you needed your head examined, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do because I do not want to see this woman anywhere near the White House.

RUSH:  Interesting.

CALLER:  This tone that she’s taken on the last few days —

RUSH:  What did you not like about Trump ten years ago?

CALLER:  You know, mostly it would have been media hype.  It wouldn’t have been any real research or any —

RUSH:  Yeah.  Right. 

CALLER:  And I have to admit that because it’s true.  I guess what I want to say to women out there, let’s not help a woman that we wouldn’t want as a daughter into the White House leading a country at a time that it’s so very —

RUSH:  Oh, now, wait a minute.  Hold it a second.  That’s a new perspective.  You wouldn’t want your daughter to be like Hillary Clinton?

CALLER:  No.  There’s nothing decent or moral that I can find in this woman that I would want any part of. 

RUSH:  All right.  Well, I mean, that’s pretty clear.  You’ve handled every pregunta that I threw at you, and you’ve done it with aplomb and your sexy voice.  I’d a never known you have laryngitis, just so you know. 

Here’s Bob in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  Bob, you’re next, great to have you, Open Line Friday.  Hi.

CALLER:  Hey, a pleasure to talk to you, Rush.

RUSH:  Thank you.

CALLER:  I have a question for you.  One, the polls.  They can be a little bit disheartening.  The last couple days Breitbart and a couple other websites, you know, Trump was one ahead, and now Good Morning America this morning, you know, George said Hillary’s got a 10-point lead, you know, it’s 51 to 41.  How much stake do you take in the polls?

RUSH:  They’re all over the place.  You’ve got Reuters — this may have been what ABC was talking about.  Reuters/Ipsos out yesterday has Hillary up 12.  But remember, that poll, the Reuters poll is famous now for eliminating undecideds.  They’ve simply stopped including the people who are undecided.  And the way they do it, after they do their interviews, even people are undecided, they either throw them out and don’t count ’em at all or they assign them a candidate based on what they perceive the respondent’s preferences to be based on the interview, the way they answered questions. 

Then you’ve got this USC/LA Times poll that shows Trump up about eight-tenths of a point, and that’s been back and forth.  Trump is up two in the Florida Atlantic University poll.  Nationwide, the polling is that Trump is just getting blown out, and it’s confusing many people.  

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RUSH: Here’s Jeff in Eugene, Oregon.  Great to have you on the EIB Network.  Hello.

CALLER:  Thank you.  It’s my pleasure.  I’ve listened to you a long time.  I’m a physician with 45 years of experience, an internist, and I’m struck by the fact that Hillary, I think, is one fall away from having a major medical problem.  She has a medicine called Coumadin, which is a blood thinner, and it’s standard. She’s been on it, best I can tell, since 2012 —

RUSH:  Okay wait, how do you know?

CALLER:  I’ve known about it for several years.  I read about it in 2012.  I’ve gone back and checked.  It’s been reported several times.  And not only that, but even if I didn’t know, being experienced, I would expect her to be on that medicine.

RUSH:  Now, Jeff, wait a minute, now.  Don’t take this personally, but you have to understand my position. 

CALLER:  I do.

RUSH:  You can call here and say you’re anything.  I mean, you can say you’re an internist, you can say you’re a doctor, you’re an astronaut, and there’s no way we can confirm or deny it.  So my skepticism, I have to have some, and doctors diagnosing public figures that don’t treat them, you know, I’ve always kept that at arm’s length.  I wouldn’t want it happening to me.

CALLER:  I understand. 

RUSH:  That’s why I’m asking, how do you know what medicine she’s on, and how do you know —

CALLER:  Yeah, your producer (sic) was hesitant as well.  I can’t prove over the phone that I’m a physician. I don’t have a password or anything that can convince you.  But it’s the truth.  And I have followed this, I have talked to the Republican National Committee about this. I have been on three other national radio shows discussing this, and I’ve known about it, I’ve been trying to get the message to Trump.  In fact, I drove one of his cars in the motorcade when he came to Eugene.  I’m 73, but I’m driving at 60 miles an hour six feet behind another black Chevy Tahoe, I don’t know why I was there — I mean, I do know why, I don’t know why I agreed, ’cause God knows what might have happened.  The point is, I’m trying to get a message through.  She’s on this blood thinner, and you can double-check this, and she’s had two clots in her legs and she’s had one in her head, it’s standard procedure —

RUSH:  Okay, why, though?  Why would she need blood thinners?

CALLER:  So she doesn’t get another clot, because she could get a clot in her brain. She could get a clot in her heart. She could get a clot in any number of places.  Another clot could be fatal.  So she’s on this medicine, as best as I can tell, I’m telling you as honest as I can tell.  One of the reasons we don’t give that medicine, we use the word “contraindicated,” if the person has falls. 

So suppose we have a patient who’s elderly who falls a lot, who has a clot, we have other things that we try, but we’re afraid to use this medicine because, if they fall and hit her their head, if they fall a certain way, they can have a catastrophic event.  And so all I can do is plead with you to get this message out, to double-check it.  I have been trying to say this over and over again.  The other thing I said on one of the national radio shows, we need to have an honest evaluation of people running for president.  I do physicals, or did physicals of people going into the military.

RUSH:  Well, speaking of that, do you know that Bill Clinton still has never released his medical records?  Everybody talks about candidate tax returns, and they release those — well, most.  But medical records, that’s another thing, and that arguably might be more important or relevant than somebody’s tax return.  We still don’t have Slick Willie’s, and of course the speculation as to why has been abundant. 

Now, in Mrs. Clinton’s case they get very defensive when anybody starts talking about her health problems.  I have vague recollection reading about her taking blood thinners, but I thought — it was just this week I was reading something somewhere that I found credible that she’s got a thyroid problem and is taking some medicine for that.  And it’s an unconventional treatment. 

The conventional treatment they always treat for whatever her thyroid condition is, is not working. So they’ve had to combine two medications.  It’s why she gets fatigued. It’s why she has to take two or three days off. 

But, again, this is just speculation, too.  She hasn’t made this announcement or official, and won’t.  I don’t think we’re gonna — if her husband’s medical records haven’t appeared, I don’t think hers are going to any time soon, either.  

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RUSH:  I’m going to postpone my answer on the poll question until the next hour because I want to meld that in with other things. There’s a bunch of things about this campaign that don’t feel right.  I don’t mean conspiratorially.  I mean, tough to nail down, tough to have certain analysis of.  I don’t think you can use much of anything in standard political analysis, standard presidential campaign analysis in this campaign. 

There are too many things that are not accounted for in the standard playbook analysis; too many things that have already been blown sky-high and blown to smithereens; too many things that should have never happened that already have happened; too many things impossible — there’s no way this guy gets the nomination, but he did running away with it.  That shouldn’t have happened.  This guy shouldn’t have survived his opening statement back in June, but he did and grew from it.

There are so many things here that don’t make any sense.  And I don’t know that the polls are capturing everything.  And this is not wishful thinking.  I’m not doing what I did back in ’12 with Romney and thinking the polls were wrong.  There’s just a lot here that I think is gonna take a lot more time to have meaningful data to understand and even analyze correctly and predict from it.  So let’s just wait ’til the next hour when I have more time and I’ll expand on that theory a little bit.  

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RUSH:  Yes siree bob, one big, exciting, busy broadcast hour remains here on the Rush Limbaugh program president 800-282-2882.  Open Line Friday means whatever you want to talk about, have at it.  Could be a tech question.  Could be the NFL.  You know, we’ve got week three of the preseason coming up.  This traditionally is the preseason game where the starters play the longest.  Traditionally the dress rehearsal for the regular season to start.  Some people pooh-pooh that.  That means fantasy football is right around the corner, gonna be revved up.  So it could be any number of things out there that you want to talk about.  

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RUSH: A guy asked me about the polls.  If you go by the polls, it’s over, Hillary in a landslide.  Now, I can point you to three national tracking polls.  UPI is one.  PPD is another, then that USC poll in the LA Times.  In all three of those polls Trump is either up one point or seven-tenths of a point, but Trump is up in all three of those dailies. 

If you go into the battleground states, in Florida Trump is up two in the Florida Atlantic poll.  In the Monmouth poll, which is said to be the Bible of polls now, the Monmouth College, Monmouth University poll, whatever, said to be the gospel.  Trump is losing in double digits, and Hillary has cracked 50% nationally in that poll.  The polls are all over the place. 

Dana Perino — I mentioned this to you last week — Dana Perino one day last week on The Five on the Fox News Channel told the audience that she was really pained to have to tell them what she was going to tell them, and that is the polls are right.  Do not make the mistake she says that she made in 2012, believing that Romney was actually up by five or six when the polls said the opposite.  She said that they were misreading it in 2012.  She said they’d had a wrong turnout sample.  She did not at all think that Romney was gonna lose, but he did, and the polls, with just a couple outliers being incorrect, were right. 

So she said last week on The Five (paraphrasing), “Please, I can’t lie to you. I can’t sit here and give you hope when there isn’t any.  I can’t tell you to ignore the polls.  The polls are right, and it’s not looking good, and Trump doesn’t have much time to put it back together.”  So you have that.  That would be a professional assessment, you know, she was the Bush administration. 

Then you have the people, “That can’t possibly be right, Rush, look at those crowds out there.”  I know.  Trump’s crowds are large, enthusiastic, vibrant, vim, vigor.  Hillary doesn’t even do them.  Hillary doesn’t even do events anymore, because she doesn’t draw anybody.  A big crowd for a Hillary event is 150 people.  And people say, “Yeah, right, Rush, so how in the world can she be at 50%?  There isn’t any excitement for her.”  Well, because the polls are working the way they always have.  And we don’t know just how different this campaign is, if at all, from previous campaigns. 

We have to acknowledge it’s somewhat different.  How many years in the past — go back to 2012.  Would Trump have gotten the nomination 2012, do you think?  Would Trump have gotten the nomination in 2008 if he tried?  If Trump had tried to unseat George W. Bush in 2004, would he have succeeded?  How many of you believed the day Trump announced that it was the last day of the campaign, comes down the escalator, “The Mexicans are rapists and murderers and we’re sending ’em back.” 

I remember my reaction, I watched it, and I’m laughing myself silly here.  I’m thinking, this is the funniest thing I have ever — and then the polls came out, and we all know.  And then Trump kept saying things like that and kept growing.  Nobody — there’s not a single expert anywhere who predicted that, other than El Rushbo.  After a couple of weeks I saw what was happening, I understood it, and I started advising people.  Nobody wanted to listen to me outside a tight-knit little group here.  And to this day, to this day the same people still think the Trump implosion that was supposed to happen last fall is now happening. 

But something really weird, and I’m telling, I can’t put my finger on all this.  

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RUSH:  No, I did not mean to leave this group out.  There is also a group of people that think Trump is finished and that the polls tell us that and that he’s got no hope of coming back.  So you’ve got all kinds of different possibilities out there, people like I… While I’m correcting myself, you know, I just opined that in a normal political cycle, Trump would have been finished, hopelessly gone months ago. 

And I’m sure there are a lot of people saying, “He is, Rush! That’s what they’re not admitting. He’s down 10 points in the polls, Rush! When are you gonna get out of denial?”  I know a lot of you think it’s over.  But a lot of people don’t.  A lot of people don’t think the polls are capturing it, not for any reason other than it’s unlike anything we’ve seen in a while.