RUSH: My God. Based on everything we’ve heard leading up to today and we get two of the flimsiest articles of impeachment that don’t even specify any crimes. What happened to bribery? What happened to the quid pro quo? What happened to the whistleblower? What happened to all of the shocking abuses of power? They’re all gone.

And then one hour after Pelosi signals this she then calls a press conference with the rest of her geriatric Democrat committee chairmen to claim that they have just passed the NAFTA upgrade. They’ve been sitting on it for a year. She goes ahead and authorizes the Democrats to vote for it as a means of protecting the 31 Democrats in Trump districts who won in 2018 in the midterms.

Now, I’m gonna tell you something, and it’s gonna fly in the face of what you may be thinking on your own and what you no doubt are seeing if you’re watching any cable news. I’m telling you this is all imploding on the Democrats, and they know it. And the Trump people are very happy and they’re very content today. Their White House Christmas party’s going on this week, and they are filled with revelry and good cheer.

“Rush, you’re smoking something. What do you mean the Democrats are imploding?” They are imploding! I’m gonna go through all of this as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears today. This is one of these days where I can’t even get close to getting to all of it in the first segment here. So it’s not a trick to tell you it’s gonna take me some time to go through this. But, folks, I try to do this as thoroughly and with as much anticipation of questions you might have as you to listen me as I can, because the objective here is to make the complex understandable.

By the way, have you noticed, there were a couple TV ads I saw last night watching the football game. (interruption) No, no, no, no. I was channel surfing around and it came on. I did not target the game to watch, especially that thing last night. But I’ve noticed a couple of TV ads now with the slogan, “Making the complex simple” or “Making the complex understandable.” And then there’s another ad that uses one of my phrases, “the relentless pursuit of excellence, the relentless pursuit of the truth.”

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RUSH: Now, what’s Trump doing about all this at this time?

Trump is like the adult in the room here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but to me Trump seems calmer now. He’s letting the economy speaks for itself and for his administration. The result of the impeachment fraud and the Horowitz report is… (chuckles) I don’t know. He’s just letting it sit there as it is. It is sinking of its own weight, what happened yesterday in the impeachment hearings, among other things. Can you imagine lawyers testifying and then questioning other lawyers?

They had no witnesses! They had nothing. They had lawyers giving statements and then lawyers interrogating those same lawyers. This is all a show. Every bit of this is a show! They had to make a mad dash to get this done. They’ve got it done. Now they’ve got the blemish of impeachment on Trump, but they don’t have a case. What happened to bribery? What happened to extortion?

What happened to all of these horrible things? What happened to the whistleblower’s first reaction to the phone call? (imitating whistleblower) “It was shocking, it was terrifying, oh, my God. I have to tell somebody what I heard in that phone call, it was outrageous.” Now we got the transcript of the phone call.

Folks, do not doubt me. They are not winning this thing. They are not prevailing in this. They have not made a persuasive case. I don’t care how much assistance they have from the Drive-By Media. I mean, Nadler, when he is awake, is reduced to having lawyers cross-examine lawyers. Schiff is the guy spying on people, not Trump. Schiff and the Democrats. Biden is the guy that engaged in bribery and extortion with Ukraine, not Trump.

Biden’s melting down on the campaign trail insulting 83-year-old liberals. Pelosi is nuts because she’s realizing they can’t stop Trump. The more they try, the more they’re losing it. All Trump has to do is somehow keep enduring all of this. He can really come out on top from what is a genuine, real coup attempt. The inspector general report confirms that this was and is an ongoing coup attempt.

Nadler and Schiff essentially are impeaching Trump for getting elected in 2016 and because they’re afraid he’s gonna do it again in 2020. I know what some of you are asking yourselves. You watch these things, like the impeachment hearings yesterday. And you’re watching these two Democrat lawyers, Goldman, and it turns out they’re both gigantic donors to Hillary and Obama and the DNC, and they’re both cable news network analysts and commentators.

So they get hired by Schiff and Nadler to go up and make the case rather than actual members of the committee. And some of you sit there and you watch this, and you ask, “Why are you people doing this?” The American people are sitting around minding their own business, bothering nobody, American conservatives are sitting around minding their own business, bothering nobody, as we always are, and here come a bunch of spoiled brat little nincompoops upset that they lost an election trying to delegitimize us because we won.

And they might claim, “Well, look at what you did to Obama.” We didn’t do anything to Obama. Everything we had with Obama was policy related. We opposed socialism, for crying out loud. We don’t like a guy lying to us about what he’s gonna do to health care. We don’t like him lying to people about keeping their doctors and keeping their plans. We don’t like him lying to us about his stimulus plan. We don’t like hearing a president say the country’s in permanent decline.

Of course we want to defeat that, but you didn’t see us taking Obama to court, you didn’t see us drumming up fake this and fake that, trying to impeach him or any of that stuff. We did it at the ballot box, or tried to. Didn’t concoct some elaborate scheme to accuse Obama and then try to disqualify his election victory. And we certainly didn’t do anything to damage the integrity of the American electoral process, which is what the Democrats have done.

It is unconscionable. I despise these people. Do not misunderstand me when I tell you they’re imploding.

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RUSH: I got an email. “Rush, how can you sit there and say that the Democrats are imploding?” Let me try to explain this to you. I think I would be safe in saying here that I understand a significant percentage of the American people. I wouldn’t have this program and it wouldn’t be as successful as it is if I didn’t.

And this isn’t hard. Folks, what are we even talking about here today? What are we talking about? Impeachment and the Horowitz — are we talking about 2016? Are we talking about 2020? The American people still don’t know. Do you know there’s still no evidence for anything that has propelled any of this? And whenever people are asked to raise their hands, “Can you identify an impeachable offense?” nobody can raise their hand.

When they’re asked to say, “Name the crime,” they can’t name the crime. The American people are not dense, and certainly you in this audience are not dense. You know full well that despite all of this that the Democrats are running in circles, that they’re throwing things up against the wall hoping against hope that something is gonna stick. And nothing is sticking to the walls. It’s like slime, and it hits the wall, it just slimes all the way back down to the floor.

Wait. So Trump colluded with Russia to steal — uh, okay. Well, three years of an investigation and nobody’s seen any evidence of it. Now we got the Horowitz report out and the only thing it says is there was no bias in the investigation, but it nevertheless turns up confirmation of everything that we know that happened in what was a biased investigation. That investigation didn’t show one bit of evidence that Trump colluded or cheated or stole anything.

The Democrats have not made the case that he did anything illegal, cheated or stole or whatever else in Ukraine. And, by the way, the American people are perfectly capable of understanding, “Wait a minute. I thought this was all about Russia. Now you’re saying that the guy committed an impeachable offense in a phone call to Ukraine, and we’ve seen the transcript,” and still in all of this, you can’t go ask anybody, what did Trump do and have anybody tell you.

I’m telling you, this has been a giant bomb, because all it has been is an effort to convince the American people that Trump didn’t deserve to win in 2016, and they haven’t made that case. They haven’t made the case that the election of 2016 should be overturned. They were never gonna be able to make that case, and they haven’t even come close to it. They’re flailing, folks. It’s embarrassing.

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RUSH: Now, on this impeachment business… Folks, I’ve never seen something so flailing and… I’m not disagreeing with the idea that you don’t want it on your resume. But I’m telling you, it’s nothing more than a political attempt to blacken and darken the resume for the 2020 campaign. There’s no crime mentioned. It’s just absurd. It literally is absurd.

You know, Barr talks about the IG investigation as basically bogging down the country for three years. That’s exactly what this impeachment thing has been. I’ll give an example. Paul Sperry has a tweet here: “Nadler says Article 1 of impeachment…” and, by the way, there’s only two articles. There’s not a crime in any of them. There’s nothing about bribery — and you know why? The reason there’s not a bribery article is so that Joe Biden and a bunch of Democrats don’t get ensnared with it.

They’re not gonna turn bribery into a high crime and misdemeanor, even though it is specified in the impeachment clause in the Constitution. Trump did not engage in bribery, but Biden did, and who knows how many others? So they leave that out. “Article 1 of impeachment will charge ‘abuse of power’ by the president,” abuse of power, “and Article 2 will charge him with ‘concealing evidence’ about how he abused his power.”

This is the famous obstructing Congress by going to the courts to protect his own documents and stuff, which presidents have done since George Washington. But the real thing here: “[I]f Article 2 will charge [Trump] with ‘concealing evidence’ about how he abused his power,” then it means they don’t have it. They couldn’t get it. So how do they know he abused power?

“Article 1 of impeachment will charge ‘abuse of power’ by the president, and Article 2 will charge him with ‘concealing evidence’…” Well, if he concealed the evidence that he abused his power, how the hell do these people know how he abused his power? How can you even have Article 1? Doesn’t matter. They just wanted to get this done — and then, an hour later, Pelosi goes out and acts like the Democrats have passed the new NAFTA bill that they’ve been holding up for a year.

If you’re suffering whiplash, it makes total sense.

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RUSH: And then there is this. This is from The Politico, and I knew this was coming ’cause I’ve known it’s already happening. When the Democrats started talking about censure as an alternative to impeachment, that’s all I needed to hear to know that they’re not all on board with this. Politico: “Small Group of Democrats Floats Censure Instead of Impeachment — A small group of vulnerable House Democrats is floating the longshot idea of censuring President Donald Trump instead of impeaching him, according to multiple lawmakers familiar with the conversations.

“Those Democrats, all representing districts that Trump won in 2016, huddled on Monday afternoon in an 11th-hour bid to weigh additional … options to punish the president for his role in the Ukraine scandal as the House speeds toward an impeachment vote next week.” “[P]unish the president for his role in the Ukraine scandal…” You see, there isn’t a Ukraine scandal.

I don’t care what these people say. I don’t care how they characterize it. I don’t care how offended and outraged they act. These people commit more political abuses of our system every day than Trump could even dream of committing. These people have done so much to destroy the integrity of our electoral system, it’s incalculable. My goodness, folks.

These people have run around saying 2016 invalid, unfair because it was rigged, the Russians meddled — and they’re already telling people 2020 is rigged. Trump’s already meddling in 2020 with a foreign government, even though they have no evidence for any of that ever happening anywhere. But their dummkopf voters are out there absorbing all of this. I’m telling you, it does nobody any good to lie to the American people about the lack of integrity in our elections. But this is the Democrat Party which simply cannot accept losing.

And when losing, they cannot accept what must be done in order to win. If you’re losing, you’re out of touch with the American people. If you’re losing, you stand for things or are proposing things the American people don’t want. The Democrats say, “Screw the American people! We’re gonna force whatever we believe on ’em no matter how we have to do it, even if it means getting rid of a president who was duly elected.”

If we’re dealing with future monarchs and kings and totalitarians, Stalinists and authoritarians, pick a Democrat. He fits the mold. See, now they want to start talking about censure. This impeachment vote is next week. Pelosi’s out talking about (impression) what a sad day it is, a very solemn day. In fact, grab sound bites 24 and 25. This was this afternoon, might have been this morning. It was at Politico’s annual “Women Rule Summit.” How about that? Women rule. Women run the show. Pelosi was there. We have two sound bites.

Here she is talking about the announcement of articles of impeachment…

PELOSI: It’s a very sad day, actually, a solemn day —

RUSH: Awww.

PELOSI: — something no one comes to Congress to do, to impeach a president. This is about the oath of office that we take to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, which — in its wisdom — our founders put… (sputters) “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it,” or a republic — a separation of power — not a monarchy.

RUSH: Yeah, well, what is it they’re upset about? They’re upset about the democratic process when they lose. The country is worthless when they lose. The country, the Constitution doesn’t mean anything when they lose. Trying to tell us this is a solemn day, start quoting Benjamin Franklin? So then we had a question. “One of the biggest criticisms of the process has been the speed you’ve moved here. What about that?”

CROWD: (laughter)

PELOSI: (laughing) It’s been going on for 22 months, okay?

CROWD: (laughter)

PELOSI: For 2-1/2 years, actually. … Was it 2-1/2 years ago that, uh, they initiated, uh, the Mueller, uh, investigation? It is, uh, not about speed. It’s about urgency. If we did not hold him accountable, he would continue to undermine our election. It is not with any speed. This has been going on for a very long time, but there is a sense of urgency. That is what is at stake in this election (sputters) and this impeachment as well.

RUSH: Right. She noticed (impression), “That is what’s at stake in this election — I mean impeachment! That’s what… Oh, gee, it’s been going on for 2-1/2 years.” Exactly right: 2-1/2 years where you found nothing when you got nothing. Don’t doubt me on this, folks. They are flailing, and if they didn’t have the media with them (which they always will have), it would be paramountly obvious to everybody.