The Legacy of Reid’s Smear Letter

RUSH: This is Paul in Naperville, Illinois. We own Naperville, Illinois. A great community for us, great test market, just perfect EIB community. Nice to have you with us, Paul.

CALLER: It is so great to be on.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: So great to be on. Big-time Major League dittos from Naperville. I just want to say that I am just so jazzed and so excited by the results of what you did with the Declaration of Incompetence by the Democratic leadership —

RUSH: (laughter) Declaration of Incompetence.

CALLER: I just think — and I hope everybody hears my point on this. I think it’s a turning —

RUSH: Hang on just a second. Folks, turn your radios up out there so that you can be sure and hear Paul’s point. Three, two, one. All right, radios are jacked up a little bit out there, Paul, start over.

CALLER: Awesome, awesome. I think that this Declaration of Incompetence, and what you were able to do with it, is a turning point in the war at home. Part of the war that, you know, those of us who are kind of like the silent victory coalition out here have really found something to coalesce around, and they did it to themselves. I mean, they shined the light on who’s really undermining the troops, who’s really out there rooting for defeat. I just think this is going to go down in history. You know, you joke about it being in the — I don’t know, maybe you’re not joking — that it will be in the Smithsonian. I think it could be. I think it could be. I think this is one of those moments in history where the side of right prevailed at a really dangerous moment.

RUSH: I hope you’re right, but I’m curious about your instincts. Why do you think that this letter and the way we dealt with it is a turning point? Turning point in what? You mean you think the way we dealt with it is going to give strength and confidence to elected Republicans to realize these people can be beat back, or it’s going to coalesce American Republicans to be more involved and interested now because, frankly, you know, I was talking to these Marine guys last night at this impromptu dinner out at Don Pepe’s, and a bunch of them came up to me and said, ‘We’re so glad you did this for more than the obvious reasons, because we’re sick and tired of the Republicans just sitting here and taking it and never fighting back despite what’s said about them or despite what’s being said about the country.’ Is that what you’re talking about?

CALLER: Yeah, I think that’s the key. I think that when you see what happened when you stood up to these guys —

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: — and how the people that matter out here, those of us that don’t have radio shows and stuff every day, rallied around this issue, and when we stood up to them, they had egg on their face.

RUSH: But it’s even better than that, Paul. It’s even better than that. The reason it’s better than that is, at the very last hour — we had 168 hours of bidding on eBay — for a hundred hours nothing from Harry Reid and the Democrats. Ninety hours, they said nothing. Eighty hours, they said nothing. Fifty hours, they were silent. Twenty-five hours to go, silent. Ten hours to go, didn’t say a word. One hour to go, and Harry Reid jumps in from the floor of the Senate trying to take credit, trying to horn in on this. Interestingly, I’ve seen a bunch of newspaper editorials, among them a Las Vegas Review Journal, castigating and chastising Senator Reid for this transparent effort! They didn’t get away with any part of this. So, in addition to getting this whole thing stuffed back down their throats, when they tried to horn in on it at the very last hour, it fell apart on them even further. And I hope you’re right. I hope this does tell people and illustrate to others that there’s no reason you have to sit back and take these kinds of smears, mischaracterizations, these assaults, that there are ways to fight back with these people and prevail.

(Playing of The Letter spoof song.)

RUSH: Harry Reid — (song lyric) ‘I shouldn’t have written the letter.’ I don’t care what Media Matters says again. Fat chance to that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Jerry in Framingham, Massachusetts, nice to have you on the program. Hello.

CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: You know last week when you were talking about the bidding you were saying how the bids were going to go up and then, at the last hour or two before you would make the announcement, they’d go way up. I have another sinister motive on the part of Harry Reid and why he made the announcement an hour before. I think he, by associating himself with the letter, was to suppress the bid. And that’s why the $2,100,100 — if you recall, it was a number of hours before 1 p.m. And I think by Harry Reid doing that, he actually suppressed bids because he was associating himself with the letter, so people, without figuring things out, wouldn’t want to be associated with the letter.

RUSH: No, no, no, that’s not true. Trust me on this, that’s not true. The way to look at what Harry Reid did, it was an act of pure futility. He takes to the Senate floor at noon and asks people to get in on the bidding. Well, it’s at $2,100,100. Who can get in on the bidding at that level? So nobody bid after — but, look, there were three people in the last six hours. We had to prequalify everybody because the amount got so high. You have to verify that they’re who they say they are. You have to verify that they can pay it. You just can’t take these bids once you’re talking about this kind of money. So there were three people in the last six hours, and what happened is two of them fell out early on, but we didn’t know that ’til afterwards, we don’t know what they’re going to do, but we knew there were three people left in this.

CALLER: But, Rush, Harry Reid didn’t know that.

RUSH: No, but by 12 p.m., nobody heard Harry Reid until we played it at 12:30 p.m. — he couldn’t suppress anything.

CALLER: There could have been a last-minute bid up. I was thinking in the last hour it was going to go up above that, so if anything he would have cost money. Can I say one more thing?

RUSH: If you want to believe this, I’m trying to help you here.

CALLER: Okay, well, I hope you’re right, because you would have cost the Marines money, but my other point is the other caller talked about the Declaration of Incompetence. I think what they really tried for is a Declaration of Intimidation, and that’s what makes that significant. It was really a Declaration of Intimidation against not only you, against all listeners and people of free speech, and that’s why I think that letter —

RUSH: In a classic sense, this was an abuse of power that they put on paper, official Harry Reid letterhead, and that’s what makes it worth it. That is why, to Betty Casey, the woman who bought it, to her, and the others that were bidding on it, that was a blatant, nowhere-to-hide abuse of power by the United States Senate against a US private citizen. When you ask his syndication partner to confer with him and help get his mind right, this is a big abuse of power. The additional signatures helped because they automatically are verified. These are US senators, and Harry Reid got the signatures. So there are a lot of factors here, but it was a full-fledged attempted abuse of power. But it was beaten back. It was beaten back, and that’s another reason why it is a valuable piece to the people who were bidding on it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: David in Wiscasset, Maine. I’m glad you called, and welcome to the program.

CALLER: Thanks, Rush.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: I’m calling because I think that the Declaration of Incompetence moniker is going to stick for that document. I think you need to go to your website or something. But the guy that called a couple of callers ago, he made the comment that that was the turning point for the war back home. I think what he was referring to was the war against the fifth column, and I think any president who ever decides to embark on a war campaign of any kind is going to have to have a strategy for winning that fifth column war. You know what I mean by fifth column, right?

RUSH: Well, I do, but people in Rio Linda may not, and I think you need to explain it. But be very careful in doing so.

CALLER: Okay. Well, I’m not an expert on the subject, but I know that generally there’s four columns in an army, and somebody coined the phrase ‘fifth column’ to describe the contingent that actually lives within your borders who is going to work for the enemy, and clearly the Democratic Party —

RUSH: That’s pretty close. That’s pretty close. It’s pretty close. That’s good enough for Rio Linda to understand it. They’re basically subversives.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: The subversives.

CALLER: In this case. We’ve got Democrats and we’ve got the Drive-By Media, and those two things, you have to have a strategy as president to win the battle against those contingents.

RUSH: Yeah, he might have meant that. I rather think that if he did mean it, he also meant — and maybe I’m just projecting because so many people reacted to me this way. They said, ‘Thanks for doing this. This is great. He fired me up. I’m going to start donating to the Republican Party.’ It did ‘rally the base,’ is what I heard a lot of people say, and I thought that’s what he meant, because that has to happen, too. The base is pretty depressed out there right now.