RUSH: ‘Hillary Clinton has personally apologized to Barack Obama over this drug flap that happened on the tarmac at Reagan airport en route to the Iowa debate today. Clinton told Obama that negative personal characterizations are not a part of her campaign, and she disavowed comments by a big shot New Hampshire supporter by the name of Billy Shaheen ‘ Now, get this: Hillary’s advisor, not Hillary, the Shaheen guy, reminds New Hampshire of Obama’s former drug use — and, by the way, a Novak column out today, Howard Wolfson and others in the Clinton campaign were running around to high-level Democrat donors, also rubbing Obama’s nose in it over his slush fund PAC. They’re running around, and in both instances — Shaheen telling people about Obama’s drug use and Wolfson or whatever it was warning people about Obama and his slush fund — they’re all saying:
‘You know what? Republicans are going to use this. The Republicans are going to use this. We can’t nominate this guy! You’re supporting Obama. He’s in big trouble! He’s got a slush fund. He’s got drug use in his past. If you support Obama, you’re going to nominate him. Republicans will destroy him and we’re not going to win!’ Really? He has the chutzpah to say the Republicans might remind us, when it’s the Hillary camp that did remind us. More projection: You blame the Republicans for something that hadn’t happened, that you’ve done. We were told Mrs. Clinton is a victim, not a victimizer. We were told she’s attacked, not that she’s the attacker. We were told that there’s a vast, right-thing wing conspiracy out to get her and her co-president. Looky here! All that Barbra Streisand was pure BS. Misdirection, transference: Accuse your opponents of doing what you do, get everything looking to the right while you go pick their pocket. We knew it. Now Barack Obama knows it, but he can take comfort in this, I think. The Clinton calendar probably had this scheduled for two weeks from now but certain developments in momentum — as in she’s imploding, along with her husband, and he’s rising — have made the announcement more urgent if you’re on the left, more desperate if you’re not on the left. This does smack of desperation. Howard Wolfson, this morning on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough’s show, PMSNBC, Scarborough said, ‘The cochairman in New Hampshire talking about Barack Obama’s past drug usage, asking the question whether he actually ever sold drugs. Is that a statement Hillary Clinton would like to distance herself from this morning?’
WOLFSON: In fact, she did so uhhh yesterday after the statement was made, uh, the campaign put out a statement saying that the comments were not authorized or condoned by the campaign in any way, and, uh, Mr. Shaheen himself, uh, put out a statement, uh, saying that he regretted them, and I know that he did.
RUSH: So Mika Brzezinski, the cohostette, says, ‘Howard, you know this Billy Shaheen’s clearly fairly high up in the campaign, a main player, really. Are we supposed to believe this is a little blip, a little mistake, not some sort of strategy to tear down Barack Obama in the long run?’
WOLFSON: Bill Shaheen is a key supporter. Uhh, not everybody always says, uh, what you, uh, anticipate they’re going to say, expect they’re going to say. We were unaware, uhh, that he was going to make these comments. Uhh, they were not approved. They were not authorized, and, uh, uh, he regretted them, uh, and rightfully so. The statements he made were his own, and, uh, I think when these things happen — and look, they — unfortunately in campaigns, everybody has a lot of supporters and people are going to say things that, uh, campaigns don’t approve of or authorize, and the question becomes: What does a campaign do when statements like that are made, and, uh, in this case, uh, we made very clear, uh, that they were not approved!
RUSH: Okay, so she has apologized now for Shaheen running around charging drug use. He might have been selling drugs! We can’t nominate this guy. The Republicans are going to destroy him — while Hillary is trying to destroy him before the Republicans even get around to him! All this apologizing is going on. Gotta apologize to Obama. How about these two campaign aides in Iowa who were sending out these e-mails to people saying, ‘You know what, Barack Obama is really a Muslim. He’s lying about not being a Muslim. He’s a Muslim! He’s going to take over this country,’ and these two people have to quit, forced out. Ah, Mrs. Clinton didn’t know anything about any of this! She never does. Let’s go back to Sunday, December 2nd, on Face the Nation. Howard Wolfson, from whom you just heard, says this about Barack Obama.
WOLFSON: There’s a lot of that voters don’t know about Barack Obama.
RUSH: (Gasp!) He was setting the stage for it all the way back on December 2nd. That would be 11 days ago, and these things just happen in the campaign? We all know Clinton, Inc., and we know what we do and we know that they’re a week ahead of where everybody else is. You know what’s happening here? They’re running a national campaign. They’re running this campaign of inevitability, and they’re running up against trouble in these individual early states. She’s a candidate of inevitability, and they don’t lose. If you’re ‘inevitable,’ it’s just a fait accompli, it’s a matter of time, and then you lose one, maybe two states? Doesn’t look good!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You need a road map to follow all this, frankly, folks. Look at me as your navigation system. So Hillary Clinton tells Obama she doesn’t run a dirty campaign, but then she hires sleazy campaign people like Billy Shaheen on the drugs and Obama, her Iowa people on Barack as a Muslim, and the New York-based guy looking for dirt on Obama in Chicago. Now, to hear the Democrats tell it, the actions of underlings like Karl Rove and Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney reflect on their boss, right? Haven’t they always been saying that? You know they said this goes all the way to the top, this is really George W. Bush, he’s the one providing the motivation, the inspiration. He’s the model for the behavior of Libby and Rove and Cheney, right? Buck stops with the boss, right? So what does it say that Mrs. Clinton’s underlings run sleazy campaigns? We have to believe that Hillary has signed off on sleazy tactics based on the libs’ own philosophy, based on their own thinking. It would be one thing if this was the first time, but it’s at least the third sleazy move by Hillary employee in just the last month. And, of course, we know that Clinton, Inc., as I have said countless times, just put some crime scene tape around the Clinton headquarters. Because we all know what goes on in there. So she’s desperate. Her lead is tanking. She is inevitable no more.
She sends a New Hampshire buddy, noted for not having any testicles, out to warn that the nasty, wild, vast right wing of the GOP will use the story of drugs on Obama. And yet, they are the ones that use the story of drugs on Obama! And then they hint that Barry had actually sold drugs, and they warned Barry supporters, ‘You better drop this guy. Once the Republicans learn of this, he’s toast.’ Well, who is it that informed, quote, unquote, or sleazed or slimed Barack Obama? And then after all this, the campaign, Mrs. Clinton, Howard Wolfson, ‘We didn’t know anything about this. We didn’t have anything to do with it. We didn’t authorize this hit.’ And then Mr. Shaheen, the one without the testicles, says he shouldn’t have said it. Did Hillary call him and scream at him? Meanwhile, it’s the top story of the day.
And this from Bob Novak: ‘David Axelrod, the seasoned Chicago Democratic operative who is chief strategist for Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, was taken by surprise in the last minute of CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ on Dec. 2. Howard Wolfson, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s spokesman, accused Obama of running a ‘slush fund.’ In fact, the Clinton campaign was spreading that story privately months ago. Last summer, a senior Clinton aide told a famous Democrat believed to favor Obama that the Illinois senator was using his ‘leadership’ political action committee to spread money around the country to grease his presidential prospects. That message was private when Clinton seemed far ahead in the race for the Democratic nomination. It became public when Obama threatened to overtake her. Before Wolfson spoke out, one of Clinton’s close supporters was spreading word of unspecified defects in Obama that should deter Democrats from supporting him. This is the Clinton style that has proved effective for two decades, but Obama has continued to close the gap.
‘This attack mode works best when the accusations are hidden from public view. Last summer, a few Clinton insiders — headed by her Senate chief of staff, Tamera Luzzatto — paid a presumably social visit to the Cape Cod, Mass., vacation home of a prestigious Democrat reported to be in Obama’s corner. Luzzatto warned that Obama was ethically challenged because of his leadership PAC.’ This is last summer. ‘My sources indicated that this was not an isolated incident and that the slush-fund story was spread widely. A month ago, a Democrat close to Clinton, though not on her Senate or campaign staff, approached a party activist who has not made a commitment to a candidate with this message: Skeletons in Obama’s closet would make him vulnerable if nominated. He did not elaborate and said that the Clinton campaign would keep its anti-Obama information to itself. … The Clinton campaign denied all this, claiming it was a Republican plot. In truth, there was no Republican source for this story.
‘In the wake of these denials, Wolfson made his slush-fund accusation on ‘Face the Nation’ shortly after polls showed Obama passing Clinton for the lead in Iowa’s Jan. 3 caucuses. … With more time, Axelrod might have noted that Obama’s PAC contributed to Clinton’s 2006 Senate reelection and, in the current cycle, to Jeanne Shaheen’s Senate campaign in New Hampshire, even though her husband, Bill Shaheen, heads that state’s Clinton campaign,’ and he’s the guy ran up the drug rumors about Obama selling, and Obama’s slush fund had contributed to both Hillary and Shaheen. Some slush fund. So, anyway, ‘The fact that this bomb proved pretty much a dud raises doubt about the whispers of impropriety by this untried candidate,’ meaning Obama, the stuff is not working, it’s not lowering his numbers, and people are beginning to think, hmm, maybe he’s clean and pure.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: As you know, Hillary Clinton in Los Angeles and San Francisco earlier in the week. She privately told donors out there, ‘Don’t worry about any of this stuff.’ This is actually in Sacramento where she said this. ‘This is going to be over by February 5th, I will win the nomination by February 5th. Don’t worry about any of this stuff,’ she told them.