Rush Recaps the Democrat Debate

RUSH: Mrs. Clinton, by the way, we’ve got audio sound bites of this debate last night. It was entertaining as it could be in spots. Did you see it? Did you watch it, Snerdley? Oh, reading the transcript will not do it for you in this case. You had to see it. Barack and Hillary went at it there for a while. Hillary accused him of doing business with a slum lord after he accused her of being a corporate lawyer on the Wal-Mart board while he was fighting for the little people in Illinois. He stood up and he said, ‘I don’t like the fact that you’re factually incorrect in assessing my positions on things.’ And, by the way, the Clintons love this. They absolutely love it because they think it takes Barack off message when he has to respond to them.

There was also — I’m not going to say — never mind, I’m not going to say it because all I’m going to do is make women mad, don’t want to do that, making women mad is going to send — all right, I’m going to say it, but I’m going to stop doing this in the future. After the first part of the debate, standing up there at those podiums and then they took a commercial break, and Blitzer came back and they were all sitting in chairs. I’m going to pay for this. See, this is the kind of thing that you’re not supposed to say, that when you say this, all it does is drive people to Hillary, women especially. (sigh) But see, I’m not going to tease you, it’s really unfair to say I’m going to say something and then not say it. So I’m going to say it now. She was the only one sitting there who could not cross her legs.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: (new castrati impression) ‘That’s just horrible, Mr. Limbaugh! I can’t believe you said that. That’s just horrible. Why do you even notice things like that, Mr. Limbaugh? I can’t believe you!’ It’s very simple, ladies and gentlemen. I’m a leg man. I’m jealous. I can’t do it either. I can’t cross my legs sitting in a chair like that. I’m jealous of people who can and I’m jealous of other people who don’t, and it makes me feel better about myself, okay? I can’t do it, either. Welcome back. Rush Limbaugh here (laughs) the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com. What I was going to say, before I got sidetracked by the latest questionable-taste comment for which I’ve now quasi-apologized, but not really. Mrs. Clinton said something. I heard a clip of her at an MLK event, Martin Luther King event, and I’m going to paraphrase this because I don’t have the exact quote in front of me. She said, ‘After 40 years we are nowhere near solving the problems of race and it’s time to step up and get it done.’ Uh, we made no progress? A black man is running for president, and we made no progress? She and Uncle Bill were in the White House for eight years, and there was no progress made? Man, that’s a clip made to order for the RNC when the general election comes up. By the way, speaking of that. I told you last week we read excerpts from the Judicial Watch website of Hillary Clinton’s actual White House papers in terms of how they were planning to get her health care plan passed, and the Drive-By Media hasn’t done a thing on that. Now, that’s expected, and the reason the Drive-Bys haven’t done anything on it is because they were to be enlisted to assist getting the thing done. Jay Rockefeller said that the news media was ‘waiting for guidance from the White House’ on how to proceed to get this all done. But where’s the RNC on this? I hope they’re saving this for the general election, because this is not what somebody thinks about Mrs. Clinton, and this is not from some think tank. These are actual White House documents. It is a perfect definition of who she is, and I’m going to tell you something. This woman does not cry — and after watching that debate last night, this woman does not cry — except when it becomes expedient.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: To the audio sound bites. Live on CNN last night, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was the Breck Girl, Obama, and Hillary. Suzanne Malveaux says, ‘Senator Obama, it was just a few days ago that Senator Clinton asserted that she was the strongest candidate when it comes to fiscal responsibility. She says the new programs that she proposes she can essentially pay for. She says that you have failed in that regard to the tune of some $50 billion worth of new programs you can’t account for. How do you respond to that charge?’

OBAMA: What she said wasn’t true. We account for every single dollar that we propose. Now, this, I think, is one of the things that’s happened during the course of this campaign, that there’s a set of assertions made by Senator Clinton as well as her husband that are not factually accurate. When Senator Clinton said — or President Clinton says that I wasn’t opposed to the war from the start or says it’s a fairytale that I opposed the war, that is simply not true. When Senator Clinton or President Clinton asserts that I said that the Republicans had had better economic policies since 1980, that is not the case.

RUSH: Okay, so this started the fireworks, because Obama here basically said that the Clintons were lying about him. So Hillary shot back with this.

HILLARY: When it comes to a lot of the issues that are important in this race, it is sometimes difficult to understand what Senator Obama has said because as soon as he is confronted on it, he says that’s not what he meant. The facts are that he has said in the last week that he really liked the ideas of Republicans over the last 10-to-15 years, and we can give you the exact quote. They were bad ideas for America. And I want to be just very explicit about this. We are not, neither my campaign nor anyone associated with it, are in any way saying you did not oppose the war in Iraq. It was after having given that speech. By the next year the speech was off your website. By the next year you were telling reporters that you agreed with President Bush and his conduct of the war, and by the next year when you were in the Senate, you were voting to fund the war time after time after time.

RUSH: So that exchange is what got all this going. All right, now, here is Obama responding.

OBAMA: Let’s talk about Ronald Reagan. What you just repeated here today is patent — wait, no, Hillary — you just spoke for two minutes —

HILLARY: I did not say anything about Ronald Reagan. You said two things. You talked about admiring Ronald Reagan, and you talked about the ideas of the Republicans. I didn’t talk about Ronald Reagan.

OBAMA: We just had the tape. You just said that I complimented the Republican ideas. That is not true. What I said, and I will provide you with the quote, what I said was is that Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure because he was able to get Democrats to vote against their economic interests to form a majority to push through their agenda, an agenda that I objected to. Because while I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart.

RUSH: Mrs. Clinton did not like that at all.

HILLARY: You talked about Ronald Reagan being a transformative political leader. I did not mention his name.

OBAMA: Your husband did.

HILLARY: Well, I’m here. He’s not.

OBAMA: Okay, well, I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.

HILLARY: But you also talked about the Republicans having ideas over the last 10-to-15 years.

OBAMA: Never said they were good ones.

HILLARY: Well, you can read the context of it, it certainly came across — all right, it certainly came across in the way that it was presented as, though the Republicans had been standing up against the conventional wisdom with their ideas. I’m just reacting to the fact yes, they did have ideas, and they were bad ideas, bad for America, and I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.

RUSH: Okay. Now, while all well and good, poor old Barry, he’s just been insulted here, he’s got a dirty contributor, a slumlord, the Clintons say he’s got a dirty contributor. Where’s Barry comeback, ‘Have you ever heard of Norman Hsu? Have you ever heard of the Riadys? Have you ever heard of the Lippo group, Charlie Trie?’ He didn’t say a word of that. He did not say a word about — yeah, real estate — didn’t say a word of that. And I can tell you why, if you want to know.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Did you notice how upset Mrs. Clinton got when Barack Obama had the temerity to remind America that she was once a corporate lawyer sitting on the Wal-Mart board? Lucky for him there were no ashtrays nearby on the stage. I mean, of all things to get testy about, okay, so I was on the Wal-Mart board. That really ticked her off. So she has to come back and say, ‘Well, yeah, while you were out there celebrating Reagan’s ideas, I was fighting those ideas, when you were practicing law representing your contributor Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.’ Interestingly, after that, Wolf Blitzer would not let Obama respond. They had to stick to the format and give Edwards some time, and Edwards said, ‘Hey, hey, hey, you know, there are three people in this debate.’ Blitzer eventually went back to Obama and he got to answer the question.

Okay, so Mrs. Clinton gets all upset about this Wal-Mart board business, and she comes back with a sleazeball contributor as a slumlord, and everybody watching the debate, at least people like us watching the debate, ‘Barry, Barry, Charlie Trie, Riadys, Lippo Group, Lincoln Bedroom, coffees, Charlie Trie with $250,000 in money orders for the Clinton legal defense fund. Barry, where are you?’ Now, there’s a reason, there may be two reasons why Obama did not reply or retort. Now, my theory is that the reason Barry did not retort with any of this is that once you go there, you open yourself up for the return volley. If you figure, that in the case of the people elected to the US Senate, you have to figure that most of these people have something in their fundraising histoire they would rather people not know. I guarantee you that Obama is probably one of those and I’m sure the Clinton opposition research team at Clinton, Inc., knows all about it, and so if Barry goes there, Hillary could come back and say, ‘How dare you insult me, we have been totally vetted on this. We had an independent counsel investigating us for years, a newspaper investigating us for years, and nobody ever found a thing. Now, how about when you, Obama, did X and Y and Z?’

Now, see, you would think, we’ve been in this primary for how long, you would think that one of these guys opposing Mrs. Clinton would use some of this, because they’re all out there talking about cleaning up the mess that’s Washington. Why don’t they? The other theory — I’ll run it by you, and you see what you think — the other theory that the DNC has told all of these people on the Democrat roster, ‘You are not going to say anything about anybody else that’s going to destroy them in the general.’ So there is sort of a behind-the-scenes handshake on the table. And they got pretty close to it last night, and the fur really started flying. Now, this is just a theory that the DNC’s told these people, ‘Go out and say what you want about each other, but do not go anywhere that could ruin our nominee’s chances, whoever it is, in the general by getting this stuff out there.’ I can argue against that theory by saying, who cares what happens in the Democrat primary? The Republicans and their nominee could fire back at Hillary with this stuff, and no DNC is going to tell ’em to shut up about it, unless the entire political class has a handshake under the table that they will not ever accuse any opponent in any party of shady fundraising because a lot of it already is shady.

McCain has given us the framework for this. (Doing McCain impression) ‘That’s right, Limbaugh. You got it. It’s a good thing most people don’t have your memory. We’re all corrupt. We were great, decent people, we got here, money corrupted us, Limbaugh, corrupted us! I got it out. I took the money out of politics.’ I’m telling you, this fundraising business is one area where none of them want to go. So you might say that the Clintons have insurance on this because nobody else is clean and pure as the wind-driven snow on the subject. Let us continue with audio sound bites from the slugfest last night. We left off with Mrs. Clinton saying to Obama, ‘Yeah, those Reagan ideas were bad for America, and I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor Rezko and his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.’ And then Edwards got in there. Wolf Blitzer said, ‘Senator Edwards, you’ve been remarkably patient during this exchange, and I don’t know if you want to get involved in this, Senator Edwards.’

EDWARDS: What I want to say first is there are three people in this debate, not two. I also want to know on behalf of voters here in South Carolina, this kind of squabbling, how many children is this going to get health care? How many people are going to get an education from this? How many kids are going to be able to go to college because of this?

RUSH: Does this sound vaguely familiar, ladies and gentlemen? Remember in 1996, the now famous debate between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, and this might have been the second or third debate, one of these debates in the round, and somebody told Dole, ‘You know, you’re not scoring. You’ve gotta take gloves off in this debate.’ So Dole took ’em off and went after Clinton on some of these matters that we’ve been discussing, fundraising and stuff. And Clinton, they were all standing around, hand-held microphones, and Clinton put his mike real close to his mouth, and he said, ‘No attack ever fed a hungry child.’ The place melted. The place just went bazonkers. No attack ever fed a hungry child. So here’s the Breck Girl recycling Bill Clinton from about, oh, 11-and-a-half years ago. Wolf Blitzer said, ‘Senator Clinton, your proposal,’ this is freezing interest rates; this is the subprime crisis, ‘your proposal calls for a five-year moratorium on interest rates, a 90-day moratorium on foreclosure, five-year, keeping those interest rates the same. Alan Greenspan suggests we simply have to let this house crisis exhaust itself. Trying to prevent the housing markets from going down merely prolongs the agony. Does your plan, as he would seem to be suggesting, prolong the agony?’

HILLARY: What I hear as I go in and out of people’s homes and talk to so many who have already lost their homes, they’re in foreclosure, they see these interest rates that are about to go up and they know they can’t pay them, is that we take action now. My moratorium for 90 days is that workout. It’s not a bailout. I want people to be able to see whether they can stay in their homes paying a rate that is affordable for them. And the interest rate freeze is I think merited because, look at what’s happening. If you’re a big bank that helped get us into this mess, you go borrow money from Abu Dhabi or somewhere. If you are you’re a homeowner who has been at the bottom of this incredible scheme that was established, you’re left holding the bag, and you don’t have the house anymore.

RUSH: Oh, this is incredible. This scheme, Mrs. Clinton, this incredible scheme was hatched by Congress. It was Congress who told lenders that you’re going to go out and lend money to people that basically can’t afford it. But look, as I said yesterday, great, let’s go freeze foreclosures. Let’s tell these predatory lenders they can’t take your house for three months, and during those three months, you figure out whether you can pay the rate. No, in those three months, you skip town. Then she says, we’re going to freeze interest rates. It’s just not fair out there. We’re going to freeze interest rates. We’re just going to have a time-out. Mrs. Clinton, if you’re going to do this, would you freeze stock prices, too? Would you put a floor on stock prices, and would you tell the markets, you tell those predatory brokers that they can’t sell a stock below X price. I know what you’re thinking, Rush, that’s silly. She can’t do that. How would you enforce it? Exactly. It would be silly. So what’s the difference between that and putting a 90-day freeze on interest rates or a 90-day freeze on foreclosures? This is frightening, frightening stuff. This, again, this debate last night, aside from the two duking it out over these little ancillary things, this was the Democrat Party telling us how they plan on destroying the US economy when they get in the White House.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: As you listen to these audio sound bites from the Democrat debate last night, you need to ask yourself a question: Why are the Democrats not asked more about their positions on social issues: abortion, same-sex marriage, school prayer? If you listen to these same Drive-By Media people ask questions of Republicans, what’s it about? Abortion, abortion, abortion, homosexuality, the Bible, Bush. Why don’t the same questions get asked of Democrats? Well, we know the answers here, but I just thought I would raise it anyway. They’re never asked about abortion. They’re never asked about same-sex marriage. They’re never asked about school prayer, or any of this. We go back to the audio sound bites here. In this one, Hillary and the Breck Girl team up on Obama. Obama says to Hillary, ‘You know what we have to do is, we have to have consistency in how we vote. You can’t say one thing during the campaign trail and then apologize afterward and say it was a mistake, and that’s repeatedly happened during the course of this campaign, and I think that tells you the kind of president that folks are going to be.’

HILLARY: Well, you know, Senator Obama, it is very difficult having a, uh, straight-up debate with you because you never take responsibility (snort-laugh) for any vote, and that has been a pattern. You in the legislature —

AUDIENCE: (boos)

HILLARY: Now, wait a minute! In the Illinois state legislature —

AUDIENCE: (boos)

HILLARY: Just a minute! In the Illinois state Senate, Senator Obama voted 130 times ‘present.’ That’s not yes. That’s not no. That’s maybe, and on issue after issue that really were hard to explain or understand — you know, voted ‘present’ on keeping sex shops away from schools, voted ‘present’ on limiting the rights of victims of sexual abuse. Voted present time and time again. It’s just very (snort-laugh) difficult to get a straight answer, and that’s what we are probing for.

RUSH: Ooooooh! Clinton, Inc., is probing Obama for straight answers. Here is Obama.

OBAMA: What happened on that particular provision was that after I had sponsored it and helped get it passed, it turned out there was a legal provision in it that was problematic and needed to be fixed so that it wouldn’t be struck down. But when you comb my 4,000 votes in Illinois —

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

OBAMA: — choose one —

AUDIENCE: (applause)

OBAMA: — and try to present it in the worst possible light, that does have to be answered. That does have to be answered. What’s also important is that people are not just willing to say anything to get elected. I don’t mind having policy debates with Senator Clinton or Senator Edwards. But what I don’t enjoy is spending the week, or two weeks or the last month, having to answer to these kinds of criticisms that are not factually accurate.

AUDIENCE: (applause)

OBAMA: And the press has looked at them, they are not accurate, and you need to present them as accurate.

RUSH: Well, this all sounds well and good, but come on. You’re grown-ups here, Barack. You know the Clintons are going to lie about you. That’s what they do, and then you start acting (crying), ‘They’re not telling the truth about me!’ When have they ever told the truth about anybody? You’re not the first guy it happened to. Frankly, I could have given a better answer about his 130 ‘present’ votes than he did, because I’ve heard him say it before. What I heard him say before is that in the Illinois State Senate, you vote present when there are things in the bill you don’t like. If there are enough present votes, you can send it back to committee and get it fixed, and then bring it back. Say you like it, but there’s something in it that’s really onerous. You vote present. Now, you can’t vote present in the US Senate. They tried to make a big deal out of it. He didn’t explain that very well last night. The Breck Girl. This is the team-up! This is the Breck Girl deciding to jump in on this against poor old Obama.

THE BRECK GIRL: The question is —

OBAMA: But, but, but —

THE BRECK GIRL: — why would you, over a hundred times, vote present?

OBAMA: John —

THE BRECK GIRL: I mean, every one of us — every one — You’ve criticized Hillary —

OBAMA: I understand.

THE BRECK GIRL: — You’ve criticized me, for our votes.

OBAMA: Right.

THE BRECK GIRL: We cast hundreds and hundreds of votes. What you’re criticizing her for, by the way, you’ve done to us, which is you picked this vote and that vote out of the hundreds that we cast.

OBAMA: No.

AUDIENCE: (applause)

THE BRECK GIRL: — and what — All I’m saying is, what’s — what’s fair is fair. You have every right —

OBAMA: Right.

THE BRECK GIRL: — to defend any vote. You do.

OBAMA: Absolutely.

THE BRECK GIRL: And I respect your right to do that, on any — on any substantive issue. It does not make sense to me — and what if — what if I had just not shown up?

OBAMA: John? John? Hang on a moment.

THE BRECK GIRL: Wait, wait, wait! Let me finish!

OBAMA: Now, hang on a second.

THE BRECK GIRL: What if I had just not shown up to vote on things on that really matter to this country? It would have been safe for me politically.

OBAMA: John?

THE BRECK GIRL: It would have been the carefully cautious thing to do, but I have a responsibility to take a position.

OBAMA: John —

RUSH: And then he tried to explain again what the present vote means, in Illinois, but he didn’t quite get there, I didn’t think. Now, this is Mrs. Clinton ripping Obama’s lungs out on health care. Blitzer said, ‘I promised Senator Clinton she could respond as well. You got 30 seconds.’

HILLARY: If you don’t start out trying to get universal health care, we know — and our members of Congress know — you’ll never get there. (shouting) If a Democrat doesn’t stand for universal health care that includes every single American, you can see the consequences of what that will mean. I think it is imperative that we have plans, as both John and I do, that from the very beginning, say, ‘You know what, everybody’s got to be covered.’ Universal health care is such a core Democratic principle that I am willing to go to the mat for it.

AUDIENCE: (applause)

HILLARY: I’ve been there before. I will be there again! (screeching over applause) I am not giving in! I am not giving up, and I’m not going to start out leaving 15 million Americans out of health care! [snip]

HILLARY: I am not running for president to put Band-Aids on our problems.

AUDIENCE: (applause)

HILLARY: (screeching over applause) I want to get to universal health care for every single American!

RUSH: Yes, and if I had been there, I would have said, ‘Have you seen how it’s failing in the UK? Have you seen how it’s failing in Canada?’ But, of course, the moderators and questioners at CNN are not even aware of that.