RUSH: Bill Clinton erupted. Milbank, South Dakota. Huffington Post reporter Mayhill Fowler spoke with former President Clinton about the Vanity Fair piece written by Todd Purdum. She said, ‘Mr. President, what do you think of that hatchet job somebody did at Vanity Fair?’
CLINTON: He’s a really dishonest reporter, and one of our guys talked to him, I haven’t read it, but the guy telling me there’s five or six blatant lies in there, but he’s a real slimy guy, totally slimy. Just blow it off.
FOWLER: But he’s married to Dee Dee Myers?
CLINTON: Yes. That’s all right, he’s still a scumbag. He’s one of guys that propagated all those lies about Whitewater for Kenneth Starr. He’s just a dishonest guy; he can’t help it.
RUSH: Wow. (doing Clinton impression) ‘He can’t help it. He’s a scumbag. He’s one of the guys that propagated all those lies about Whitewater to Ken Starr.’ Todd Purdum. Isn’t this delectable? Clinton wasn’t finished.
CLINTON: You notice he didn’t use a single — he didn’t site any source in all those statements, it’s just slimy. It’s part of the national media’s attempt to nail Hillary for Obama. It’s just the most biased press coverage in our history. It’s just another way of helping Obama. They had all these people standing up in his church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn’t do anything about it the first day, he said, ah, well. But that’s what they do, he gets other people to slime her. So then they saw the news, they thought, this is a great ad for John McCain, maybe I’ll quit the church. This is all politics. It’s all about the bias in the media for Obama. Don’t think anything about it.
RUSH: He’s right about that, the media is in the tank for Obama and they have told us all along. I mean, Chris Matthews gets a tingle up his leg. Jonathan Capehart last night says you can’t help but get caught up with all these, these huge crowds. Hey, Jonathan, most of these crowds are overestimated and the big one out in Oregon, it was a rock concert crowd, a total sham. Clinton’s right about that. He even wonders about what went on in Obama’s church. He, too, notices the congregation getting up and cheering the notion that Hillary was a white racist. He then concludes.
CLINTON: But I’m telling you, all it’s doing is driving her supporters further and further away, because they know exactly what it is. This has been the most rigged press coverage in modern history, and the guy ought to be ashamed of himself, but he has no shame. It isn’t the first dishonest piece he wrote about me or her. Any time you read a story that slimes a public figure with anonymous quotes, it ought to make the bells go off in your head, because any time somebody uses those things, he wrote the story in his head in advance and he just goes around and tries to find some coward to say whatever they want to say hoping they get some benefit out of it. It didn’t bother me, it shouldn’t bother you. He still hasn’t apologized to me for Whitewater.
RUSH: It didn’t bother him. It didn’t bother him! (laughing) You know what this shows. It shows that this piece is a home run. This piece bothers him to no end. It shows that he is one angry guy. He is just mad as he can be. He doesn’t understand the Drive-Bys turning on him. The Drive-Bys were Clintons’ allies all through the nineties, and he just doesn’t get it, he’s just mad as he can be. By the way, the thing about that Vanity Fair story, we’ve all known it, none of it was new. This is stuff the Drive-Bys knew for all these years and suppressed. They marveled at this kind of stuff. They envied Clinton for having a bevy of babes that he could pal around with. They envied Clinton being able to run around on his wife. They envied him being able to go around lying left and right. They envied him and they respected him because of the way he pummeled Republicans, and they knew all of this. That’s the real story.
How come only now does Purdum and the rest of the Drive-Bys decide they gotta get this stuff out? It’s to kill off the Clintons. They’ve had it, they don’t want the Clintons; this is a coordinated effort. I think partly to keep Hillary off the vice presidential ticket, and Clinton isn’t helping here by losing his cool like this and calling a reporter a scumbag. I think they did like him. I think at one time the reporters did like him. They envied him. But I think after awhile they got tired of carrying the water. I think they got tired of covering for the guy and now it’s the opportunity to cleanse their reputations for having done so. Yeah. I mean, clearly they liked the guy way back when, as did a majority of the American people, according to polling data. So last night on Larry King Live, we have a montage of James Carville talking about Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair.
CARVILLE: Unnamed sources in this tawdry cocktail party gossip. This is nothing but a compilation of drunk cocktail party Washington dinner party talk. It was a Washington cocktail party, kind of after-dinner drinks, bantering around. What happens here in Washington, the way that it operates is, they go to these dinner parties, and after they talk to each other, they get all gassed up, and they talk to a bunch of other people, and you end up with something like this.
RUSH: Well, he just called Todd Purdum a drunk. Carville just called Todd Purdum a drunk. He’s running around to all these cocktail parties, after-dinner drinks with the gumbo and all these other things, cocktail parties. Where did this theory first evolve? The cocktail party theory first evolved here as we sought to explain, how come the Drive-Bys, each and every one of them, 35 in a row, used the same word, gravitas, to react to Bush choosing Cheney to be his vice presidential nominee. Here’s Tim Russert, Morning Joe today, MSNBC, along with Pat Buchanan, Buchanan says, do you think a sense of resentment and bitterness, that we were treated unfairly is pretty deep not only with Bill but with Hillary and the folks of her campaign?
RUSSERT: I talked to Clinton supporters. They believe that his comments were not presidential, terribly inappropriate, he has apologized. It’s not what you want to hear coming from someone who served in the Oval Office, but clearly they are a reflection of the anger that he feels towards the Obama campaign, towards the media, towards the process because he didn’t win and I think it’s very difficult for him to accept intellectually that a freshman Senator from Illinois has defeated the former first lady of the United States, his wife, someone who was going to redeem the Clinton brand in American politics. That’s a lot to absorb. I think that’s why we saw that anger flowing forward.
RUSH: Yeah, they can’t believe this rookie black guy has wiped ’em out, Russert is right about that. But I can’t believe these people are surprised that Clinton would use language like this so inappropriate to some. He was inappropriate for the Oval Office when he was in it, and that should have been their judgment back then, not just now.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I got a note from a friend during the bottom of the hour obscene profit break. The friend said, ‘I kind of like Bill getting mad at the media. I like Bill getting mad at these guys.’ My friend hates the media, just despises the media. He loves Clinton taking it to them. I wrote him back, said, ‘I got no sympathy for the guy.’ He said, ‘I’m not talking about sympathy. I just love anybody hammering the media.’ My problem is that Clinton got such a free ride from the media for all these years, for all these Drive-Bys to talk about how what he says is not befitting someone who once occupied the Oval Office. Hell, he wasn’t fit to occupy the Oval Office, and they knew it then, and they knew all this stuff that Purdum wrote now. They’ve known it for a long time. There’s so much hypocrisy in this.
Now, I can understand the anger at that, but I also understand this. I looked at my e-mail this morning. Do you know how thrilled millions of Americans are that the Clintons are finished? We are this close to having the House fall on the wicked witch with just those feet about ready to curl up exposed from underneath the house, and they can’t wait. Doesn’t matter what we end up with, Obama, there is such a revulsion for anything Clinton, and people are just excited. And these are some of the same people that were afraid that Operation Chaos was going to revive her. I warned you not to have that fear. That fear was never valid. Operation Chaos worked like a champ, and it is still working. This party, despite all these efforts to so-called unify it, they are still in abject chaos, as was evidenced by their meeting last Saturday at the hotel in Washington, DC. (doing Clinton impression) ‘Hey, hey, hey, Limbaugh, I gotta say something to you.’
What is it, Mr. President? ‘I heard you saying your buddy likes it when I get mad at the media. Let me tell you something, pal, I’ve held in check here for I don’t know how long. You realize, I am the first president of this country whose wife wanted the damn job, Limbaugh. I had to sit out there and I had to act like I cared and I had to act like I was interested and I had to go out there and act like I — because if I don’t help my wife I got hell to pay in all kinds of other places, and then what happens she loses, and she can’t help herself, and they come hit me again every damn time. They run hit pieces on me, and I’m sick and tired of it, Limbaugh, and you know the truth, you know these people have no right to do this kind of thing to me because they loved me at one time and they know I saved this country from the Republicans, and I saved them. They turned on me like this. I’m not going to put up with it anymore, Limbaugh, I’m moving on to other things. Burkle, here I come.’ President is quite angry, ladies and gentlemen.