RUSH: Carlos in Weston, Florida. Carlos, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks for taking that guy Joe to the woodshed earlier.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: Rush, that Tony Blankley piece that you read earlier is a perfect example of why John McCain needs to get ahead of this thing. He had a golden opportunity on 60 Minutes and he just pandered and now they’re hitting them over the head with it on that New York Times piece. So I just want to know when you think he’s going to start naming names on this thing.
RUSH: Well, they are hammering the New York Times today, did it in a press release on their website. Look, they’re naming names in ads. They’re naming names in the voices of others. But McCain is not doing it. I gather it’s just not in his nature.
CALLER: Well, it’s the only way that he’s going to get the attention of the people that need to hear it, you know, above and beyond who’s already hearing it on the Internet. But it’s just frustrating because he has a golden opportunity to take advantage of this and doesn’t do it.
RUSH: Isn’t this the four-year lament we have about our candidate no matter who it is?
CALLER: Yeah, it is.
RUSH: Be it the House speaker, be it anyone, they just don’t fight back. They continue to try to reach across the aisle and make friends of these people. These people are trying to destroy them. I know it’s frustrating. I’m not a psychiatrist, I cannot explain McCain. Look, he’s been around a long time, he’s 73 years old, he thinks he knows the right thing to do, and I can’t tell you the number of people who say, ‘Rush, do you have an inside line to that campaign? I want to tell them what they ought to do about X.’ These are people that you would know their names.
CALLER: I have the same fear that you have, that they’re watering down Palin and they should let her just be herself.
RUSH: Let Palin be Palin. See, they’re keeping here on a script so that she mirrors McCain in this reform business. He thinks the election’s about reform.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, he’s being hit over the head with it, you know, this guy, Joe, that called earlier that had the audacity to try and blame McCain for this is just a perfect example of how out of touch they are.
RUSH: Not just that. Presented with the facts to refute his point he didn’t say, ‘Oh, thanks, I didn’t know that.’ The facts didn’t matter. This is why we can’t debate these people in a rational way. This is why they will not come into the arena of ideas. They don’t have the facts, they’re wrong, and occasionally they’ll send out little infantry men like Joe here to try to get into our high command. But it doesn’t work because the arena of ideas doesn’t lie, and these guys don’t have ideas, they’ve got propaganda. I was going to say I’ve got so many people that call me, e-mail me, ‘Rush, I gotta talk to whoever is running the McCain campaign,’ after they see him on television, ‘We gotta get a message in there. There’s a better way to do this.’ And I say, ‘I don’t have that information. I don’t know what the back channels are, but I know what the reaction would be.’ I mean the people running McCain’s campaign are professionals, and if they start hearing from everybody in the world they’re going to start resenting all the advice they’re getting because they’re gonna hear it as an insult or as endless criticism. And they’re going to say, ‘Look we’re the guys running this show, we’re the guys McCain hired. We know what we’re doing; back off.’
McCain’s running the show here. He’s setting out the pattern and the tone that he wants to use and the main ideas he’s trying to get across. This New York Times stuff, part of the purpose of this is just to keep McCain constantly on defense and saying, no, that’s not true, no, that’s not true, no. They just flood the zone with lies. Obama’s doing it with an ad out there saying McCain opposed stem cells. The whole Obama campaign is just flooding the zone now with lie after lie after lie, and so the McCain campaign is stuck at the rapid response theory, okay, we have to respond to that. Some of these are so bad even the media is ripping Obama for it. But they’re doing it in a way that says, ‘Ah, 15-yard penalty.’ They kind of lackadaisically half jokingly say, ‘Look at old Barack, he-he, another good lie,’ sort of the way they marveled at the way Clinton did it, still lied, it’s cleverly done though, we barely caught it, da-da-da-da, what have you. That’s why the guy Carlos in Weston is right. Go on offense here. McCain is the opponent. Wall Street’s not the opponent. Chris Cox is not the opponent. Let Sarah Palin loose. Let her start electrifying things again. It can happen.
This is Kaelin in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Great to have you here. What a great name, Kaelin, one of my all-time favorite top ten female names.
CALLER: Somehow I’ve heard that before.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Rush, I have waited for — unlike your previous caller, I have tried for 16 years and waited to say the word, mega dittos! I’m so excited to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I am really concerned. You mentioned earlier not to be concerned with the Washington Post poll that came out today, but if you cite like say Florida, for instance, on Fox & Friends this morning they mentioned that although McCain is leading in that poll that at least 500,000 more Democrats are registered to vote. Furthermore, my daughter, who is a Republican delegate, national delegate at her college and a political science student, she mentioned that the effort to register voters, college students, has been huge. They’ve gotten down several. And she said that in the past it isn’t just that they’ve slept in and haven’t been able to vote, they weren’t registered. And she says Obama’s campaign pays people to register, people to sign up and register.
RUSH: That’s the Chicago street money.
CALLER: Do we need to be concerned about that?
RUSH: Yeah. I mean you always gotta be concerned, the Democrats can’t win without cheating and that’s why you gotta be worried about what ACORN is out there doing, fraudulently registering as many people as they can. It’s a small bit of comfort, but every four years we hear about college-age voter registration, how it’s setting the records, we hear about Rock the Vote, we have that idiot, that sheer, stupid, brainless amoeba, P. Diddy with his Vote or Die voter registration effort, and we hear every four years about how, oh, man we really rock ’em and sock ’em, we got college kids, they really want Obama, and they never show up in nearly as large a number as we’re told. All of this is propaganda. You’ve got to learn, Kaelin, all of this that you’re seeing, all these polls right now, the truth is that Obama is going to spend a whole lot of money in Florida because he’s in trouble in Florida. He’s in big trouble in Florida. He’s going to dump a lot of money in here, and he partly wants to do that so that McCain will get tricked into spending a lot of money here and wasting it in a state that he doesn’t need it. There’s so much going on here behind the scenes. The bottom line is you are like everybody else. You watch even Fox, these polls right now, don’t ignore them, but don’t give them whole lot of credibility and don’t let ’em affect your attitude. The purpose right now is to have you all depressed and think that there are 500,000 more Democrats in Florida than there are Republicans. ‘Oh Florida, oh, it’s horrible.’ You’re subject to a propaganda effort that gets ratcheted up every four years by the media for the Democrat candidate.
CALLER: Okay, so I’ve got to stay strong and not fall for that.
RUSH: I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you when it’s time to panic.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I’ll tell you — and it’s not.
CALLER: I trust you, Rush.
RUSH: You can, don’t doubt me. It’s not time to panic. It’s time to be really mad about what’s going on in Washington. And, folks, this is very simple. If you want health care run like the financial mortgage system, if you want more and more of this economy reflected by what happened in the mortgage business, then do, vote Obama. This is what you’re gonna get. You’re looking at the people who broke this thing represented by Barack Obama. This notion that the economic downturn is benefiting Obama is conventional wisdom. Some polls even say it’s true. But it’s just conventional wisdom. This is a sitting duck like energy prices are a sitting duck, and this is where McCain ought to go on offense, knock this out of the park. This is Democrat corruption from the top to the bottom. He doesn’t want to do that because he wants to work with them. Somebody needs to tell that campaign, ‘the Democrats are who you need to beat,’ but he doesn’t look at it that way. So that’s why turn Palin loose and let her rip.