RUSH: It is so, so clear about the debate last night. I’m not surprised at all to get up and listen to the Drive-By Media analysts and read the New York Times or most of those in the Drive-By Media. I’ll tell you, whatever McCain’s faults (and there are many of substance and political strategy) the push is now underway to end this election right now, to make this an historic landslide, to increase the numbers in Congress.
All predicted, by the way. I predicted this to you, and I’ve been predicting it for a while. But, frankly, this is even more aggressive and monolithic than I have ever seen the Drive-By Media behave, and they are motivated. They are inspired. I cannot find a single mainstream newspaper that isn’t preaching the same Obama talking points! I cannot find a single honest reporter in the Drive-By Media. We are up against a party and a press that is of one mind, that sees an historic opportunity here to advance their far left radical agenda; and they’re not going to allow honest reporting, honest voting, or anything else to get in their way in pushing Obama over the finish line. They’re simply acting out a desire and dogma. They are leaving little to chance. The outcome is not inevitable, but it is also clear that McCain has no idea what he’s up against. If you’re a football fan, let me tell you who McCain is.
He’s Al Davis. Al Davis still thinks the Oakland Raiders compete for the Super Bowl every year. He still thinks he’s got a quarterback, Jim Plunkett or Daryle Lamonica out there throwing the ball 80 yards down the field. He thinks he’s still got all of his great wide receivers out there. The Oakland Raiders have been, frankly, a joke in the National Football League for I don’t know how long, but Al Davis doesn’t know it, and he’s running it. Senator McCain has no idea what he’s up against here. Sarah Palin kicked Joe Biden’s butt last night, period! They had many of you — and I tried to warn you yesterday that she was going to be okay, that she was going to be fine and you were going to be surprised if you had bought the Katie Couric version of Sarah Palin, if you had bought the version of her that the Drive-Bys were trying to portray her to be.
For the left to deceive themselves and the voters by pretending that that debate last night went any way other than Sarah Palin absolutely mopping the floor with Joe Biden, is nothing short of delusion. Now, yeah, Biden may be filled with Washington-speak. You know what his best friend last night was? The clock! One thing I noticed was that Gwen Ifill did not give this guy a chance to start rambling with diarrhea of the mouth. She kept those time limits dead certain. She also gave him the last word three times to every one time she got it. Now, if you’re impressed with Washington-speak, no matter what it is… I mean, Biden’s never been in a Home Depot unless he went in there to see if he could get a repair kit for his cuff links. He’s never been into a Home Depot.
Joe Biden doesn’t know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah; he doesn’t know where Gaza is. They talk about Sarah Palin not having her bona fides here on foreign policy! Sarah Palin came off as more experienced and qualified, personable and able to connect with people than Obama does, and that’s where she shined last night. She was knockout gorgeous. She looked good last night, charming, pleasant, likable, witty. She was on point. She did not appear contrived. Chris Matthews said she looked like somebody in a spelling bee. You know how they’re given the word they have to spell, and then repeat the word, and then spell it. He insults her by saying that he thought he was watching a spelling bee. Biden was not likable last night. He wasn’t witty, even when on point. Of course, he’s not charming.
Has he done something to his eyebrows? I thought I was looking at a Klingon last night. I hate to make these kinds of observations, but I couldn’t help it. There’s something different. It’s either that or his makeup artist was a ChiCom. You know, I watched the debate. I had to go to San Antonio last night, yesterday afternoon, right after the program, and I flew back — I got back on the airplane ten minutes before the debate started — and I watched the debate on the flight back home to Palm Beach and I have a bunch of TV monitors in the plane. One is a ten-inch monitor where I sit and I’m sitting real close to it. I saw there was something weird about the way Senator Biden looked last night. Different, not weird, something different. I thought it was a Klingon. I was going to say Botox, but hell, that’s old hat now to the Democrats. His forehead didn’t move much.
I thought the entire time Biden looked cornered, and I thought he came off as smug. He tried not to, but I thought he did. I thought he lost the debate. I thought he tried. But, see, here’s the difference. Here’s the difference. If you are in the Drive-By Media or you are part of the New York-Washington media corridor, you look at somebody like Sarah Palin and she may as well be from Mars. You don’t have the ability to connect with people that she connects with, and so you don’t understand how that’s done, and you don’t like it when you see it, and you think it’s too folksy and it’s too pedantic and it’s too simplistic and you just don’t understand it. You don’t understand the winks. You don’t understand the goll-darn its and the doggone its and the dadgum its, and you don’t understand this hockey. ‘What’s hockey? Hockey mom? I understand soccer moms, but I don’t know what a hockey mom is.’
So this is a disconnect. The reaction to this debate that you’ll find today in the media versus the reaction among real people, is just as partisan and striking as is the division in the country over the future of the country. Now, I got a note. I got an e-mail note. I’m flying home, and the debate ended before I got back home, and I got a note from a friend of mine in the Drive-By Media, and the friend in the Drive-By Media’s note said, ‘Tomorrow’s headline will be ‘Sarah Did Fine; Biden Gave the Performance of His Life.” I looked at that, and I said, ‘What in the world did my Drive-By buddy see? The performance of his life? She did fine? The performance of his life? The performance of his life?’ When does anybody remember a previous performance to measure this to, all those Democrat debates?
And then, lo and behold, I turn on CNN. I’m scanning around there. I’m watching post-debate coverage, and, lo and behold, what do I hear David ‘Rodham’ Gergen say? ‘Well, she did okay, but this was a performance of a lifetime for Joe Biden.’ I said, ‘Well, the text message talking points have gone out here,’ and then people said, ‘Oh, yeah. He was substantive.’ Substantive? What does it matter when you’re wrong? What’s the substance worth when you’re wrong? He doesn’t even know what the Constitution says about the vice president’s role as defined constitutionally. I mean he lectured, he made faces, he cried, he sighed, he finger pointed. He talked to Gwen Ifill, not the camera a lot, and he kept repeating this point: ‘Let me repeat! Let me say that again, you idiots. Let me say it again.’ Actually, he was vamping for time there, trying to figure out what he wanted to say next.
But to pretend that this defeat of Biden last night didn’t happen, by citing such silliness as flash CNN and CBS polls proclaiming that Biden won big, it’s just not the same thing that real Americans saw last night. It’s a big thing. We all watched it. We saw it with our own eyes. Now, some of you may have varying disagreement with me on how well she did or how poorly Biden did. Frank Luntz had one of his focus groups on Fox somewhere in a secret room at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis after the debate last night. He brought ’em in there, and scientifically put together, and I think it was near unanimous among those people in St. Louis that Sarah Palin won the debate. Now, only four of them said it was going to be change their vote. One said, ‘It’s going to move the polls.’ He told Brit, ‘It’s going to move the polls.’
I don’t know if it’s going to move the polls. I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see. All I know is that she did great. I’ll share with you one thought that I had, before we go to the first big Obscene Profit Break here on the EIB Network on Open Line Friday. It was early on in the debate, and the subject of the financial crisis came up, and Sarah Palin said, ‘Well, we’re going to…’ I’ll paraphrase. ‘We’re going to get rid of this greed on Wall Street, these people who are managing our money,’ and I’m cringing! I’m going, ‘No, no, no!’ I said, ‘Jeez, you know, if she weren’t shackled to McCain — if she didn’t have to mirror what McCain’s campaign talking points are — do you realize how great this woman could have been?’ Do you realize how great she can be when she’s turned loose to be herself? I’m optimistic about that.
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RUSH: Who’s the biggest loser in last night’s debate, ladies and gentlemen? Who would you say, Brian, was the biggest loser in the debate last night? Well, not ‘the Drive-Bys,’ one Drive-By member. That would be Katie Couric. Katie Couric did her best with her gotcha questions and her ghoulish follow-ups and her even more vicious editing of the interview with Sarah Palin. The biggest winner last night was everybody who thought that Sarah Palin was whatever Sarah Palin is because of the Katie Couric interview. There are people who watched last night, I will guarantee you, could see how the news creates an image or destroys an image with absolutely no truth to it, no reality to it. Remember: The same folks that are tearing Sarah Palin down are the same ones building Barack Obama up, covering up for all the… (interruption) What are you laughing at in there? I realize I’m a funny guy, and I haven’t said anything funny here unless Katie Couric’s name makes you laugh.
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RUSH: We continue now with the audio sound bites. Everybody was talking about Sarah Palin and her gaffes with Katie Couric and so forth. Can I play for you the biggest gaffe in an interview with Katie Couric so far this year? And it was not Sarah Palin. The question from Katie Couric: ‘We were with him last Thursday during one of the rockiest weeks in history for the US economy, something that wasn’t lost on the six-term senator.’
BIDEN: Part of what a leader does is to instill confidence, is demonstrate that he or she knows what they’re talking about, and communicates to people, ‘If you listen to me and follow what I’m suggesting, we can fix this.’ When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt (sic) got on television (sic) and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the — the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’
RUSH: There wasn’t television in 1929, and Roosevelt wasn’t president. That’s a huge gaffe. There have been countless gaffes like this. ‘Oh, that’s just Joe!’ This is the evidence of just the monolithic dogma with which the Drive-By Media is pursuing electoral victory for Obama and as many other Democrats as possible. Now we continue here with Senator Biden in the debate. The McCain campaign last night put out an e-mail blast to people. I am not on their list, but I know people who are. They sent it to me. There are 14 lies, they say, that Biden told last night. We have some of them here. From the debate last night, this is Biden.
BIDEN: This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say sit down with Ahmadinejad.
RUSH: All right, now, this is just a flat-out lie, and they know that it is a weakness. They know that they’re vulnerable on this. We go back to July 23rd, 2007, CNN’s YouTube Democrat debate from The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. A viewer named Steven from California asked this question: ‘Would you be willing to meet separately without precondition, during the first year of your administration — in Washington, anywhere else — with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?’
OBAMA: And I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow to be talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.
RUSH: He said it! We have the tape. Biden was standing right there when he said it. Ahmadinejad is the leader of Iran. Now, what they’re trying to skate on is, ‘No, Ahmadinejad’s not the leader of Iran. That’s not what Obama meant. No, no, no. I mean, the leader of Iran, why, that’s — that’s — that’s the mullahs.’ This is how they’re trying to skate out of this, but he said it. There can be no doubt about it. Snerdley, what did you think of the first sentence in the debate? First ten seconds? First ten seconds. Here are the first ten seconds.
PALIN: Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?
BIDEN: You can call me Joe.
PALIN: Thank you.
RUSH: Sarah Palin: ‘Nice to meet you. Can I call you Joe? Thank you.’ She was pretty personable. Wow. I got notes from people, ‘She looks like deer-in-the-headlight eyes here in the first ten minutes.’ I didn’t see that, either. I’ll tell you what. I got a great analogy for those of you who are just scared petrified going into last night and even the first ten minutes when you saw her. I did not see her scared. I didn’t see her deer-in-the-headlight eyes, but a lot of people told me that they did, and I know what it is. I know what it is. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, that you are a fan of the Chicago Cubs. You know your team’s going to lose every year. Every year they’re going to lose. You know it. A few of those years they are going to make the playoffs. And you go in there and you watch, and you just know they’re going to blow it. The Cubs have made the playoffs. They got blown out twice in a row by the Dodgers. Their fans believe it, but yet there is this hope that the team doesn’t blow it.
Everybody goes in, because of the Katie Couric interview, expecting Palin (who is representative of their team) to blow it. It’s like every Super Bowl; if your team makes the Super Bowl, you just know they’re going to blow it. You just know the coach is going to do something stupid. You know the quarterback’s going to throw interceptions. You just know it. If you’re a fan of Missouri University football, Missouri University football hasn’t mattered for 40 years. Now they’re number four in the nation. They play Nebraska on Saturday. I, ladies and gentlemen, will be there. I’m going back to Lincoln to see Mizzou-Nebraska. Now, I am not expecting Mizzou to lose. See, I am not a pessimist. But people go into these things just expecting everything in the world to go wrong, and it didn’t go wrong last night for Ms. Palin. Let’s see. Let’s move forward to number 18. Right out of the box I thought she connected here. Gwen Ifill said, ‘The House of Representatives this week passed a bill — or didn’t pass it, I should say. The Senate decided to pass it. The House is still wrestling with it tonight. As America watches these things happen on Capitol Hill, was this the worst of Washington or the best of Washington that we saw play out?’
PALIN: Go to a kids soccer game on Saturday and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, ‘How are you feeling with the economy?’ And I’ll betcha you’re going to hear some fear in that parent’s voice. The barometer there I think is going to be resounding that, our economy is hurting and the federal government has not provided the sound oversight that we need and that we deserve and we need reform to that end. Now, John McCain thankfully has been one representing reform. Two years ago, remember, it was John McCain who pushed so hard with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reform measures. He sounded that warning bell.
RUSH: Wait, I thought it was Obama that did that. Obama is running around saying he sounded the warning bell. McCain sounded a warning bell. He also sponsored and supported legislation to do something about it that got turned down by the Democrats. Now, Ifill offered Palin a rebuttal to something Biden had just said (it doesn’t matter what it is) and Palin pounced here. Ifill says, ‘Would you like to have an opportunity to answer that before we move on?’
PALIN: I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let ’em know my track record also. As mayor, every year I was in office, I did reduce taxes. Now, as for John McCain’s adherence to rules and regulations and pushing for even harder and tougher regulations, that is another thing that he is known for, though. Look at the tobacco industry, look at campaign finance reform.
RUSH: So you have here Palin says, basically, ‘Up yours, Ifill,’ and, ‘Up yours, Biden. You know, I’m through letting Katie Couric tell people who I am. I’m through being filtered. You may not like the way I answer these questions, but I’m going to answer these questions and talk to the American people.’ I just got the numbers on this debate last night, and it’s stunning. Over ten million alone watched on CNN. The audience for this debate last night dwarfed the bore-fest between Obama and McCain. Overall rating was a 45.0, much higher than the Obama-McCain debate which had a rating of 31.6. The Baltimore market had the largest TV audience, a household rating of 59.1. Let me get the number for this: 10,685,000 viewers alone on CNN. Now, it also means that the doofuses watching CNN also got the most biased, wrong, purposefully wrong analysis after the debate; ’cause they had their own stupid little focus group, and I think it was unanimous for Biden, and their commentators were unanimous for Biden. Don’t forget, David ‘Rodham’ Gergen out there repeating the talking point. ‘Well, Sarah Palin did fine, but Joe Biden turned in the performance of a lifetime.’
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RUSH: Here’s Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania. Jim, welcome to Open Line Friday. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: Thanks for taking the call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I heard something last night Senator Biden saying something that I haven’t heard anybody else mention and I think it should be brought up.
RUSH: What’s that?
CALLER: I don’t have the transcript, but didn’t he say something like that no one in the Senate is a better friend of Israel than Joe Biden? Don’t you think Joe Lieberman would take issue with that statement?
RUSH: See, that’s a good point, but that’s just Biden being Biden. Nobody’s a better friend of Hamas. Nobody’s a better friend of Hugo Chavez. I’m looking for the sound bites. I’ve got a bunch of sound bites we haven’t gotten to yet.
CALLER: I was hoping to hear Governor Palin would call him on that.
RUSH: We’ve got the clean coal lie. I’ve got a lot of cuts how he lied on clean coal. He lied his butt off on the clean coal stuff. He got it wrong, totally wrong on the role of the vice presidency. In fact, let’s do that. We’ll find that for you, Jim, at least transcript-wise, number 27, audio sound bite 27, in the debate last night, Gwen Ifill says, ‘Senator Biden, Vice President Cheney’s interpretation of the vice presidency?’
BIDEN: Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history. The idea he doesn’t realize that Article I (sic — Article II) of the Constitution defines the role of vice president of the United States. That’s the executive. He works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand it.
RUSH: And you don’t understand it. The role of the vice president is spelled out in the Constitution. He is president of the Senate. He has an office there. If he wants to, he can go preside over the Senate every day. He can’t vote unless there’s a tie. Now, what Biden was basically saying is, ‘I’m going to be doing nothing. I’m not going to do diddly-squat. I’ll be advising Barack a lot ’cause Barack doesn’t know what he’s doing. So I’ll be advising Barack a lot,’ but he thinks the only time the vice president can go up to Capitol Hill is to break a vote, break a tie vote or sit there for the State of the Union speech because he’s basing it on separation of powers. That’s what he meant by the vice president’s part of the executive branch and you gotta stay away from Capitol Hill.
The vice president presides over the Senate every day if he wants, and Biden doesn’t know that. What else did he say that was squirrelly? Oh! That setup question toward the end: ‘Have you changed your mind about something big in the course of your career?’ and Old Plugs looks at the camera says, ‘You know, Gwen, I really have. When I first got here, I thought that all that mattered in the Supreme Court was judicial temperament, moral turpitude, but I have since come to learn that you gotta get into people’s judicial philosophy and their ideology and disqualify them on that basis. Why if it weren’t for me, we’d have Robert Bork on this court. If it weren’t for me…’ That’s just flat-out BS. Joe Biden arrived in Washington as a card-carrying liberal. The idea that these guys had to learn about opposing conservatives on the Supreme Court, after they got to Washington?
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RUSH: What Biden said in the debate last night was this. ‘No one in the United States Senate has been a better friend of Israel than Joe Biden. I would never, ever have joined this ticket were I not absolutely sure Obama shared my passion.’ (snorts) Joe, you better hope you guys lose, because that one may come back to bite you, Joe. The guy wants to sit down with Ahmadinejad, without preconditions, and you lied about that, Joe! You know damn well he wants to sit down with all these guys.