RUSH: You know, oil prices are getting pretty low out there, they’re hovering around $90 a barrel. What’s the Dow Jones Industrial Average right now? It’s down a little bit, but I’m sitting here thinking that old Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could probably use an artificial boost in oil prices with an international incident such as shooting down a plane, a Hungarian plane, maybe something that didn’t happen. I guarantee you, $90 a barrel is killing Iran; it’s killing Russia; it’s killing Venezuela. Greetings, my friends, welcome, Rush Limbaugh back after a fun-filled and thrill-packed weekend away. Great to be with you. Here’s phone number if you want to be on the program: 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
Let’s see. The market plunge that the bailout was supposed to prevent happened, right? It happened yesterday, and guess what’s going on yesterday and today? Congress is conducting hearings grilling Wall Street CEOs! It’s too rich.
Yesterday I was in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The new federal courthouse there was dedicated yesterday to my grandfather, Rush Limbaugh, Sr. It was just a great honor for all of us in the Limbaugh family for this to happen. It was about a 90-minute ceremony. After it was all over, we left the tent where the ceremony was taking place, walked up to the steps, front of the courthouse, a bunch of us, to cut the ribbon. After we cut the ribbon, my cousin Dan who now lives in St. Louis, a West Point graduate, came up to me and said, ‘You know, I really can’t wait for this election to end and you to get back to humor.’ I looked at him and I said, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’ And it got me to thinking about the intensity of this campaign and how serious it is, because we’re talking about what kind of country we’re going to be for a long time in the future. McCain came out yesterday, I was watching television on the way back to Florida yesterday afternoon, and McCain was in Albuquerque, and he just came out smoking against Obama. I’ve never heard McCain sound this way. I got a couple sound bites. Here’s a portion, the first sound bite we have of the two.
MCCAIN: For a guy who’s already authored two memoirs, he’s not exactly an open book. Whatever the question, whatever the issue, there’s always a back story with Senator Obama. All people want to know is what has this man ever actually accomplished in government. What does he plan for America? In short, who is the real Barack Obama? But, my friends, you ask such questions, and all you get in response is another angry barrage of insults.
RUSH: Now, I wonder what this is? Is this a setup for what McCain strategery tonight during the town hall meeting is going to be? I hope so. I like him saying these things, I really do, but I wonder strategerically if it would have been wiser for Senator McCain to spring all this stuff on Obama tonight as a sort of a surprise and a shock. A I’ll tell you something else that’s going on out there, and it’s effervescing, and that is this whole business of Bill Ayers. This association with Ayers, it’s starting to hit the Obama people very hard. They’re getting very defensive about this. Axelrod’s out there, we’re going to cover this in great detail as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears. Now, another thing interesting about this, I’m reading in a lot of places in the Drive-By Media that this is a waste of time, to talk about Obama’s associations, even some conservative media people are saying it’s a waste of time, it’s a wrong tactic because the only thing that matters to people right now is the economy. And if McCain doesn’t get himself in the right position on the economy and so forth and so on, the election is over, a lot of people are trying to put pressure on the McCain campaign to ignore all of the associations.
There’s a better word for this, because the Obama people are running around, (paraphrasing) ‘This guilt by association. I didn’t know Ayers. I didn’t know Ayers. I didn’t know what he was doing when I met him.’ You want to hear something hilarious? I was told, I didn’t see this, but last night on Brit Hume’s show on the Fox News Channel, Mara Liasson attempted to defend the Obama association with Bill Ayers and said that their kids attended the same school. Now, that doesn’t work out because Barry’s little girls are six and ten, seven and ten, something like that, and Ayers’ kids are 29, late twenties, early thirties, I don’t know how that works out. Nobody’s caught this, but it nevertheless is indicative of how the Drive-Bys are circling the wagons. These are not associations. This is what everybody has to understand. Thomas Sowell put this very well today in a column at National Review Online. These are alliances. Obama has alliances with Bill Ayers and Jeremy Wright and Pfleger and all these other terrorists and wackos and fraud dealers such as Rezko. He allied with them.
I think as far as Obama, he doesn’t care. I don’t think he cares that Ayers was a terrorist. I think he knows and his campaign knows he has to say that he didn’t know, but it wouldn’t have stopped him because everything in Obama’s life has been a calculation to get him to this point, establishing a base of operations in Chicago among the left to get the skids greased there as he needed to, and he would deal with all the fallout from it later, and it’s now starting to happen. This Ayers situation is another example of Obama’s morality option approach to government. He was willing — this is the way to look at this — he was willing to look past Ayers’ terrorism to promote his political career. There’s no right and wrong for Obama. There’s only things that are advantageous to do or disadvantageous to do. There are only things that will help or harm. But in terms of having a morality-based life and campaign and agenda, that’s not a factor. So Ayers and his wife are internationally known. They’re renowned particularly on the left. They were active in Chicago. Ayers air wrote a book on 9/11, he was featured on 9/11 in the New York Times, Obama served with him on a board, attended a number of lectures with him, set up by Michelle Obama. By the way, where is she? How come they have her sequestered? You can answer that question yourselves.
Ayers was an opinion leader in his district, and he sponsored the first fundraiser for Obama way back. But we are supposed to believe that Obama knew nothing of this guy. And interestingly, his campaign manager, Axelrod, says there’s no evidence that he knew Ayers was a terrorist. It didn’t matter. If he did know that Ayers was a terrorist, there’s no evidence that Obama would have cared that he was a terrorist. And that, my friends, is the way of looking at this. As Joe Biden would say, ‘Let me say again,’ let me say again, there is no evidence that Obama would have cared that he was a terrorist. I’m seeing no evidence of a conscience in Obama. All I see is naked, raw ambition. Sarah Palin nailed Obama and Ayers this morning. She was at a rally in Jacksonville, Florida. We have the audio coming up. And essentially she said, ‘I guess Obama will now claim he was unaware that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had a radical background, too, after he promised to meet him without preconditions.’
Polling data is out today, but before I get to the polling data, we all talked last week and everybody’s a little up in arms about this, that all these early voters in Ohio, and we’ve got stories of the homeless being bussed in and soup line people being bussed in to register and vote on the same day. But a story here, this is New Zealand or maybe it’s the Philippines, I’m not sure which. ‘A week-long period in which Ohio residents could register to vote and immediately cast a ballot has ended with turnout that didn’t quite match the expectations of election officials or the campaign predictions that preceded it, according to the AP. As of Monday evening with polling sites still open, projections are that about 4,000 voters in the state’s four largest counties would have taken advantage of the policy which survived multiple court challenges, but they expected between 20 and 25,000 people to have voted early in the four counties in Ohio beginning on September 30th.’ Again, it’s an AP story, APO, Associated Press Obama. We have a new name for it, APO, Associated Press Obama. So they could be just sandbagging everybody here by lying about the low turnout so that when the election returns are counted in Ohio that people do not suspect fraud.
The Zogby poll is out and this, ladies and gentlemen, is key: Obama 48, McCain 45, likely voters, three-day telephone — it’s actually 2.4, it’s not actually three. They’ve rounded things up. Obama is at 47.7, McCain at 45.3, so that gets rounded up to 48.5. It’s actually a 2.4% advantage which is in the margin of error. By the way, Zogby was the only one to get it right last time in 2004. Zogby nailed it. We keep a sharp eye on Zogby. All these polls want to get it right in the end. They want to use polling data to influence public opinion up until the end, but at the end, they want to be able to say that they got it right for the accuracy and the credibility of their operation. CBS: ‘In a sign that the race for president has returned to about where it was before the first presidential debate, the Obama-Biden ticket leads the McCain-Palin ticket 47 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. The Obama-Biden ticket led by a wider margin, nine percentage points last Wednesday,’ before the vice presidential debate. CBS assuming here that there might have been some movement in the presidential race because of the vice presidential debate. Seventy million people watched it. The Drive-Bys and the Obama campaign tried to tell us that the reason people watched the debate is because they were so excited to see Plugs Biden. Well, we all know, ladies and gentlemen, that Sarah Palin was the drawing card for that debate, and it worked. Here is the second McCain sound bite yesterday from New Mexico tearing into the anointed one.
MCCAIN: Senator Obama has accused me of opposing regulation to avert this crisis. I guess he believes that if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough, it will be believed. But the truth is I was the one who called it the time for tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It could have helped prevent this crisis from happening in the first place. Senator Obama was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein them in. As recently as September of last year, he said that subprime loans had been, quote, ‘a good idea.’ Well, Senator Obama, that good idea has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
RUSH: And Obama’s fingerprints are all over this plunge with his close associations to ACORN. Now, Saturday Night Live did a skit. Did you see this? They did a skit nailing the Democrats on this, nailing Pelosi, nailing Barney Frank, nailing George Soros. You can’t see it, however, they took it off their website. They nailed the couple that started this subprime mortgage business and ended up selling that business to Wachovia for $25 billion, which is what got Wachovia in trouble. This couple also funded Air America. They fund all of these vast far left-wing causes, and Saturday Night Live ripped them to shreds. People were stunned and couldn’t believe it. Now, what happened, this thing aired and the people involved must have called NBC and said, ‘Take that down, that’s outrageous, we don’t want that up,’ and they scrubbed it. It is not on the NBC website, but it’s all over the blogosphere. We have the audio for it and we’ll be sharing it with you as the program unfolds before your eyes and ears. Lots to do, folks. Great to be back with you. The phone number again is 800-282-2882.
One more thing, I want to close the thought about this humor business and my cousin Dan saying we can’t wait ’til the election is over and get back to humor. He’s got a good point about that. These really are intense times. We are talking about the future of the country, a dramatic change in the future of the country if Obama and Biden win this. I know that humor is a fabulous way to be persuasive and so forth. Sometimes you just get so intense about this because it matters so much. I don’t want to give people the impression that I’m taking it lightly by making fun of it or by making fun of Obama. I know how effective it is. But it brought home to me just how intense this whole campaign has been because of the stakes that are involved here, and they are profound.
We’re talking about a vision of two distinct Americas, an America that’s true to our founding where the traditions and institutions that have defined our greatness are defended, protected, and, hopefully, empowered and expanded. The Obama view, peppered with mentorship from Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright and so forth is to tear down all the institutions and traditions that have defined this country’s greatness and rebuild the country in an image that, for lack of a better word, would be socialist. It’s been tried everywhere in the world except here, and the left worldwide and in this country has great hope invested in Obama that he can succeed in bringing this country into the fold along with the rest of the socialist leftist world.