RUSH: To the phones! We start in Pittsburgh. This is Shelly, and it’s great to have you with us. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. What a pleasure to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just wanted to call and make sure that you got my e-mail via the Democrat committee website where they encouraged us all to write our comments about your comments, you know, about hoping Obama fails.
RUSH: (laughing) Look, there are so many of these.
CALLER: (giggles)
RUSH: I think the well-wishers using the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee website, people sending me good wishes far outnumber the malcontents that the DCCC hopes sign their petition.
CALLER: Rush, I think you’re right.
RUSH: If I’m doing such great damage to the Republican Party, why petition against me? If I’m doing all this damage…? This is another thing just hilarious.
CALLER: I think you’re right. I was on there, and I e-mailed you, and I read a few comments, and, of course, there’s the sheep who don’t bother to research any of what you really said and that are —
RUSH: Yes, they did. They lied about it.
CALLER: Yes, they did.
RUSH: They took it totally out of context. They got a little clip, a 19 second clip of me —
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: — at the end of a long monologue explaining why I hope he fails. They’re just using that. It is the Michael J. Fox thing all over again.
CALLER: Right. And I just wanted you to know that I e-mailed them also, and I told them that if they wanted to confront you and win, they should learn a lesson from their debacle with Harry Reid and they should do it honestly because what Harry Reid did, twisting your words around and that just blew up in his face. He didn’t even have the good sense or class to admit that he did that after you raised all that money for charity. He tried to horn in on that and take responsibility for it, and it just made him look like an absolute ass. So I suggested to them that if they were going to try and take you on, the best thing they could do would be to do it honestly.
RUSH: Wait, wait just a second. See, it might have made him look like an ass, but where is he today? He’s the majority leader of the US Senate. Was he harmed by that at all? I bet to this day he doesn’t think he is or was. We won’t know ’til he begins his own reelection effort in Nevada in 2010. Folks, you gotta understand what this is about if you want to take this stuff seriously. To me, this is old hat. This is just the latest stunt that they’ve tried for a number of years, but let me tell you. Let me offer you a contrast. It wasn’t very long ago, was it, that the Democrat Party spent entire weeks praying, hoping, demanding defeat in Iraq. They spent years saying they hope President Bush failed. In fact, Google. Back in the old Google search days, if you searched, you’d find it.
They had to pull this down eventually, but I’ve got the screen shots. If you put in the words ‘George W. Bush’ in the search field at Google, the second or third entry was ‘miserable failure.’ Dick Gephardt called George W. Bush a ‘miserable failure’ way back in 2002. Now, the idea that the Democrats have behaved like angels the last six years and all of a sudden it’s mean old Rush now saying rotten things about Obama, and they have to take me out of context again to do it. Now, it’s troubling to some people. It’s interesting nevertheless. We had brave men and women in the US military losing their lives, getting wounded. We had the members of the US military who were following orders and succeeding, succeeding in taming the Wild West known as Iraq.
And all during that time Harry Reid and others are hoping that they lose. They are calling the commander a liar to his face, General Petraeus when he’s brought up to testify. Every Democrat from Waxman to Hillary Clinton to Harry Reid. They were waving the white flag of surrender before the surge even began. ‘This war is lost,’ Reid said. Jack Murtha was accusing them of being murderers and rapists. They said some of the most outrageously wrong, lying, personally destructive things about George W. Bush. So it rings a little hollow to me for the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee to now — and, by the way, this is an association of elected Democrats. This, once again…
The similarity to Harry Reid is this. You have elected Democrats using the power of their office to attempt to stifle the speech of a private citizen who is in the media, and the First Amendment’s free speech clause was expressly — not expressly, but it was focused primarily on political speech, which is what we do here. So the Democrats get this free ride. Nobody was upset. I don’t remember too many people in our party doing what the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee is doing today. I don’t remember people petitioning the Democrats to shut up, stop aiding and abetting the enemy, stop saying we can’t win. Remember we would do side by side audio sound bites of how talking points from Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer sounded just like they came from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or when a tape came from Ayman al-Zawahiri, how similar Zawahiri or Ahmadinejad’s views on America were from what Democrat leaders were saying.
The idea that they have been angels behaving clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, and all of a sudden I come along and they have to manufacture a lie or an out-of-context statement in order to get the rabble-rousers? This is an attempt to stifle dissent. Remember what Hillary said about dissent. Dissent is the new patriotism! Well, not anymore. The new patriotism is paying higher taxes, according to Joe Biden. So we’re in a serious battle here. These people play for keeps. The Obama philosophy is to clear the playing field, not level it. Just get rid of anybody on it who could stand in your way and that’s what the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee is doing, and they’re doing it dishonestly. So, you know, I appreciate everybody responding to it and sending them a message.
But what we’re going to do — I’m going to predict this to you. It won’t be long, today or tomorrow they’re going to say they exceeded their goals in signatures. They’re going to say, ‘We got more signatures to tell Rush to shut up than we ever dreamed of getting.’ That’s the next step of this. That’s the next stage. ‘We got more response! The American people,’ they will say, ‘are fed up with Rush Limbaugh,’ and they may release the numbers, who knows. How are we going to prove it? They don’t have a counter on their website. So this is just more of the same Stalinist-type, under the cover, under the guise of doing good and protecting the new president that everybody loves, and making sure he’s not criticized. When the fact is, my friends, I, El Rushbo (and I say this happily) have hijacked Obama’s honeymoon.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, as for this — I want to see one more thing about this Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee petition, this online petition. I’ll tell you what they’re going to do. Maybe they’ll announce the numbers. When this is all over, when they decide to pull the plug on this, they’re going to say something very simple, that there is a consensus to silence Rush Limbaugh. Our petition drive was far bigger than we ever thought it was going to be, and there is a consensus to shut up Rush Limbaugh.
Now, this whole thing was put in play with Obama mentioning me last Friday at the congressional leaders’ meeting he had at the White House. You know, marginalize me (and by virtue of that, all of you) as the fringe kooks out here and co-opt the Republicans into, you know, being moderate, maybe even liberal a little bit and going along with the historic nature of the first black president. For that reason alone, he can’t be denied. It’s His plan. It’s Change! Only His plan can get it done. It relies quite a lot on the ignorance of average Americans. It relies on the ignorance — and I’m not saying stupidity, the ignorance — of average Americans who do not understand what’s in the plan. Even when you tell ’em, I think a lot of people are focusing on the individual items. Well, 650 bucks for coupons to convert your analog TV to digital, $21 million to re-sod the Mall, $4.19 billion for ACORN, for ‘neighborhood stabilization efforts.’
See, the objective here, is people want to pick out these individual things and say, ‘Look at this! How does this create jobs? That’s not stimulus.’ I think, you know, narrow-casting this or looking at it in niche ways is interesting, it might be persuasive to some, but truly says what this is really all about. What this is really all about is simply advancing an agenda of enlarging government and entrenching the Democrat Party in power, in perpetuity. That’s all this is, and the individual ingredients are the mechanism that they accomplish this. Now, Snerdley has just sent me a note: ‘Everybody doesn’t know the details of what the petition is and who the DCCC is.’ Okay, fair point. The Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee. Republicans have one, too, and they are organizations in the Senate.
For example, Chuck Schumer ran the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee, and when he was running it was when they uncovered the private credit data of Michael Steele and went public with it. Tony Coelho used to run it in the House way back when. Chris Van Hollen runs it now for the Democrats. The purpose of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee and the same thing with the Republican version, is to find candidates in off years and get them to run for open seats, and then to get your sitting members reelected, your incumbents reelected. It’s all about reelecting Democrats. And the Republicans have one, too. I don’t know who’s running the RCCC right now, but the Democrats are doing it. So they put up a petition.
This is right out of the Rahm Emanuel playbook. This is right out of — and, by the way, do you know that Rahm has a conference call every morning? Now, he’s the chief of staff to Obama. You know who’s on the conference call? James Carville, works at CNN; The Forehead, Paul Begala, works at CNN; and George Stephanopoulos, who has his own show at ABC. It’s absolutely true. There is a conference call every morning between Rahm Emanuel and these three guys who worked together in the Clinton days. They’re all former Clintonites from the Clinton war room. This is a conference call that takes place every morning, and sometimes multiple times during the day. I kid you not. Now, they have an online petition at the DCCC website that has a 19-second clip of me saying I hope Obama fails.
It’s taken totally out of context and it’s presented as, ‘Tell Rush Limbaugh what you think! Here’s a message and hit the submit button, and we will send it to Rush.’ So it’s a flood-my-inbox kind of campaign, and on my website last night, we linked to their home page where you can send the DCCC a message yourself. So we did a reverse petition last night at RushLimbaugh.com. It’s still up there. So you go to RushLimbaugh.com, the reverse petition sends them a message from you, and it’s been going gangbusters all night. So we’ve just been having fun with it. My spam filter has taken care of all their e-mails to me. I haven’t seen one of them, and so… (laughing) It’s funny, but at the same time, folks, this is an organization that serves to advance elected Democrats again targeting the free speech and lying about the free speech of a private individual citizen.
Which of course I am, even though I have hijacked the Obama honeymoon and they’re not happy about it. So what they’re going to do at the end of whatever their plan is, however long it takes, is they’re going to say the response to their petition was overwhelming. More people think I should be shut up than they could possibly have imagined. There is a consensus of opinion now that they’ve collected that I need to be silenced. It’s exactly what they’re going to do, and there’s no counter on their website so you don’t really know how many it is. We’ll just have to trust — at least there wasn’t one last night. We’re just going to have to trust what they say.