RUSH: Yesterday on this program you heard me say this.
RUSH ARCHIVE: What they’re doing here, and you see it happening with the Ann Coulter situation up in Canada, that’s possibly our future, they don’t have free speech up there. If the people in charge don’t like what you’re saying they can keep you from saying it, and what they’re trying to do is criminalize now all criticism of Obama as hate speech, as being racist or worse.
RUSH: Right on cue, last night Chris Matthews, hard-boiled, he had as his guest Chris Van Hollen, Democrat from Maryland, discussing criticism of President Obama.
VAN HOLLEN: There’s no denying the fact that they are stoking the flames here and they are not trying to separate themselves, in fact they’ve embraced the benefits, what they consider to be the political benefits from these activities.
RUSH: I’m not going to repeat all of the examples, all the news stories of all the violence, real violence, hate speech, et al, committed by Democrats in the last six or seven years. I did that in the first hour. I’m just giving you examples. I know what I’m talking about when I talk about these people. One of the examples I saved for this hour is from Chris Matthews himself, last October on the 13th on a morning show on MSNBC. Ask yourself when you listen to this if what Matthews said is criminal.
MATTHEWS: You guys see Live and Let Die, the great Bond film with, um, with Yaphet Kotto was the bad guy, Mr. Big?
WOMAN: (giggling)
MATTHEWS: In the end they jammed a big CO2 pellet in his face, and he blew up. I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is beginning to look more and more like Mr. Big. And at some point somebody is going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come.
WOMAN: (giggling)
MATTHEWS: I think he’s Mr. Big. I think Yaphet Kotto.
WOMAN: (giggling)
MATTHEWS: Are you watching, Rush?
RUSH: Is that hate speech? Is that inciting violence? Is that criminal? On television, Chris Matthews actually envisioning with great joy the day somebody jams a gun in my mouth and pulls the trigger. Last night on Hardball with Chris Matthews, he had Mark Halperin, the TIME Magazine senior political analyst, and they were talking about White House criticism of John McCain. Matthews says, ‘What are they up to with these patronizing comments about the Senator from Arizona from the White House? What’s that about?’
HALPERIN: With John McCain he’s a special case because they have practice from the campaign of painting him as petulant and erratic, and the more they can do that to any Republican leader, they’ll do it to Rush Limbaugh and others as well, they want to do that ’cause they want the public to see the Republican Party led by people who are uncooperative and emotional and petulant.
RUSH: Never forget what this is really all about. This is all about the fact that the Democrats need to paint themselves as victims, they’re the ones who do not want to be bothered by their conscience, if they have one. They have to change the focus on this. They want to make themselves innocent victims of an unruly mob of a bunch of tea partiers. They are shaken. And this conservatives-as-violence-prone people narrative is the only way they can cope, because never forget, folks, the real death threat is their legislation. The real death threat to our economy, to the country as founded, to our health care system, the real death threat is the bill Obama signed into law on Tuesday morning. But it’s all my fault, it’s all the fault of all of us on the radio, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, we’re inciting all of this. Here’s Dylan Ratigan, MSNBC, yesterday afternoon, last night, whenever it was.
RATIGAN: Many fear the angry rhetoric has gone too far among tea partiers and even conservative talk show hosts who seek to stir up that small fringe and incite them to action. One tea party leader promised an Election Day onslaught, Rush Limbaugh inciting his listeners to defeat these bastards and the Alabama tea party warning, ‘We are all getting our second wind, when we do, you better watch out.’ Sounds a little bit like a threat.
RUSH: Just amazing, these people have no memory of their own words and their own actions. But make no mistake, this is all coordinated. This is all coordinated from the highest levels of the White House and down through the Democrat Party, the faxes, the talking points, the marching orders have gone out to all the members of the media, that’s why they’re all saying the same things and that’s why they’re all citing the same people. And while this is a fringe movement I want to remind you of a CBS News poll out, 62% of the American people want the Republican Party to continue to oppose the health care bill. Sixty-two percent, that ain’t fringe. And, yeah, we do want to run these people out of Washington via the ballot box. We do. We want to beat ’em. We want to send ’em packing. A lot of us think that’s the only hope the country has.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I am reminded of the following by a friend. The great majority of modern presidential and other political assassins have been men and women of the left. Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, the Farrakhan-supported Muslim killers of Malcolm X and Jerry Ford’s would-be killers (Sara Jane Moore and ‘Squeaky’ Fromme) were all leftists. Some people have forgotten that the assassination of McKinley, the assassin of McKinley, Leon Czolgosz, was an anarchist. The man who shot at FDR and missed, killed the mayor of Chicago instead, was Giuseppe Zangara, a political radical. The attempt to kill Truman and blow up the Congress in 1950 was carried out by Puerto Rican nationalists.
And apropos of political violence it’s also worth mentioning the KKK was composed almost entirely of Democrats. Robert Byrd and Justice Hugo Black are liberal icons who belonged. So too, briefly, did Harry Truman. All of these assassins, all of these radicals are men and women of the left! When’s the last time you ever heard of a conservative riot? Remember this from The Australian, 25 July, 2006: ‘Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W. Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren. ‘Right now I would love to kill George Bush.’ Her young audience at the Brisbane city hall clapped and cheered.’ Thursday, July 12th, 2007: ‘Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams came from Ireland to Texas to declare that President Bush should be impeached. ‘Right now I could kill George Bush,’ she said at the Adams Mark Hotel and Conference Centre in Dallas. ‘No, I don’t mean that. How could you nonviolently kill?” But that’s the second time she had said it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Hope Mills, North Carolina. This is Nora, great to have you on Open Line Friday on Thursday. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Army mom dittos to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: The reason I’m calling is because as soon as I heard some of the tapes of these so-called threatening phone messages —
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: — my radar went up. I have been calling Congress since 2006, with immigration reform, and I can tell you for a fact that more often than not you’re not able to leave a message because you’re gonna get an automated voice that says, ‘Sorry, voice mail is full. Please call later.’ So it really kind of got my hackles up.
RUSH: Which…?
CALLER: Gee, I don’t know. Astroturf? I don’t know.
RUSH: Well, they’re playing a supposed call. I can’t remember the member of Congress.
CALLER: I think it’s Congressman Stupak, and I will tell you that I have gotten that sorry ‘mailbox full’ from Congressman Stupak at least three times on Monday.
RUSH: Yeah, it is Stupak. That’s correct. You know, this is an interesting point. But it’s also possible, it’s also possible they could have cleaned the voice mail and left it wide open, hoping that some lunatic would call.
CALLER: Yes, and I’ll tell you also — having been to tea parties, having been in Washington on the 12th of September last year — we are so polite that we wouldn’t stoop to that level. That’s where I think they’re making a big mistake.
RUSH: Wait just a second here, though. Why are we assuming that the only people that might be upset about this is tea party people? There are more people in the country than just tea party people, and we know there are some Democrats that don’t like this. We know there are some pro-life Democrats who believed Stupak when he stood up for his cause, his pro-life cause and then betrayed everybody. We know that there are a lot of Democrats because in his district they elect him. Now, who’s to say — why are we automatically assuming — that whoever, if anybody, is calling Stupak that they’re either a tea partier or a Republican?