RUSH: Folks, I’m all over the sound bites. It’s a shame. You know I try never to talk about me on this program. I try never to make me the issue. I was accused yesterday of sedition. Eighty percent of the American people disapprove of government power right now, it’s a Pew Research Center poll, 80% of the people do not like the level of power the government has now. They don’t like it. Are they guilty of sedition? You know why I’m guilty of sedition? Because I use the word ‘regime.’ I’m guilty of sedition. Joe Klein was on Matthews Sunday show, he said Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are guilty of sedition, and this John Heilemann guy who wrote that book with Halperin where they kept all that information for their book rather than the campaign, ‘Well, gotta throw Limbaugh in there, Limbaugh is sedition, too.’ Byron York, just as he did with Matthews, has gone back to the nexus database and found that Mr. Heilemann himself has used the word ‘regime,’ numerous times. In fact, even once describing Obama. Yes-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s.
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RUSH: So I am divisive. The tea party is responsible for things that have not happened. Speaking out against the government is sedition. Let’s go back, if you can bear it one more time, April 28, 2003, Hartford, Connecticut.
HILLARY 2003 (screeching): I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, ‘WE ARE AMERICANS AND WE HAVE A RIGHT TO DEBATE AND DISAGREE WITH ANY ADMINISTRATION!’
RUSH: And of course that’s not seditious, no, no, no, that’s patriotism, the new definition. Fifty-six percent support the repeal of health care. Still the momentum is building.
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RUSH: Do you remember the MoveOn.org ad against General Petraeus before his appearance before joint committees in the House and the Senate about the surge in Iraq? The MoveOn.org ad referred to him as ‘General Betray-Us.’ Was that ad not sedition in the way Joe Klein defines it, which you’ll hear in a moment. He says he looked it up. ‘Sedition is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state.’ Well? How about Clinton in 2006 going over to pay homage to the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh. Remember that? September 2007: Bill Clinton condemns Republicans over the phony outrage over the MoveOn.org ad about General Betray-Us. He also mentions the Republican attack ads smearing the military service of Max Cleland and John Kerry,’ speaking of who: John Kerry, you’ll remember, served in Vietnam, and let’s not forget all the protests he engaged in and false accusations against military memberships in Vietnam when he got home. But of course when those guys do it, that’s dissent and patriotism. Tea party? They’re a bunch of rabble-rousers responsible for all kinds of hell that hasn’t happened, but if and when it does we’ve set the table to blame them.
So on Chris Matthews’ Sunday morning syndicated show, The Chris Matthews Show during a discussion about the tea party members, TIME Magazine columnist Joe Klein said this about conservative media.
KLEIN: I did a little bit of research just before the show, it’s on this little napkin here. I looked up the definition of sedition, which is: ‘Conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state,’ and a lot of these statements — especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin — rub right up close to being seditious.
RUSH: John Heilemann, New York Magazine columnist and author, at that point jumped into the fray.
HEILEMANN: Joe is right. And I’ll name another person. You know, name Rush Limbaugh, you know, who uses this phrase constantly, talks about the Obama administration as a ‘regime.’ That phrase, which has connotations of tyranny. You think back to 1994. There was Ruby Ridge. There was Waco. They were triggering incidents. There’s been nothing like that. The only thing that’s changed in the last 15 months is the election of Barack Obama.
RUSH: Yeah, and Joe Klein says, ‘Well, what does that mean?’
KLEIN: There are two things going on here, not just that he is African-American, but that his name is ‘Barack Hussein Obama.’ The other thing is that we’ve had a very scary economic crisis, and when people get scared, they get defensive and they get a little crazy.
RUSH: Okay. So did you hear what Heilemann said? Heilemann said, ‘There haven’t any triggering incidents here. There’s nothing to explain why the tea party people are so angry,’ except they’re not that kind of angry, Mr. Heilemann. They’re just a little ticked off that the country has been stolen and the economy’s been destroyed for two or three, four generations. They’re overtaxed. The country is not what it was. He even goes on to say there wasn’t any triggering incident like Waco. Did Mr. Heilemann inadvertently step in it there, calling Waco a triggering incident for McVeigh? Well, who was Waco? (doing Clinton impression) ‘Uh, you have to go ask Janet Reno the attorney general about that, I had no idea we were going to launch those tanks in there. You have to ask her. Heh-heh-heh. Don’t bother me. Where’s Monica?’
No, what he’s saying, Heilemann said is no, it’s racism. It’s ’cause Obama’s black and ’cause his name’s Obama. That’s why the tea party’s engaged in doing what they’re doing. So Byron York sprung into action, even before we did here at the EIB Network. The last time this charge of anti-Americanism was leveled at me because of using the term ‘regime’ to describe the Obama team, Chris Matthews just had a fit. ‘That word should never be used. It’s horrible. This is a duly elected administration of a democratic country. ‘Regime’ implies something foreign.’ No, regime implies and defines authoritarian governments, which this one clearly is. But Byron York in the Washington Examiner finds out that Chris Matthews had himself used the term ‘regime,’ talking about the Bush administration and that it was used throughout the broadcast evenings on MSNBC all the time, too numerous to mention.
So now John Heilemann has spoken up, accusing me of sedition because of the use of the word ‘regime.’ Has Heilemann himself ever used that word with its ‘connotations of tyranny’? ‘A search of the Nexis database shows four recent examples of Heilemann using ‘regime’ to refer not to tyrannies but to American domestic politics. He even used the phrase ‘Obama regime.’ For the record: In the January 19, 2009 issue of New York, Heilemann wrote that Barack Obama had no particular expertise in economics, ‘So it’s ironic, to say the least, that the first defining moment of the Obama regime happens to revolve around matters macroeconomic — dealing not just with a nasty and potentially prolonged downturn, but with a wrenching, epochal crisis of capitalism on a global scale.”
He referred to ‘the Obama regime,’ January 19th, 2009. ‘In the January 5, 2009 issue of New York, Heilemann wrote of ‘the power troika of Bob Gates, Jim Jones, and Hillary Clinton, each of whom plausibly could have filled the very same jobs in a John McCain regime.’ In the December 1, 2008 issue of New York, Heilemann wrote that all administrations experience internal conflict over foreign-policy issues, ‘And Obama’s regime — with Joe Biden in the building and Robert Gates likely to remain atop the Pentagon — will be no exception.” Twice Heilemann, who accused me of sedition yesterday on TV, has referred to this administration as ‘the Obama regime’ himself. ‘In the November 17, 2008 issue of New York, Heilemann wrote that Obama’s choice of veterans of previous administrations satisfied some supporters, ‘But for other Obamaphiles, it fuels the anxiety that the regimes of the new boss and the old boss will end up resembling one another all too much.”
‘So I got one, two, three, four — at least four times. Oh, sorry, more than that. ‘At other times, Heilemann used ‘regime’ in ways that he would now pronounce acceptable — to refer to Middle East autocracies and the like. But he clearly used ‘regime’ as a synonym for ‘administration,’ in the American political sense, on more than one occasion. Did he mean to convey ‘connotations of tyranny’?’ as he accused me of doing? There you have it. Do you remember The Sopranos? Do you remember the Russian woman that Tony had a little affair with who only had one leg? Remember her? In one episode where Tony and some of his crew had tried to mess around with this woman, she got in his face with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth and said, ‘Don’t screw with me,’ which has been the theme of the first hour and 15 minutes of this program.
Don’t screw with me.
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RUSH: On Friday when Bill Clinton was trying to re-again re-blame me for the Oklahoma City bombing and you and all of the talk radio hosts and conservative bloggers, what were we in the middle of doing? We were in the middle of raising millions of dollars to cure leukemia and lymphoma while we were being blamed for something that hasn’t happened and blamed for something that the Clinton administration is solely responsible for, and that is the Oklahoma City bombing. Not from my own opinion or anybody else’s, it’s Timothy McVeigh’s own words.
To the phones we go. We’re going to start Albany in New York. This is Mike. Thank you for calling — what?
CALLER: Can you hear me?
RUSH: Albany, Indiana. Sorry. All I saw was the Albany. We never get a call from Albany, New York. Albany, Indiana. We’ll get a call from Washington, Columbia, but never Washington, DC. I don’t know how Snerdley does this. Anyway, where is Albany, Indiana?
CALLER: Albany, Indiana, is about an hour northeast of Indianapolis.
RUSH: Great to have you on the program. Thank you.
CALLER: Honor to finally talk to you, Rush. The thing I wanted to say was I still recall back when President Bush was in office, all the people that went overseas and slammed our country and slammed that administration. I remember Bill Maher almost begging somebody to shoot President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and that wasn’t sedition. I mean, that was all just everybody expressing their opinion. And you go back to the sound bite you played about Hillary, you know, that stuff was so much harsher than anything that we’re doing now. And what they’re afraid of is for so many years we were satisfied, we were comfortable, we were economically solid so nobody was really complaining much and nobody was voicing their opinion. We’re actually voicing our opinion now, and they just can’t take it. It just blows my mind.
RUSH: Well, they are afraid. There’s no question they’re afraid. I see polls like this, 80%, they’ll try to turn it around and make it into a positive for them and their point, but they won’t succeed with it. But you’re right. It was Bill Maher, it was John Kerry talking about our soldiers being murderers and rapists and terrorists. Clinton and Gore would travel overseas and rip the Bush administration left and right. And of course that wasn’t sedition. And let’s not forget there was actually a movement called Drive Out the Bush Regime. Remember Drive Out the Bush Regime? That was a group funded by John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, well, he doesn’t have any money. It was funded by his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry and George Soros. And that bunch used to demonstrate in Washington constantly during the Bush administration. And let’s not forget that in Osama Bin Laden’s own words, Bill Clinton’s retreat from Somalia inspired Bin Laden to begin his jihad against the US thinking we had become a paper tiger. We run away, we won’t hang in there, culminating in the 9/11 attacks. Actions have always spoken louder than words.
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RUSH: Let’s not forget sound bite 27. Since we’re talking about this sedition stuff and all these words that might provoke people, Senator Dick Durbin from June 10th of 2005 on the Senate floor.
DURBIN: If I read this to you and didn’t tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have happened by Nazis; Soviets in their gulags; or some mad regime, Pol Pot or others; that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that’s not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of our — their own prisoners.
RUSH: And there he was joining the fray against how we were treating people at Club Gitmo — where I, to this day, have a thriving licensed merchandise business.
Steve in Cheyenne, Wyoming, welcome to the EIB Network. It’s great to have you with us.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: Very good, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: I was just wondering. I’m a little confused today. It seems like all weekend — and, of course, today — all I’ve been hearing is Clinton said this and Clinton said that and Clinton said this and Clinton said that. So I just need you to educate me and maybe refresh my memory. Maybe I lost something down the road here. Wasn’t this guy impeached and disbarred for lying under oath? And that being the case, when was it that his credibility was restored?
RUSH: You are exactly right, by the way, in your recollection.
CALLER: Oh. I thought maybe I was just confused and I was hallucinating or something.
RUSH: Remember now, who at the 2004 Democrat convention was given the seat of power in the audience? Jimmy Carter.
CALLER: Yeah. (laughing)
RUSH: Remember: Failure say requisite for advancement in the Democrat Party. Failure is a resume enhancement.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: The reason why Clinton has credibility — I’m being serious with you here. The reason Clinton has credibility is because they think he beat us. He won reelection. Even though he was impeached, he was not convicted. They think Clinton is big because he beat us.
CALLER: Even though he was disbarred for lying under oath?
RUSH: Necessary price to pay. A tremendous sacrifice!
CALLER: Oh, I see.
RUSH: The president gave it all up in order to defeat us.
CALLER: (laughing) Well, I’m glad I attended class today.
RUSH: You know, he had 50-plus, 55% approval numbers. So the impression was the American people liked Clinton, too.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: They all, in that party, make things up and lie. I mean, they all have credibility problems.
CALLER: Mmmm.
RUSH: It’s just, you know, picking lesser of all evils.
CALLER: Well, thank you thank you, Rush, for straightening me out.
RUSH: Happy to help, Steve.
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RUSH: Jan in Martinez, California, or Martinez. Which is it, Martinez or Martinez?
CALLER: It’s Martinez.
RUSH: Martinez. Great to have you on the program. Yeah, it’s Martinez Georgia, outside of Augusta.
CALLER: Okay. You’re having problems with these names today and cities. It’s your call screener’s fault.
RUSH: (laughing) Thank you, thank you, thank you.
CALLER: I love Snerdley, I don’t want to get in trouble with him.
RUSH: Well, you wouldn’t believe how he spelled this. That’s why I asked you.
CALLER: Oh, okay. All right. I’m sorry. Hey, I’m sitting out here in the home of Cindy Sheehan. She’s allowed to engage in dissent and be a disrupter —
RUSH: Oh, I know.
CALLER: — Travis Air Force Base or Bush’s ranch in Crawford. You know, in ’06 Pelosi told anti-war protesters that FDR was a disrupter, and she’s a fan of disrupters. But now I, the backbone of the American society, the humble middle class taxpayer that loves my country and is a law-abiding citizen, goes to a peaceful rally, which I haven’t even signed on yet, I am not an official member of a tea party, but I’m vilified. And words like sedition are thrown around? And Mr. Heilemann, it is not the bad economy that scares me, it’s things like accusing law-abiding citizens of sedition. I mean what is this about? I don’t get it. The reason I’m out there, Rush, is because of the acronym for the tea party. I’m taxed enough already. Now, didn’t George Bush learn his lesson, it’s the economy, stupid? Remember he said, read my lips, no new taxes? Look what happened to him? We had Obama going around saying he wasn’t going to raise taxes on anybody making less than $250,000. Well, I contend that they just did that through the health care bill indirectly. They actually made the cost of my health care go up and it’s going to be a lot worse than what I’m getting right now. The California economy is a nightmare and I am living it. And my friends and family are living it, Rush. I just think these people, they don’t get it. So I contend it’s one of two reasons that the trust in the government is so low, that poll is just incredible. Eighty percent? Okay, so it’s either two things and you can’t have it both ways. Obama is either a Marxist and is screwing with the economy on purpose like that Cloward-Piven concept.
RUSH: Yeah, right.
CALLER: And he’s going for fundamental change and he’s going to ram it down our throat no matter what, or it’s number two, and the media will not own up to either of these. He is totally inept and all his czars are and they need to be tossed out of office because Obama has as much executive experience as I do, Rush, and that would be zero. So I don’t think I’m qualified to be president of the United States, why does this community organizer think he is? It’s pretty evident in this economy what’s going on. You know, my husband’s worked on straight commissions, so has my brother. No one’s buying anything. They’re battening down the hatches. They don’t know where this economy is going. I’m looking at double-dip recession. I’m looking at arms resetting in 2010, the last batch. There’s no bottom in this housing market yet. I’m looking at China devaluing their yuan and just sitting there and I’m looking at Moody saying they might lower our AAA credit rating and interest rates will go up and we will no longer be able to make payments on our debt —
RUSH: Right. This is why, all of these reasons, artfully stated, this is why you have the feeling and the thoughts that you do. It’s not because of anything somebody on the radio is telling you to feel or think. I hate to go because the constraints of time force me to. Thanks much, Jan.