RUSH: One of the intriguing things to me, folks, about watching the coverage of the Herman Cain story… Like Snerdley came in here to me today and asked me, “Who do you think really leaked this stuff? Do you think it was Romney or do you think it was Perry?” I said, “I think it only matters who leaked it if it’s not true. If it is true,” if there’s genuine real sexual harassment that went on here, “it’s silly to focus on who leaked it.”

Because it was going to come out anyway, and if it’s true, that’s the bottom line here. You can get sidetracked, “Well, why should the Republicans be eating their own?” Well… (laughing) We’ve been “eating our own” since as long as I’ve been paying attention. But it’s also part of the primary process. That’s not really what interests me. I mean, it holds some, but I am as fascinated (if not more fascinated) as I read and listen to people talk about how
Herman Cain has handled it, and it seems to be universally agreed that he’s botched it; that he and his campaign by dribbling things out with conflicting bits of information rather than just, “Okay, here’s the whole ball of wax in one announcement;” Others are saying he’s really blowing this.

“You don’t send your campaign chief out there and publicly accuse somebody else’s campaign. What you do is you whisper it to people, like at The Politico, and you let them run it as a blind item. But you don’t send your own guy out there to do this!” So a lot of the coverage is on how Cain and his campaign don’t know what they’re doing here. I have a lot of people on our side writing to me saying, “You know, I don’t care if he’s done it or not. What troubles me more is the way he’s handling it. This is not presidential. This is not giving me confidence that he knows how to handle these things.” That’s got me scratching my head a bit, because the message seems to be that Herman Cain hasn’t handled a media ambush well and therefore…

“I don’t know, Rush! I don’t think he’s good to go. He didn’t handle this media stuff very well. I don’t think he can be president.” Okay, so what is handling it “right,” then? We have to look to the past. We have to go back in time and we have to see where in similar circumstances other candidates similarly accused have handled this — and I did that, and here’s what I have concluded. “Herman Cain can’t be president,” based on what I’m hearing, “because he hasn’t handled this right.” What he should have done is assigned, as we discussed earlier this week, somebody on his staff to head up a Bimbo Eruption Department. That’s the way to do this, apparently.

To do this right, you need the guts and the foresight to set up a “bimbo eruption” plan and turn it over to unscrupulous people to execute the immoral, unethical, and probably illegal instructions. The right way to handle this therefore is you go out and you have a bimbo eruptions babe who deals with all the women who come forward, and then you hire a mad dog assistant who will go out and destroy all the women. Such comments as (James Carville impression), “That’s what happens when you drag a dollar bill through a trailer park!” Apparently that’s the right way to do this? I guess Herman Cain doesn’t have the right way to do this in him.

He hasn’t handled a largely irrelevant media ambush very well. He isn’t a sufficiently good enough liar to be president, I guess. So we’ve all seen enough. He doesn’t know how to lie. He doesn’t know how to go out and attack his accusers. He doesn’t know how to have a Bimbo Eruptions Department. He doesn’t know how to destroy everybody involved in the investigation. He’s a rank amateur and he doesn’t know how to deal with this. Similar to Newt Gingrich, who didn’t bat down the story of visiting his soon-to-be-ex wife when she was in the hospital. That’s a story that survived for years. I know women who hate Gingrich because of this story. It turns out to be not true.

The story is that Newt walked into his cancer stricken wife’s hospital bedroom and told her he was divorcing her and walked out of there. It’s not true. His daughter set the record straight this week with an op-ed column someplace, and now there are a number of (I’ve seen it on conservative blogs) blogs, “I want to apologize to Newt Gingrich.” All these years it wasn’t true. But it wasn’t true but Newt not qualified to be president, either, I guess because he didn’t bat it down. He let it survive. He didn’t do what the experts here do. Had he done the right thing, what he would have done was have hired somebody to go out and attack his wife and besmirch her even further and make up the names of people and falsely accuse them of spreading this story.

A man of presidential timbre would have immediately forced his family into the public spotlight with signed affidavits and corrected the smear. So I guess what this country needs is a John Edwards. That’s the right way to handle it, I guess. I guess what we need for president is a Ted Kennedy type. I guess that’s the right way to handle these kind of things. Maybe a reincarnation of Bill Clinton. What I’m hearing from everybody, they’re the ones who do this the right way. They’re the ones who handle media attacks the right way: Edwards, Clinton, Ted Kennedy. You know, if it wasn’t for that stupid Constitution with its restrictions on how many terms a person can serve as president, we could use Clinton again.

He’s obviously better at batting back sex claims in the media than Herman Cain is. Herman Cain obviously is proving he’s not qualified to be president, but Clinton? Not only could he be qualified to be president, he can be president and be a sexual harasser at the same time and be the most admired man in the Democrat Party because he apparently knows how to handle it right. Herman Cain doesn’t know what he’s doing; we can’t support him. So what if Clinton pushed community shakedown reinvestment act down our throats, so what if Clinton’s responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis and a bunch of other crap? “He’s still qualified to be president,” we are told, “because he handled the media the right way on his sexual harassment charges, bimbo eruptions, Carville, and all that.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. So, ladies and gentlemen, here’s where we are. I have been watching (as I do) the media react to Herman Cain react to them; and I have been watching our own media react to Herman Cain. Just this morning I had e-mails from a couple people: “What do you think of this Cain business?” and I purposely responded, “I don’t know. What do you think?” “I think he’s blowing it! I don’t like the way he’s responding. This is not presidential, Rush. I’m not so much concerned — I mean, everybody’s gonna have things in their past — I just don’t like the way Cain is handling this.” It got me to thinking, “Well, who did handle this kind of stuff well? Hey, who got praised for the way they handled it? Whose careers were enhanced because of sexual harassment or infidelity or what have you?”

Whose career was not damaged when a woman was killed when with him in his car? That would be Ted Kennedy. So maybe if Herman Cain isn’t doing it right, that’s who he needs to learn from? What we’re saying is and what this country needs is an “exceptional liar” back in the office of president? Frankly, Obama’s one of the biggest liars we’ve ever seen. There’s no reason for Herman Cain or anybody else to oppose him. He’s so good at it, we can’t outdo Obama at lying. What are we saying? “Good-bye, Mr. Cain! Washington’s no place for a man like you. You’re not handling this right. You need a bimbo eruptions team. You need to be out there now destroying these women.

“You need to be trying to put The Politico out of business. You know what you need to be saying, Mr. Cain? You need to point out that the Politico was created for one reason: So that the Washington Post wouldn’t have to tarnish its own reputation by doing this kind of stuff,” because everybody at The Politico, at least the founders, came from the Washington Post; and the Washington Post gets their little farm team over there at The Politico and they go out and they do all this questionable journalist stuff on occasion. Whereas the Washington Post, they’d think, “Ah, I don’t want to do it this way with our banner and our name at the top of this kind of stuff.” Say stuff like that! Hire somebody to go out there and talk about what sluts these women are.

In fact, go out there and hire a bunch of people to say you were minding your own business; these women came on to you and they took their clothes off and they’re nothing but a bunch of stalking groupies. Apparently, that’s the right way to do this. Those are the people that get praised as belonging in Washington. They’re the ones who know how to do this. This town’s not for you, Mr. Cain. You’re too interested in having some version of the truth involved in this. See, I thought we didn’t want slick politicians anymore. Did Clinton handle Lewinsky right? Apparently so! You can find no bigger star in the Democrat Party today than Bill Clinton. He’s bigger than anybody. With women, with the feminazis, with anybody, there is no bigger star than Bill Clinton.

Mr. Cain, what you need to do is go out and get on TV. Get your wife out there! Your wife needs to go on the Today Show and say this is a “vast left-wing conspiracy” out to do you in because you’re the first viable black Republican ever to have a chance at the office. You just don’t know what you’re doing! I don’t know how any of us can support you — and next you know what? You need to call Jesse Jackson and you need to have a public prayer session with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton where you confess your sins to them, offstage; then you all three come on stage and hold hands and pray that you never do it again; and with whom are you praying?

A serial abuser! I mean, who better to offer such counsel? The Reverend Jackson has his own love child, and he survived it. I don’t know, folks. Really when I look at people talk about how Herman Cain doesn’t know what he’s doing and how he’s not handling this right, what I hear is we still have people on our side who want to judge us by how well we do what the mainstream media wants. And until every one of us understands that not one of us will ever be treated with respect or promoted by the mainstream media — until that happens — we’re gonna be flailing away in dreamland. Too many people, apparently, still want to define their own relevancy, their own success by virtue of how they appear in the mainstream media; and Cain’s not appearing in the mainstream media very well.

Clinton always does, so maybe that’s the way to go. John Edwards? They did everything they could to cover that story up for as long as they could. They wanted nobody knowing any part of what John Edwards had done, and even after the story was out there — while it was widely known to be true — the mainstreams had not reported it. There were still pockets of the mainstream media who were supporting Edwards for president, because it’s all about policy. It’s all about ideology. It’s not about “fairness” or anything of the sort. You watch the latest developments in this Herman Cain witch hunt and you really (and we say this a lot) have to wonder why anybody would go into politics, especially somebody who is a conservative, which is exactly the way the media wants it. They want, and the Democrats as well, to tamp down any desire on the part of qualified conservative candidates to get into this.

What’s happening to Herman Cain’s a warning shot to every other Republican: “You’re next if you become viable. If it looks like you could defeat Obama, if it looks like you could go all the way, you are next.” That’s right. Bill Clinton officiated at the wedding of Anthony Weiner and Huma Weiner. The Weiners! Clinton officiated at Weiner’s wedding — and Weiner? They did everything they could to cover that up for as long as they could. “Ah, nothing to see here.” That was due to Andrew Breitbart keeping things alive, that the media was finally forced to deal with that. Client No. 9, Eliot Spitzer? You can find examples where the media turns on them. Eliot Spitzer, Client No. 9, was not all that well liked in Democrat media circles to begin with. That also is a factor in all this. I’m gonna take a brief time-out, we’re gonna come back and I’ve got a bunch of sound bites that will put all of this Cain stuff in perspective and bring us up to date as to where we are on it at the moment. Cain has no public appearances today.

BREAK TRANSCIRPT

RUSH: Maybe if Herman Cain’s candidacy is cut short (or if it’s not but he loses), maybe CNN could give him a primetime television show just as they did Eliot Spitzer, Client No. 9. Apparently that is a qualifying resume aspect for people in the left-wing media. Ted Kennedy, serial womanizer and worse; Bill Clinton, we know the story; and they are the big stars of the Democrat Party. They’re the ones who tell us the right way to handle these scandals in the media. I know I’m gonna get some blowback on this. “Rush, we’re better than that! We don’t want our people dealing with that.” No, you may not want our people dealing with it, but you still — people on our side still — seek the approval of the mainstream.

You still want us to be approved by the mainstream, just like you’re seeking it for yourself. It’s on that basis that you say Herman Cain’s mishandling this. If you think he’s mishandling it, just say he’s mishandling it; not because he’s not gaining the approval of the media or not. What our side doesn’t understand is there’s nothing Cain can do to make this go away. They lie about us! If this turns out to be untrue, it’s gonna be reported as it was always “alleged.” They’re never gonna let go of this. So trying to get the approval of the mainstream media or to get them to report the truth is a fool’s errand. Let’s say these women came forward and say, “You know what? We were paid to say all this. None of this ever happened.” And the country is convinced that he’s been victimized by scandal.

I guarantee you the next day there would be a story in the media: “Herman Cain alleged to have sexually harassed three women,” and then they would talk about whatever he’s in the news about. That will never go away. That’s a “tag,” if you will. That’s something he’s gonna be forever tagged with. Bill Clinton will never be tagged with it. Clinton’s tag is, “Clinton Global Initiative.” John Edwards’ tag is, “He had such compassion for the poor.” Herman Cain’s tag in the media is always gonna be, “Alleged to have sexually harassed three women.” He’s gonna be forever tarred with this. That’s the way they play, and there’s nothing he can say to anybody at The Politico — there’s nothing he can say to anybody at the New York Times or the Washington Post or ABC, CBS, NBC — to change that.

BREAK TRANSCIRPT

RUSH: Remember the book Game Change, Mark Halperin, about all of the stuff they knew in the 2008 campaign that they withheld? They knew that Edwards and his wife were at odds, hated each other, that things were falling apart; and they withheld it on purpose so as — well, to sell books, but also — not to negatively impact the Edwards campaign. Nothing is ever going to change that. There’s nothing Cain can do.