RUSH: Yesterday afternoon there was, I guess, breaking news. Everybody was going absolutely nuts, breaking news. And here’s basically the story that was the breaking news. Let me set this up. (interruption) There we go. I lost my battery contact in my cochlear implant. I was a hundred percent deaf there for the last 30 seconds, but I just fixed it. It wouldn’ta happened if somebody hadn’t told me what I already knew, that the story’s been retracted.

Remember when I, a couple days ago, started the program by saying, “Are you sitting down?” I informed you that Mitt Romney, in defending his time at Bain, said, (paraphrasing) “Hey, you know, we did the same thing that Obama did when he took over General Motors. He was trying to save the business just like we were. You go in there, you close some dealerships and you have to cut some employees off. Obama did it, everybody knows that’s what you do.” And I had a conniption fit here because Obama wasn’t doing anything that was oriented in capitalism. Obama wasn’t trying to save the company for profitability, he doesn’t care about that. He was trying to take the company away from its rightful owners and give it to the unions. And I cringed at Romney comparing himself to Obama.

Then yesterday, a story came out on CNBC, and the blogs went nuts with this. Did you hear about this? The story yesterday from CNBC was that that Bain Capital had advised and consulted Obama in which dealerships to cut when they took over General Motors. This led to speculation, “Well, maybe that’s why Romney cited Obama, because he knew that Bain –” Romney hasn’t been at Bain Capital in, what, 10 years, 20 years, whatever. So none of this involved Romney, but Bain Capital is Romney for all practical intents in terms of political perception. So the story hit yesterday from CNBC that Bain Capital had consulted and advised Obama on how to cut General Motors down to size. And I can’t tell you the number of e-mails I got from people, “Oh, my gosh, just when we think we’re getting ahead, this guy does something stupid like that. How the hell could this possibly happen?” I said, “Well, let’s just be patient on this.”

I wasn’t thrilled, don’t misunderstand. Blogs wrote pages of analysis on this, pages, literally pages of analysis on what this means for Romney. “Why in the world would Bain do this?” Now we know why Romney tried to equate Bain with Obama, because Romney knew what nobody else knew at the time, that Obama had consulted with Bain. And of course that would be strike two, ’cause Romney’s advisers are out there saying, “Yeah, we told Obama how to put together a health care bill.” So this would have been strike two. So this morning, my good friend Andy McCarthy, National Review, he posts a brilliant piece about this, and about two hours ago CNBC runs a correction. “A previous story incorrectly reported that Mitt Romney’s former firm, Bain & Co., was part of a team of consulting companies that advised President Barack Obama on a decision to shutter car dealerships during the auto bailout. Bain & Co. said it has no connection to the ‘Bain Consulting’ firm referenced in government documents.”

There was a Bain company, but it wasn’t Romney’s. So, “Never mind!” Right before the program started: “By the way, there’s been a retraction.” I knew that two hours ago. Anyway, it’s out there, and the retraction, folks, is about one-tenth the size of the original story. But if you were aware of that, if you had seen the news, you’re a blog reader, and you had seen the news that Bain had consulted Obama, that Bain had been sought out by Obama, and that Bain had told Obama which dealerships to cut, it’s not true, it didn’t happen — not the Bain that Romney had anything to do with.