RUSH: I was just telling the staff here, ladies and gentlemen, I have never felt happier, I’ve never felt better about being a hermit, about being a recluse. Man, oh man, I thought rampant incompetence was taking place, but even I had no idea how bad it is. No, I don’t think it’s peaked yet. Sadly, I do not.

Greetings. It’s Rush Limbaugh. These the EIB Network. We’re happy to have you here. It’s a thrill and delight to be with you. It always is. The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 1-800-282-2882. And the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com. ‘

Now, there’s a lot to do every day, and I can open the program the same way every day by telling you I can’t get it all in even if I try for three hours. This may be one of those days. I mean, we’re literally loaded. I’ve got four or five things here that all would qualify as being the top story that I would lead with. Ebola has to be it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You probably have heard by now the second medical worker at the Dallas hospital has tested positive for Ebola. And, ladies and gentlemen, the newest Ebola patient flew Frontier Airlines the day before her diagnosis. Not Air Africa. Not Air Liberia not Air Nigeria. Not Air Sierra Leone, but Frontier Airlines.

“The second Dallas health care worker who contracted the Ebola virus was on a flight the day before her symptoms,” according to the wizards at the Centers for Disease Control. It was Frontier Airlines, flight 1143, Cleveland to Dallas. The CDC is asking all 132 passengers who were on the flight to call the CDC phone number. Those 132 passengers will be monitored for symptoms and interviewed about the flight.

According to the crew, the healthcare worker showed no symptoms. Wait a minute. Wait just a minute! The director of the CDC says that if somebody doesn’t show symptoms, you can’t get it. Obama said it’s not coming here. And even if it does, we are perfectly equipped to handle it. We’re not. And it has. It was brought here. We brought it here.

What are we dealing with here? What is the point of all this? The whole story of this outbreak hinges on a few things that the government and the Drive-Bys have tried very, very hard to hammer into truth. One of those things is in the unlikely event anyone gets it, we’ve got protocols in place to isolate and handle this. No, apparently we don’t. And it’s only contagious if you show symptoms.

The second healthcare worker who tested positive for Ebola last night flew by air October 13th, the day before she reported symptoms, said the CDC. Frontier Airlines Flight 1143, Cleveland to Dallas. The CDC is asking all 132 passengers who were on the flight to call them. Passengers will be monitored for symptoms and interviewed about the flight. According to the flight crew — I guess if you like your flight crew you can keep your flight crew — according to the crew, the healthcare worker showed no Ebola symptoms during Flight 1143.

Well, now, look, the CDC said you can’t catch this if you aren’t showing any symptoms. So why do they want to talk to the other passengers? If you can’t get the disease from somebody who has got the virus but isn’t showing symptoms, if they have to be showing symptoms, and she wasn’t while on the Frontier flight, then why do they want to talk to the other passengers? And how about the people in the security line with her or at the restaurant in the airport, wherever she was, or outside with the skycaps. Or in the ladies’ room. I’m sorry, folks, I didn’t know. I assumed.

A friend of mine today sent me a note about this, said, “Yeah, second victim, got on a commercial flight.” I wrote back and said, “What’s commercial?” Just teasing. Her cab driver, whatever, everyone she came into contact with. How did she get there? It can’t happen. We were told it can’t happen. Now, I don’t know how many people believe these people. That’s another thing. I mean, you see the CDC guy on TV. This is a dangerous thing. People have an implicit trust in government. Doesn’t matter who is running it. And these people are just — I mean, this is glaring incompetence.

We’ve got people who have no business being in the positions they’re in, from Obama on down. No business whatsoever. Frieden has no business being there. He has no business being the Centers for Disease Control director. Has no clue. It’s patently obvious. There were basically three things that the government and the media tried to hammer into us to believe as the truth. In the unlikely event anybody gets it we’ve got protocols in place to isolate and handle it. Well, the nurses have blown that out of the water. The nurses involved in all these hospitals have blown everything the CDC director has said out of the water.

They said it’s only contagious if you show symptoms. Hello, passenger, Frontier Airlines, and it can only be passed through bodily fluids, not through the air. Then why do they want to talk to these hundred passengers? Did they all touch her? The entire credibility of the US government requires all of these things to be true. They assured us that these things were all true.

This CDC director continues to say some of the most nonsensical things about containing this disease in Africa, while at the same time saying that we can’t. In the same sentence, he will say we’ve got to contain it in Africa, but any effort to contain it in Africa, it’s unfair and it’s biased or whatever the hell his cockamamie brain tells him it is. It’s just confusing as it can be. The entire credibility of the US government requires all three of these things to be true and none of them are.

You don’t need the flight from Africa. Now you’ve gotta ban flights to Dallas, apparently. If you read between the lines on this second medical worker at the Dallas hospital tested positive for Ebola, if you read between the lines it looks like they’re suggesting that this person must have failed to follow a different protocol from what the first nurse is supposed to have failed to follow, which is pretty amazing since we still don’t know what protocol Nurse Pham failed to follow. But they dumped on her, if you remember. They blamed her for not following protocol, and we don’t know what protocol the second nurse violated here.

And I’ve just received word — this is big — Obama has cancelled a fund raiser. Those never get cancelled. Not even Benghazi cancelled a fundraiser. Nothing cancels fundraisers. But Obama has cancelled a fundraising trip to hold a meeting on Ebola. The optics must really be bad here, folks, because it’s all about the optics. It’s all about the buzz and the PR. It’s all about the election. And now the media, “Will Obama canceling his fundraising trip hurt him in the election?” That will be the media take on this.

On top of all that, folks, we’re now being told by the nurse’s union in Dallas, there were no CDC protocols for the nurses to follow when Thomas Duncan showed up in the ER. Now stop and think of that for just a second. The Ebola outbreak in Africa began in the early spring, March or April. It’s not a secret. It isn’t a mystery. And as we got into the summer, it really started claiming lives in great numbers. It was well known how bad this outbreak was. It was well known that there wasn’t a cure. It was well known that the death rate was being expressed by experts, if there are any anymore, as between 50 and 90 percent.

We were told we got protocols in place. We have the situation handled. Everything okay. And now the nurses union in Dallas says that there weren’t any protocols from the CDC for the nurses to follow in the ER when Thomas Duncan showed up. They had to wing it. And winging it involved wrapping medical tape around their necks four or five times, to keep their skin from being exposed to Duncan’s bodily fluids because of the gaps in their protective clothing.

See, they’re not wearing hazmat gear. You’ll see in the media that the nurses are wearing full gear, whatever. It’s not. It’s gowns, it’s gloves, and it’s masks and shields. But they’re not airtight. Besides that, people in full hazmat gear did contract the disease in Africa. Now, on top of all of that, can you imagine the nurses wrapping medical tape around their necks four or five times, on their own, they just decided to. There weren’t any protocols, they’re saying.

On top of that, the nurses union is also claiming that Mr. Duncan sat in the ER for hours like everybody else who goes to the ER sits there for hours. The nurses union claims that Thomas Duncan sat in the ER for hours. That was a long time before he was put in isolation. And they say that he probably had contact with at least seven other patients while he was sitting in the ER waiting room waiting to be dealt with. And on top of that — we keep piling things on here — the nurses who treated Mr. Duncan went on to treat other patients. There was no isolation. There was no quarantine.

I remember praising these health workers and everybody was complaining and whining and moaning, I said, “Folks, we’ve got to trust they know what they’re doing. They’re treating these patients. They know full well.” They were not given protocols. The nurses who treated Duncan went on to treat other patients, and we were assured by the CDC for weeks that every hospital in the nation was prepared to handle Ebola cases and they weren’t.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now I want to go through three things here again. First, I want to draw a contrast with you. The whole story of this outbreak, the entire story of this Ebola outbreak hinges on three things we’ve been told by the government and their sycophant slavish supporters in the media, as true.

One, in the unlikely event that anybody gets it we have protocols in place to isolate and handle it.

Two, it’s only contagious if you show symptoms.

And three, it can only be passed through bodily fluids, not through the air.

All of that is wrong. All of that has been demonstrated to be not just wrong, dangerously wrong, incompetently dangerously wrong. And now I want to take you back, remember Hurricane Katrina and remember the cacophony of whining and moaning and accusations the left was making against Bush for botching the recovery effort in Katrina and leaving people alone to die?

Where is anything like that? There isn’t. They’re all circling the wagons around Obama. They’re circling the wagons around themselves and pretty soon we’re gonna get a fall guy, probably Frieden, to take the hit for all of this. That will probably be the outgrowth of the meeting that Obama is having.

But I want to ask you a question: Ask yourself which is harder, organizing a relief effort to transport across an entire continent, everything from soup to nuts to tens of thousands of people, to bottled water, to food, to temporary housing, coordinating that effort down to New Orleans to handle the homeless, the jobless, the destitute. Or, stopping Liberians from flying into the country. Which of those two is harder? All we had to do was keep flights from Africa from landing in the United States. That’s all they had to do. And they wouldn’t do it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The flight crew, ladies and gentlemen, on Frontier Airlines 1143 Cleveland to Dallas said that the health care worker showed no Ebola symptoms. How do they know? Look at what we believe. They say, “No, they didn’t see any symptoms,” and we go, “Oh, okay! The flight crew didn’t see any symptoms.” People just throw things out, and you’ve gotta catch yourself, folks, because it’s easy to believe

You want to believe these things. I’m not saying the flight crew has ulterior motives. I just don’t know what expertise they’ve got. All these efforts to reassure people are fine, I understand not wanting to cause a panic, but for crying out loud, if there was ever a case for the mayor for Realville, this is it. How does the flight crew know the patient had no symptoms?

Even if she wasn’t exhibiting symptoms, then what does that make of what Frieden told us, the CDC director? “Well you can’t get this disease if the patient isn’t showing symptoms. It’s not transferable. It’s not contagious.” Really? Well the flight crew says she wasn’t showing symptoms. What do they know? What does the flight crew know that the CDC director does not know? And they probably do know more!

This guy is just a typical, touchy-feely lib that wants to be judged on his intentions, like they all do. He wants to be judged on his intentions his big heart and how much he cares and so forth, as if that gets things done. These people on the left believe just saying something accomplishes something. Proclaiming something makes it so. Giving a speech changes the world, lowers the sea levels or what have you.

I’ll tell you what makes people think that is just pure arrogance.

Arrogance and conceit.

The idea that they’re better, the idea that they’re smarter, the idea that they care more, the idea that their intentions are more honorable and so forth, and the idea that their political opponents are racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes? All of that stuff is relevant here. The Democrat Party unfairly benefits from an image of all of this compassion and all of this caring and all these good intentions, and they haven’t earned it.

What they’ve earned is distrust. Mistrust. What they’ve earned is the realization that they’re not competent. We don’t have the best and brightest and the smartest in these key positions, and not just here. It’s true in the judiciary, it’s true at all these government bureaucracies, and every day the news is filled with evidence of this. Let’s go back to the nurses union claiming that Mr. Duncan sat in the ER for hours.

How many have been to the ER? I’ve been to the ER. I haven’t ever really gone but I’ve had to take people. But I don’t know why they call it “emergency.” Nobody’s acting like there’s any emergency an any ER room that I’ve been to, and I’m not being critical of medical people here. I’m just making an observation. Nobody is in a hurry unless somebody comes in who is not breathing.

If somebody comes in on a stretcher, bam! They do something. Walk in there and you have a genuine emergency, and it’s get in line and wait like a doctor’s office. That’s the point. You get in line. You sit and you wait with a whole lot of other people doing the same thing. Except when Duncan went in there, we had an Ebola patient sitting around and he was exhibiting symptoms.

But who knew?

Nobody was told.

The nurses didn’t even know. The nurses weren’t given the protocols. After they treated him the first time, they sent him home. They didn’t know what they were dealing with. Now, we can be critical and say, “Were they not paying attention to the news?” But these people, these places are very regimented. Protocols. Policies. The manual. The book. That’s how you do things. Step outside of that and you get reprimanded.

Take matters into your own hands?

“Ah, ah, ah, ah!” The protocol supersedes, dominates everything. And in a situation where you’ve got fear of violating protocol, you’re going to adhere to the protocol. In this case, it was a protocol that didn’t exist and it wasn’t applicable. It was a long time before Duncan was put in isolation. He probably had contact with at least seven other patients and who knows how many other people in the ER.

On top of that, the nurses who treated Duncan went on to treat other patients. Bear in mind during all of this that we were assured by the CDC for weeks that every hospital in the country was prepared to handle the Ebola cases. Obama told us. The CDC director told us. Flight crews may as well have told us. Now, I still maintain, like I just said, contrasting Katrina.

Remember that? Here you had a nationwide mobilization effort to get people, supplies, repairs, temporary electricity. Any number of things needed to be done in New Orleans after Katrina went through. It was a nationwide mobilization effort, and remember how the left — and I’m sorry, folks, it is political. I don’t care.

The sooner everybody realizes this and stops chewing my face off because, it would be better off. This is all political. The motivation for the people in charge here is politics, politics, politics. First, second, third. Because it always, always, always is. The substance of whatever they’re dealing with is way down on the list. The politics, the ramifications. The opportunity that politics presents.

“Never let a crisis go to waste,” as Rahm Emanuel said. Here it is. I still maintain that it would have been much easier to just ban flights from Africa than what Bush had to deal with during Katrina. Yet these same people, they’re praising themselves for being so smart, doing the right thing, having so much compassion and care and love for their fellow man and so forth.

They just couldn’t wait to hammer Bush and browbeat everybody else that they wanted to accuse of totally botching Katrina, and they were throwing charges of racism around. Bush didn’t care because there were black people in New Orleans, and he especially didn’t care because more black people leaving New Orleans and going to Houston would be better for the Republicans because that would mean fewer blacks voting in Louisiana.

That’s the way they were thinking. That’s what they were charging. Those were the accusations they were leveling at Bush. All the while the Bush administration was leading a nationwide mobilizing effort to get supplies, repairs, assistance into New Orleans. They’d told them to get out of the city. Meanwhile, School Bus Nagin is over there blameless. That governor, Kathleen Blanco? She was blameless.

Those two were the culprits in this for not being prepared. Want to talk about not prepared? How about all the school buses. I don’t want to focus on Katrina. But my focus is the same people leveling all these baseless, centrist, mean-spirited, extreme political charges at Bush and his regime with administration Katrina. How hard would it have been to ban airplanes from landing in this country from Africa?

That’s all they had to do, folks!

That is the first failure in their precious protocol was not closing our airports to people from Ebola countries, and we know why. “That would have been really mean, because we couldn’t turn our backs on Liberia, especially because of slavery! Yes, because we had slavery! Liberia was set up so people who had been slaves could escape the horrors of this country and set up in their own paradise in Liberia, and we can never turn our backs on them.”

That’s why we didn’t shut down flights from Ebola countries in Africa. So far we have at least two more people who are at risk of dying because we refused to take that single precaution, and we refused to take that single precaution all because it wouldn’t look nice and it wouldn’t seem fair. You see, it’s just not fair that they have Ebola in Africa and we don’t. That’s not fair.

No, I’m not saying that they define fairness as us then getting Ebola. No, no, no. Don’t misunderstand. I’m saying their preoccupation with diversity, equality and fairness and all this other stuff, leads them to not taking correct protective measures for the United States of America. Pure and simple. Whatever happened to that old argument? What if a Republican had come out and said: “If stopping flights from west Africa might just save one child…”?

Remember the Democrats used to say that? Remember there was a presidential debate in ’96, Bob Dole and Clinton? It was Dole, right? He was the nominee. Right. Dole actually mounted a very substantive charge at Clinton based on his catting around, his immorality, lying under oath and all that sort of stuff. Clinton’s reply was to smile and to say (impression): “No attack, especially on me, ever fed a hungry child.”

The audience and media started crying. “Oh my God, he’s so good!” Well, what if somebody had stood up and said, “If stopping flights from Africa might save just one child…”? I don’t know. The Centers for Disease Control? If you didn’t know, if you just landed here from Mars you might want to call them the Centers for Disease Redistribution. Because that’s what’s happening: CDR.

CNN is currently gob smacked (meaning they’re incredulous) at the news that the latest Ebola victim was allowed to fly to Cleveland the day before he or she was diagnosed. They just don’t understand this. CDC is now asking anyone on that flight Frontier 1143 to get a hold of them immediately. But we don’t need to close the airports. No, no, no, no! You can’t get it from somebody not showing symptoms.

Then why do they want to talk to them? Why do they want to screen them? Here’s part of a CDC statement: “The health care worker exhibited no signs or symptoms of illness while on Flight 1143 according to the crew.” Did the crew take her temperature? Did the crew feel her forehead?

Why would they have noticed her out of 132 passengers? There were 132 people on that plane. How did the crew know to focus on this patient if she wasn’t showing symptoms? (interruption) TSA protocols, really? You mean focus on Grammy? Is that what it is? Here’s more from the CDC statement:

“The health care worker exhibited no signs or symptoms of illness while on Flight 1143, according to the crew.” I got nothing against the crew, but what did they do? Did they just eyeball it and say, “Hey, she looks perfectly healthy to me”? Do they have one of those laser guns that you zap somebody with that supposedly can tell their temperature? Did they do that?

Have to take another timeout, my friends. Be patient. Courage.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. Let’s go to the phones, because if I don’t, it’s going to be a while. I just have to discipline myself here to get to the phones get something in here. It’s only the polite thing to do. We invite them to call and they’ve been patiently waiting here.

We’ll start in a town named after me, no doubt, Rushville Ohio. This is Sam. It’s great to have you, Sam.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. We were here before you.

RUSH: Well, that’s just the way it is then.

CALLER: Just the way it is. My question is, in the infinite wisdom of the CDC, why did they not tell these people that worked in that hospital not to travel until they know for sure?

RUSH: Great question. Just add that one to the list.

CALLER: Yes, sir.

RUSH: These are the kind of things we thought they were going to be doing. Monitoring all of these people. This is a nurse in there who treated Duncan, was involved, we thought they were going to be monitoring. For crying out loud, we quarantined the NBC medical person, Nancy Snyderman, because she violated the voluntary quarantine to go to some leftist soup Nazi place and get a bowl of soup. So we found her, we quarantined her. By the way, the media is all hipped up about that.

It might be time, in addition to phone calls, to do some sound bites. Let’s start with number four, Mike Rawlings, he is the mayor of Dallas. This was from this morning at Texas Presbyterian Hospital during a press conference.

RAWLINGS: While Dallas is anxious about this and with this news this morning the anxiety level goes up a level, we are not fearful. And I’m pleased and proud of the citizens that I talk to day in and day out, knowing that there’s hope if we take care and do what is right in these details. It may get worse before it gets better, but it will get better.

RUSH: Well, we have some reassuring news from the mayor of Dallas. I thought you would want to hear that. It may get worse before it gets better, but it will get better. Well, yeah, Ebola does run out of victims at some point. Here’s Daniel Varga. Dr. Daniel Varga, Texas Health Resources Chief Clinical Officer at the same press conference, Texas Presbyterian Hospital this morning.

VARGA: I want to thank the mayor, the judge, the CDC, state health officials and the Dallas County Health Department for their continued partnership as we manage this unprecedented crisis. As others have said this morning, today’s development, while concerning and unfortunate, is continued evidence that our monitoring program is working. We’re a hospital that may have done some things different with the benefit of what we know today, but makes no mistake, no one wants to get this right more than our hospital.

RUSH: So they’re working on it. And they’re doing what they can do. And they’re doing what they have to do. They’re dealing with public reaction to all this the best they can. But everybody’s doing this on the fly. That’s the takeaway here, folks. Dr. Frieden of the CDC was going on and on about how precious the protocols are, and we’ve got them in place. Yes, our protocols are being followed and we’ve got our manual here and protocol here, protocol there, all the protocols. Everybody’s winging it, is what’s happening.

If there are protocols, nobody can find them to follow them. If there are protocols, nobody knows what they are. And they could be changing. Yes, they are changing. Frieden even said they’re going to change the protocols, yesterday.

The BBC has decided to ban guests from Ebola countries. “The BBC will ban guests from its buildings if they have Ebola symptoms as staff admitted they fear they will catch it. Star broadcaster Fiona Bruce, 50, has revealed that staff including make-up artists are fearful because they have physical contact with guests from high risk countries.

The newsreader said their fears are ‘not unreasonable’ and admitted she would refuse to report from an Ebola-stricken region.”

The news schmooze, notwithstanding, the hell with the news. I’m not going there to report and we’re not letting any Ebola people into our building. The BBC. The Beeb, a bunch of leftists.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The White House has announced Obama is going to have a statement, a statement at 3:30 this afternoon after his meeting on Ebola. He’s cancelled a fundraising trip, which is a major cancellation for Obama to cancel a fundraiser. He didn’t cancel a fundraising trip for Benghazi! He got on a plane for Vegas (after telling everybody not to go there).

He got on a plane for Vegas and another fundraiser, and that’s all he’s been doing lately. But he’s cancelled a fundraising trip to have an Ebola meeting. The Ebola meeting is happening right now and there’s going to be a statement he’s going to make after that meeting at 3:30, which means 4:00 because he’s always late, and at 4:00 (4:07, actually) is Game 4 of the Orioles-Royals American League Championship Series.

I got a note from sometime host of this show Douglas Urbanski. He said, “You’re absolutely right. ‘Never let a crisis go to waste,’ is applicable here. But there’s a part two. Don’t forget part two.” He’s dead on right about this. “It was Rahm Emanuel who famously said, ‘Never let a crisis go to waste,’ meaning, ‘Whatever crisis we’re going to politicize the damn thing and use it to our advantage!’

“But he also said — this is part two — the reason you never let a crisis go to waste is because you get to do things you otherwise would not be able to do, and that is the real key to never letting a crisis go to waste, and we’ve got a crisis. We’ve got people who like to utilize crises for political purposes because they get to do things they otherwise would not be able to do. Just a little heads-up.”

Also some breaking news: One of the Dallas health worker Ebola patients will be transferred to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for treatment. Emory is one of those four hospitals with a real isolation unit. There are only four in the country, and they have a grand total of 11 beds. Did you know that? We’ve got four hospitals with real isolation units — and in those four hospitals, a grand total of 11 beds.

Now, Mr. Duncan wasn’t taken there. Thomas Duncan wasn’t taken to Emory. No, no! Thomas Duncan, they left him in Dallas. (interruption) “Why?” Well, that’s for others to answer, Mr. Snerdley, and I’m sure the Reverend Jackson will at some point. Don’t you? Aren’t you? Aren’t you fairly certain that the Reverend Jackson will have an answer to why is this worker being taken to Emory but Thomas Duncan was not? (interruption)

No, it has nothing to do with having a better health plan. Nobody has a better health plan.