RUSH: Yeah, yeah, I think I’m gonna have to do that. I’m gonna have to go back to the nineties and explain a lot of things. In order to understand what’s going on with Hillary Clinton today, you have to understand what happened in the nineties. And what I mean by that, folks, in order to understand what the media is doing today with Hillary, we’re gonna have to go back and revisit the nineties. But don’t worry. It’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be some great memories revived from the Grooveyard that many people have forgotten.
Anyway, great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh, back at it on hump day. Telephone number at the EIB Network is 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
All right. So we had the press conference. The first thing to point out, and, folks, please do not doubt me on this. None of what I am going to offer in terms of analysis or explanation of Hillary Clinton is ego oriented. It is fundamentally necessary, if you want to understand. For example, the press, AP has sued. AP is suing to get hold of her records. Most of the Drive-By Media is not tolerating what she said yesterday. Most of the Drive-By Media is not accepting it. Many people are mocking her and making fun of her, justifiably so.
People are puzzled by this because the popular conception is that Hillary is the fait accompli Democrat nominee for 2016, the fait accompli next president. People assume the media loves her. People assume that the media can’t wait for her. People assume the media have been lining up ready to launch her, get behind her, and stay in her good graces. None of that appears to be true, and it’s leading to some confusion in terms of people doing analysis of this.
I mean, that press conference was an absolute disaster, folks. That woman is not the smartest woman in America, not the smartest woman in the world. She’s not even a good liar, and that’s the difference between her and her husband, one of the many. She evokes no sympathy. People don’t really feel sorry for her, not even the feminazis. It’s a strange thing. She’s stuck back in the nineties.
You know, I didn’t want to say it yesterday all during the program, but when it was announced that that press conference of hers was gonna be at two o’clock, I told myself, and I mentioned it to Snerdley, I said, “There’s no way that she’s gonna come out and do this press conference before this program ends. It isn’t gonna happen.” I didn’t tell you that ’cause it didn’t seem relevant at the time. It was no big deal. What was relevant was that she did this at the UN. That was purposeful because, as we mentioned yesterday, at the United Nations you have to apply for news credentials 24 hours in advance of any event.
She didn’t give ’em 24 hours so the people that were on hand, the media people on hand to query her yesterday were the UN beat reporters for all the news networks and agencies. So it wasn’t the White House crew. It wasn’t the daily news crew that you’re used to. It was a bunch of people whose beat is the UN. By definition, they were not the most up to speed on whatever this scandal involving Hillary and her e-mail is. That was done on purpose. And right on schedule, I mean, to the second when this program ended, out she walked. And that told me that this woman is in a time warp, that this woman is stuck in the 1990s.
I’ve been thinking the past hour how best to put this in perspective and to make the most sense out of it. In order to do that, I need to ask you, do you recall the Pretty in Pink Press Conference that Mrs. Clinton did in 1994? It was on April 22nd, 1994, and it was called the Pretty in Pink Press Conference because she had on a pink pantsuit. The reason for that press conference was me. And if you have not been listening to this program from the beginning, if your listening doesn’t go back any longer than 15 years, you don’t know what I’m talking about. That’s why it’s necessary to put this in perspective.
Back in 1994 Hillarycare was all the rage, and the Clintons were just getting started on ramping it up. There had also been already the controversies over Whitewater and what had become known as the Rose Law Firm billing records. There had been numerous bimbo eruptions. We had not yet had the election in 1994 that the Republicans would go on to win and retake the House of Representatives. The Clintons were arguably still in their honeymoon. It was the second year of the administration.
But what had happened that week, prior to the Pretty in Pink Press Conference, there was a town hall edition of Nightline. And everybody was in Iowa. There was something going on in Iowa. Ted Koppel was in Iowa, and Geneva Overholtzer was on that show. She was at the time the editor of the Des Moines Register. She would later go on to work she at the Washington Post and USA Today, a number of other places like that. James Carville was there.
They asked me to be on this program, and I agreed to do it. I was the only one not in Iowa. I did it from my TV studio on West 57th Street in New York, across the street from the CBS broadcast center, just to give you some perspective. And on that program, as they began detailed discussions of Hillarycare and any number of other things, when Ted Koppel came to me, I said, “Ted” — essentially. I mean, I’m gonna have to paraphrase this. I don’t have it exactly at my fingerprints what I said verbatim. But I said, “Ted, I think this is all pretty much a waste of time. I don’t know how we can believe anything these people tell us. I think it would be ridiculous for us to believe anything the Clintons say.” And then I went rat-tat-tat why.
Carville was reduced to a mumbling failed attempt at rebuttal. It caused a mini-firestorm on the set in Iowa because I was not falling into line. I was not discussing the topic as — that’s why Koppel had me on. Back then he liked me. And it caused the program to, in a mild way of expressing it, blow up, because essentially what I was doing was telling everybody, “You guys, this is all a bunch of hooey here. I mean, we can’t believe what they say about health care, it doesn’t matter, they haven’t told the truth about a lot of things.” And I went down list by list, item by item, what they’d lied about.
Well, the next day the New York Times wrote a scathing review of what had happened on Nightline the night before. Two or three days later she scheduled that press conference that became known as Pretty in Pink. And she sat right under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and sat in the chair exactly as Lincoln was posed in that portrait. And the picture, the image, you know, Honest Abe, here’s Hillary in the pink pantsuit, and she was masterful in the press conference. She was relaxed. She was the exact opposite of the way she was yesterday. She was relaxed. She was in command.
My name didn’t come up, don’t misunderstand. But I was the reason because I had changed the direction of the way all this was being looked at. I had challenged their veracity and their honesty. Remember, there’s no Fox News yet. There’s barely any other talk radio. There are no conservative blogs yet. The Clintons, the reason why this is relevant to yesterday, I believe Hillary Clinton’s stuck in the nineties in a host of ways. And coming out at three o’clock yesterday waiting until this program was over to do whatever she did yesterday, to me, is an indication.
Because back in the nineties, that’s what they did all the time. They waited until this program was over to do anything of substance so that I would not have immediate opportunity to comment, because I was the only anti voice back then. There was no Fox, there was no blogosphere, and there weren’t any other national conservative talk shows. I was it.
So they never did a press conference between noon and three. They never made news between noon and three. They always waited until after three o’clock, unless it was something unavoidable, an international incident or some sort of thing. But I mean, if they could avoid making news between noon and three, they did. And I think Hillary’s still stuck in that mind-set.
What she has forgotten is when I finish at three o’clock, yeah, I’m through, but the rest of the New Media isn’t. It’s still out there, and it pounced. It doesn’t matter when the left does things now. They don’t have to wait ’til three o’clock. They still do in Hillary’s case, and I think it’s a mind-set, I think it’s indicative of a mind-set that she is still stuck back in the nineties in a host of ways. And you can see it in the media coverage. Ron Fournier and a number of other Drive-Bys — and Snerdley will back me up on this — are writing that they don’t want to go through the nineties again with the Clintons. They just don’t want to go through it.
They blamed everything on the Republicans. They blamed everything on the media. They never took responsibility for anything. Now, many people hearing this will be surprised, and your reaction, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I thought the media loved the Clintons. I thought the media loved the nineties. I thought everybody thinks the nineties were the good old days with Clinton running the show and the economy was booming and the Republicans are getting shellacked every day and Ken Starr was getting shellacked every day, and here’s the media writing, oh, my God, they don’t want to go back to the nineties. What’s that about?”
What that’s about is the media doesn’t like Hillary. They like Bill. They love Bill. They are enamored of Bill. But Hillary, you take her, because she is with Bill. And to the extent that you get behind and help Hillary, you’re doing it because you’re getting behind and helping Bill. But if they are so behind Hillary, if they are so supportive of Hillary, how in the hell did Obama beat her? Do you realize the first opportunity the Democrat Party had and the first opportunity many in the media had to abandon her, they took it in 2008.
And I think what we’re seeing in some of the post-press conference coverage yesterday from a lot of media that were reporting back in the nineties — I mean, some of those people are still around, most of them are. They are all in one way or another lamenting, “Oh, we don’t want to go back to the nineties,” and this press conference yesterday reminded them of what the nineties was. That it was the Clintons lying every day, and it was the Clintons blaming the Republicans every day and the Clintons stonewalling and blaming the media every day and so forth.
They’re writing that they don’t want to go through that again. Hillary Clinton, ladies and gentlemen, and I’m the kind of sorry to say this. As you know, I tried to keep her campaign alive in 2008 when all of her supposed media buddies and party officials abandoned her. And make no mistake, they did. And what do you think is going on now? Why do you think all this has come up?
They don’t want her now, folks. They want somebody, they want Elizabeth Warren, they want somebody else, but that’s why this is coming up now. And that’s why so many in the media seemingly are lining up in unsympathetic ways. They didn’t want her in ’08 and they don’t want her now, which I know violates every tenet of conventional wisdom, but it is what it is. It’s right in front of our face.
Hillary Clinton is the most cheated-on woman in America. I don’t care how you slice it. Now, you can interpret that as a criticism. You can think of it as kind, unkind, or what have you. But I’m sorry; in just her relationship with her husband alone it’s true. But then look at the all the other betrayal that she has had to put up with. This 2008 campaign, you remember what that was? In her mind, that was her turn now.
She had done her duty. She had backed her husband through all of his scandals. She had given up her life, essentially, given up her own career to marry him, move to Arkansas. There’s no worse place to go, maybe, other than Oklahoma or Alabama. If you’re at Wellesley, and if you’re in the Northeast, and if you’re in line to become something big in the New York-Washington-Boston axis, and all of a sudden you end up in Arkansas? But she did it, and she stood behind Bill with every one of these female scandals, the bimbos that kept — anyway, you know this, and 2008 was to be her payback.
This was the party saying “thank you.” First chance they got they abandoned her. I think that’s what’s happening now. There are media supporters, don’t misunderstand. There are people claiming that she did great yesterday. But it’s not unison, it’s not a majority, and it certainly is not unanimous. And I think this business about not wanting to have to relive the nineties is an indication these people think that she’s stuck there. She has not grown. She has not modernized. And this e-mail story is all the evidence they think they need. Some of these answers that she gave yesterday are just — the idea that you need two phones for two e-mail accounts.
These things indicate to a lot of people that time has passed her by. Tech certainly has. And that’s because in many ways she’s stuck back in the nineties. I think coming out at three o’clock yesterday is the greatest evidence to the world she’s stuck back in the nineties. I could take it as a compliment. I’m not looking at it that way. I’m analyzing it in a whole different way. We’re gonna get in nuts and bolts of what she said in the press conference as well and some of the contradictions and the attitude.
Charlie Hurt had a piece at the Washington Times: Do we really want another 10 years of the woman scorned as our leader? And it’s a great way to put it. She’s where she is because she’s been so scorned and so mistreated, now it’s payback time, time to be nice to the girl. No qualifications, no real reason for her to be president other than we owe her. And she plays that victim card well, and people are getting tired of it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m are aware of that flag burning thing at UC Irvine. I’m also aware that there was not a single American flag on display Sunday in Selma. Not one. Not one American flag anywhere to be seen last Sunday in Selma. So they not only cropped George W. Bush out, there weren’t any flags.
Listen to Mrs. Clinton from the Pretty in Pink Press Conference. This is April 22, 1994. This is two days after that Nightline episode that I was describing, just two days, when I basically said, “Ted, why should we believe them about anything? What…? The details of her health care program are irrelevant to me. Why should we believe them?” As usual, nobody had planned that or contemplated that, so it took off.
Anyway, a question from a reporter: “You were reported to have opposed a special prosecutor, some of the release of tax documents on the basis of privacy. You felt you had a right to privacy, Mrs. Clinton. Do you think that that helped to create any impression that you were trying to hide something?” It’s the same thing with this woman, always! And here’s what she said.
HILLARY: You’re right. I’ve always believed in a — in a zone of privacy, and I told a friend, uh, the other day that I feel after resisting for a long time I’ve been rezoned, you know (chortling press corps). And I — I now have a much better appreciation of what’s expected and not only what I have done — because I am extremely comfortable and confident about everything that I have done — but about my ability to communicate that clearly and to give, umm, the information that you all need.
RUSH: See? Nothing changes, and the media knows it. That was about turning 10 grand into 100 grand in the cattle futures market. That’s what that question was about. “How did you do that? Do you think maybe you should have been up front and forthcoming and tell how you did?”
“Yeah, looking back on it, I had a zone of privacy, but I’ve learned!”
She hasn’t. It’s the same old thing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Some of the people sending me e-mails are funny. I checked the e-mail during the break. “Hey, Rush, that was really clever of you, going back and giving yourself credit for the Pretty in Pink Press Conference in 1990, trying to relate it to today just to give yourself an attaboy.” That’s not what I was doing.
Let me tell you something, folks. There are people, young people, Millennials who abandoned Mrs. Clinton in 2008. They chose Obama instead. They don’t like her. They instinctively don’t like her. Some of them do, however. They weren’t alive back then. We’ve been at this 26 years. That’s a generation, and there are people in this audience who do not know Mrs. Clinton from that era, and my purpose was to tell them that nothing’s changed. The Clintons are still the same Clintons they were, especially her, but she’s the one that still hasn’t had the prize of sitting in the Oval Office, as her own.
Going back to the Pretty in Pink, including the sound bite from back then, was to illustrate it’s the same victimized woman from the nineties that’s still living there. She thinks that her ticket, that her success track is — she hasn’t moved forward. She is stuck in a time warp. She’s stuck in the 1990s. And the techniques that she used, that Pretty in Pink Press Conference, I should have made it a little bit more clear. The Pretty in Pink Press Conference, the press was dazzled. They were in awe.
They couldn’t believe how composed and how on she was, and any thought that the Clintons were lying about what was in their health care plan or any idea that the Clintons were doing something chicanerous, in her case turning 10 grand to a hundred grand in the cattle futures market, all of that was erased, and Mrs. Clinton was considered once again the smartest woman in the world. And my point was she tried the same tactic, the same technique with the same restrictions on the press that she tried in the Pretty in Pink yesterday, and it didn’t work this time.
Her United Nations press conference was done with the same mind-set that she had back in the nineties: She’s a victim. She’s being put upon. The evil Republicans or the evil whoever is out to get her. The vast right-wing conspiracy is always out to get her, and it didn’t work this time. The media was not dazzled by what she did yesterday. Quite the contrary. Many in the media on the left wing and the Drive-By Media are writing about how embarrassing it was to sit through it and how incompetent she appeared.
Any number of adjectives were used: Shrewish, woman scorned, victim feeling sorry for herself. She has not managed to stay current, is the point. The reason she thinks that she is in trouble, same reasons in the nineties. The way she thinks to extricate herself has not changed. She still uses the same techniques they tried in the nineties. Not working now. That was one of the reasons, it was to educate people that weren’t around paying attention back then. It’s no different today than it was then.
This is the woman — I lived rent free in their heads for two terms. I mean, Clinton’s flying into St. Louis on Air Force One and he calls KMOX to complain that I’m coming up next and there’s no Truth Detector, and I got three hours to say whatever I want. He’s president of the United States. He’s got that bully pulpit, and he’s complaining and whining to the morning show at KMOX, there’s nobody controlling me. And they tried to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. They tried to blame me for the Oklahoma City bombing.
Look, this is all before there was a Fox News. This is all before there was any other conservative blogosphere or any of that. And she’s still stuck there, is my only point, and I mean to offer that up as information opportunity. When I say she’s the most cheated-on woman in America, I mean it. Stop and think. Just in her marriage alone. But it goes beyond that.
Undeniable Truth Number 24 comes to mind in explaining why she’s owed this and why she deserves this, and none of it’s because she’s earned it, in a traditional merit-based sense. I mean, it’s been payback Hillary time since 2008. But it hasn’t manifested itself the way she and everybody thought.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s set this up. I’m sorry there’s so much distance here between the first hour and now when I talked about this. But yesterday, the whole point, I don’t want to have to reset this table, but people noticed that the press — not all of it — but quite a lot of the Drive-By Media is really hammering Mrs. Clinton even before her press conference yesterday, but especially after it on the basis of, “Oh, no, this was just the nineties all over. We don’t want to go through this again.”
It’s amazing to read these guys, by the way, because the impression that everybody has is these reporters all loved the nineties. “Oh, man, those were the salad days. Yeah, we had Clinton, and he overcame this Republican onslaught led by Newt Gingrich. They won the House in ’94, then Clinton made mincemeat of ’em in the ’95 budget deal and basically just ran roughshod over ’em.” Clinton was loved and adored because he so easily beat the Republicans, and they loved how he did it. He lied. He got away with lying to a grand jury. He had an affair with an intern. Any other president would have been thrown out of office, but Clinton not only survived, he became the biggest rock star in the Democrat Party.
So people think the media loved the nineties. What is true is they love Bill Clinton. But they were not enamored of Hillary and the victimization game that she constantly played. And my point was that the press conference that we got yesterday was an exact replay. She tried to recapture the magic of the 1994 Pretty in Pink Press Conference which, I say with no ego, I was responsible for. The Pretty in Pink Press Conference took place after a Nightline episode in which I accused the Clintons of lying and made the point, it was some sort of town hall edition of Nightline. Everybody was in Iowa, but I was in my TV studio in New York. I made the point which you’ll hear in a minute that I don’t know why we’re even talking about it ’cause why do we believe them?
I linked Whitewater to health care, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. And since I’ve been talking about it Cookie went back to our archives and got the audio. We have two bites and the first one is a setup. Both of these bites are from April 25th of 1994. The Pretty in Pink Press Conference occurred on April the 22nd, I believe. I might the get that date a little wrong, but they happened, I mean, just right back-to-back. So here is the first bite. I’m not sure what this is. I mean, it’s 20 years ago, folks. It looks like it’s a phone call. Let’s just play it. I’ll be able to tell what this is.
RUSH ARCHIVE: I wonder who she might be talking about? I wonder who could it possibly be that she — who, in the last few days, has sought to link Whitewater to health care?
MAN: We have a tape with that person.
RUSH ARCHIVE: You do?
MAN: Yes.
RUSH ARCHIVE: We know on this show who she’s talking about?
MAN: Yeah.
RUSH ARCHIVE: We know who did it?
MAN: Yeah.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Well, by all means, let’s find out who did it.
RUSH: So I guess that was an audience member that was shouting at me. What had happened here was that Hillary had started complaining about some of the opponents of health care trying to use Whitewater as a proxy for their opposition to health care. She was talking about me. That’s why I was having that little humorous back-and-forth with the audience member, saying, “I wonder who she could have talking about.”
The Nightline episode was April 19th of 1994, and it was in Iowa. It was a town hall meeting in Iowa, and it had James Carville and Geneva Overholser. It was a bunch of people. I think Floyd Abrams was on this show. It was a lot of people. I was the only one not there. I was on satellite location, my TV studio in New York.
RUSH ARCHIVE: And I think Whitewater is about health care. Whitewater is about Bosnia, Whitewater is about crime and welfare reform, and I’ll tell you why. Character, the issue of character was put on hold during the 1992 campaign. Nobody cared about it because so many people were upset with the economic situation, they wanted a change, and it’s now coming home to roost. Most people think that health care’s a good idea, but they haven’t read the plan. They’re taking the president’s word for it. Now, I think if the president’s word is what we’re gonna rely on for his policy, this is a debate in the arena of ideas, and this is the man setting the agenda, and if people are going to base their support for the plan on whether or not they can take his word, I think it’s fair to examine whether or not he keeps his word. It’s not about getting rid of the president. This is about people who would like to stop health care in a legitimate democratic sense, try to compete for the minds and hearts of the American people, the basis that maybe what the president’s saying isn’t true.
RUSH: Well, that’s all it took. Because everybody on that panel was salivating for Clinton to succeed. I mean, this was the salad days, this is 1994, the second year in office. The Republicans hadn’t done anything yet. They wouldn’t win the House election until November of that year. This is April. And there were efforts underway to undermine it with Whitewater and so forth, but nobody had linked Whitewater to health care the way I did there.
The audience was laughing because the camera had cut to Carville, who was making reptilian faces at me as I was making those comments. I couldn’t see him, of course, because I wasn’t there, so it wasn’t a distraction, but people watching it could see. But, anyway, it was this little bite. And, by the way, there’s much more that happened. That’s just the sample bite. It was just days after this that Hillary called that press conference, explained Whitewater and that they don’t lie and that they were being honest, you can trust them, and people are out to get them, and this kind of thing.
And I think she tried a repeat of that. The whole point of playing this is that she’s stuck in this time warp, and this is how she sought to extract herself. She got rave reviews for the Pretty in Pink Press Conference back in 1994, and she did not get rave reviews. AP, “The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the US Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.”
Now, would the AP wait five years to sue a Republican official like Dick Cheney for refusing to honor a Freedom of Information Act request? And the answer is no. I think what’s happened here is that the AP’s probably been shamed into this by the Hillary e-mail scandal. I mean, this is a tough one for the Drive-Bys to swallow. And I still am amazed by it. Of all the things the Clintons have done. I mean, over here is Benghazi, and the press want to cover for her on Benghazi, ’cause they’re covering for Obama. I mean, that’s the bottom line there.
So Hillary is actually being protected by the press’s love and devotion for Obama. But this e-mail thing, this is all hers. She owns this. They can target her and not have to include Obama in it. And I think what we are seeing — and again, a stark difference from the nineties — we’re seeing that many in the Drive-By Media once again are apparently prepared to throw her overboard, just as they did in 2008.
I know some people think that this is all a ruse, that they’re battle-testing Hillary, and they’re getting this out of the way now so that she can say she survived it and triumphed over it. And that’s a common analysis that has been made about occasions when the media has decided to be critical of the Clintons. This is different. This has gone on and on and on, and the difference here is Obama. There is a Democrat that they value more. There’s a Democrat they want to protect more. That’s Obama. And remember how many of them just immediately abandoned her and went over to his camp in 2008.
Another word I’m starting to see in media coverage of Mrs. Clinton is this word “likability” and how she doesn’t have it. So you might say, “Well, why did the press seem so friendly or supportive?” ‘Cause they love Bill Clinton, and this is part of the deal. But now, you know, she’s kind of on her own now. They can target Hillary without taking anybody else out. They’re not gonna harm Bill by anything that happens here because he doesn’t send e-mail. There’s nothing he did. They’re not gonna harm Obama if they go get Hillary.
And I know there are plenty of other things that you would think would be far more valid in terms of mistakes that she has made that should be called on. But this is easy. It often comes down to the easiest, the most simple explanation. It’s like the House bank scandal. I mean, there were a lot of things going on that the Democrats were doing back in the late eighties and early nineties that were scandal ridden, but the House bank was so easy to understand. It didn’t require any explanation. All you had to do was tell people that members of the House could go to their own bank and cash checks for money that was not in their account.
The House bank, you know, Congressman Smorgasbord had 25 bucks in his checking account and walked in with a check for a thousand dollars, they’d cash it. You couldn’t do that. Your bank would not do that for you. But the House bank was doing that for House members. Nobody had to explain what the controversy was, and nobody had to explain the scandal. It was easy.
So’s this. Mrs. Clinton has a server in her house where she’s shielding all of her work e-mail from the country and from everybody, including the president, and it’s against the law. It’s easily understood. So it doesn’t take a lot of press effort to explain this. And for those that do want to get her out of the way, say, for Elizabeth Warren, this is made to order. And it’s why they’re engaging in it.
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