RUSH: You know, I had no idea. I just noticed Obama’s in Argentina. When did he leave Cuba? I thought the last we knew he was at a baseball game in Cuba. He’s in Argentina so, okay, we gotta apologize for something down there, right? I’ll bet he’s gonna apologize because we overdrew — no, that was Chile. Pinochet. What did we do to Argentina? Had to do something. Maybe we didn’t export Madonna there. Greetings, my friends, great to have you. Rush Limbaugh. What is this, already — this is Wednesday, this is unbelievable, fastest week in media, great to have you here. Telephone number’s 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program and e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
Well, guess what has happened? Ted Cruz has become the focus of the Republican campaign today. It is stunning how these things happen. In no particular order, somebody ran an ad that included a picture of Trump’s wife, Melania, nearly nude from 15 years ago in a GQ, it’s from a Gentleman’s Quarterly photo spread. And Trump didn’t like it. So he tweeted: (paraphrasing) “Lyin’ Ted, you better be careful or I’m gonna spill the beans on Heidi.”
And everybody says, “What are the beans on Heidi? What beans are there on Heidi Cruz that Trump could possibly spill?”
Well, then Cruz responded (paraphrasing), “Hey, real Donald Trump, I had nothing to do with that ad. We had nothing to do with that ad released by,” bah bah bah. “Be careful. Stay away from Heidi. She could run rings around you,” whatever it was. In fact, you’ve gotta hear this. Let me get the actual tweet here. “LyinÂ’ Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a GQ shoot in his ad. Be careful, LyinÂ’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!”
I don’t have Cruz’s response tweet here. But it was along the lines: “Be careful, you don’t want to tangle with Heidi.” And you’ve gotta hear how CNN reacted to this. Grab sound bite number one. This is on CNN this morning around an hour and 40 minutes ago, Carol Costello plays a clip from earlier with Cruz. I want you to listen to how she reacts to this. She plays the clip of Cruz, and then she reacts.
CRUZ: Last night Donald threatened my wife. He went directly after my wife, and I gotta tell you that, number one, Heidi, my wife, she’s the daughter of missionaries in Africa, she’s my best friend in the world, and if Donald wants to get in a character fight, he’s better off sticking with me ’cause Heidi is way out of his league.
COSTELLO: I’ll stand up for my little woman. (laughing) Thoughts?
RUSH: I’ll stand up for my little woman. Carol Costello, I’ll stand up for my little woman, mocking it, mocking a man defending his wife against an attack from Donald Trump. Now, in what world does that happen? What, are you not supposed to defend your wife anymore? Is that the new feminism? Are you not supposed to defend women? Are you supposed to let them go ahead and be ridiculed and threatened? Are you supposed to let them be defamed? Are they just on their own out there?
Or is it that when a conservative, when Ted Cruz, who they hate, who they don’t like, if anybody threatens anybody, it’s Ted Cruz threatening these people. These people all think Ted Cruz is gonna put ’em in the morality prison. That’s what they’re afraid of. So, in that context (imitating Carol), “Well, I’ll stand up for my little woman, ha-ha-ha,” and then she runs around the table and asks for thoughts, and nobody reacted to that clip the way she wanted. She had David “Rodham” Gergen and some other woman whose name I don’t remember, and neither of them commented on what Carol Costello asked. (imitating Carol) “Oh, well, I’ll stand up for my little woman.” You’re not in her league either, Carol. Just for everybody to know.
Anyway, it turns out that the original tweet, or the ad that featured Melania Trump nearly nude from a 15-year-old photo shoot in GQ was actually placed by a PAC, a political action committee called Make America Awesome, and a woman runs that PAC. Her name is Liz Mair. And it has been fascinating to me read all the reaction to this today. There’s some people on the right who can’t believe Liz Mair would stoop to such a thing, can’t believe that anybody on the right would stoop to such a cheap gutter type ad, even if it is about Trump, who many on the right think is already in the gutter, meaning Trump.
And all the hand-wringing, “I can’t believe we would stoop to this level. I can’t believe this would happen.” And, of course, the ad that this PAC ran is being characterized as slut shaming. Do you know what that is? Well, it’s pretty much self-explanatory. So that’s another reason some on the right don’t like it ’cause they think it’s slut shaming, and so Liz Mair said (paraphrasing), “No, no, no, I hate that word. I hate that word in any context. That’s not what we’re doing here. We were trying to alert Mormons to vote for Ted Cruz. We wanted Mormons in Utah to know certain things about Trump and his wife.” But it does break some taboos, you know, children, wives, off limits. Melania, she really hasn’t put herself out there. She’s done a couple of interviews. But it just goes to show how volatile the whole campaign is.
I’ve got two different stories, maybe three today, on how the campaign’s already over. One from Politico, from a liberal Democrat who thinks it’s over — actually there’s three. Jonah Goldberg, National Review, who thinks it’s over no matter what happens, the GOP is destroyed, it’s over. Whether Trump gets the nomination or if Trump doesn’t get the nomination, we’re finished, it’s over. Another person said this campaign ended last October, and it’s over, it’s for the Democrats. Hillary has been the winner since last October. And then there are others, one other who thinks it’s still wide open and a possibility.
Oh. By the way. I’ve had a couple of people send me snarky e-mail. “You know what? Everything you told us about rule 40, you were wrong, you were wrong. It doesn’t apply to this convention.” I said go back and listen to what I said. Rule 40, convention, Republican National Convention rules, rule 40 was written, I said, for the 2012 convention. And it was designed to prevent people like Rand Paul from making an end run against Romney in the 2012 convention, but it still stands. And what rule 40 essentially says is that nobody can be made the Republican nominee unless they have won a majority of delegates in a minimum of eight states.
Well, that leaves only Trump and Cruz. It disqualifies Kasich; it disqualifies everybody else. It disqualifies whoever they would come up with in a contested convention, which I’ve known all along, which is why I said they’re gonna meet in April and rewrite this. And I said further, they can meet the day before the convention and rewrite rules. But if Rule 40… I think it’s 40, parentheses, B. If it doesn’t change, then it can’t. But, of course, it will change. They’re gonna change it to whatever.
I got another story here that says Paul Ryan, in his speech to AIPAC, made it clear that he’s running for president. His speech to AIPAC was his first attempt at getting delegates from Florida. I kid you not. It’s the variety, the scattershot, the shotgun element here of commentary. Nobody knows what’s going on. Nobody can analyze it, nobody can explain it, and people are unable to keep their emotions out of it. On the Republican right, you’ve got fatalists and defeatists writing that it’s all over.
On the left, you have people beating their chests, celebrating that it’s all over, that nothing can stop Hillary. On the right, you’ve got people that don’t think it’s all over but they’re worried about Trump. The worry, the negativism, the pessimism that’s out there is just overwhelming. I guess it’s natural. I mean, I think, sadly, pessimism is more a natural state in the human condition than optimism is. Pessimism doesn’t take any effort. Optimism does. And that’s why there’s always far more pessimism out there than there is optimism.
The number of people that are natural optimists? You ever notice how many people suspicious of those people? Natural optimists, it is said, “There has to be something wrong with ’em. How can you be an optimist in the mess that we call the world today? How could you be an optimist when you look around the country, when you watch the evening news? How in the world can you be an optimist?” Some people claim to naturally be. Pessimism seems to be the order of the day — and that’s how you cater to people, by the way.
You play on their pessimism. You amplify it. You acknowledge it. You let ’em know that you, too, understand and you’re pessimistic but you have the solution. Which takes us to the news of the day, and that’s Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is all over the news for two reasons. One is that ad attacking Melania that everybody thought came from him that didn’t. That has created its own universe. But Cruz said something else. He said that the police need to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods,” and you would have thought that somebody has suggested impeaching Obama.
The reaction to this is overwhelming. People can’t believe he would say such a thing, and they’ve gone talked to experts, cops, commissioners, law enforcement people here and there, to ask what they think of Ted Cruz suggesting that the police need to start patrolling and securing Muslim neighborhoods. And the amount of fear at the very idea of doing this? There are so many people who are shouting disagreement with Cruz ’cause they don’t want the jihadis to target them. And Trump, meanwhile, is saying that we need to start thinking about using torture to stop some of this stuff.
So that’s gonna be our starting point. Gonna take a brief time-out. I want to come back and replay a response I gave to a young caller, I think it was Friday, a 14-year-old who was pro-Cruz. The kid was pessimistic himself, and he asked me if I thought that Cruz could still win. And we’ll we play what I said and get started with all the rest of this when we get back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back on Friday, ladies and gentlemen, we had a young caller who wanted to know if it was over. Is a Cruz supporter. He’s from Texas, 14 years old, and asked me if Cruz still had a chance. This is what I told him…
BEGIN RUSH ARCHIVE CLIP
RUSH: I think the fact that Ted Cruz is in second place is astounding. Ted Cruz has been ignored from the first day of his campaign. … Ted Cruz is in second place; he has been given no time by the Drive-By Media. He has been shown no respect. They have not treated him as a viable candidate. He has been hammered over and over by every other candidate one way other another. Ted Cruz has been lambasted. He is very rarely given a chance to rebut the things that are said about him. He is routinely one of the speakers at each debate that speaks the least.
Nobody wants to talk about Ted Cruz. We’re told over and over that everybody in the Senate hates him. We’re told over and over everybody in Washington hates him. But yet he’s in second place and he’s won nine states. So you’re asking me if I think Ted Cruz can win? Yeah, I do. I don’t think it’s anywhere near over yet. Everybody wants you to believe that it is. Everybody wants you to believe one of two things: It’s over, Cruz is not gonna get there, Trump is, or we’re gonna go to a contested convention and it’s gonna be between Kasich and whoever else the establishment can throw up.
It still amazes me. You have the establishment types with their secret dinner meetings like last night near here in Palm Beach trying to figure out how to game the convention so that one of theirs can get the nomination. Then you have these conservatives who are plotting, trying to come up with a third-party candidate. And here, again, nobody’s talking about Ted Cruz. And he’s there every day, and he’s out campaigning. He’s going everywhere, and he is in second place despite all of the obstacles that have been put in his way. So I think he can win.
END RUSH ARCHIVE CLIP
RUSH: In any number of ways. It’s a long shot, yeah. But still I think it’s a major achievement given the odds that have been stacked against him. Which, hey, I’m not complaining about them; I’m just pointing them out. Nothing is guaranteed. I’m not crying about anything here. I’m just laying things out as I believe they’ve happened. Today, Jeb Bush did endorse Ted Cruz. And he’s not the first. I made a point earlier in the week that if some of these establishment guys start endorsing Cruz, is it gonna actually be helpful?
Are these the kind of people he wants endorsing him? These are the people he’s been running against, for example, the establishment. But, you know, things are fluid, and we’re getting down to the end of this in terms of time to pull it out, and unity is what has to happen here one way the other. There has to be some kind of unity if the Democrats are going to be defeated in November. I don’t know how the unity would manifest itself yet, but there has to be some. This could be an indication of it. Jeb alone probably is not a significant thing in terms of bringing support to Cruz.
He never… He had four delegates and that kind of thing. But at this point, everything like this matters, and it adds up. So we see where it plays out. It’s a long shot. Cruz, as predicted, won Utah last night. Trump won Arizona, and there were more delegates at stake in Arizona. So Trump had a net delegate gain last night despite Trump winning Arizona and Cruz sweeping Utah. And, of course, John Kasich is still out there. Another round of George Soros money has been donated to Governor Kasich.
This is the second installment now, which puts him up over $200,000 that Soros related PACs have contributed to Kasich, who literally has no chance. He has no mathematical whatsoever of securing the nomination, yet he runs around talking about that as though he does and as though it’s a reality. Now, to Ted Cruz. This is CNN: “Ted Cruz on Tuesday called for law enforcement to step up their policing of Muslim neighborhoods in the US in the wake of terrorist attacks in Brussels, comparing it to police boosting their presence in areas with known gang activity.
“‘If you have a neighborhood where there’s a high level of gang activity, the way to prevent it is you increase the law enforcement presence there and you target the gang members to get them off the streets,’ [Cruz] told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. ‘I’m talking about any area where there is a higher incidence of radical Islamic terrorism.’ Cruz also pointed to what he called the ‘successful program’ in New York implemented by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, apparently pointing to the New York Police Department’s controversial surveillance efforts targeting Muslims under his administration.
“J. Peter Donald, communications for the New York Police Department, described Cruz’s comments as an ‘incendiary, foolish statement.’ ‘Hey, @tedcruz are our nearly 1k Muslim officers a ‘threat’ too? It’s hard to imagine a more incendiary, foolish statement,’ he tweeted, the night before Cruz is expected to host a rally in New York City.” Hillary Clinton got in on it. Everybody has gotten in on ramming Ted Cruz on this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Listen to this montage. This will set up what’s coming. A quick montage of the media savaging Cruz over his suggestion the cops patrol Muslim neighborhoods.
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: How would you define a Muslim neighborhood? Is there a certain percentage of Muslims that have to live there? Do you have to have any particular suspicion that they’re being radicalized, or is it just the mere fact they’re Muslims?
CHRIS CUOMO: You don’t want to paint with too broad a brush and blame an entire faith for the acts of the worst among them, and that’s why there’s criticism about policing Muslim communities, uhhhh, as if they were all an enemy.
MARIA BARTIROMO: People had a problem with that “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods,” as if saying all Muslims are radical.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: How is targeting Muslim neighborhoods constitutional?
NORAH O’DONNELL: How many Muslims are in America? Three million Muslims in America! Law enforcement is overwhelmed. It’s impractical what you’re suggesting. Name one community, one city.
GAYLE KING: Your comments are decidedly anti-Muslim. You’re playing right into the hands of ISIS.
RUSH: Ted Cruz was on every morning show today, and those are sound bites of Drive-By Media people that are preaching to him, lecturing him or asking him questions. So you can see, it didn’t go over too well with the Drive-Bys. And it didn’t go over well with Hillary, either.
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