RUSH: Kicking off Thanksgiving week on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, Rush Limbaugh. Great to have you here with us, folks. And we go to the phones starting in Charlotte, North Carolina. David, what’s up?

CALLER: Hey, Rush, I appreciate you taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: I’m a huge fan of the show. I just wanted to get your thoughts about the idea that for the first time in a long time the Democrats are terrified by this scandal. I think that, you know, they’ve lost control of the narrative, and I also believe that really this is just the tip of the iceberg. This behavior by the liberal progressives has kind of infested both Hollywood and politics for a long time. And they’ve been able to get away with it starting even as early as Clinton when he was president. So I just want to get your thoughts about that.

RUSH: What specifically do you think that they are scared of and are afraid of losing control? You mean the sexual harassment stuff, Weinstein, all the Hollywood people, and now people like Al Franken and Charles Manson dying, these kind of things?

CALLER: I think both. I think what it comes down to is that, you know, this behavior was kind of a wink, wink, nod, nod, for a long time. I think that the belief was that it was so prolific and the media was protecting them for so long and not asking questions that when the first people came forward to kind of start this ball rolling, I don’t think that they recognize how big this potentially can be and I really think they’ve been caught off guard with the whole situation.

RUSH: I don’t want to let the air out of your balloon because it would be nice if you were right, but I don’t think they have that kind of self-consciousness. You’re describing people with a conscience who can be awakened from a haze of vulgarity and perversion and have a realization that they’ve really goofed up. I don’t think that’s the kind of people we’re talking about. These are calculating, completely, totally politically calculating warriors. And the only thing going on here — there’s no awakening to how they were wrong for 20 years about Clinton. There’s no guilt, there’s no shame.

There’s simply a value judgment being made. And they have finally decided that getting rid of Donald Trump is more important than saving and preserving the Clintons. And I think as part of that they have determined the Clintons are actually becoming an albatross. The Clintons are a problem and a pain. They are no longer winners. They’ve got to be taken out. But there isn’t any shame or guilt over this. That’s all phony. That’s plastic banana, good-time rock and roll. They’re trying to make you think they’re ashamed and feel bad about it, but they’re just doing everything here in their own self-interest.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, look, I didn’t mean to be short with our first caller today. I just had limited time. I know exactly where he was coming from. I’ve been there myself. Any time over the last 30 years when I’ve been hosting this program, when there appears to be an earth-shattering moment where it looks like a Democrat or the Democrats or the left are about to get a taste of it or about to get theirs, there is a desire we feel for that to happen.

And what I mean is, we have a desire to them to be as affected negatively by exposure of scandal and wrongdoing as it happens to people on our side. We want that to be the case. We long for the day when they wake up and when they realize how unfair and all this they are. And so when something like this current sex harassment scandal in which 99% of the people are Democrats, when it is becoming obvious that they’re a bunch of pervert reprobates, and they start doing mea culpa stories on, “Man, we should have held Clinton to account. Oh, man, we should have listened to the women,” we want to believe they mean it and that they’ve seen the light and that it’s gonna change things.

And I don’t mean to let the air out of the balloon, but, folks, that’s not who they are. They do not have consciences. These people are, in their own estimation, life for them is a daily political war, and all of these stories are individual battles. And each one of them has a singular objective, and that is to beat and destroy us. And any time it looks like they are about to fall prey to the same stuff we fall prey to when our rancid behavior is exposed, that’s not at all the way they look at it. This is a value judgment. This is nothing more than a political calculation.

If they want to keep going after Roy Moore, if they want to ultimately go after Donald Trump — and they do — they are gonna have to clear the hypocrisy deck. And, believe me, they have calculated that it’s finally time, you know, they propped the Clintons up enough. The Clintons have served their purpose, but the expiration date has been reached. The Clintons can be thrown overboard, under the bus, what have you, with no harm coming to the Democrat Party. That’s the calculation.

So all of this hand-wringing, “Oh, we’re so sorry. Oh, my God, we should have listened to the women!” They haven’t had an awakening! They haven’t realized how they blew it 20 years ago. What they’re realizing is now, that in their own self-service, which is everything they’re about, everything they do is nothing more than self-serving, and if it doesn’t serve them, they don’t do it.

This isn’t about morality. It isn’t about right and wrong. It isn’t about making amends. It isn’t about doing anything to apologize for the egregious behavior of standing by the Clintons and destroying the women who surface. It’s not about that. This is about a political calculation that they think they have to make in order to continue on this quest of destroying Donald Trump. And by virtue of destroying Trump, destroying any future outsider and destroying anybody who supports Trump. That’s all they’re interested in.

Whatever they have to do to keep moving that ball forward, they will do it. There’s not a pang of guilt, I don’t care what they’re writing, I don’t care what you’re hearing them say, there isn’t a pang of guilt over anything they did 20 years ago. There’s not a pang of guilt about saying Paula Jones is what you get when you drag a dollar bill through a trailer park. There isn’t a pang of guilt at all over Hillary Clinton leading the bimbo eruptions unit. When they look back on that stuff, they applaud themselves, job well done. They overcame an effort to impeach their guy and in the process destroyed the people who wanted to impeach.

That’s the way they look at all of this. They’re never admit what they did was wrong. They’re never gonna admit what they did was immoral. They’re never gonna admit that what they did was a miscalculation. Because everything they do is because they intend to do it. They do not have moral lapses. You would have to have morality in the first place to have a moral lapse. They do not have moral lapses.

They are not nice people. They are not tolerant people. They are none of the things that they have told you you have to be. They’re none of the compassionate, understanding, open-minded people willing to give people a break. That’s not who they are. They are willing to pounce and destroy anybody that they want to take out with the slightest provocation, the bare minimum of reason. And they are on it, as Ali said, like white on rice.

I don’t think they have it in themselves, they don’t have it within themselves to actually look back and feel remorse for what they did or helped the Clintons do to Kathleen Willey, to Juanita Broaddrick, to Paula Jones, to Gennifer Flowers. I mean, the list is endless. I’m gonna tell you why too. You know, one of the reasons why we have all these sex scandals in politics right now — in my opinion — and it’s not the full answer, but it is a contributing factor. The reason we have so many of these sex scandals in politics is not just because we have scandals. I mean, they’re real. Don’t misunderstand. But we have turned people in elected office into celebrities.

Bill Clinton was a celebrity before he was a decent ideological liberal centrist, whatever they want to call him. Trump is a celebrity. But Trump is an outlier. Trump’s celebrity occurred long before Trump got into politics. The people I’m talking about, the celebrity happens to them after they get into politics. It’s the politics that makes them celebrities because of the way they’re covered. You know, the old saw about politics being showbiz for the ugly, it’s pretty true. Take a look. On balance it’s pretty true. But it’s still showbiz because that’s how the media covers it now.

They are celebrity power brokers. And women, as the survey just said here, are attracted to money and power. Try to imagine all of these sex scandals with unassuming people like Calvin Coolidge. Try to imagine a sex scandal with Richard Nixon. You can’t, can you? Well, you can’t, because Nixon was not a celebrity. They didn’t turn him into a celebrity. Nixon was nothing more than a devil. Nixon was not allowed to become a celebrity.

Celebrity pop culture is one of the reasons why politics is the way it is. It’s not even reported on with any sense of seriousness or allegiance to the maintaining of the republic, to our country. That’s not even a factor in any of the reporting. The explosion of the media, especially their worship of people in power — and that’s really true when it is their people in power. Look at how they worshiped Obama. They still do.

Look how they worship the Clinton. And that has not stopped, by the way. They’ve not stopped worshiping Clinton. They still to this day marvel at how Clinton was able to get away with it, with their help. They marvel, they’re proud of how they helped Clinton lie all the time to get out of tight squeezes and loose squeezes. Clintons knew ’em all. They still worship Hillary! Blindly, weird and crazy as it is. They worship her.

That’s exactly what is happening, and it’s made things even worse. Worshiping politicians. Can you imagine anything more contradictory? But that’s what the left does. And not just the media, but I’m talking about these dunderhead, brain-dead voters like Lena Dunham and some of these other people that end up being celebrity endorsers, they’re literally brain-dead. They have IQs of less than a pencil eraser. They worship these people. They don’t care what they really think or believe. They don’t get that far with ’em. They just worship them as celebrities, as they’ve been created his the media.

So it really has become showbiz for ugly people, and ugly people know who they are. It can lead to severe self-esteem problems. But it’s not that they have consciences, and it’s not that they’re troubled by what they did, and it’s not that they are struggling with what did we make happen, what could we have changed if we had held Clinton accountable? There’s no way they were gonna have Bob Dole in there instead of Clinton. There was no way they were gonna George W. Bush over Algore. There was no way George W. Bush was gonna win in ’04. That’s not what they wanted.

My point is, when they are encompassed, or shall I say when they are enslaved in scandal, it’s not the same result and doesn’t cause the same reaction when people on our side get caught. When our people get caught up in scandal, many of them try to save themselves and do what’s necessary to right the wrong and to appease the media and make ’em see I’m not this kind of guy, please. The left, they don’t even allow themselves to consider it a scandal. They’re just making political calculations and sweeping obstacles out of the way.

You know, F. Scott Fitzgerald said the rich really are different. They’re not like you and me. Maybe. But I’ll tell you who isn’t like you and me, and that’s these leftist liberals and communists. They are not like you and me. And it is a mistake to assume you can rationally persuade them, talk to them, or whatever, like you would talk to anybody else that you feel comfortable talking to. They hate you. They’re predisposed to hate you, and there’s nothing that can change that, especially if they don’t know who they are.

If all they know about you is whether or not you’re a conservative or Republican, then that’s all it takes. In their minds, they don’t make mistakes of behavior, of right and wrong. They make mistakes of calculation. They’ll make political calculation mistakes, but not behavioral or virtuous, those kinds of mistakes. Nah-nah-nah-nah. They’re not capable of those kind of mistakes, ’cause they are what is. In their minds, they are what’s normal. You and I are the odd people that need the men in the white coats in the little yellow bus picking us up from school every day and taking us to parts unknown. And they never stop any of that. That is their lives.

They get up, they spend a day, and they go to sleep calculating, plotting, thinking, they dream of it, it is their lives. Your life, this stuff not primary or even secondary. Maybe tertiary. You have other things going on in your life. You actually try to live your life. This is everything to them, acquiring the power, maintaining the power, and then, most importantly, using the power against us, their enemies.

I’ll give you names, if you want. Lois Lerner, IRS. Deep state, all of this contrived, phony stuff about Trump. They live for it. It’s what really turns ’em on. And now we find out that they are also perverts and reprobates. Not all, but many. I mean, look at the size of this group that’s expanding each and every day. So they’ll do what they think necessary to make you think they get it and that they are changing and that they are engaged in remedial behavior, but in truth everything remains a political calculation.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Nick in Pensacola. Nick, welcome. Great to have you on the EIB Network. How are you doing?

CALLER: I’m good. How are you?

RUSH: Fine and dandy. I’m glad you called.

CALLER: Thank you. I just want to say first off thank you. My grandpa died last year and one of my best memories is driving around listening to you with him on the radio, so every time I hear your show it reminds me of that. I want to thank you for that.

RUSH: I really appreciate that. I sincerely do. I understand.

CALLER: Yes, sir. Thank you. I’ll get to the my point. I was wondering what you thought about this. I’m more worried about the culture war right now. I think it’s worth it to lose the seat in Alabama — (unintelligible) popular opinion with America be the voice of reason and say that character still counts. I wonder if that would give us more credibility and be able to really bury the left, especially with Al Franken and everything coming up with Hollywood right now.

RUSH: So you think it’d be worth it to lose —

CALLER: As long as Roy Moore’s running I think it’d be worth it to lose the seat. Unless the allegations aren’t true.

RUSH: Wait a sec. No, I get your point. But are you suggesting that somehow we get rid of Roy Moore as an expression and illustration of our morality or that we just stand aside and let him lose and not try to help him as an expression of our virtue and morality? Which course of action —

CALLER: I’d rather see him replaced with somebody like Mo Brooks. But I’d rather step aside and let him lose and let him fight it out by himself, especially if he’s not gonna bring anything new to the table that contradicts what the allegations are.

RUSH: Yeah. This is a toughie, because the — you believe the allegations, then?

CALLER: Well, not the 14-year-old one. From what I’ve seen, and I don’t know if there’s enough to believe it, but as long as —

RUSH: You know, I’m gonna take a wild guess.

CALLER: What’s that?

RUSH: It’s not what you believe. You’re concerned that it appears everybody else is believing this stuff, and you think that’s harming the whole effort.

CALLER: Yeah, that’s fair to say.

RUSH: And since you can’t disprove it yourself, you can’t tell these people who believe that Moore did this stuff, you can’t tell them with certainty, “No, no, no, no. The left is making it up. It didn’t really happen.” Even though, you know, there’s not been a conviction, there hasn’t been any proof of any of this, just the allegations and of course now the accompanying the women don’t lie about these things, so I know where you’re coming from. You’re thinking since so many people already believe this, that it would behoove us to somehow get rid of him so that we are not dragged down by his baggage and defined by it, correct?

CALLER: Yeah, that’s a pretty concise way of putting it.

RUSH: I don’t know what the election regulations, rules, laws are in Alabama. I don’t know if it’s possible to do that right now. The Republican Party chairman of Alabama supposedly, if Moore wins, can simply withdraw their support and nullify the election. And somebody came along and said, no, no, no, no, they can’t do that.

But, look, I’m coming up here on a break. But I want you to listen, I’ve got one more example. There’s a close example, not quite a perfect analogy. But I want to just put it out there for you to ponder. In fact, hold on through the break and I’ll get your thoughts on it the other side, rather than force you to listen to it on the radio and not be able to react to it. So if you can hang on for just a few short minutes.

CALLER: Okay, sure can.

RUSH: Because I’ve had this exact philosophy articulated to me about someone else. Her name was Sarah Palin. Now, it’s not, as I say, fully analogous, but hang on and I’ll explain we get back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One other thing before I get back to Nick in Pensacola. I should have added this in the brief monologue I did on the left, liberals and their current sexual harassment scandal. Folks, there’s one — and it’s really a key element — I should have put this at the top of my descriptions of them. They hate. The Democrat Party and the American left are the largest hate group in America today, and they hate you and me just on principle, before they even start pondering specifics.

And so if you’re waiting for them to say, “You know what? We’re sorry. We shouldn’t have done that. You are right.” It’s never gonna happen, folks. You’re never gonna get that satisfaction, just like you’re never ever gonna get the satisfaction of the mainstream media one day admitting all of their bias and unfairness and asking for forgiveness over it and telling us that they’re gonna try to turn over a new leaf and operate fairly. It’s never gonna happen.

And I think it’s hard, you know, you people are not haters. You do not hate — even though I’m sure some of their things said and done tempt you — but they do. And I don’t think a lot of people on our side fully understand the degree of hate they harbor. Some of them even hate themselves, they’re so self-loathing it’s fascinating.

Okay, now, let’s get back to Nick here in Pensacola, Florida. Just to summarize Nick’s point. Nick is 22, and he’s very concerned that Roy Moore is creating baggage for the entire Republican, slash, populist, slash, Trumpist, slash, conservative movement, and he wishes Moore were gone. He wishes Moore were not on the ticket, wish Moore could be done away it, short that, he would hope that Moore would lose and that we wouldn’t cry about it. Because Moore being there and maybe even Moore winning would be very, very bad because there’s so much public dislike and disapproval for Moore that there’s no way he helps us. Does that pretty much summarize where you’re coming from, Nick?

CALLER: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I would also like to add that having the extra seat hasn’t done much for us. The Republicans haven’t followed through on too much of what they said they were going to.

RUSH: Understood. Understood. Okay, it’s an important point. Nick is saying so what if we lose the seat, we’re not really killing it with 52 anyway, and he’s got a point, by the way. Nick’s got a point, if we’re not killing it with 52, what’s 51 gonna mean? But, Nick, let me come at this a different way with you. I remember Sarah Palin when she was McCain’s vice presidential nominee, and that would have been 2008.

CALLER: ’08, yeah.

RUSH: So you are 12 years old then.

CALLER: I’m 22 now, so I would have been, what —

RUSH: Okay, so you were 14.

CALLER: Fourteen, yeah.

RUSH: Do you remember much of it? Were you paying attention to it back then? Yeah, I do. I do remember that.

RUSH: Okay. Sarah Palin was hated by the media. She was hated by the Democrat Party because she was an effective conservative spokeswoman. She mobilized people. She encouraged people. She motivated them. They loved her. They liked her more than they liked McCain. She was a threat. So they immediately descended upon her and set out to destroy her as an idiot, as a half-wit, as a dumb woman that had no connections to feminism. Her family was in disarray, they said, her family was this, that.

I had a dinner party at my house one night, and there were some people that I didn’t know who were invited by some friends, and I said, “Yeah, go ahead and bring ’em.” My instincts said don’t do this, don’t let people you don’t know in here. But my friend, “It’ll be fine, they’re big fans and they would love it.” I said “okay.” There’s two of them and immediately I’m sitting down at dinner, they start ragging on Sarah Palin. And they tell me we’ve gotta get rid of her, that she’s hurting us, she’s harming us. That Sarah Palin’s gonna be the end of the Republican Party, we gotta ditch her.

And I’m sitting there, I said, “Why?”

They said, “The media’s destroyed her! And Rush, she is an idiot. Have you looked at her? She’s dumb. She’s stupid.”

I said, “The media has destroyed her?”

“Yeah, there’s no way she can win. There’s no way we can win with her on the ticket.”

I said, “Do you realize you’re telling me that you want to throw away a viable potential winner because the media doesn’t like her? The media can destroy any of your people they want if people like you are just gonna roll over and let it happen.”

It didn’t change their minds. I got so mad, I walked out of my own dinner party and flew to LA two hours ahead of schedule ’cause I was so ticked off at this. But it showed me the power of the media. The media had created this impression of her that these guys didn’t even want to fight. They didn’t want to deal with it. They had already conceded defeat, the media had ruined her, there was no saving her, there was no salvaging her, there was no point in fighting.

Now, do not misunderstand. I’m not saying Sarah Palin’s Roy Moore. But there are things in common here, and they are that the media will always do what they can to take — look what they did to Trump. They’re always gonna do this, Nick. There’s gonna be a Republican candidate you like someday that they’re gonna do this to. And you’re not gonna want to throw ’em overboard because you like and respect the candidate or the person, and you’re gonna get really ticked at it.

It’s a tough thing, because I know what the public approval numbers of Roy Moore are but, you know, it actually looks like it’s possible he could win. He’s got all kinds of supporters now coming out of the woodwork for him, including the governor there, who said, “Yeah, you know what? I believe these women, but I still think he’d be better than a Democrat in the Senate.”

CALLER: I just think that’s dangerous, especially to say you believe the women and then say I’m still gonna vote just because they’re not Democrat. I think we have to be the party of character and unless he’s gonna — I don’t know what we’d have to do, maybe a lie detector test, but it’s just tough to support somebody who’s got all these accusations against them.

RUSH: Well, let me tell, that same opinion drove a lot of conservative intellectuals and conservative media people to not support Donald Trump. That same thinking. “We have to be the party of character and morality and virtue no matter what, because at the end of the day if we don’t have any of that, we don’t have who we really are, so it’s worth losing elections to maintain that.”

We had people on our side totally willing to let Hillary Clinton become president rather than them having to voice support for Donald Trump. Now, in many of those cases, those people live and breathe in Washington, and they hang around with leftists, and they’d rather not be excommunicated from the swamp, and so it was easier to just join the left and rip Trump to shreds than stand up for him. What is your thought on Trump?

CALLER: Well, I’ll just say I think it’d be easier to hitch my wagon to Moore if the Senate was passing a tax bill I thought was good or anything like that. Again, is it really worth the fight? On Trump, I was a big Cruz guy and then begrudgingly was a Trump voter.

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah.

CALLER: Hm-hm.

RUSH: I know some of those, in fact, a lot of people like that that were just really, really in love with Cruz and then when they saw that Cruz have not gonna make it and even if Trump played a role in that, they begrudgingly joined Trump because it became obvious to people, enough people that we can’t have Hillary Clinton in there. We couldn’t have more of the Obama agenda.

There’s so many things that people balance and try to weigh when it comes to these choices. And this guy running against Moore, you know, you’re not hearing anything about this guy because Moore’s soaking up all the oxygen. This guy couldn’t tell the truth if his life depended on it. This guy has been claiming up until recently, pro-life, pro-life, pro-life. He’s not. The guy is just expedient as necessity demands in saying what he thinks in order to get votes.

CALLER: Well, he should fit right in in Washington, then.

RUSH: (laughing) Yeah. Exactly. Well, look, I understand where you’re coming from on all this. What is your thinking on — this is a state election, essentially, it’s people of Alabama. What is your thinking on, hey, they want to elect the guy or the other guy, it’s up to them.

CALLER: I was thinking that, too, ’cause the media’s gonna make it like it’s some big national opinion, and really it’s just the people of Alabama. It sure makes (unintelligible) smart with wanting the state legislature to pick the senators again.

RUSH: Well, nationalizing elections usually has been very productive for Republicans. It’s how the Republicans won the house in 1994, by the way, by nationalizing all those local House races. But that’s another story. Look, I appreciate your calling. We got your thought down. You think Moore should go for the sake of our own credibility as a party of people of character and morality and virtue and all that. But you also admitted that it’s troubling that so many Americans in opinion polls seem to have this animus toward Moore that you think that he is gonna take everybody else down with him, and I can’t blame you for thinking that.

But I just want to leave you with one other thought, Nick. And I know what your reaction’s gonna be, but I still want you to think about it. The left, the Democrats never do what you’re doing. If the Democrats could win with Manson, they would have done it. Well, that might be going a bit far, but they have had so many genuine reprobate shreds of human debris that they stood behind, promoted. Ted Kennedy at the top of the list, but the Democrat Party is filled with people who have engaged in this kind of behavior, and they’ve gone overboard trying to save ’em all. They never do because of their quest for power.

And I know what you’re thinking. Well, right, and they don’t have any character, they don’t have any virtue, don’t have any morality, and we do and we need to hold on to it. And I understand that. But what if that stuff doesn’t help you win elections right now, and what if we have to win these if we’re to save the country? They’re tough questions. But, you know what? You’re 22 years old and I’m glad you’re thinking about ’em, and you’re thinking about ’em critically. You’ll come to the right answer for you. And that’s cool. I’m glad you called very much.