RUSH: Well, the Democrats and the media wanted a destructive hurricane. Let’s all admit it. They were hoping for disaster. They wanted it to validate their politics-based hysteria on something like the weather. See, a Category 5 hurricane would be seen as validation for global carbon taxes, massive regulatory control of the economy, and getting rid of Trump. You could blame Trump for a Category 5 hurricane. Thing is, Trump’s a Category 5 every day anyway, so what would be the big deal?
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: “Mr. Limbaugh, don’t you feel the slightest bit hesitant making these kinds of charges?” No, I don’t, folks. There’s no question about it! I even had a story from a website called Grabien News. The headline: “Media Politicize Florence, Blame Trump for Storms, Predict Mass Death.” Subheadline: “Trump is ‘actively making the problem worse.'” Subhead: Limbaugh assisting Trump making the problem worse.
Trump and I both said to be complicit in Hurricane Florence because, you know why, Rachel? Because we don’t agree with climate change, and since we don’t agree with climate change having an impact on this, then we are responsible for people who may not be leaving. Oh. That’s another thing. People who are not leaving have become a new target for the Drive-By Media. (laughing)
Anyway, greetings. It’s Open Line Friday, and it’s great to be back with you as we wrap up yet another sterling week of broadcast excellence. The telephone number is 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program. Email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.
Our official climatologist here at the EIB Network, Dr. Roy Spencer, has a great column in USA Today today pointing out that the only thing affecting the hurricane is weather. That the hurricane is weather, in fact, and that there are meteorological explanations for everything that’s happening. There are statistics galore that indicate the severity. In fact, the 36 — ready for this? — the 36 most damaging, strongest storms since 1940 have decreased in intensity while at the same time we have been told they should be increasing in intensity because we are polluting our atmosphere with CO2s, creating the greenhouse effect.
It’s like pretty much everything else. I’m approaching that point where I don’t know what to do about this. Everything they’re saying is not true. Pretty much everything they pass off as fact isn’t true. What do you do with this? How do you reach people who are soaking all this up and accepting it and believing it? I mean, it’s been the challenge of this program since it began. It’s been the challenge of conservative media since 30 years ago.
But as they go on, they are getting even more extreme, less connected to the truth. And it’s almost on purpose. It’s as though they know the truth is damaging to their assertions. And when it comes to climate change, I need to make this point again. The storms are decreasing in intensity. They are occurring less frequently. I mean, we went 10 years without a major hurricane hitting the United States coastline. We’ve had global temperatures declining. Why aren’t they claiming credit for this?
They’ve been out there demanding policies, and there have been policies implemented because of their demands. Why aren’t they claiming credit for this progress? Why aren’t they claiming credit? Why instead do they want to lie? Why do they have to lie about things that are demonstrably not true? And the answer to that is politics.
The Democrats today want us to believe that Brett Kavanaugh was a high school bully. At age 17, he locked a girl in a room that she was able to get out of. When he was 17. This is something like 35 years ago. The Democrats are making fools of themselves except the Drive-By Media is joining them in this effort to destroy Kavanaugh. It is almost a redux of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas scenario.
So the media, the Democrats want you to believe that Brett Kavanaugh and Mitt Romney also, high school bullies. Remember they ran a story on Romney that he beat up some kid at a prep school because he didn’t like his hairstyle or some such thing. I don’t remember what it was. Meanwhile, Democrats who have actually murdered and sexually abused women are celebrated and lifted to the top of the Democrat star ranks, Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
Kavanaugh locks a girl in high school in a room? How many of you have not pulled high school pranks? If I spent some time here detailing my high school pranks — we’ve done this over the years, but it’s been many, many moons since I have described some of the things I did. I loved it. In fact, I took some of those pranks to the radio as a struggling young disc jockey way back in the early days. I mean, this is just absurd. I feel like it’s crazy to even address this stuff and try to refute it point by point because it feels — I don’t know — worthless. Because it keeps happening.
There’s not a single thing to stop these people from their abject lies. There’s another example out there today. Nikki Haley, as you know, is our ambassador to the United Nations. When Susan Rice was our ambassador to the United Nations, she lived in the 35th floor, 50th floor, whatever, way up there in the Waldorf Towers. Now, for those of you who don’t know, the Waldorf “Hysteria” hotel on Park Avenue is one of New York’s greatest of all time.
And right next to it, in fact part of it, is something called Waldorf Towers. They are apartments, condominiums that you can rent as a home for any length of time that you want. They routinely go for something like $135,000 a week, sometimes, depending on the size, $135,000 a month. That’s where Susan Rice lived. Susan Rice lived at Waldorf Towers. The federal government paid an exorbitant amount of money for her to live there. Many actors who are doing stints on Broadway stay there.
I was at Waldorf Towers one day. I had a meeting up there, believe it or not, with CNN people way, way back. And the head honcho at CNN happened to be staying there. So that’s where I had to go for a meeting with CNN. I come out of the meeting room — well, the apartment, and there’s Tom Selleck. Tom Selleck is staying there. He was playing somebody on Broadway. So he stops, says hi, says, “Fancy seeing you here.” I said, “I could say the same thing.” It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, he was on the way to his gig on Broadway.
Anyway, the point is that while Susan Rice was living there, they ordered something like 75,000 or $50,000 of new drapes and $35,000 of motors to open and close them! But they didn’t happen to arrive and be installed until Nikki Haley moved in, so Nikki Haley is being blamed.
And even that little Camera Hogg kid from the school down in Parkland, the little Camera Hogg kid’s out there tweeting that she is making irresponsible appropriations while people are being shot and while people are starving and while people are being destroyed by hurricanes and so forth. The story has been corrected.
The truth of the story is out there that Obama’s administration is the one that ordered the exorbitant drapes and was paying the exorbitant price. Nikki Haley’s saying her rent is nowhere near what the Obama Regime was paying for Susan Rice, and yet it’s all over the media. The media knows the truth and refuses to withdraw it. The media refuses to correct it. They’re running the story that Nikki Haley and Trump ordered this massively expensive set of drapes and motors to open and close them when it all happened during the Obama administration!
They didn’t even know it.
Nikki Haley and her crew didn’t even know it ’til the installation crew shows up one day and said, “Okay, we got these curtains now; it’s time to put them in.” What does that say about it that you order curtains and two years later they show up to be installed? Anyway, the truth is that Nikki Haley had nothing to do with the expenditure. She didn’t even know anything about it. And everybody reporting this knows that they are lying through their teeth, that this is a Trump-Nikki Haley exorbitance and that it illustrates how they don’t care about the little guy.
In the midst of this hurricane devastating people, Nikki Haley saw fit to install 55- or 75- (or whatever it is) thousand-dollar curtains in her temporary home ’cause nobody stays at Waldorf Towers. Well, I guess there are people that live there. I don’t know. They’re basically apartment rentals, but… (interruption) Are they worth a hundred thousand…? Well, it’s like anything else. It’s where it is. It’s Waldorf Towers. There’s nothing in there that sets it apart from any other luxurious place. I mean, the price is not… Not that I recall, anyway.
Hell, you know, there are New York businesses that keep apartments at Waldorf Towers for visiting clients from out of town who want “company.” Ahem. Ahem. Waldorf Towers. You have your standing… I was offered one once way back when I first became an investor. (interruption) Oh, yeah. Anyway, that’s just one of many examples, and here you’ve got Donald Trump fighting every day pushing back against all this. And as he pushes back, they ratchet up the fact that he’s the one lying and can’t tell the truth.
This ridiculous controversy over number of people died in the aftermath of the Puerto Rico hurricane? This is classic! This is pure politics. We have a computer model used by experts at George Washington University claiming 3,000 people died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. There isn’t any evidence of it. It’s just a bunch of experts and their computer models, and Trump is accusing them of making it up, of a nobody that isn’t real, that the Democrats are behind it to make him look bad. He’s exactly right.
But now, because this involves Puerto Rico, you’ve got down here in Florida… You’ve got Rick Scott who’s running for the Senate, Ron DeSantis running for governor. They’re having to distance themselves from Trump on his claim here that he’s not responsible for 3,000 people dying. That’s what the Democrats and the media are saying, that Trump didn’t care enough, didn’t do enough after the hurricane in Puerto Rico; so 3,000 people died because Trump doesn’t care. Trump’s saying, “The hell with these peopling! I’m not gonna sit here.”
It’s standard operating procedure for him. You lie about him and he pushes back. Well, because of a lot of Puerto Rican residents in Florida — Puerto Rican people in Florida and friends of Puerto Ricans here — Ron DeSantis running for governor and Rick Scott running for the Senate have had to kind of distance themselves from Trump on this. Not because they disagree with him, but because the media is hammering this, and these guys can’t take the chance.
They’re gonna have to go with the flow, they’re gonna have to go with what the conventional wisdom is, and that is that 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico — when they didn’t — and that Trump may be responsible. So these guys have to distance themselves just to show the Puerto Rican voters here in Florida that they’re not anti-Puerto Rico. Just absurd. Just make these claims, 3,000 people after…? Can somebody name me a single hurricane where 3,000 people died?
(interruption) Galveston, Texas. When was that? It was 1900. I think there’s another hurricane where 7,000 people died way back. You do have to go back 75 years where we didn’t have nearly the kind of warning systems that we have today to get people out of there. We didn’t have nearly the kind of tech recovery, any number of things. “Well, they didn’t in Puerto Rico, either, Rush, because Trump didn’t care. Trump didn’t care.” We were the only nation that did go down there. We’re the only ones that did try to assist. So the Democrats…
When I mentioned earlier… You know, I hate doing this. I really do because I know how it sounds to some people. I told you earlier in the week this storm was not going to hit as it was predicted to, not because of anything other than that’s the way it always is. It’s tough to predict these things far out. As a hurricane expert here, there are only two of them in my memory since 1997 that, if they were forecast to hit you say Category 3 or 4, they did. Most of them become much weaker where they get where they’re going to hit.
And the track changes constantly. You can’t deny that earlier this week, “It’s Category 4! Maybe Category 5!” We even had a guy saying it was gonna be so bad, we may need to have a new category, Category 6, because of Trump and because he doesn’t believe in climate change. And when I happened to remind people, “There’s a good chance this thing might weaken. There’s a good chance it’s not gonna go where they say right now,” I was lambasted all over TV as the irresponsible, because I was not following the mandated government-speak on what the hurricane was gonna do.
Meanwhile, everybody else in the Drive-Bys? It was sick. They were excited by it because of the politics of everything, because everything has been politicized. This ongoing, expanding hatred (which is just an outright poison) that they have for Trump is causing them to distort what is already a dangerous level of hatred that they harbor. The hatred’s fully on display in this Kavanaugh circumstance. Even Ruth “Buzzi” Ginsburg has essentially said this is enough. You know, she loved Antonin Scalia. He loved her.
They spent New Year’s Eve together. They liked opera. It was odd to a lot of people, but they were best buds. She said (paraphrased), “You know, he was confirmed 98-nothing. That’s the way it always should be.” She was confirmed by a similar high number. Democrat numbers when they’re nominated generally get confirmed by a decent number. Pretty much every Republican nominee they try to destroy, try to ruin. Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Kavanaugh. They tried to destroy Alito. They tried to do some damage to Roberts but they didn’t have much success there.
But this business with Kavanaugh? he locked a girl in a room in high school, 35 years ago, 17-year-old and she got out? How seriously could it have been? He’s categorically denying it, by the way. Dianne Feinstein’s had this letter from this anonymous studied all these years, didn’t do anything about it. Yeah, months. Oh, and the FBI has declined to investigate (chuckling) because there’s nothing to investigate. But they’re trying to create this gigantic cloud.
The left is also so upset they have not been able to move Susan Collins into voting “no,” that they sent her a giant cardboard cutout of male genitalia. Three-foot-long male genitalia cardboard cutout to try to intimidate her into voting against Kavanaugh and claim… (interruption) Well, I’ll tell you what do you mean, “What’s the symbolism of it?” The symbolism you’ve got a three-foot-long cardboard cutout of male genitalia.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Minor correction. I misspoke when I said that there had been no major hurricanes in 10 years. I meant in a 10-year period. We had two major hurricanes last year, Harvey and Irma. It was 2006 through 2016, 11 years that we had no Category 3 or greater hurricanes striking land in the United States. In 2016, right in the middle of massive climate change, massive carbon dioxide pollution, and all that. My point is, why not take credit for their policies working instead of getting mad? And the answer is politics.