RUSH: So what were we talking about yesterday? We were talking about whether or not Pelosi’s looking for an out on impeachment. And now the discussion today is all about how the polls have plummeted and it’s three polls that have plummeted. We’ve got the poll we mentioned yesterday, the Emerson poll showing African-American support for Trump at 34.5%. Rasmussen showing African-American support for Trump at 34%.
We have Schiff now telling everybody that they sent a Dear Colleague letter, said he expects to send a report laying out evidence to support impeaching Trump to the judiciary committee — that’s Nadler — right after Thanksgiving. In the letter, Schiff claims that evidence gathered from depositions with 17 current and former U.S. officials — that’d be the civil service corps — revealed a months-long effort in which Trump again sought foreign interference in our elections for his personal and political benefit at the expense of our national interests.
Now, I was watching a little bit of TV before the program started, and Marie Harf, the former Obama State Department spokesbabe — and I mean the stereotypical, I mean, she’s the counter to the Pajama Boy. She is the female Pajama Boy. And she’s saying (impression), “You know, the Democrats ought not listen to polls. The Democrats, this is too important, impeachment is too important. We can’t listen to polls in this. The Democrats are not gonna be listening –” not gonna be listening to polls? That’s the only thing.
Polling data is how they shape public opinion. It’s not reflecting public opinion. And, lo and behold, wouldn’t you know it, CNN magically today released a poll a couple of hours ago that shows what? Why, 50% of the American public want Trump impeached and removed. There isn’t another poll anywhere close to CNN’s. But they need evidence.
See, folks, I talked yesterday about this. I posited how Pelosi could do this. How she could announce there wasn’t gonna be an impeachment. There won’t actually be articles of impeachment presented to the Senate because partisan Republicans are not taking it seriously, partisan Republicans are gonna defend the president. The last thing that we need, the last thing America needs is for this guilty as sin president to be acquitted in an election year. ‘Cause that’s what will happen when it goes there.
But I think there’s a telltale sign that this is gonna happen. Brenda Lawrence is a Democrat from a very anti-Trump district in Michigan. She is not a moderate, and she is not from a district that voted for Trump. And Sunday on a podcast — by the way, you know what I saw? There’s a story by Matt Labash in Spectator — not the American Spectator, Spectator — bashing podcasts. He says there’s 700,000 of these damn things. I can’t keep up. I don’t want to listen. What the hell, the average length is 43 minutes, what do we need podcasts for?
I knew this was gonna happen, overload. You know why we have podcasts? Because they can’t figure out how to succeed on talk radio. Everybody wants a microphone. Think about it. All you need are 10 or 12 people listening to your podcast and you think you’re a star, 700,000 of them out there.
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RUSH: Anyway, back now to this impeachment business. Brenda Lawrence was on a podcast on Sunday, which, this is now Tuesday. It’s why it took two days for people to realize it. It was on a podcast. The name of the podcast, No BS News Hour. Are you familiar with the podcast? You ever heard of that? You have heard of that? What, six listeners, seven listeners?
LAWRENCE: We are so close to an election. I will tell you sitting here knowing how divided this country is, I don’t see the value of taking him out of office.
UNIDENTIFIED HOST: Wow.
LAWRENCE: I want him censured. I want it on the record that the House of Representatives did their job, and they told this president and any president coming behind him that this is unacceptable behavior. And under our Constitution, we will not allow it.
RUSH: She went on to say that the timing is all wrong, there’s an election coming up, it doesn’t make any sense, she hadn’t heard enough to throw him out of office. Well, again, this happened two days ago. It just made the news today. And just before the program began, Brenda Lawrence released a new statement recanting. They got to her, is my point. The pressure must be intense.
This tells me that there is not going to be any delay. They are going to move full speed ahead. They are going to do their articles of impeachment. Pelosi damn the torpedoes and full speed, because this was a devastating — people been playing this all over cable news all morning long. This being used along with reporting on the polls as an indication that impeachment is falling apart.
And then with Schiff’s Dear Colleague letter in which he says that Congress now has to decide what’s left to us now is to decide whether this behavior is compatible with the office — everybody knows they’ve already made up their minds about that, but they haven’t pulled the trigger yet. So Brenda Lawrence comes along, indicates she’s not gonna vote for it. Remember what we said yesterday, Pelosi may have 218 votes, but she doesn’t have 220. And she doesn’t have 235, and she doesn’t have any Republicans. And that could be problematic.
But with the pressure being applied to Brenda Lawrence, who’s released a new statement clarifying her first statement. If they were really thinking of backing off of this they would let Brenda Lawrence’s statement stand, and they would use it as an impetus or an excuse. But, see, I think they’re too far committed. I guess she could still yank it back.
They wanted to get this done before Thanksgiving. If you recall they wanted the articles of impeachment written and presented. They want to get this done fast because the senators on the Democrat side running for the presidency cannot campaign while a Senate trial is in place. So they wanted to get this going. Now they’re talking about the articles of impeachment before Christmas. So the time frame has slowed down.
The polls are totally opposed. The polls do not provide them any impetus whatsoever, which is why so many leftists are now saying, “The Democrats don’t listen to polls. This is too serious to listen to the polls. We can’t be guided by the polls, and we Democrats generally aren’t guided by the polls,” which is a total crock.
So it’s a fluid situation. And however it goes, if it does go to the Senate, there’s going to be an acquittal there, and Pelosi and the Democrats are gonna have to find a way of dealing with that. And of course I gave them the road map for that yesterday.
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RUSH: CNN’s poll, they tout it as 50% support impeachment and removal. However, if you click on the CNN link to their poll, you know what the headline is? “No change in views on impeachment after public hearings.” Now, that puts an entirely different perspective on things. No change — and this is only the CNN poll. So CNN’s claiming that when this whole thing started, 50% wanted impeachment or removal, and after the hearings, 50% wanted impeachment and removal.
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RUSH: I want to go back here to Brenda Lawrence for just a second and the nature of her flip-flop. Her district is Detroit. Her district is John Conyers old district, kind of a schizoid district the way it was drawn to make sure Conyers would get reelected every year, a majority African-American constituency, which is fine. Not a complaint. I’m just giving you the facts. It’s how the Democrats have chosen to draw the districts there.
Over the summer, Brenda Lawrence fully supported impeaching Donald Trump, but she said over the weekend that she’d changed her mind. She said, “I feel we should begin that process.” Back on June 12th she told CNN, “I think we should begin the process. If we impeach him, he’s still sitting in the White House because the Senate has to act.” She said, “Our democracy is bigger than Trump, and we need to act.”
She’s been in office since 2015. Now as of her appearance on the podcast on Sunday she changed her mind. “You can censure. You don’t have to remove the president,” she said. By the way, the podcast is called the No BS News Hour, and the guy that runs it is Charlie LeDuff. I don’t want anybody to think that I am disrespectful of podcasters, as I point out to you that there are 700,000 of them and why many of them exist.
But, anyway, she said, “Sitting here knowing how divided this country is, I don’t see the value of kicking him out of office, but I do see the value of putting down a marker saying his behavior is not acceptable.” The host couldn’t believe what he was hearing, “I hear you say that, you’re a Democrat, you’re a liberal minded person. I know you don’t like Trump. You think for the betterment of all of us in an election year it’s unwise to tear him from the chair? Is that what you think?” She said, “Yeah.”
She predicted a partisan vote in the House on impeachment. No conviction in the Republican-controlled Senate. So Lawrence released a statement saying, “I was an early supporter of impeachment in 2017. The House Intelligence Committee followed a very thorough process in holding hearings these past two weeks. The information they revealed confirmed the president has abused the power of his office. Therefore, I continue to support impeachment.”
In a matter of two hours Pelosi’s goons got to this woman and made her do a 180 as though her statement over the weekend on the podcast was never even made. “The information they revealed confirmed that this president has abused the power of his office. Therefore, I continue to support impeachment.” She mentioned her concern about impeachment moving forward in the Senate.
Now a conversation that Barack Hussein O has had about this list of Democrats has been revealed. And it’s not pretty. And now you got Bloomberg starting his campaign, and he tweeted out — he didn’t even know where he’s going. He got it wrong where he was gonna be starting his campaign. So the Democrats, despite the aura presented daily in the Drive-By Media, the Democrats here are discombobulated, they are disjointed, and they are really wandering aimlessly here, even though they have the objective of getting Trump thrown out of office.
But in terms of actually pulling that off and making that happen, they haven’t advanced the ball at all. So right now their objective has to be holding their base, because this adds up to a gigantic failure. They’ve been promising this base for three years that Trump was gonna go. They have been telling their voters that Trump colluded and stole the election. They’ve been telling their voters, with the media, for three years. None of what they’ve told ’em has come to pass.
So they have to rely on continuing to gin up the hate for Trump. That’s what Pelosi has to keep doing here. They failed to make any kind of a case. We’ve got the Democrats now saying, “We want to talk to Mulvaney, we want to talk to McGahn, we want to talk to Bolton. The White House is not letting them talk. It’s not right. It’s a disrespecting of the congressional legislative branch.”
Okay. Fine. Trump says (paraphrasing), “I wish they could go up and testify, but I’m not gonna let that happen. I gotta protect the office of the presidency now and into the future. I’d love for ’em to testify, but they’re not going to. Not gonna let ’em. I can’t let the legislative branch run all over the executive branch.” Okay. Fine. Let me ask this. ‘Cause they say Trump isn’t a king. He can’t sit there and say who and who won’t testify.
That’s where this is gonna get dicey for the Democrats if it actually goes there. Now the Republicans can call all of these witnesses that Schiff refused to. And the president’s lawyers can go in and make their case and call their witnesses as well. Once you get to a trial in the Senate, that’s where fairness in the system is mandated. Schiff can deny any witness he wants. He can squelch any testimony he wants in the House in his committee.
So he’s telling everybody, Republicans, we need to talk to the whistleblower. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the whistleblower. Schiff is saying the whistleblower will not be made available because Trump has threatened his life. We’re not gonna make his name public because the man fears — which is a crock. It’s a total crock.
The whistleblower is the safest person in this country. The whistleblower is the most protected and safest human being in the country right now. But he doesn’t have to testify. All Schiff has to do is say, “Nope, he’s not showing up.” That’s not a problem, but yet Bolton and McGahn and Mulvaney not showing up is some kind of great violation of the Constitution.
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RUSH: I have a couple of tweets here that I’m not… I probably ought to wait to read these and then translate them to, ’cause I’m not quite sure ’cause I don’t have enough information here, but I’m gonna go ahead and share them with you because I think I know what this is about. If I’m wrong, so what? I have no problem admitting I’m wrong, ’cause it doesn’t happen very much, and therefore it’s not an embarrassment whatsoever, being so rarely that I’m wrong.
If I’m wrong, I just correct it later when I find out. The first tweet is by somebody named Kevin M. Kruse. I have no idea who he is, so I don’t know why it was sent to me, but I’m guessing. The first tweet: “A lot of news today that suggests the House Democrats should reconsider their rush to wrap up the impeachment hearing. They need to issue subpoenas and force testimony from Parnas, Giuliani, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Bolton, and McGahn at the very least. Get it all on the record.”
I assume this guy’s some journalist, and he may not be. He could be just an average, ordinary American tweeting, which makes me wonder why I’m paying attention to it. But the subject matter is that there is a lot of news, meaning a lot of Drive-By Media people are trying to tell Pelosi to slow down. You don’t have to have this vote now. You don’t have to have this vote before the end of the year. You don’t have to hurry on this. Go ahead and delay it. Issue subpoenas. Go talk to all these people — Giuliani, Parnas, Mulvaney, Pompeo, Bolton, McGahn — and get all of it on the record.
This, again, is attributed to her, that she said waiting for courts means waiting until July or later for all this testimony, ’cause Trump is gonna oppose it, which means it’s gonna go to court. And whatever decision is first forthcoming will be appealed, then that decision will be appealed, and then that will be appealed, and then finally go to court. She says all of this appellate process will take us until July — and I’m not gonna wait ’til July to have an impeachment vote, she’s saying.
So instead, they’re gonna push for impeachment in the next two months and continue the investigations and hearings into next year. So the Washington Post reporter is saying that Pelosi is gonna go ahead and let Schiff have a vote. They’re gonna vote the articles of impeachment, they’re gonna present them — and while that’s being done, they’re gonna continue to have hearings. It’s like a second phase of impeachment, but she’s not gonna wait because that would mean waiting until all this goes through the courts.
And even if she wins, it wouldn’t be until July. So I guess what we can conclude here is that Pelosi, talking to the media, says she’s not gonna wait. She’s gonna move full speed ahead in the next two months. Actually, I think what she means I sbefore Christmas. That’s one month. Maybe she means January. But, at any rate, let me grab a quick call, if we can. Here’s Spokane, Washington. Tom, hello, sir. Great to have you. What’s up?
CALLER: Top of the morning to you.
RUSH: Yes. Hello, sir.
CALLER: (garbled cell) Hello. So I have a theory. Of course, action the president isn’t waiting —
CALLER: How’s that?
RUSH: There you go. That’s better.
CALLER: All right. So I have a suggestion for the president — I know he’s waiting with bated breath for what I’ve got to say here — and that would be to go talk to the House Republicans and get the House Republicans to go to Pelosi very publicly and say, “We’re gonna vote for impeachment. We want the president impeached. We want this to go to the Senate. We want it to go to a trial. We want them to be able to call witnesses and allow them to perjure themselves and put all of you in jail.”
RUSH: No. I gotta… That’s kind of like a makeup of the theory “Let the Democrats win so everybody can see how bad they are!” There’s way too much risk in that. Way too much.
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RUSH: Now, yesterday during the discussion — and this is an illustration of what I mean when I say you will be on the cutting edge if you listen to this program regularly. You’re gonna know things before they actually happen. You’re gonna see and hear about trends while they’re being made, but before anybody’s aware of it.
Now, yesterday on this program in the discussion about how Pelosi could get out of impeachment — remember, the polling data is collapsing. Let me review that again for you. Support for impeachment has collapsed among black and Hispanic voters. Those are two voting constituencies that the Democrats believe they own. Support for impeaching Trump has collapsed among Hispanic and black voters.
This is a recent poll released by Emerson College, and the Drive-Bys trust it. They cite this poll a lot. The poll found that 38% of black voters are opposed, 37% in favor of, 25% are not sure. Hispanic voters, meanwhile, only narrowly in favor, 48 to 41% with 11% unsure. But the support among Hispanics is dropping. The trend line is down. The Emerson poll also found 48% of white voters nationally opposed to impeaching Trump. Forty-four percent support him. These numbers are much worse for the Democrats than they were when the process began. They’re much worse than they were say a month ago, three weeks ago.
In fact, they are starkly different from the results recorded nationally by Emerson in October. Back in October, 58% of black voters were in favor of impeaching. Now only 38% — that’s a 20 point collapse. And you put this poll together with both Emerson and Rasmussen that shows 34 to 35% approval for Trump’s job performance among black Americans, that result is so good that a bunch of Never Trumper Republicans and left wingers are saying they don’t believe it, it’s not possible, there is no way, zilch, zero, nada chance that 34 and a half, 35% of African-Americans give Trump thumbs up on his job performance.
But what if it is true. What if it is true? And it looks like it might be because it perfectly coincides with black and Hispanic support for impeachment collapsing. In just one month the collapse happens to coincide with Adam Schiff’s hearings. Now let me move on to the — now, stick with me on this. Stick with me.
From Reuters: “On Trump Impeachment, Divisions Between Urban and Rural Democrats – First-term U.S. congresswoman Cynthia Axne, back home in her rural Iowa district for the Thanksgiving break, faced a room full of farmers on Saturday who made clear their opposition to the impeachment investigation,” much less impeachment itself.
“Meanwhile, 1,000 miles (1,610 km) away in the old industrial town of Wharton, New Jersey, freshman U.S. congressman Tom Malinowski was treated like a rock star when he told a crowd of about 150 he believed the evidence to impeach Trump was overwhelming.”
So within the Democrat Party there is a divide between rural and urban Democrats. Now, the Democrats routinely ignore their rural constituents. They think everybody rural is Deliverance, including in their own party. They pay no attention to them whatsoever, other than during primaries when they have to go to Iowa, they have to go to some of these states.
These Democrats are precisely the Democrats in all of these toss-up states that voted for Trump and abandoned the Democrat Party. And they are still aligned with Trump, and they are still opposed to even the investigations, the hearings, much less the actual impeachment of Donald Trump. This again is division among the Democrat Party.
Over on the Republican side you don’t have any serious support for impeachment that you can find anywhere. You have to go to the Never Trumper intellectual media class to find any of it on the so-called Republican side. Even those people now were openly naming which Democrat they want to support. I’m not kidding. The so-called, what we always thought were conservative intellectual magazine and website conservatives, are now discussing among themselves which Democrat they could support. Not making it up.
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RUSH: I just got an email from a friend summarizing all this. “Hey, Rush, it’s a race now between their upside of staining Trump with impeachment and the downside terror that they’re gonna lose the House and increase Trump’s chances. I think what’s going on is they’re waiting a bit longer to put their finger in the wind on popular opinion. They want to see what the Horowitz report and the rumors of the Durham investigation bring.
“If the polls against impeachment get near 60% Rush, they’re gonna drop it. They’re gonna have to. And I think (barring new evidence), they’re gonna get there. But in time to scare them off? We don’t know. They knew Nadler blew the Mueller appearance and embarrassed ’em, and he’ll likely botch anything he touches. With Schiff now triangulating on TV,” meaning Schiff, you know, being reticent and unsure, “we know that Pelosi’s told him to cool it for a while, while they continue the polling.
“They got burned by the whistleblower, lost credibility. We’re down to only 50-50 going ahead with impeachment, Rush. That’s my best calculation: 50-50 they go ahead with it — and today the Chicago Tribune is writing that they want censure and not impeachment. “The ranks are thinning on the Democrat side, Rush. Keep doing what you’re doing. Stick with it.”
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