RUSH: I feel like I’ve been here before. I feel like I’ve done that. I feel like this is deja vu. I feel like this thing has happened before and we’ve commented on it before and I’ll be darned if I can find anything different to say about it from previous years. I’m kind of hamstrung here. But that’s why I’m here, folks, to give you a perspective that you haven’t heard anywhere else.

JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny South Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH: And I have to tell you the easiest thing in the world would be to say, “Holy cow, did Biden knock it out of the park.” (interruption) Well, that’s what even commentators on our side are saying, Mr. Snerdley. They’re saying, “Boy, did Biden knock it out of the park. Holy cow.” And why do people think that?

It’s partially our fault. We lowered the bar. We’ve been talking about the fact that he’s got early-onset, late-onset senility, Alzheimer’s, what have you, and so he does a speech for about, what was it, 15 minutes? (interruption) How long? (interruption) Twenty-two minute speech, and there was only one flub, and you would have to have that flub pointed out to you. It was not glaring. It was toward the end of the speech.

But because he didn’t goof up a word, and because he didn’t lose his train of thought ’cause he’s reading a teleprompter, it’s very easy to say, “Oh, my, he nailed it. Oh, my, oh, my, he’s back.” And this is what the commentariat has been devoted to saying. And I imagine that there are a lot of you who are thinking, “Hey, yeah, we were expecting Biden to be not what we saw last night.”

I’ll bet there’s some of you who are scared now because Biden did better than you thought, better than the conventional wisdom had led you to believe. I’ll bet you, Mr. Snerdley, that there are even some people who are now wondering if Biden’s senility has been an act from the get-go. That he has been really good at pulling off that he’s not senile, that he doesn’t have early-onset Alzheimer’s, that there’s nothing wrong with his brain other than that he’s a leftist, and that he’s gonna be able to do his debates just fine, he’s gonna be able to answer questions just fine.

All these appearances where he’s appeared to lose his train of thought, debates where he forgot what he was gonna say so he said he was out of time, people thinking it was all an act, a gigantic… (interruption) I’m just telling you that I’ll bet there are some people who think that now given what people think of the Democrat Party and their capabilities. So we’ll get to the observations of all this.

Whatever you think of last night can’t erase, folks, this is one of the darkest, most apocalyptic weeks in the life of a political party I can recall. And that’s saying something because the Democrat Party has been devoted to the apocalyptic future of this country for quite a while. That has been their strong suit. That has been the way they have attempted to reach out to people and essentially to scare them into thinking that America’s best days are behind us, and your future is not up to you. It used to be, but things are so bad now, you need to just turn your life over to us, and that’s your best odds of having an enjoyable life and so forth.

But this week has taken the cake for pessimism, for darkness, for anger and rage. And it’s breathtaking to behold. Throughout this entire week there hasn’t been one reference, and there wasn’t last night, to the violence and the civic unrest that is happening in Democrat cities. There hasn’t been any condemnation of it. There hasn’t even been any supportive mention of it, Black Lives Matter.

And, by the way, did you notice last night all the flags? I mean, if you watched this, I guess Plugs showed up at some, I don’t know, it looked like a gigantic cafeteria or something where he was inside. And the parking lot, they converted it into like a drive-in theater, and they had giant screens out there, and people drove up in their cars and watched Plugs’ speech in their cars. And there were flags festooned all over the sides of the buildings, gigantic American flags. People were waving the flag, and they were celebrating the flag, and flags were just everywhere.

Now, that is not gonna go over well with Black Lives Matter. The Democrat Party right now is devoted to people who want to kneel on the flag, who are promising to disrespect the flag. You know, the NFL season is gonna start in September. And the expectation is established that players and coaches, the first thing they will do when the national anthem is played is take a knee. This is expected. The flag will be disrespected.

Also the NFL has announced they’re not gonna have live anthem singers prior to games. And I think that’s part of a long-term project to get rid of the anthem, period. And you know why? It’s because of the surveys that we’ve cited over the years, that the sight of patriotic symbols like the flag tend to ratchet up people’s sense of patriotism, their love of America. And it tends to send them into voting booths to vote Republican. That’s from Harvard University, folks. I’m not making this up. And you probably remember me talking about it.

Well, that irritates Democrats out the wazoo. And so the NFL getting rid of all these symbols makes perfect sense. I’ve long thought that the left wants to get rid of symbols like the flag on the premise that they’re unnecessary and it’s divisive, it’s biased, it’s not unified. The flag is not unifying. Like Make America Great is not unifying. And we shouldn’t be corrupting sports with the flag. And so there it was on full display last night.

Now, I haven’t seen any negative reaction to it from Black Lives Matter or Antifa, but I’m telling you, I’m here to tell you, there are some people that watched that speech last night that the word had better gone out to ignore it, that it was a speech given for a specific purpose but don’t think it means anything. I did two things. I listened to it and I watched it. If you listened to it, it sounded pretty good. If you watched it, it was clear that Biden looked scared.

He looked uncomfortable. He looked stiff. He looked nervous, belying somebody with his many years of experience. The speech was a list. It was a list of every political bromide and cliche ever written, such as, “Light is more powerful than dark. Love is more powerful than hate. Green energy is more powerful than fossil fuels.” Whatever.

It was just one little slogan after another. But you know what that was, ladies and gentlemen? There are a lot of people in… Well, we are told there are a lot of people that Donald Trump has worn out, that Donald Trump has made nervous. They don’t like the fact that Donald Trump is an outsider. They don’t like the fact that Donald Trump has come to Washington and turned the place upside down.

What we got from Joe Biden last night was 100% pure inside-the-Beltway politics. What we got last night was what people expect of politicians: A bunch of meaningless, banal, open-ended bromides and cliches that don’t commit the politician to anything. They just establish him as a good guy with character and good manners, but they don’t really get into any kinds of specifics.

They just make people feel comfortable. It was 100% inside-the-Beltway politics. It was written by people who live there, written by people who have worked there. It was written for a guy who has served there for 47-some-odd years, and for people who are now tired of an outsider who doesn’t use cliches like that, doesn’t use bromides, doesn’t get into meaningless pap.

I mean, Donald Trump would never say (impression), “Light is more powerful than dark, let me tell you. Let me tell you. It’s shocking to everybody, I know. Nobody’s ever seen anything like that, but light is more powerful than darkness.” He would never say anything like this. Donald Trump would never think that’s how you uplift people. But this is how inside-the-Beltway, professional deep-staters and politicians — who exist to mislead people, who exist to lie to people — do it.

This is exactly how they do it, and some people might find what Biden did last night comfortable if they’re tired… I’m not talking about Trump supporters. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m simply talking about people who want to return to what they think political normalcy is: Being lied to, having a bunch of meaningless pap thrown at them. “But it made ’em feel good. Yes, the emotion, Mr. Limbaugh! That’s exactly right.”

It was very welcoming, it was very comfortable, and it would remind people what Trump isn’t, and, in that sense (depending on how many of those people are who saw it), it may have connected. We can’t deny that based on expectations, Plugs did well — and we’re the ones that lowered the expectations. We’re the ones who have been telling everybody that Biden can’t do what he did last night.

Well, not last night, ’cause I, frankly, expected last night to happen. I don’t think I said so on the air, but I did to a lot of people: “I expected last night to happen. He can read a teleprompter. At least he can do that. Twenty-two minutes? That’s one of the shortest nomination acceptance speeches on record.” I predicted that media on our side would be fawning all over it because of these lowered expectations.

Here’s a quote. Van Jones: “We were prepared for it to be a terrible speech. As long as he didn’t embarrass himself, we were going to come out here and praise it!” This is what the liberal media would be doing tonight, tomorrow, and the foreseeable future. Well, he didn’t embarrass himself. They had the low standard too. They had the bar way, way low.

But once again, Biden did what Kamala Harris did when she spoke earlier in the week: He lied through his teeth about what happened and what Trump said in Charlottesville, Virginia, just like she lied about the virus and what Trump did or didn’t do and how he has reacted to it. She lied through her teeth about how Trump has destroyed the economy — and these things never get corrected.

But this is a big one, and Biden knows he was lying through his teeth about the Charlottesville story. It’s a 3-year-old story, and it is a perfect left-wing, liberal lie. It has been corrected every time it’s been told, and yet the lie stands on its own. So, I’m gonna fix it again. I’m gonna explain it again.