RUSH: I don’t know how many of you have seen this today. This is all over. When I saw this I asked, “So how does this make as large a story in USA Today as it does?” “Group’s TV Ad Uses Storm’s Aftermath to Target Roberts — The televised images of poverty stricken evacuees from Hurricane Katrina are part of a provocative last minute effort by liberal interest groups to divert federal Judge John Roberts’ path to confirmation as chief justice. MoveOn.org plans to unveil a TV ad on Monday that questions whether Roberts is sensitive enough to civil rights concerns to lead the Supreme Court.” They’re going to show footage from New Orleans in the hurricane aftermath to illustrate that Roberts doesn’t care for black people. Remember, he grew up in a neighborhood with no blacks and no Jews (Whispers: Jews) in Long Beach, Indiana. He’s not qualified because he — oh, did you hear about Richard Cohen’s column today in the Washington Post? Roberts is too perfect. He’s too perfect. He’s too perfect to know the people.
There’s no failure in his life. He can’t relate to people, because he’s never failed. This is the most hilarious thing that I’ve seen yet on Roberts, and that’s saying something. Well, anyway, this is a huge, long story in USA Today by Mark Memmott. It’s a huge story about an ad that’s not even on the air yet. So I asked myself, “Why are they doing this?” and then I said, “Rush, don’t be an idiot. You know why they’re doing it,” because they want MoveOn.org to do this, and they think this is a great idea, and they’re trying to give this ad a little pre-publicity, an ad that uses footage from the New Orleans hurricane aftermath in an attempt to denigrate John Roberts as a racist, as somebody who doesn’t care about the plight of blacks.
He has a rotten civil rights record, and the rest of the story is all about what MoveOn.org and others say about Roberts and his lack of caring about black people and civil rights. Well, what has happened since then is that MoveOn.org is backing off. MoveOn.org issued a statement this morning: “For immediate release — Statement by Eli Pariser, executive director, MoveOn.org — political action on misleading headline on USA Today.” Misleading headline? “Group’s TV Ad Uses Storm’s Aftermath to Target Roberts.” The whole story, Eli, it’s not just a misleading headline. “USA Today ran an inaccurate headline in this morning’s paper saying that we plan to produce a TV ad that uses the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to criticize Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts. We have no plans, we have never had plans, to produce such an ad. We stand by our criticism, however, that Judge Roberts’ record indicates a lack of commitment to protecting and defending civil rights.” Apparently one of the sources for USA Today was somebody at MoveOn.
If that’s true, then I have no doubt they were going to run this ad, and I think they just misjudged once again. They thought that the world would greet their ad with eager anticipation and they found out, “Hey.” I was all prepared to say, “I want Senator Kennedy and I want Senator Leahy and I want Senator Schumer to all stand up and back this ad. I want them to stand up and support this ad.” That’s what I was going to say today until they pulled back. I will guarantee you that somebody, somewhere, in the Democratic Party called Move On.org, said, “That’s counterproductive. You can’t exploit the aftermath this way.” What it means is what we’ve always known. They’ve got nothing on John Roberts. They’ve got absolutely zero on John Roberts, and speaking of this, here’s Richard Cohen today in the Washington Post.
“Too Perfect to Know the People?” Here’s just one sentence from this piece of brilliance. “Judge Roberts’ record is appallingly free of failure.” Appallingly free of failure? Mr. Cohen, you have done a great service. You’ve once again defined liberalism for us and that is defining equality by making everybody miserable, the lowest common denominator. You can’t have somebody who is a success because that’s offensive to somebody who hasn’t succeeded. You can’t have somebody have a good time because that’s offensive to people who are not having a good time. You can’t have somebody succeed in school because that’s offensive and stigmatizes people who don’t do well. So once again the left has shown us that they shoot for the lowest common denominator and this comes from their arrogance and their elitism and their own vaunted elitist view that they stand so high above everybody else. It’s okay for them to succeed; it’s okay for them to achieve. But that’s because they’re special people, the average bloke in this country doesn’t have a chance. The average bloke in this country doesn’t have a prayer of succeeding and so liberals must do what they do in order to make everybody’s lives at least passable. Hello, New Orleans! If you want to see what liberalism unchecked, unbridled, unstopped, does to people, take a look at New Orleans. We know what the Census figures are there. We know 75, 80% of the population is black. What does that mean? It means they can’t charge racism down there. You can’t charge racism down there, and you can’t say that they need affirmative action down there, and yet look at the poverty rate down there. Look at the poverty rate.
This is a city that, rather than modernize and move forward, has chosen to celebrate its past and try to hold onto it because some people think it’s quaint, and as a result, you get rampant poverty down there, and this hurricane brought it to shore, brought it to fore, and what the thing that everybody needs to see is, that liberals and Democrats have run that place, the whole state, city, for 60 years. It ought to be a panacea. It ought to be a Utopia. It ought to be so nice that no hurricane would dare get near it. It ought to be so nice that it’s indestructible. There ought be no crime because everybody’s happy and sufficient, their bellies are full, they all have jobs, they all have health care, the government does everything for them at the whim of the moment, everybody should be just the happiest people in the world in New Orleans. I’m sorry, I must have missed it in the aftermath but I haven’t seen a whole lot of happiness, and I don’t see a whole lot of people who have been taken out of there making tracks to get back. Not the poor. I don’t see the poor making tracks to get back. We even had a story on this yesterday.
So Judge Roberts’ record is appallingly free of failure. “I sometimes think the best thing that ever happened to me was at the time the worst. I flunked out of college,” admits Mr. Cohen. “I did so for the usual reasons, painfully bored with school, distracted by life itself, and so I went to work for an insurance company while I plowed ahead at night school. From there I went to the Army, emerging with a storehouse of anecdotes. In retrospect I learned more by failing than I ever would have by succeeding. I wish that John Roberts had a touch of my incompetence. Instead, the nominee for chief justice of the US punched every career ticket right on schedule.
“He was raised in affluence, educated in private schools [whispers: private schools] dispatched to Harvard and then to Harvard Law School. He clerked for US Appellate Judge Henry Friendly and later for William Rehnquist. Roberts worked in the justice department, then in the White House until moving on to Hogan & Hartson, one of Washington’s most prestigious law firms. Then he was principal deputy solicitor general before moving to the bench where he has served for only two years. His record is appallingly free of failure. Unlike, say, the presidency, the Supreme Court is no place for a sluggish thinker who thinks, if that’s the word, that in the schools the non-theory of intelligent design ought to be taught along with the theory of evolution. What next, alchemy and chemistry?” So here you have it. Mr. Cohen spelling it all out for us what liberalism is. It surely isn’t success. Success distances you. Success makes you incapable of relating to most of your countrymen. (interruption) No, he did earn it all. That’s the point, Mr. Snerdley, he earned it all, and it’s abnormal. Most people are failures and louses. Most people are just part of the endless parade of human debris, but this guy Roberts, he’s too perfect. Why, he doesn’t even have the vanity to cover up the bald spot.
They’re even complaining about that. Do you know that on Democrat websites they’re playing guessing games on whether or not he’s really gay? And one of the ways they’ve decided he’s not gay is he hasn’t covered the bald spot. If he covered the bald spot that proves he was gay, but he’s not gay because he doesn’t have the vanity. I’m not kidding you, folks. I am not. They’re looking for everything. He’s gay. They want to do to him what they did to the mayor out there in Seattle. (interruption) Huh? Spokane, whatever, Spokane, that’s somewhere out there in the great northwest. Need a covered wagon to get to it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: About Richard Cohen, one more thing. You know, he’s proving with this column, “John Roberts can’t go anywhere, why, he’s never failed, he has an alarming record of success, an appalling record of success.” What have I always said about the left? How do you climb the ladder of success on the left? You fail. Jimmy Carter, perhaps the worst president in history, is now regaled as one of the greatest Democrats ever. Howard Dean bombs out, doesn’t get a single state in the primaries. He’s now running the Democratic Party. I mean, if you look at the Democrats, those that fail somehow continue to climb the ladder of success. Failure is a r?sum? enhancement. That’s what Richard Cohen is saying. You want to enhance your r?sum? in a liberal-run business? Fail. You want to enhance your r?sum? in a liberal-run school? Fail. You want to enhance your r?sum? in a liberal-run government agency or government, period? Fail. That is what Mr. Cohen is suggesting.
By the way, human interest story here that I absolutely love. This is from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and it’s from this morning. It cleared just about three hours ago. The headline: “Smokers Sticking Together.” I love this story. Listen to this. “A member of the National Guard, cigarette hanging from his lips,” ? la John Wayne (I added the ? la John Wayne part), “confessed that he had taken cartons of cigarettes that he spied in the jettisoned luggage of fleeing Hyatt hotel guests last week. He took those cigarettes, cartons of them, not for himself, but to toss into the crowd of Superdome refugees, add that to the random acts of kindness files,” says The Times-Picayune. Wait ’til the health Nazis hear about this. Bush ordered the National Guard to give cigarettes away to already suffering hurricane victims to enhance cancer deaths even sooner, or shall we say those that don’t die from the hurricane will die from cancer later on. Bush not taking any chances that people will survive. Wait ’til they get hold of this, folks. Just wait. I’ve just probably specified exactly what will be on these blogs, these Democrat kook websites before too long.